Discworld

[scoriae]

Yes, I understand. I just dislike the guy and distrust his motives behind the whole easter egg thing.

[Meringues]

Fair enough, I'm currently about half way through so I'll no doubt give it shot when I get to that point just for the sake of it, then I'll probably play through it again once its supported in ScummVM

[scoriae]

great - I have yet to anyone confirm that it works, just several reports that it didnt. Although based on the technicality of getting it to work, I don't put it past a 'user error'.

[Pietroskij]

Great Game!!
I can't wait to play it again!!!

[Silver28]

Congratulations to everyone who was involved with obtaining the code, you all did a marvellous job!

[ovvldc]

Hear, hear!

-Oscar

[sev]

moderatorial: this went too off-topic. All off-topic posts were removed. hal9000lives, please, keep all personal discussions in private e-mails.

[hal9000lives]

moderatorial: this went too off-topic. All off-topic posts were removed. hal9000lives, please, keep all personal discussions in private e-mails.

Exactly my point. Thank you for removing all the offending posts

Back to a previous Discworld related comment, the Discworld 1 Easter Egg solution on www.trueblueaussie.com is wrong. A corrected solution will be posted as soon as I remember the actual sequence (it was 10 years ago after all). I have been sent save games and specific engine versions to test it.

The Discworld 2 cheat is correct and should already work on all versions. Psygnosis allowed the insertion of the cheat into the second game, but insisted that that key words in the Eric Idle "sequel" phrase be beeped over to avoid offence.

These cheats will work with any ScummVM versions of the game that appear. Is there a time-frame for it's release?

Thanks, Dave

[md5]

moderatorial: this went too off-topic. All off-topic posts were removed. hal9000lives, please, keep all personal discussions in private e-mails.

Exactly my point. Thank you for removing all the offending posts

Back to a previous Discworld related comment, the Discworld 1 Easter Egg solution on www.trueblueaussie.com is wrong. A corrected solution will be posted as soon as I remember the actual sequence (it was 10 years ago after all). I have been sent save games and specific engine versions to test it.

The Discworld 2 cheat is correct and should already work on all versions. Psygnosis allowed the insertion of the cheat into the second game, but insisted that that key words in the Eric Idle "sequel" phrase be beeped over to avoid offence.

These cheats will work with any ScummVM versions of the game that appear. Is there a time-frame for it's release?

Thanks, Dave

Interesting facts about the cheats

As for a time frame: the tinsel engine for DW1 is in quite a good state and is progressing very well, however we are trying to fix some evil pointer casts and parts of the engine which are not portable at all (e.g. parts which assume that the platform and operating system are 32bit)

[hal9000lives]

Interesting facts about the cheats

As for a time frame: the tinsel engine for DW1 is in quite a good state and is progressing very well, however we are trying to fix some evil pointer casts and parts of the engine which are not portable at all (e.g. parts which assume that the platform and operating system are 32bit)

Yes, the source I have, of an older version of the DW1 engine, is a mess of casting. I started converting it all to C#, but put that on hold when I could not get the final source code.

To clarify, are you only doing a DW1 conversion or DW2 as well? The later game had a Windows engine (as well as DOS) and contains numerous fixes and new features.

There has always been the opportunity to fix the existing DW2 Win32 engine, as a patch, so the many DOS sound and video drivers would not be needed for existing users. I made a utility to install/configure all those bits more easily, but the sound of DW2 under VDMSound emulation is rubbish.

I don't suppose you guys have the facilities to also fix the existing DW2 Win32 engine and release it? That would make a lot of people happy and help promote your conversion project.

Thanks, Dave

[sev]

To clarify, are you only doing a DW1 conversion or DW2 as well? The later game had a Windows engine (as well as DOS) and contains numerous fixes and new features.

We will do both. But of course, now we concentrate on DW1, both versions of the engine. We will try to integrate both DW1 and DW2 engines into a single one in order to avoid code duplicate. We always try to do that with multi-game engines.

And there will be no point in fixing existing DW2 Windows engine, as ScummVM will be a complete replacement.


Eugene

[hal9000lives]

We will do both. But of course, now we concentrate on DW1, both versions of the engine. We will try to integrate both DW1 and DW2 engines into a single one in order to avoid code duplicate. We always try to do that with multi-game engines.

And there will be no point in fixing existing DW2 Windows engine, as ScummVM will be a complete replacement.

Eugene

The point was that Scummvm could get a large amount of free publicity, for very little effort, as the Win32 version only requires minor tweaks to fix it for XP.

So to clarify, you will convert the core DOS engines of DW1 & DW2 to run either dataset. As you know the DW1 Tinsel language is subset of the DW2 Tinsel language, you will use the code from both to build the first ScummVM DW1. Sounds like a good plan.

You may have read that I rebuilt a Director's cut of DW1 using the DW2 engine (fixing all the game bugs and restoring missing cut-scenes), but that required a recompile of the game scripts and sadly that version and all game scripts are "long gone". Not realising the significance of the changes, Psygnosis did not want to pay to re-test the game. Any mentions you see of a released verson of the director's cut are malarky. To my knowledge only bug-fixes went out in later release. Real shame. I was quite proud of that version... even the butterflies made more sense!

Cheers, Dave

[Arantor]

If the bugs are known, though, surely the ScummVM implementation can work around those bugs?

Unfortunately missing cut scenes may be a bit more problematic, but surely something could be arranged like the Broken Sword cutscenes, where they are made available via SourceForge for use with ScummVM?

[hal9000lives]

If the bugs are known, though, surely the ScummVM implementation can work around those bugs?

Unfortunately missing cut scenes may be a bit more problematic, but surely something could be arranged like the Broken Sword cutscenes, where they are made available via SourceForge for use with ScummVM?

Not quite so simple I'm afraid.

They game was written in a separate compiled language called Tinsel. It was compiled down to P-Code which is basicially a sequence of low-level instructions stored as byte values (a bit like assembler)

It is the Tinsel code that controls all object interaction and animation in the game (i.e. the actual game logic). Although the engine is being converted, the game code will not be touched. To the ScummVM project the game itself is nothing but data and it cannot be modified without the original scripts and compiler. The scripts are not known to exist anywhere (I have only a few).

The missing cut-scenes are variations of existing scenes in the game, so again the problem is not being able to recompile the data to insert them.

Sorry, but we will have to live with the published version, unless someone comes up with all the Gigabyte "JAZ" discs I used to store everything for the game at Perfect Entertainment. A huge number of sound, image and script assets went into the process of building the game and I have no idea where they went after I left Perfect.

Dave

[md5]

I believe that those bugs are in the game's scripts (i.e. in the game's data files), so it's a bit harder to fix those. As for the cutscenes, they're all handled by the game's scripts too, and they're not in external files like in Broken Sword