Hi all!
Sorry for not posting for so long. The thing is that I didn’t want to write again until I can present you guys something visible again, but now I just don’t want to postpone any more giving some signs of life about myself.
After Eugene brought it up, we reconsidered our approach with Arnaud about CGE2. Even through we decided against merging it with the previous version of the engine during the development, we did made up a new, a little bit different plan from the one that is in my proposal. Instead of concentrating immediately on the display of the scenes, we decided that I should try to implement the intro animation of the game first. We think it’s important now, since as Eugene (and me) pointed it out, the two engines are painfully similar, so we should first map the differences because it could speed up my progress significantly. If I’d know what parts of CGE1 are completely reusable (like the sound code was), and what need certain modifications, I’d be able to just copy-paste the analogous parts and concentrate on the ones what need more attention.
For example, right after I started to work on the intro animation, it turned out that the graphics code itself is in the second group: even if it’s very similar to it’s predecessor, it uses a new form of coordinate representation and the storing and loading of sprites is very different from CGE1, even through the displaying of the pictures share the same code. (Actually, EVERY picture in Sfinx is a sprite, or part of a sprite’s sequence of pictures.) For the coordinates, CGE2 introduces V2D and V3D, and for the sprites, it uses a pointer collection of them: Spare. I had great difficulty with the latter, since the original code uses an ugly DOS-specific hack for the implementation. I think I finally got it right and mimicked it in the right way. Anyway, time will tell…
If you check my repository, you can see that I am working with full power on the finishing of the implementation of movie(), which is responsible for displaying the intro animation. My next aim is to (at least partially) implement Snail, the script parser, which is responsible for the displaying of the animation by drawing the pictures of it one after the other.
Stay tuned guys! Hopefully in my next post I’ll be able to give you even a roaring sphinx! 😉