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Interrupt / systemshock

Shockolate - A minimalist and cross platform System Shock source port.
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Demo support? #144

Open neuromancer opened 6 years ago

neuromancer commented 6 years ago

I will be nice to have support for the free demo, to allow people to easily test this neat re-implementation.

Interrupt commented 6 years ago

That's a cool idea, this might just need support for older versions of the map format. There are some conversion functions from an older map format to the current one that are commented out in the map loading code, it might be possible to revive that.

voodoo47 commented 6 years ago

seconded - the latest version of the demo should be here: https://www.systemshock.org/index.php?topic=9529.0 (discussion here: https://www.systemshock.org/index.php?topic=9516.0)

voodoo47 commented 6 years ago

poked at this for a bit - first, the port chokes at SVGAINTR.RES not being available, once that is added from the full game you can get to the main menu, however it crashes again when attempting to start a new game. it seems like the demo ARCHIVE.DAT is the culprit, as once replaced by the file from the full game, you are able to get ingame (obviously, you will be playing the full level instead of the demo level).

so the initial idea about the demo map not being supported is probably correct (and would be nice if it could be added).

Interrupt commented 6 years ago

Does the demo include the floppy versions of cutscenes? Might be able to fallback to using them instead of the SVGAINTR.RES version.

voodoo47 commented 6 years ago

only INTRO.RES as far as I see - you can get the full demo from the systemshock.org topic I've linked. also, maybe the engine could just skip them if not available, instead of crashing?

icosahedral-dragon commented 4 years ago

The demo has no cutscenes included. I don't think we can play the floppy cutscenes at the moment anyway, since they use a different format from the hi-res ones. It should be possible to get them to play using the vmail code or a variant thereof, but I think that comes under "floppy version support" and out of the scope of this bug. (Besides, I don't have a copy of the floppy version at the moment.)

I don't experience a crash arising from the archive.dat in current builds. (It may have been fixed in master, although I do have a couple of local edits that aren't in master yet.) If you run without the intro cutscene, the game gets stuck on a blank screen. This is because the game goes into the "setup loop" when the cutscene fails to load, but still thinks that an animation is playing and doesn't know what to do with it. (The game does not end when you hit the elevator switch at the end of level 1, for much the same reason.) This is easily fixed; but I would like to support more variants on the directory structure, which has undergone some revisions since the DOS days. Adding a few search paths would let us support the original DOS game and demo without the need for so much file copying when setting up.

icosahedral-dragon commented 4 years ago

Current master should run @voodoo47's slightly hacked "SHLINK" demo version. The original DOS demo still does not work.