Firefreak on 4/2/2008 at 06:21

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Heh:
"You wake up after what seems to be the most longest sleep in years and realise you are in a hospital like surgery room. Soon the backflashes of the cause that brought you into this room make you feel you now could take the entire world.
The room is well lit with two examination beds to your sides, a small ramp in the west between them leads to two doors. On the bed to your right lies something small. In the east, behind you, a monitor connected to your bed shows some readings.
What do you want to do?"

> Read Monitor

"It says: '6 months' in big red letters - other than that the readings make no sense to you"

... :p :cheeky:

icemann on 4/2/2008 at 17:18

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lol I used to love text adventures back in 80s and early ninties. I`m resuming work on an old one I was putting together (a remake of a fighting fantasy gamebook into text adventure form) several years ago but got side tracked from. All it needs is the final 200 sections to be finished + work out how to implement a save feature + maybe add some sound effects in then its done.

"As you scan around the surgery room for other items of interest you have an increasingly nagging feeling that you are being watched. Looking around at first you see nothing, but then in the upper corner of the room you notice a camera fixated on your position. To test your theory you jump to the left only for the camera to follow your every direction.

As you ponder why the camera is so interested in you, you suddenly hear a loud series of beeps from a nearby corridor, and what appears to be a medical robot races in your direction. Its razor sharp claws reaching outward as its speeds towards you.

What do you want to do?"

> Examine floor

"Barely noticeable in the dark, you can barely make out a steel pole. Not far from where your standing.

>

kodan50 on 4/3/2008 at 17:13

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I was making my own text based style RPG as well. I barely got save/load feature working, but I stopped working on it because I lost it. BTW I was only coding in BASIC. Other than that, I wouldn't be able to help. I assure you though, if there was something I was capable of doing, I could give all my free time in efforts to helping TSSHP become a full blown recreation.

What I can do though, and as I was working on with the Half-Shock recreation, was the texture animation. System Shock uses a palet and the color changes based on the palet it is using, or something like that. The game seems to use 2 different palets, one that animates slowly, and one that animates fast. At this point, all I can do is determine the RBG color of each cycle and recreating the animation for each image based on the RBG value. Yes, I know that someone has an easier way, such as extracting the palet from the RES file directly, but I do the save-screenshot and editor way, cause it feels more enjpyable, that and I could never figure out how the game determines which part of the palet to use on which part of the image. I plan to make animated GIF files of each texture animating, in case someone else would be interested in the animated textures....

However, if someone can tell me what image format SS1 uses natively, I would be happy to do some experimentation... What format are the images stores in the res files?

Firefreak on 5/3/2008 at 06:30

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kodan50: Have a look at the unofficial ss-specs document from TSSHP:
(http://tsshp.cvs.sourceforge.net/tsshp/tsshp/doc/ss-specs.txt?view=markup)
Chapter 2.1 Describes the bitmaps, their (binary) format and their compression.
Chapter 2.1.3. Particularly describes the palette looping (pixel 'anmiation')

icemann: Do you mean save and load of general resource files (which the save games are as well basically)? Load and especially Save of the resource files is in the tsshp2 module I recently added to the project and mentioned in this thread:
direct cvs link: (http://tsshp.cvs.sourceforge.net/tsshp/tsshp2/)
prepackaged source zip: (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=23259&package_id=261475)

both: Have a look in the tsshp2/src/res subdirectory - in here the basic resource load/save code and the encoding for some basic types (such as bitmaps) is contained.
The TestBench.cpp test-program contains a module test to verify the saved resource file equals the loaded.
If you don't like others code, the ss-specs document is the general start either way ;)

cosmicnut on 5/3/2008 at 10:52

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icemann, what language are you using and what can't you work out...

For a simple text adventure, you just need to store the inventory and the players current position.

Not read that book (or if I did it was so long ago that i can't remember). Are there any events that need to be saved? (pressed button A here or killed giant B there)

Been a while since I tried to create data files.

In the end you could probably use a bog standard CSV file. it normally used to store databases exports. Basically each record is stored on one line of a text file, each field seperated by a comma or other symbol.
When you read it back, all you have to do is read in the line and split it based on the sybol you used.

While its not the best structure to use for game data (especially because its quite human readable), all you need to know to use it, is text file handling.

Of course, the language you are using may have its on data file structure you can use