Riven X development wiki

Hi, I recently (that is, yesterday, through issue 1 of the CCN Archiver) found this project and I’m quite excited about it. I’m missing a mailing list or newsgroup (that’s why I’m replying here), is there one, or does Trac somehow handle that?

Anyway, I downloaded the tech demo and tried it, then checked out the latest code, built it (which required a few tweaks to the Xcode project), and played around with it a bit. Is it currently capable of doing anything more than displaying some images? I also browsed through some of the source (which seems very elaborate) and through Tito Dal Canton’s MHK file documentation.

I wonder if there’s anything I can contribute to this project. I looked at the Trac tickets that seem to serve as some kind of To Do list, but I currently can’t make much sense of them. Maybe that will change when I examine the code a bit more.

I’m going to make 2 mailing lists sometime today. One for development (your typical -devel mailing list) and one for Subversion and Trac notifications.

Cool. Consider adding them to Gmane, I like newsgroups. And they have a nice web interface, too.

I’d be curious to know those tweaks, but I reckon it has to do with setting both projects (rivenx and MHKKit) to build in the same directory. That’s a per-user setting and there’s not much I can do about it.

No, I didn’t do that, it seems to work fine with each of them bulding in its own directory. What I did was, off the top of my head:
• Put the $(SRCROOT)/../mhk/build/Debug framework search path in quotes so that it works when $(SRCROOT) contains spaces. However, I later had to move the project into a space-less location anyway because otherwise it wouldn’t find the FScript framework. Seems like a bug in Xcode, though I have to investigate it a bit more before reporting it to Apple.
• Modify the svnversion shell script build phases because my Subversion client is in /usr/local, not /opt/local. I’m not fluent in Perl so I don’t know how to solve this more dynamically.
• Somehow the Copy Files build phase looked for MHKKit.framework in the wrong place. Removing MHKKit.framework from the build phase, then adding it to the project (in the Frameworks group) and dragging it into the build phase again from there seemed to solve that.

I’m currently aiming at a “Core Media” release by the end of this weekend, which means Riven X will be capable of properly rendering pictures, movies and sound effects in cards. After that, I’ll move on to other things, like hotspots, variables, etc.

Cool. When that stuff works, please give some examples of which cards in which stacks to look at to see it in action. Up to now, I couldn’t help getting the impression that I missed something.

Eh, thanks, I guess.

That sounds like you’re wondering whether my “elaborate” was meant in a positive or negative way? Neither, actually, just a neutral and friendly constatation. I just got the impression that you are intent on doing things right from the beginning (defining a singleton base class, everything is multithreaded, etc. …), while I usually tend to KISS and expand things incrementally as needed. I guess both of those ways of working have their merits, and both can lead to a mess when done improperly. (Read my code here if you’d like to compare )

I’ll be documenting the architecture of Riven X on this blog and on the Trac Wiki some more this coming weekend, hopefully

That would be helpful (though of course I don’t want to distract you from your scheduled coding if that’s not something you planned to do anyway).

If you’re interested in contributing to Riven X, we can talk! I’d be glad to explain you where I am, what needs to be done, answer your questions, give you commit privileges and all.

Well, let’s not rush it. I can’t really say yet whether I’m interested in contributing (beyond the initial excitement). I’ll follow the project for a while to determine that, maybe submit a patch or two, participate in discussions when I like. I’m notorious for losing interest in projects after a while, so I’d generally like to keep my involvement as informal as possible. Reading the code and the forthcoming architectural documentation will probably substitute for a direct “talk” to some extent, but whatever we do, I think it’s important to do it in a public, archived place like the mailing list and the Wiki, so that other potential contributors can benefit from it too.

By the way, I’m already doing some debugging and I’ll open a ticket for it.

Thanks! I don’t consider it particularly complete in its current state. Many potential users (rightfully) miss movie and sound capabilities. I recently started thinking about sound, and using OpenAL it seems to be easier than I had feared, but I suspect displaying movies through OpenGL (without QuickTime, CoreVideo and all that stuff) will get me some performance headaches. It seems you have already solved that problem for Riven X…
Reusable? If you mean reusable to make different games, well, yes, that’s the point. If you mean the source code being reusable - I doubt it. It’s pretty much grown organically, and I usually end up making changes all over the source tree to implement a single new feature. But it works…

Hi Christian, if you want you can contribute to the reversing project! There is really little work to be done, though it’s (by definition) the hardest: figure out unknown script commands, map external commands (this is *really* hard, if even possible) and figure out some unknown field here and there. If you use Linux I could send you the powerful tool I’ve written to look into data files, which decodes everything known (scripts, pictures…). It’s written using wxWidgets so you might be able to run it on different OSes too. Let me know.

Well, my implementation is really trivial… there is much more GUI code than actual decoding stuff. And it’s all C++, while I guess your code is completely Objective C.

As for external commands, I should be able to put a complete list on my site in days, check it out often. Their names are sometimes very explanatory (xflies) and sometimes completely unuseful (xopencard), so generally they’ll just give us clues. What actually happens inside external commands will be discovered only by trial with your engine. I’m really excited to begin this all soon.

And yes, probably the same principle will be useful for unknown opcodes, although most of them don’t produce observable effects. (side question: do we need to implement them if they don’t give observable effects?

Hello,
I should start by saying that I am a programming civilian. I just found my old copy of Riven that was given to me way back when. I would love to play it on OS X, and have no idea if that is possible. I tried by installing in OS 9, but when the game asks for disc 2 (in OS 9), it doesn’t seem to see the CD. Will it be possible to play Riven again? I love this game and would love to experience it again. Thanks for any help you can offer.