30 November, 2008

Kyrandia MIDI support

It's been some while since the last post on this blog, but there was nothing interesting I did on ScummVM in the meantime. Now I finally finished XMIDI support for the KYRA engine. The PC DOS version of Kyrandia should be supported with every major music output. Of course PC Speaker is still missing, but since nobody complained about missing support for it yet I guess it's rather ultra low priority :-). The MIDI output itself might have some minor glitches, but those seem to be timing related, since they don't happen every time and there are no valgrind warnings about anything related either. It might even be caused by the ScummVM XMIDI parser, which overwrites timing related meta events, to play at a fixed tempo, as far as I get it at least. Maybe I can fix it in the near future, but it should be fine now never the less. I hope there are some people out there, who will test it and give feedback about it :-).

It seems clone2727 can't joke about me not doing any serious coding anymore!

11 August, 2008

Lands of Lore, Coders::Block, GSoC

Weeeee long time no news, I know. But I finally got around to talk about the current state of things in this place of the world.

After _athrxx and I finished support for Kyra2, better known as Hand of Fate or for short: HoF, and Kyra3, better known as Malcolm's Revenge, I started to look into Lands of Lore support in the Kyra engine. I actually got around to extend the TIM, some script format used by Westwood for animations, used by Kyra2 to support the intro of the Lands of Lore CD Version. Also the character selection is up and working fine. Now all left is the actual in game, which means most of the work has still to be done ;-), apart the outro TIM script is not working currently, since it uses some different commands and additional opcodes. Might be old news to those of you who checking our ScummVM commit logs frequently, but well I actually didn't come around to write a blog entry about it. Now here it is!

For some people it was like wow Lands of Lore will be supported, but the reality is that I think I'm currently having yet another Coders::Block, I came across this nice pun in our IRC channel on freenode btw., so sadly I didn't came around to work on it this week :-/. It might be related to school starting again this week, thus I have no real motivation to work on something in the afternoon. Of course clone2727, who actually seems to make jokes about my blog on his, would now say I'm just lazy as always. Another problem actually might be that I started to play World of Warcraft again with some real life, yeah I know nobody suspects that I have that!, friends again, I hope I can keep my playtime low though.
I still hope I will get around to work a bit more on it in the next weeks. So there's no need to fear, since Lands of Lore will be worked on in the (near) future, and no we will not support Lands of Lore 2 and 3 in the future!

Last but not least I have to note over here that I really appreciate the work by my GSoC student Vincent Marti, you can find his blog over here btw. It is some real impressive work he had done on ScummVM's GUI this summer. I hope he can get rid of some bugs remaining this week and of course finish (or rather start ;-) the user documentation of the new theme description format. After all I feel I had been not a good mentor at all, at least he seems to make jokes in our IRC channel that I'm "the master of the torture chamber", I guess I didn't gave enough kudos to him.

11 May, 2008

Malcolm's Revenge supported as of today

Wee! I implemented the album and helium mode of Malcolm's Revenge today, thus Malcolm's Revenge is fully supported now by ScummVM. So I added a news item and a forum post today. I hope this time there will be some people reporting bugs and submitting screenshots. Last time, when Hand of Fate was announced, sadly just a few people reported bugs, and those even reported them before I announced support for Hand of Fate, but maybe I should be happy and take it as there were not much bugs :-).

Funnily as Eugene pointed out in IRC, he wrote a blog entry about Kyrandia yesterday. Another funny thing is that olhoh still did not catch up any of my Malcolm's Revenge related commits as of today. There is only one commit shown up there related to Malcolm's Revenge, but that one was not related to any real work on it.

05 May, 2008

Malcolm's Revenge soon fully supported

A month ago we announced support for Hand of Fate by ScummVM, and now I am nearly finished with Malcolm's Revenge support. I implemented the GUI of the game today, so all what is missing is support for Malcolm's family album, which is pretty worthless in the game. It is just there as a thing you can look at, if you got no clue what to do and want to have some fun. Sadly support for it will be not as easy as I hoped. It uses quite ugly (namely fully hardcoded...) ways of handling animations etc. I hope I will come around to implement it this weekend. After it the game is fully supported, which is quite nice since then all Kyrandia games are supported by ScummVM. Oh well just half the truth, Legend of Kyrandia Amiga is still not supported, but well... maybe I will get fonts and palettes working correctly there one day.

03 May, 2008

Welcome

Welcome out there to my new shiny little blog. Seems like these days you need to have a blog, so I had to start one too ;-) (yeah I know stupid bandwagon effect).

What is it about?

Yeah I know you would ask! Well it will be mostly dealing with the things I come across in every day life, which could be partically everything from books over to politics over to the free software projcets I work on. I will focus on the latter though, since that is probably most interesting. Ah I forgot to mention the only project I currently work actively on is ScummVM.

So read you soon (or not so soon, depending on how often I will update this blog).