Tag Archives: Projects

Riven X 0.8

Update: Riven X 0.8.3 is now available.

Riven X 0.8 is a massive release, with nearly every puzzle in the game implemented and a long list of improvements and bug fixes to the engine. See the release notes for all the details. I know it’s been a long time coming, but I think you will find it to be the strongest, most polished release yet. I’m also hoping it will resolve a number of graphics issues some people have been seeing on older hardware as well as on Intel graphics hardware.

I now turn my attention to a short list of remaining puzzles and core game features to essentially complete the game. This work will be released as Riven X 0.9, which aims to be a completely playable from start to finish version of the game. I expect this work to take around a month and a half. Once Riven X 0.9 is out, I will advertise the beta a little bit more to gather as much feedback as possible to make sure Riven X works great on as many configurations as possible. The 1.0 release cycle will thus focus on polish, bug fixing, interface and installation improvements, packages, and all the things one must do for a final release.

Finally, thank you to all of those who have tested Riven X so far and contributed feedback or bugs. Your help and support is greatly appreciated.

Now go on and give Riven X 0.8 a try!

Download Riven X 0.8.3 (4.0 MiB).

Riven X 0.6

Riven X 0.6 is now available and is a significant update from 0.5. Major new features include:

  • 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.

Riven X for Mac OS X cancelled; announcing Mobile Riven

Update: This was my April Fools entry for 2008. Riven X is still under development for Mac OS X only.

The recent introduction of the iPhone SDK got me thinking about the future of Riven X. And I came to the conclusion there was no future for a slideshow on modern desktops. However, plenty of people will want some games on their iPhones, and Riven certainly would be great with that touch UI. So I’m officially announcing I’m stopping development of Riven X for Mac OS X and will be working exclusively for the iPhone. Expect daily builds in a month or so.

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

Update: Riven X 0.6 is now available.

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.

Riven X’s edition manager

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.

DropMPQ 0.7

DropMPQ 0.7.1 has been released. It adds support for dropping folders on DropMPQ’s icon in Finder or the Dock.

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.

MPQDraft 1.0

MPQDraft 1.0 is now available, after a ridiculous 6 years of development. This is my second oldest project, second only to MPQKit (and its predecessor, MPQ2K Mac Edition). The highlights are as follows:

  • 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.

MPQDraft is now working on Intel Macs for CFM applications

This is probably coming out of the blue, but the renewed interest in StarCraft spurred by the ongoing development of Starcraft 2 has prompted me to take a look at MPQDraft again. As the title indicates, I now have the technology working again on Intel and PowerPC Macs for CFM (that’s Code Fragment Manager, a relic from classic Mac OS) applications (the primary target of MPQDraft, StarCraft, is still a CFM application).

MPQDraft at work

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.