Just a quick word on what is currently going on.
- My internship at Apple is soon coming to an end. It was an absolutely fantastic experience, which I will surely talk about some more in future entries, NDA permitting :p
- There will be a new MPQKit release sometime by the end of August. It will likely be the last beta release before the release candidate for 1.0, which will happen sometime in September.
- I have started intensive work on Riven X again, and there is a lot more to come for that project as well. There will also be a new binary release by the end of August. I plan on finishing this project before next summer (for real this time).
- StarCraft II will be awesome.
- OpenGL 3 (codenamed Longs Peak) will go final sometime in September or October. This is fantastic news for OpenGL, as LP brings some much needed fresh air to the API, particularly in the realm of object model and data / state transfer efficiency. It will be a while before we see LP implementations ship to customers, but at least the spec will be out there.
Much more coming in a week.
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Tuesday, August 14, 2007 at 13:18 PDT
Peter
I think this is the wrong place to put this, but I couldn’t find a better one. I work for a small library which uses Broderbund Living Books on its children’s computers. Apparently, Living Books are in Riven format. However, upgrading these machines to Windows XP makes all the Living Books crash. I know that you don’t care much for Windows (neither do I: Linux nerd), but I wonder if you have any suggestions for a reliable alternative player. I checked out your MHK toolkit, but I wonder if you had any thoughts on whether this is at all portable to XP. Thanks in advance, I’m sure this wasn’t something you’d expect from your work on Riven X.
Wednesday, August 15, 2007 at 13:37 PDT
Jean-François Roy
Peter:
If Living Books is using MHK archives, then you could probably inspire yourself from MHKKit or port it to Windows. The code is unfortunately Mac OS X centric (it’s using the File Manager API), but several structures fundamental to the MHK format are just pure C. It’s unlikely that I’ll have the time in the near future to port any of my projects to Windows (nor do I really intend to ever do so), but at least the source code is available.
You didn’t give much detail about the content of those archive. If it’s using the exact same stuff as Riven, then MHKKit also has functional code for ADPCM decompression and image decompression. Unfortunately, again, in both cases I use Mac OS X centric APIs (Core Audio in the case of the ADPCM decompressor and the Accelerate framework in the case of the image decompressor). But again, the logic and core decompression routines are plain C and only rely on Mac OS X API for output or input data structures and pixel format conversions. Finally, MPEG Layer II decompression is done using ffmpeg.
Thursday, August 16, 2007 at 09:59 PDT
Tito
It would be interesting to have a look at those archives, and see if they use the standard Riven resource set. Maybe they are exactly the same thing (I don’t know Living Books but I guess it’s like that).
Wednesday, September 12, 2007 at 23:36 PDT
DJSheets
Yayeeeeee!!!!
Riven perhaps…!!!!!
–dj