{"id":1928,"date":"2013-06-27T17:22:09","date_gmt":"2013-06-27T16:22:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thelordsofmidnight.com\/blog\/?p=1928"},"modified":"2013-06-27T20:03:58","modified_gmt":"2013-06-27T19:03:58","slug":"the-frozen-gates-i-shall-tear-down","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thelordsofmidnight.com\/blog\/2013\/06\/27\/the-frozen-gates-i-shall-tear-down\/","title":{"rendered":"The Frozen Gates I shall tear down."},"content":{"rendered":"

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!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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!<\/p>\n

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 I last generated this about 2004 I think, so the binary format was a little out of date because of a few changes I made while making the iOS version of the engine.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.<\/p>\n

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.
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\"f_dwarf\"\"f_free\" \"f_tarithel\" \"f_giant\"<\/center><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

And that was that…<\/p>\n\n\t\t