Supernova engine merge

Hello, the last week was really busy for me. Because I had a lot of personal stuff to take care of, I sometimes struggled to work as much as I should (that’s the reason, why I am a day late with the blog post), but in the end, I think, I managed. Last week I planed to implement the outro, test the game, fix all the bugs I find and prepare to merge the supernova engines into one. I managed to complete everything I wanted, but I not only prepared the engines for the merge, I actually managed to merge them. The merge is not finished yet, I still have to do a lot of refactoring, testing and fixing bugs I made when merging the engines, but the games can be played on the single engine and they seem to work.

So the plan for next week is to mainly finish the merge. After that, there is not much left to do, so I will work on enhancing the translation.

Right now, we are able to load custom images from a .dat file that are in .pbm format, which is a simple format with only two colors per image. This format is enough to save for example newspaper images like this one:

But there are images in the second game that should be translated, for which only two colors aren’t enough, like this one:

which is in grayscale and with only two colors, I don’t think I can get it much better then this:

Another problem with images is, that the engine uses a format of images, that contain “sections”, that are rendered on top of each other, so we right now have no way to translate this:

Because in this room, you have to push the right letters to write a password. After a letter is pushed, it is highlighted and that is done by rendering different sections of the image.
So the task after I finish the merge will be figuring out and implementing a way to load custom images similar to the original ones (containing sections and a color palette).