Keen Dreams Tool and Source Work

Anything related to Keen Modding.
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Bitemaster
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Keen Dreams Tool and Source Work

Post by Bitemaster »

Greetings! I have decided to put my Keen 1 mod on the side burner and focus effort on the Keen Dreams engine. We have the source to it, and I'd like to discover what's in the code, like if we can make music work with it (the infrastructure for Music seems to be in there at least), and see if we can match the mod utilities with the 1.93 code or vice versa, since most of them seem to be set up for 1.13. Also studying the source would allow us to hopefully edit all the file formats associated with Keen Dreams eventually.

If any work has been done in this vein, please let me know. I searched for news about that on this forum, but didn't find any.
Nospike
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Post by Nospike »

All the Keen games have "standardized versions" that are considered ideal for modding and thus have all the patches suited to them. For Vorticons, that would be 1.31, for Dreams it is 1.13, for Galaxy that's 1.4. Not sure why anybody would want to mod different versions, there are zero advantages to that AFAIK... just a lot of effort.
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Post by Bitemaster »

Well, I assumed the problem would be that the files from 1.13 would not work with the 1.93 executable. But after you said that, I decided to run some tests to make sure.

In this case the problem is that 1.13's .MAP file does not work with the compiled 1.93 source code (we don't have the 1.13 source code) -- it causes a lock up. Indeed I checked both map files and as it turns out, 1.13's .MAP file is exactly one byte smaller and this is causing the fuss.

None of the other files seem to have an issue, the .EGA and .AUD files have identical numbers of bytes and 1.93 will run with 1.13's there. The .CMP file is different but it's just the title screen and will load anyway. It seems the only thing that's needed is to change the source code so it can handle 1.13's .MAP file.
lemm
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Post by lemm »

Hello!

http://pckf.rigeltechnical.com/viewtopic.php?t=3536

I recently programmed a mod with the source code. If you like, you can use it to make your own mod.
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Post by Bitemaster »

Thanks! I also stand corrected, we do have the 1.13 source for Keen Dreams under the commits on GitHub :) So everything is cool there!
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