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<body class='hmmessage'><div style="text-align: left;">Hello everyone<br><br>This is a little heads-up on the two new engines that have been added to ScummVM yesterday.<br>Work was being done on both of them, and they both reached a state where they could be<br>added to ScummVM's code base. After obtaining permission from ScummVM's project admins, <br>both of them were added yesterday.<br><br>MADE is an engine used by some Activision games, most notably Return to Zork. It's quite a<br>small and relatively simple engine, since it's used to parse a custom made LISP-like language. <br>All the game logic is in the game data files themselves (even the game's main loop). In its <br>current state, the engine allows the player to move around and perform some actions in the<br>CD version of Return to Zork, though it's still in an early stage and a work in progress - there <br>are still several things to do. I've added some information about the engine itself in ScummVM's<br>wiki:<br>http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/MADE<br>The engine has been coded almost entirely by Benjamin Haisch, aka johndoe.<br><br><br>M4/MADS is an engine first created by Microprose (MADS stands for Microprose Adventure<br>Development System) and was used to create the 3 adventure games that the company created<br>(Rex Nebular, Return of the Phantom and Dragonsphere). It was then sold to Sanctuary Woods,<br>who renamed the engine to M4 (perhaps MADS version 4?) and continued development on it.<br>The company then created 2 games based on that engine (Riddle of Master Lu and Orion<br>Burger). <br><br>This is quite a complex engine, with several subsystems. The bad thing is that the game logic <br>itself in each game was written in C++ and hardcoded in the executable, which makes work <br>on it even harder. Also, several parts of the main game executables of the three Microprose <br>games were overlay code, using a tool called RTLink, to reduce the overall base memory<br>that the (quite big) executable needed. This makes work on it even harder, but there's<br>good work being done on this part. A design decision was made to separate the game logic<br>from the executable itself, and avoid having code similar to what we can see in the igor engine<br>(where game logic is also embedded in the executable itself). Therefore, a script parser has<br>been created, which is used to parse the game's logic from an external data file.<br><br>A large part of the MADS part of the engine has been based on johndoe's existing work.<br>
In its present state, the engine is capable of showing certain parts of Orion Burger and the<br>
three Microprose games, however a lot of things are currently triggered using console<br>
debug commands. Also, Riddle of Master Lu is quite different in some aspects from the other<br>
games, so most probably it will be one of the last games that will be supported by the engine<br>
in the future. The main part of the work now is being done on Orion Burger, where the last<br>
and most mature version of the M4/MADS engine was used. Then, work will probably be done<br>
on the Microprose titles and finally on Riddle of Master Lu.<br><br>I've added some information about the engine itself in ScummVM's wiki:<br>
http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/M4<br>There have been several developers that have written parts of this engine, including<br>(sorted alphabetically by surname):<br> Torbjörn Andersson (eriktorbjorn), Paul Gilbert (dreammaster), Benjamin Haisch (johndoe)<br>and Filippos Karapetis (thebluegr/md5).<br><br>To sum up: both engines are still a work in progress, so don't have high expectations yet :)<br>They are both in quite a good state though, so hopefully there will be interesting results<br>in the not so distant future.<br><br>Regards<br>Filippos Karapetis (md5/thebluegr)<br></div><br /><hr />More immediate than e-mail? <a href='http://www.windowslive.com/messenger/overview.html?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_Refresh_instantaccess_042008' target='_new'>Get instant access with Windows Live Messenger.</a></body>
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