Hammerhands wrote:somehow I still remain perplexed as to the ENGINE or driving force that interfaces your work into the game and what powers the client server connection.
I still don't follow the question :-) My work *IS* the game, I'm rewriting everything from scratch, using nothing from the original, writing my own 'engine' if that's what you want to call it - the only reason my version requires the original LBX files is to pull the graphics out of them. I felt it was a pointless exercise extracting all the graphics out of the original LBX files only to repack them into another format and adding to the size of the download - why not just read directly from the original LBXes? No data/text/descriptions are used from the original LBXes, that's all stored in the 3 XML files (server, graphics & language).
I had to look up what this Torque 2D thing you were talking about was, I had never of it :)
Hammerhands wrote:I had an idea for creating custom maps . produce them as SAVED games even if not one turn is taken and allow them as selectable in multiplayer games i assume the host of the game produces the map for all thru the server but then I assume again standard gaming proceedures.
Don't see why not - currently I generate the maps randomly but since you'll eventually be able to save games, you could certainly use that to save maps.
Hammerhands wrote:I am a machine code author
I used to be, I had an old 3D engine I wrote in pure assembler in the '486 days prior to Windows 95 & Direct 3D. It was pretty good and handles z-buffers and object intersections which a lot of other programmers' similar engines at the time didn't do. Of course totally obsolete :)
I gave up on assembler when I started examining the code that Delphi actually generates and came to the conclusion that it wrote just as good machine code as I could directly, and in a language that is 100x more readable. My preference is Java now, I seriously considered it for MoM IME from the start but I did a few tests and I couldn't get the graphics smooth and fast enough. I am very seriously considering porting the server across to Java though, so I can run it on Linux.
>> my biggest questions are this
>> 1) game originally loaded above dos and used expanded memory [did you alter this ?]
Since its a Windows app with no dos code/dos-style memory usage, it can use the whole of memory available to Windows.
>> 2) game originally looked for audio hardware in UMB region (unused by Win XP) [so how did you enable sound?]
There's a TMediaPlayer component in Delphi which in the background is what produces the sound. I forget the actual Windows API calls that TMediaPlayer itself does, I can check if you like.
>> 3) do you still use the LBX files as resources in game?
Graphics - yes. Sound - no (XMI and VOC are too awkward). Data - definitely no, I want it to be user-editable in the XML file. So if someone wants to make the spell of mastery only a rare spell, or change the stats or costs of any units or spells, they can do so.
Hammerhands wrote:yes I was part of the storyboarding team before this game went to production my CIS nick of Hammerhands ie the dwarven unit hammerhand and my other Nick Ryjak became Rjak in game
So... are you saying you worked on the original MoM?
What/where/who is CIS? CompuServe?
Implode.