I'm looking for someone to take over development of the Dark Seed II engine for ScummVM, since I haven't worked on it for quite some years now.
The current engine is mostly based on guess-work and reading the (plain-text) scripts. However, said scripts contain several "magical" values that still elude me. It's very possible that it's necessary to crawl through the disassembly of the original binary to completely understand them.
A video of the current status of the engine playing Dark Seed II is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hf3yZtccX3g . Basic interactions, including speaking to people and taking items, work. Videos, music and sounds play.
There's graphical glitches, no sprite scaling and the walkmap isn't correctly evaluated. Also, several scripts relatively early in the game (talking to the twins in the carnival) lead to a dead-lock in the script interpreter. The scripts wait for something that never occurs.
Since this WIP engine is several years old now, it doesn't cleanly rebase onto the current development branch of ScummVM anymore. I can provide assistence there, if necessary. It might be best, however, to start completely from scratch with a recent ScummVM checkout and add the current engine, piece by piece, back on top of that.
Known ports of the game include the common Windows 3.x version (translated into many languages), a Mac OS (PowerPC) version, a Sega Saturn version (Japanese only) and a PlayStation version (Japanese only).
The Japanese Sega Saturn version modifies the conversation interface to play more like a visual novel. It's possible that the PlayStation version does something similar, but I don't know.
necros2k7
commented
5 years ago
I'm looking for someone to take over development of the Dark Seed II engine for ScummVM, since I haven't worked on it for quite some years now.
The current engine is mostly based on guess-work and reading the (plain-text) scripts. However, said scripts contain several "magical" values that still elude me. It's very possible that it's necessary to crawl through the disassembly of the original binary to completely understand them.
An example of how the scripts look can be found here: https://gist.github.com/DrMcCoy/609e246653713e731d6e
A video of the current status of the engine playing Dark Seed II is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hf3yZtccX3g . Basic interactions, including speaking to people and taking items, work. Videos, music and sounds play.
There's graphical glitches, no sprite scaling and the walkmap isn't correctly evaluated. Also, several scripts relatively early in the game (talking to the twins in the carnival) lead to a dead-lock in the script interpreter. The scripts wait for something that never occurs.
Since this WIP engine is several years old now, it doesn't cleanly rebase onto the current development branch of ScummVM anymore. I can provide assistence there, if necessary. It might be best, however, to start completely from scratch with a recent ScummVM checkout and add the current engine, piece by piece, back on top of that.
Known ports of the game include the common Windows 3.x version (translated into many languages), a Mac OS (PowerPC) version, a Sega Saturn version (Japanese only) and a PlayStation version (Japanese only).
The Japanese Sega Saturn version modifies the conversation interface to play more like a visual novel. It's possible that the PlayStation version does something similar, but I don't know.