I have upload the full install version 0010 of the engine. This has all the bug fixes that have been in patch versions over the last 11 days. If you have been patching since version v0007 you only need the v0010 patch. Thanks to everyone who has helped with reporting bugs.
Winlom99
Well it’s been a long time in coming… but the latest version of The Midnight Engine is finally with us!
New graphics! – Thanks to Jure Rogelj.
The Load and Save is now implemented – apart from saving over old save games ( which just happens without prompt! ).
The Launcher program is implemented. This allows you to set the Frontend, Scenario and graphics mode. The frontend and scenario all give the same result at the moment… but the mechanic is now there.
The Launcher can load a save game from anywhere on your drive and load the required scenario as well as the game.
A few bug fixes.
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Winlom99
I’ve not got as far as I wanted with this release. ( Seems to be the story of this project ) Anyway, this versions has most stuff except the load/save. Please read the .doc file for detailed information. I thought I’d upload this because it is almost a month since the last version and just incase I get further behind with the load and save, at least something is up.
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Winlom99
My time has been pressing me of late and I have been working on WinLom in the morning before work 5:30 – 7:30. So progress has been slow.
I am currently systematically working through some of the features that are missing or need tidying up and hope to have a new version within a week or two. This version should be the 1st Beta of the WinLom99 scenario.
What I am hoping is that this version can be played by as many as wish to and I can get good feedback of what/where the bugs are.
I then intend to leave this version in beta for the next month, this will give me enough time to evaluate the engine and work out the areas I need to address to allow the Doomdark’s Revenge scenario to work correctly.
The engine is currently already *very* configurable through the access database and all manner of different things can be done with it. I just need to fix up some of the idiosyncrasies of DDR. About the only thing that can’t easily be changed at the moment is the map. This requires an editor which will come later.
I want to take the next month off as I need a break from WinLom and I want to refresh some areas of my web site, which I have neglected lately.
After that month I will resume work to finish off the Midnight Engine and start on the editor. ( ie: unless someone wants to take up this task! )
I will probably release this first version of the source code to allow others to look at it and we can start the process of fixing up the areas that don’t make it portable etc. With this version anyone interested in building new scenarios should be able to make a start and get a general idea of what they can/can’t do. This will all help for improving the engine further.
Again, if anyone has any noticeable areas that DDR is different than LOM I would be interested to know.
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Winlom99
I’ve not had much time to code for the last week or so and I’ve had to re-code a few areas in order to restructure. This was to allow me to separate out my standard library stuff from the rest of the project. This now gives me the front-end, backend and library setup.
Everything is now back up and running – except text and night processing of doomdark.
The night processing is missing because I never finished it in the first place and the text is due to not wanting to use certain proprietary graphic formats.
To explain:
I have a lot of code and utilities which handles generic graphic stuff, which I have used from company to company, project to project. I chose not to use my own sprite/graphic format and stick with BMP’s, mainly because you would need all the utilities to add graphics to the engine and I cannot distribute them. Not to mention the fact that that particular utility isn’t very pretty – plus I’m not using any of the features that the graphic format/utility gives.
All this is fine, except for the fonts. I have routines that alpha edge blend/anti alias the fonts to give a nice font smoothing affect. So in order to use these fonts and allow others to change them I need to re-code a simplified version of my font maker. ( time time time )
I will stick in a windows font for now and fixup the font util later. The text won’t look as pretty – unless anyone knows how to get Windows GDI to render a font to a DDRAW surface with font smoothing on! ( I just couldn’t get that to work last time I tried. )
Anyway, enough rambling… I’m hoping to get a version up on my site for you all to look at by Sat 13th Feb.