I’ve been working on the engine that powers (among other great games) Frasse and the Peas of Kejick (and will power its sequel). Tim Furnish, who made the engine, opened up its source code almost a year ago (how time flies!) and I immediately downloaded it and started looking at it with the intent of porting it to Mac OS X. As you might imagine, that’s not a completely straightforward process. It took me a while simply to get it to compile and run in Windows (using another compiler than the one Tim used).
Progress was made for a while, but then I was hit by serious lack of time somewhere around August, and didn’t resume work on this project until this week. Before this long break, most stuff except the graphics were more or less working. (I say “more or less” partly because there are some things that I know that doesn’t work, and partly because it’s not easy to test things without any graphics.) Today I made a bit of a breakthrough on the graphics front: While there’s still a lot to be done, I can now see the backgrounds of Frasse (at least the non-scrolling ones) on my MacBook. Yay! This gives me new confidence – I now know I’ll be able to make it run properly eventually. It’s just a matter of time.
Then we will be able to play Frasse and the other good SLUDGE games on our Macs. Maybe even Bad Timing, eventually. Erwin is also slow with his game making, but I’m looking forward to seeing if the game will be able to match my (high) expectations for it.
That’s it for now, but I hope it won’t be quite long until next time I have news to share.
Sounds awesome.
I’m having fun, and making progress. I’ve now played through The Interview successfully. The backgrounds work properly (including the scrolling), and most animations (there’s still a problem with large sprite banks – I can’t see Gertrude or Frasse yet) display as they should.
There is still plenty to do. Freezing is currently broken, and save/load doesn’t yet work…
Today’s update: Now large sprite banks also load properly, and I’ve fixed an issue that was lingering with the fonts. Biggest of the remaining issues are: Freezing, z-buffers, lighting. I’ve also so far ignored the limitation regarding power of two textures… (I’m rewriting the graphics system using OpenGL.) I wonder how new graphics cards have to be to support the ARB_non_power_of_two? It works great on my MacBook, but I suspect that I’ll have to make some workaround for older systems.
But now my week off work is coming to an end, so it remains to be seen how much work I’ll be able to put into Sludge in the near future.
freeze / unfreeze: Done.
Exciting news! I can’t believe it’s been a year since Tim opened up his engine.
Now things are back to normal with time being something I don’t have a lot of. I expect the week before Easter to be my next productive period for Sludge, but I intend to try and not drop it completely in the coming weeks either.