Investigating X-Wing (OPT and XWI file formats)

The other day I was reminiscing about the old PC games I used to play back in the 90s when I remembered the Lucasarts classic X-Wing. I remembered that in the late 90s I used to make levels for it using an editor. A bit of searching found me two different editors that I remember fiddling with, one was the DOS based "X-Wing Mission Builder" and another was the Windows based X-Ed.

I found downloads for both (the X-Ed website still exists!) and both ran fine on my Ubuntu PC (XMB using DosBox, X-Ed through Wine). Little did I know that these downloads were going to start a chain reaction that would drive me to spend hours of my weekend staring at a hex editor. :)

Using Multiple Wine Prefixes

This post is a cross-post from Ubuntu Gamer

Wine rocks. It is probably one of the most underestimated pieces of software in the open source ecosystem. If the idea of running pre-compiled programs from Windows on a totally different operating system with a different kernel, and different programming libraries doesn't make you cross-eyed with the complexity, then you aren't thinking about it hard enough.

Just to give some idea of the Herculean achievement that Wine is; the current number of lines of code that make up Wine stands at well over 2.5 million and the project was started in 1993.

The Wine developers don't just have a mountain to climb. To extend the metaphor, they have to climb the mountain, blindfolded, in a straight jacket while tied to a goat... drunk. Their work really is that hard.

Yet despite all that effort, Wine still isn't 100% perfect. Sometimes a Wine DLL will be missing some code, other times the code may not match what Windows does and occasionally a program assumes the existence of files that may not even necessarily exist on a native Windows installation (e.g. .NET).

Amnesia: The Dark Descent

Just a quick blog post to plug what looks like an amazing game: Amnesia: The Dark Descent

Take a look at the video!



I haven't bought Amnesia yet (mainly due to having not completed the awesome predecessor, Penumbra yet) but by the sound of it it's a great game, and available for Linux DRM-free! Check it out!

My newest project... a scene editor

So, over the last few months I've been planning an interesting 2D/3D platform game with a new camera concept, it's one of those ideas that won't go away, so I started implementing it using Irrlicht (which is a very nice engine btw) but I got stuck pretty quick when I went looking for a scene editor...

There are various ways you can generate scenes for Irrlicht, you could use Blender for example but that's overkill for me, all I want is a way to load models, place them on a heightfield and then save it. There is of course IrrEdit.. the closed, Windows only editor. Unfortunately this doesn't run under Wine, and after chatting with Stefan Dösinger one of the Wine D3D guys, it turns out, it's not easy to fix.

After Googling various methods, I thought sod it, I'll write my own. So that's what I'm doing, it's a simple, unique scene editor written in C++/OGL and wxWidgets. It's unique in that it behaves unlike any other editor I know, hopefully I'll have a preview in the next couple of weeks. The general idea is that everything is done via a single 3D view and a tree view which displays the scene graph. So far I have terrain generation (either a plain grid, or via a heightmap), object selection/hovering, a lot of underlying infrastructure and the scene tree view. Next on my list is camera movement, this is going to be particularly cool, because selecting an object will cause the camera to move so the object is focused ready for you to manipulate it. More updates to follow ;)

Oblig screenshot: