Another WC:Priv remake

Crazy Abbot

Spaceman
Hi Everyone.

I've got a little project i've been working on for a month or so now. It's more or less another privateer remake, but this uses the games original data and scripting to run the game on windows (or whatever OS you want to compile it on).

This could probably be adapted to suit wing commander 1 & 2 and strike commander. I think the games use a similar engine & data formats. However i'm not too sure as I dont have the games, so I cant examine them.

I know there is the vega strike remake project and dosbox for the rest of the games, however I'm doing this more out of interest than anything else. (and privateer is one of my all time favourites)


Currently you can't do much of anything at the moment. It just lets you move about the various bases in the game.

It requires the games TRE files, and works with both the CD and Floppy versions.

linky

Right now i'm trying to add support for the xmi midi, and i've recorded the midis from my synth so you can hear the music as it was supposed to sound (not the way the sound blaster butchered it :D ) and i'll add support for an add on MP3 pack sooner or later.

If there is interest from other programmers we can make this a sourceforge project and see if we can't recreate the original game.
 
In terms of game engine, WC1 and WC2 are very similar. I believe Privateer is also based on the same engine to some extent.

In terms of file structure, WC1 and WC2 are similar, while Privateer, Armada and Strike Commander share the same TRE format.
 
the exe pretty much immediately exits. It could be a Wine thing, which I'll look into, but in the meantime maybe it says something to you.

output:
Please use the registry key HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG\Software\Fonts\LogPixels
to set the screen resolution and remove the "Resolution" entry in the config file
fix your ini file


ini file:
[Priv]
count=1; number of tre files
1="e:\games\privmoo\priv.tre"


[Base]
;What base do we start on?. see bases.txt for info
base=32
 
MamiyaOtaru said:
the exe pretty much immediately exits. It could be a Wine thing, which I'll look into, but in the meantime maybe it says something to you.

output:
Please use the registry key HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG\Software\Fonts\LogPixels
to set the screen resolution and remove the "Resolution" entry in the config file
fix your ini file

I dunno what that's about, It doesn't use the registry whatsoever. the resolution is hard coded into the game currently.


The "fix your ini file" is spat out when you mess up the ini file some way. the numbers of the TRE files must start counting from zero. Have a look at the readme for examples

I'll see about whipping up a linux binary in a day or two. Currently the GCC compiler spits the dummy when i go to compile it.

Try this:

[Priv]
count=1; number of tre files
0="e:\games\privmoo\priv.tre"
 
yeah, the resolution stuff was a Wine thing. Just some innocuous error that gets spit out any time I run anything with is (just hadn't noticed it until now).

Anyway, fixed the .ini. I just edited the one that came with it. I deleted 0="gameflow.tre" and edited 1="midgames.tre" to point to my .tre file. Stupid me, should have realized that deleting the 0 entry meant I had to make 1 0..

So, it starts up and runs in Wine. Looks good. The mouse is stuck in the middle of the screen though. It can be moved away, but keeps warping back to the center of the screen. If I am real quick, I can click on the hotspot for main concourse :) I really doubt that is your fault, it probably works fine on real Windows. Great work so far!
 
Small update

So, it starts up and runs in Wine. Looks good. The mouse is stuck in the middle of the screen though. It can be moved away, but keeps warping back to the center of the screen. If I am real quick, I can click on the hotspot for main concourse I really doubt that is your fault, it probably works fine on real Windows. Great work so far!

:D

I've managed to compile this on linux. binary is here if anyone is interested link
It seems to behave somewhat strangly tho, it takes a while for events to register.
SDL must be installed for it to work.

I've also made a change that allows it to display the ship on the landing pad. ships can be changed in the INI file. (the windows version in my first post has been updated)

I've made a few discoveries in the data files. The game appears to have scripts for spying, smuggling, and sabotage missions.

There are also scripts for random fixers sitting in the bar giving missions, completely unrelated to the plot. however there does not appear to be graphics for them.
 
Yeah, they had the text for random fixers included, but the implementation never made it into the final release.
 
I'd be willing to help out with some programming, if you want help and know what we should do. I would do testing and programming both in Linux - good that you've chosen to write this piece of code in SDL, so it's easier to port..

I will be skiing for one week now, but just to let you know now that I will try to help you if you need some help :) Will you get back to me (E-Mail preferred) in a week's time? thanks!

Thomas
 
Is there a way to implement a filter system like they use in VMSCUMM? It did a hell of a job to the enhance appearance the old graphics.
 
Eleazar said:
Is there a way to implement a filter system like they use in VMSCUMM? It did a hell of a job to the enhance appearance the old graphics.

I've looked into it. I did at one point try and use the scummvm scalers, but they are undocumented and the source code is hard to understand. I coudn't get them to work.

I do have some code that did an enlargement to 640x400 however it looked pretty bad and it had some other problems integrating with the rest of the program.

Also the graphics must be converted to 16 bit to do the scaling, as no graphic scaling aglorithm I've seen works on 8 bit data. my 8to16 bit coversion is buggy at the moment.

For the moment I've given up on scaling the graphics and I'm working on the internal game logic.
 
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