Tag Archives: Doomdark’s Revenge

Midnight/MU

Aside

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For those coming back to Midnight, or indeed those new to it, you might want to check out Online Multi-User Midnight – Midnight/MU It’s a great experience. It’s been running now at least 10 years, and you can play the Lords of Midnight Scenario, Doomdark’s Revenge Scenario, as well as a host of newly specially created scenarios. The games have been tweaked and well honed to cater for issues caused by Multi-User play, and a number of new features have been added. But essentially, if you are familiar with Midnight, you will get along here.

Register on the game site and on the forum. It’s a very friendly community. There are usually plenty people around to help you with training games, although it might be a little quieter than usual at the moment due to holidays.

The Frozen Gates I shall tear down.

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Seven moons from now I, Shareth, Empress of the Icemark, will ride forth to avenge Doomdark, my beloved Father. The Frozen Gates I shall tear down. Midnight I shall lay waste and through the portals of Xajorkith I will pass, triumphant. All shall adore me and despair! Or, if the Moonprince prefers, let him ride to hammer at my door and find defeat more swiftly!

Last night I took a moment to branch the current Lords of Midnight desktop project, and create the Doomdark’s Revenge source tree. The reason I took the desktop project and not the released 1.6 mobile version, is purely because the Desktop and v1.6 Mobile needs to be merged anyway, and I thought that this separate project would be a good opportunity to find out what I broke for mobile in the desktop version. As it happens, not that much!

Jure had already sent me most of the graphics, so this would also act as a good opportunity to create a list of missing art resources. I plugged all the artwork in and created a ddr.tme file. This is the file that links up data from the backend database to the frontend presentation layer. Once I’d made my first pass through that I built the project and ran it… boom! No surprise really! First issue was the Doomdark’s Revenge database. I last generated this about 2004 I think, so the binary format was a little out of date because of a few changes I made while making the iOS version of the engine. Few changes to the export script, and that was all working ok.

Next thing to resolve was some graphical issues. There are no shields in Doomdark’s Revenge, and I used small versions of the shields for the select icon. Jure and I had not come to a decision on how this was going to work, so I created a temporary solution and quickly cropped the characters faces.

f_dwarff_free f_tarithel f_giant

On the main look screen, then shield needed replacing with the character graphic. So the engine now detects a lack of shield graphic and uses the character graphic instead.

And that was that…

That was just stage one. I can wander around the map using any of the three main characters. It randomly crashes, and obviously there is a distinct lack of AI. But, all in all, not bad for a few hours work.