Lords of Midnight – iOS – Update

Just thought I’d post a quick update.

I’ve now been working on this project for a tad over 2 months. Mike contacted me tail end of January, and we started work beginning of Feb.

However, I only work midweek evenings on the project, and then only for 4 evenings. Actually sometimes it’s less because some nights I’m just knackered from burning the candle at both ends and in the middle too. I get anywhere between 3 and 6 hours of coding time. Recently I’ve spent less time than I would like due to having a persistent neck problem that is affecting me sitting in front of the computer – and as I do that all day, it gets hard to do it in the evening too.

Anyway, I’ve nearly finished getting the game fully functional. I spent some time doing underlying UI code recently. We decided against using AirplaySDK’s UI stuff, just because it’s too much baggage. But now that my UI stuff is done, knocking stuff together is pretty quick.

Currently everything is still very simple. I have resisted the urge to throw everything that was in winLOM and winDDR into the mix. The objective is to get the game functional and then start the work of turning it into what we actually want – a small piece at a time. We know how the current overall game works. So once it is working, we can then identify what we want to change, write a design document, and then change it once step at a time.

Tonight I will be putting the character select screen in. Currently you can choose the 4 main characters from the main view, and you can recruit everyone else – you just can’t select everyone. After that I just need to put in the night screen and I’m done.

At that stage I will start testing on different devices. I would like to be able to get a number of people across the following formats – iPhone 3Gs, iPhone4, iPad1, iPad2, Windows, Mac, Linux, Android. If you are interested then keep an eye on the blog, I will post a call for help soon.

Getting up and running…

It seems a little strange, that after all this time, something might just finally become of this project! 🙂

The first stage was to get the Midnight Engine up and running under iOS. Well I tried that about 3 years ago without any major success. However, it’s a little more important now. So I downloaded the Airplay SDK which Mike and I had decided to evaluate, and started porting the engine.

It was a pain! Differences in compilers, changes in the language, blah blah blah… it took a couple of days of monotonous work before I had a project that loaded the TME data in. While I was working on that, Mike was playing around with some graphic ideas that we had talked about implementing – mainly to do with lighting.

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Lords of Midnight Development

Back in 1999 I started work on the Midnight Engine. The scope of the project was to develop an engine that could play Lords of Midnight and Doomdark’s Revenge and help create other Midnight inspired projects.

The development was split into five separate parts.

1. The backend, the actual engine.
This is a self contained library that loads a Midnight database and allows the game to be played. It has no concept of visuals or platform. It works by exposing an interface to anyone that should choose to use it, and is extended using scenarios. The scenarios allow for the code to be modified in game specific situations.

The original scope of the backend was to take both Lords of Midnight and Doomdark’s Revenge and amalgamate them into one entity. I removed all hard coded logic and made everything data driven. I expanded every compressed bit of data and removed any restrictions on size that existed. I then added a number of data items that I believed future games would likely exploit.

2. The Lords of Midnight Scenario
3. The Doomdark’s Revenge Scenario
Although both of these were developed as separate scenarios, most of the differences were in the data, ie: characters, map, etc.. and features from the engine that were turned off and on.

4. The Lords of Midnight Frontend – WinLom99
5. Doomdark’s Revenge Frontend

The frontend’s where the graphical aspect of the games. They were the user interface that drove the Midnight Engine for the specific scenario. WinLom99 was pretty straight forward. Doomdark’s Revenge however was where the graphics started to take on a whole new dimension.

The reason that I mention all this is because, everything I have done before, becomes the start of Lords of Midnight 2011.