Tag: Midnight

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Lords of Midnight – 2011

In 1984, maybe 1985, my brother Darren, introduced me to a game on his zx spectrum – Lords of Midnight. It’s a wargame/adventure game which was revolutionary in its time. Written by Mike Singleton. You can read much about the history of the game on its wiki page.

In about 1990 I was playing around with a new Spectrum+3 that I had bought and decided to reverse engineer Lords of Midnight. I just wanted to know how it worked.

After performing the reverse engineering, I ported the game to the PC. This indirectly led me to getting a job in the games industry when another industry legend Jon Ritman saw the project and suggested I should think about joining the games industry, and thus everything else that has followed in my career over the last 20 years.

My port was released along side Mike’s official 3rd part of the game. Lords of Midnight:The Citadel in 1995.

In 1999 I started work on an updated version of Lords of Midnight and Doomdark’s Revenge. A project that was never finished and over the years has fallen by the wayside. But much good came out of it.

My website ICEMARK.com ( Icemark being the land that Doomdark’s Revenge was set in ) was setup and covers much Lords of Midnight material. It has become the unofficial central site for midnight related material.

My reverse engineering of Lords of Midnight and a number of other spectrum titles that followed, led to me performing some work for a New York law firm on 3d Patent Case 4,734,690

In 2004 I wrote a 10 page article about Lords of Midnight in which I also interview Mike Singleton. It was my first piece of published work. Which in turn led to a number subsequent articles.

I host a website for the game Midnight/MU developed originally Jean-Yves Rouffiac, a multi-user take on the Midnight games, and have been involved in the development in some small way over the years.

Needless to say, that Lords of Midnight has played a major part of my life for the last 27 years.

So, taking all the above into account, you can imagine my jubilation, when Mike emailed me at the end of January to discuss the concept of us collaborating on a Lords of Midnight project….

… further details of this new project to follow…

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The Midnight Engine – iPhone

So I’ve taken, to porting The Midnight Engine to the iPhone. This is a task that I started 3 years ago. But as many of you loyally Midnight followers will know, time is not a friend to my projects.

I have been playing with getting the engine up and running under AirPlay SDK as this will hopefully give me a little more scope. It kinda goes against my normal philosophy with development, in that an engine must offer just the right amount of assistance to your project but not bog you down with far too many features that you don’t need nor want. There are reasons to consider AirPlay which I won’t go into here, but one of the advantages is that it allows me to keep development in C/C++ which is how TME was written. This is a bonus as I can just port the engine without having to rewrite – well that was the theory.

First I had to scrap my porting attempt from 3 years ago. A because there were an awful lot of errors, and B because I had no idea where I was at.

Creating a new project under XCode and Airplay, I had some 20,000 errors and warnings – mainly errors. Part of this problem was that the codebase had been written to cross-compile across OS’s. And it used to. Not any longer.

It’s been nearly 5 years since I did any proper work on TME, and things have moved on. The compiler didn’t like my code anymore. New keywords had been reserved. Warnings popped up for things that I’d never had warnings for before. eg. Comparing signed and unsigned variables. The Compiler was having different affects on areas of the code that previously compiled fine. The GNU compiler doesn’t appear to be as happy with namespaces as Visual Studio used to be. (that said I can’t get the old project to compile under VS2010 anymore!)

So I had to strip it back. And bit by bit put the code back into the project and painstakingly change everything that needed to be done to make it compile.

After a week – I’m done.

Now I need to do some testing and recoding. First is to get the project loading in the LOM database. This will allow me to wrinkle out some of the OS/Hardware issues in the TME libraries. After that I need to painstakingly test large chunks of the code to make sure they are still doing what I want them to…

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Lords of Midnight & Doomdark’s Revenge

Watch this space…

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Doomdark’s Revenge


I know it’s been a while since I posted or did anything on this project, but I finally got round to doing something again today.

Firstly, I wrote a lot of code for DDR back in October 2006, I had a good few programming sessions on it, and then as usual faded away. I coded most of the NPC’s AI; Follow Liege, Follow Foe, Go after Object, Go home, Do Nothing, Approach a Lord, Pickup Objects on their travels, and Move. I coded the moving mist and wild thing regeneration. I also coded most of the battle code… and then I got distracted by shiny objects.

Since then I’ve changed computers and compiler; so loading up the project yesterday I found that it didn’t compile in a big way. So tonight I have mainly spent all the time fixing compiler issues… and there are an awful lot of them.

One of the other problems I have had with the project is that the graphics are getting so complicated that while running in debug mode, the project runs a little slow. I’ve been putting up with it because it isn’t so bad in Release mode but slowly it has been getting me down and distracting me from the issues. It’s hard to test logic if the frontend isn’t working properly.

I’ve wanted to move the graphics subsytem to make use of the hardware. By moving the 2d logic to use 3d cards I would be able to massively speed everything up. However, I’m not a 3d programmer and again the task just keeps distracting me away from things.

I had a word with Jon Alma today who has been working on the Legends Engine and hopefully he is going to knock up a quick wrapper for some OpenGL stuff that will allow me to move the graphics forward and solve the speed issues.

So today I felt that I made a little progress…

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Doomdark’s Revenge

I sat down today to do some DDR code, first in a while, and spent 3 hours debugging some crashes!

Don’t you just hate it when you leave your code in a none working state! One was some bad XML, incorrect closing elements, and the other was some memory being trashed. The memory problem was due to my string class doing a shallow copy on assignment… well actually it wasn’t, but the compiler was for some reason not using my string assignment operator and instead doing it itself! Actually I have no idea what the compiler is doing at that point… grr…
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