The idea here is to make a sort of recreation of the original ALIVE engine used in the first two games, the main difference being that it would be much more open ended.
It would be a good idea since it would provide the ability to: first, actually ADD new stuff (by that I mean, something missing from the original ALIVE engine that could be used to improve level design), and avoid the annoyingness that the engine itself makes (basically, Exoddus).
Obviously it will take some time, and already I have started on a version to see how far I get with it, and I will upload the project file (it's VS2010 C#) after enough updates every now and then.
Some stuff I've got started on here though:
Firstly, I have been working on implementing the texture system. At the minute, all textures you want to load into the game need to be defined. This is the TEXDEFS.DAT file, plain text, but it has rules obviously...
TEXDEFS.DAT Preview
The idea is that textures/sprites can be manipulated as standard images (bmp for the minute as I get it working), and then the TEXDEFS file will tell the game what to load and how/where to draw them. This allows you to edit the sprites in an easier way.
Another reason for doing this is obviously you need to own the game's assets (or make your own), so you need to use Paul's Decoder app to retrieve the game's sprites to use them in the engine. You just put them straight into the TEX folder where the TEXDEFS.DAT is, or you will need to edit TEXDEFS.DAT and tell the game where you are storing the sprite files. At the moment, I am writing the texture definitions as I go along, using the default filenames made by Paul's Decoder.
Here's how my TEX folder is so far:
The way I'm planning on developing it, is as follows:
- Get animated sprites working, and add in all of Abe's sprites.
- Get some sort of physics and basic level construction with a good file format (including loading backgrounds and foregrounds from pngs).
- Work on a generic class for actual interactive objects (bombs, sligs etc).
- Put in the normal environment and non-thinking obstacles (bombs, levers, wells etc).
- Around this time would be working on level-level transport though said objects (also; hubs!)
- Now add the thinking stuff in (sligs, scrabs etc).
- Final fixing up before first sort of done release.
- Improvements on top of that and possibly some other thingys to make other thingys with.
Finally, as a result on the work I've done with the textures, here's Abe's standing still sprite loaded from the extracted ABEBSIC.BAN:
Remember; it's still work in progress!