SoAoS progress....

1st Official Post

    Hi all,
    I'm the guy who's porting SoAoS to Linux and MacOS X.


    Great to see these forums still active. I have made a slight break-through this week ( thanks to the help of one of other SoA developers - Allen Halstead ), in that I have managed to write a converter to convert the *.pox files to a more cross-platform format, which actually has slightly better compression in most cases. The idea is that if you already have the game, this convertor will convert all your existing pox files to the the new format and still allow you to play SoAoS.


    So far the animated sprites all convert well, but I have some slight problems with Static objects ( carts, walls ) as they seem to use a slightly different technique for storing their images. I will be speaking to Allen about them this week to see if he can help me sort those out as well.


    Anyway this is just a quick note to say stuff it going on, even though it is at a snails pace.


    If anyone is interested in seeing some basic animations that use the new cross-platform code. Post a message to this thread and I will put something together.

    • Official Post

    Really.... I never thought to read anything new about SoAoS *g*
    And that you talked to Allen Halstead *g* I also did... :D
    We're interested in everything new. Talk to me, hades or PiroMaster
    to add material into our DL Sektion.


    How big is your team? Are you a lonely warrior? :)


    Thank you for writing here and give us hope that still something is in progress :D


    So... give us what you have ;D


    //Edit


    I moved this in the news board ^^

    It's just me as always working on it.
    I've been very busy with Real Life (tm ) and also other projects.


    I'll put together a small layered animation demo to show it working and post a link to it in the next day or so.


    About a year and a half ago I posted information about how the intro and initial game menus were working and were now totally multi-lingual and support German, English and Spanish at the moment and could be changed at run-time.
    Hmm come to think of it maybe I posted that information on www.delphigamer.com or www.pascalgamedevelopment.com.


    Anyway, the point is that the basic startup and menus, have been tested and work on both Win32 and Linux ( ix86 ), and with the current code base, should compile and run under MacOS X with little or no code changes. There is still much work to be done on porting the engine side of things, but my aim is to eventually re-write the engine and tools ( with or without help ), so that the isometric game engine can be used for other projects and maybe a more complete Pillars of Avalon.

    Here is the simple animation and layering demo using SDL.


    It's not much, but is more of a proof of concept demo. The new pox files use PNG images internally, instead of using Fast Projects' proprietry system. Please read the "SDL Demo Reame.txt" files to find out what keys do what.


    I have not tackled shadows yet, but I am looking into it.


    Remember this is highly unoptimised and very crude.

    Someone might be lending me a MacBook for a few weeks so I will see if I can get SoAoS working on there and will post a screen shot here, if I do, before I hand it back to him.

    Here is a work in progress screen shot to show the SoAoS german menu running on MacOS X. With the dev environment in the back ground.


    [Blocked Image: http://savagesoftware.com.au/download/JEDI-MACOSX.png]


    This essentially shows that JEDI-SDL is cross compilable using FreePascal on Win32, Linux and now MacOS X.


    So the next step is to continue my work in getting the engine ported over. If I have some time I'll upload a MacOS X version of the simple sprite demo I posted last week.