Month: June 2013

Sign of life

Hey everybody!

Don’t worry, I am still alive! 😉 The cause of the absence of posts is that I still keep on stubbing the engine to make it work, to make it more object oriented and in general: more C++-like. (Which I am sure you can see if you check my GitHub repository regularly.)
I followed a dead track for some days: I made all of the Pascal units into C namespaces, but after my mentor highlighted a much better way (using C++ classes instead of namespaces), I changed my methods and I am proceeding quite well now. Sometimes I just really don’t know what I would do without him.
Thomas (one of the original creators of the game) was also very kind and provided me with a recreation of the missing ROOMNUMS.INC file (It can be found in my repo under the name of “roomnums.h” now.), which I am using since then. He saved me a bunch of time with his action and I am very thankful for that.
So please stay tuned! Only a few more days and I’ll be finished with the stubbing and I can finally start working on the implementation of the functions and the real fun will begin.
See you soon!

Stubbing

Just beautiful… But it’s a bit repetitive, isn’t it? 🙂
That’s the actual output of my project, as well as a blank main ScummVM window.
Although it doesn’t seem so (judging by the picture), I’ve made incredible progression (compared to myself) during the past three days. My engine is now up and hooked into the VM. (After many hours of struggling with the detection – Right, Arnaud? ;D)
Besides that, I also included the main loop of the game in avalanche.cpp and started working on the include files of the original sources what I’ll need in order to make the function run_avalot() (in the main loop) operate. (Which calls the method of the class Avalot you see in the picture, which will be responsible for the actual gameplay.) My first target was Gyro, what I stubbed heavily to make it behave, and during the following days I’ll keep on adding and working on these (now header, not include) files as fast as possible.
Listening to the advice of my mentor, I also reorganised the sources: I made a new folder for the already used and the not-yet used converted files and left the files I made myself in the root. I think now my work will be more followable for those who doesn’t have the MSVS2010 project file I use.

Beginning

As Google Summer of Code officially started on yesterday, I started the actual coding as well. The amount of code is still frightening a bit, but with the help of my mentor and enough tenacity, I am sure I will succeed.

Looking through the automatically converted sources (made with PtoC) and adding the standard header to the files (with the awesome help of License Header Manager for Visual Studio) and a namespace for my engine took up most of my Monday. Luckily, I am a bit more familiar with Git by now, so using it didn’t cause me any troubles.
My plan is now to make the converted sources more readable using Artistic Style, then add an empty engine to my work and hook it into ScummVM. You can read more about the procedure here. (And I hope soon here, in my blog as well when I am finished with it.)
There is still the problem of the missing ROOMNUMS.INC, but I think we’ll be able to get through it, thanks to this great wiki the original author made himself to help the porters. (Especially with the help of this page.)
By the way, if you are interested in my work and would like to follow it a little closer, you can find my repository on GitHub, where I “commit early, commit often.”