Riven X in Launchpad
MPQKit in Launchpad

• Water animation
• Cursors
• Transitions

In addition, all the important Riven script commands have been implemented, which means most of the engine is now functional, besides what is implemented by external functions (which includes most of the complex puzzles). Of course, a large number of bugs have been fixed since the previous release as well.

The next release is scheduled for the end of the summer and will focus on implementing a portion of the complex puzzles, as well as saving and loading games.

Download Riven X 0.6.

I hope you’re as excited as I am about this. When you solve that puzzle at 4 PM riding the bus home or being jammed in traffic, you won’t have to wait anymore! Just slide that unlock slider, punch the Riven icon and off you go on an adventure.

Riven X 0.5 is now available. The most important new feature is the edition manager, which will allow owners of the CD edition as well as owners of the various DVD editions to use Riven X. It should be noted that optical disc swapping is not supported yet, which means that CD edition owners should do a full install for the time being. Other changes include performance improvements and a large amount of bug fixes.

There is a number of outstanding issues in this version, namely one that will badly affect single-processor machines (see bug #70). I will try to remedy this in the early 0.6 builds, which will become available through Sparkle.

Riven X 0.6 will be a more interesting releasing focusing on missing engine features, such as transitions, cursors and so forth. For detailed information, see the 0.6 milestone page.

Download Riven X 0.5.

This is a relatively small but critical update for DropMPQ. The highlights are:

• Fixed a bug in MPQKit that caused invalid MPQ archives to be created on Intel Macs.
• Added support for the bzip2 compressor and updated the compression settings for zlib and ADPCM.
• Added Sparkle for easy updating.

I was also made aware that the previous archive didn’t execute on Leopard (and in fact might have simply been corrupted), so this update also resolves that particular (and somewhat embarrassing) issue.

It should be noted that if you’ve used DropMPQ previously, the import preferences will most likely be reset because the internal format has changed significantly. Speaking of which, I’ve added additional default import settings for some new file types, including ogg, mp4, mov and smk.

Download DropMPQ 0.7.1.

• Support for patching PowerPC CFM programs on both PowerPC and Intel Macs. Mach-O and Intel support are forthcoming.
• MPQ Loader 0.5 only supports Starcraft. Warcraft III support will be added only if there is demand.

The download is available from the sidebar and on the MPQDraft project page.

MPQDraft has an interesting history which I will be revisiting in an upcoming post. This will bring us all the way back to the days of Classic Mac OS.

In addition, I am planning on releasing in partnership with Campaign Creations updated versions for their classic campaigns using this new version of MPQDraft. Hopefully, people will check out the richness of the Starcraft modding community before stepping into the next chapter that Starcraft 2 will begin.

I will be releasing the new version once a few more bugs are addressed and proper testing on Leopard is completed. Once that’s done, I will probably contact old friends at Campaign Creations to have updated versions of all their classic StarCraft campaigns posted.

At this time, there’s only one category, “rendering”, which contains only one variable, “renderHotspots”. As the name suggests, this variable is interpreted as a boolean by the engine and controls whether or not hotspot rectangles are rendered over regular card content.

To change the value of an engine variable, you can use the new “set” debug shell command as such:

set <category>.<variable> <value>

For example,

set rendering.renderHotspots 0

Right now, there is no way to query for the value of a single variable, nor for a complete listing of valid engine variables. To remedy that, I am currently working on a variable editor interface which will not only allow easy viewing and editing of engine variables, but also of game variables (what determines and control the state of the game; that is which doors are open, etc.).

There it is at last, a new binary release of Riven X. This new version is of course far beyond the previous release. Some highlights:

• Basic hotspots are working (mouse up and mouse down), which means you can walk around the islands, flip switches, push buttons, and so on.
• Major improvements in movie and audio rendering. Ambient sounds now fade in and fade out correctly.
• Game variables are implemented and have sane default values, which means simple puzzles should be working correctly.

Of course, there’s still a lot of work left to be done. CD media is still not supported, transitions are not rendered, there are a lot of stability and performance issues left to address, many opcodes and all external functions are missing, water animation is not implemented, saving and loading games are not implemented and full-screen is not available yet.

In addition, this new release comes with Sparkle, the popular technology for self-updating applications. All development builds are set to check a development appcast which gets automatically updated daily with a fresh build from Subversion. In short, Riven X will update itself to the latest revision automatically every day. I hope this will help get new versions into the hands of testers more rapidly.

I’ll be preparing a short series of posts about useful tricks for finding problems and using the debug console in the coming days. In the meantime, enjoy this new release.

Download Riven X 0.4 (4.60 MB). A permanent link is available in the blog’s sidebar.