Nikmind

Sure, just PM me with your e-mail address. /Mikael

Hi again Interesting to see that no one has been able to make a linux port of this one yet. It's nearly two years ago since I worked on this and my port is fully playable. My port is totally dead though and I'm not going to do anything more about it. Anyone who is interested in taking over the code? It will come as is with no comments or anything so take it for what it is. And I will probably not be much use in answering questions on the code. Don't remember much about it. Maybe Celtic Minstrel is still around. Remember him being interested in taking over the code. Take this as my way of getting some kind of linux version out there more or less quick Hope you can make some use of the countless of hours I spent on this. /Mikael

Hi everyone I'm not totally gone but have too much to do atm. to have time for working much on this. I've finished the game so all should be in place now and only minor bugs (induced by me that is) should be in there. Maybe i'll try and clean up the code a bit and leave it to you or i might decide to continue myself... We'll see what happens... just thought i would drop by and tell you how things are atm. /M

I have no intentions of doing that no. It was just a dirty quick hack to make the .RC file into structs. Ie. the .RC files are now just .h files with some special code around it. I've now also fixed some trimming errors which gave me odd graphical results in some cases. Also i went into a dark cave and noticed that the light cropping was not working. Found and fixed that error. Ive not been able to locate the strange GTK errors which fills my console. Seems that i some cases the src or dest rectangle into rect_draw_some_item have negative values. I'm not sure if this occurs in windows version also and its handled by the StrtchBlt function. It doesnt in any case give any graphical errors on screen so its not really a problem. I can supress those errors if i want to but have decided to keep them around for now. Maybe i'll find the culprit in the end. Now I'm working on locating some errors around ending scenarion and starting a new one. This gives some strange and random errors. Need to look into what gets wrongly initialized when i start a new scenario as opposed to starting a new one at startup. The game is fully playable now and this atleast gives me the push to continue this tiresome work /Mikael

So, now the event handling is fixed (as far as i can see) and at the same time the missing dialogs appeared... hence they where event driven. Shopping mode has now been tested when i could finally run into a shop "dot". It worked without a hitch. hooray! Scrollbar functionality has been added now. So the scrollbars are no longer just for show Combat works but throws out lots of errors when doing missile animations. This will be my next concern. All in all i actually think the game is playable now. All mayor parts should now be implemented i think. Gonna play through a scenarion soon to see what new bugs i can come by... /Mikael

Haven't had too much to work on it lately, but i have atleast come a bit further. Talking now works and after many not so nice words the targeting is also ok now. Lots of various other fixes also has been done. Most notably some long standing problems with my clip regions code. With the targeting in place i'm gonna try out the combat mode tonight. Will be interesting to see how that works. There are some big showstopper bugs i know of that needs to be fixed. Like the fact that event "dots" arent triggered outside (works in town). Some dialogs never gets shown making some noteable info missing. The menus in game needs to be coupled to functions, they are just stubs at this moment. There are probably several other bugs i've forgotten to mention as well as havent found yet In any case i'm making nice but slow progress. Will keep you posted on any further progress... /Mikael

Now the keyboard support is there. Really made it more playable in a jiffy Still need to fix the talking part... and the targeting code in combat makes the game crash. There is still things to do... /Mikael

I tried to at first, but it quickly noticed it would be too much work. The interface code is so deeply integrated, it would be very hard without a total rewrite. Since i was in no way upto this, its like the original code... very integrated. This means it will probably be as much work to change this to something other than GTK, as it was to get it to GTK. Its getting very close to being playable under linux now, and that was pretty much my goal. /Mikael

There, now the signs works fine. I've also had to do some rewrites in my dialog code again... never ending story... The map now works, but is missing the "OK" button. Should be a quick fix for that, but to tired tonight. Going into combat mode also work, and also running into people for combat. Not tried and actual fight yet though. Going in and out of town works nicely also it seems. Talking to people is seriously bugged. This will be my next part to fix. After that i'll try combat and see how well (or not) it works. /Mikael

There, no the char is no longer invisible I can now move around and picking up stuff also work. The event "Dot" works fine and also the opening door info. Looking at the sign outside the door crashes game though. Will be my next project. /Mikael

No, i did the mouse input first. I've fixed that bug now. This means i can move around now. Found another bug then since the char is invisible Trying to find the source of that problem now. I've also fixed so it says Guest Quarters as it should. Also noticed that the map crashes the game. I've still got some way to go for it to be usable. Oh well, one problem at a time /Mikael

Another quick update. Load/save of games/scenarios now work. Never thought this part would give me sooooo much problems. After hours of swearing i found out that align padding of structures was the problem. The "#pragma pack" compiler directive was my saviour in the end. So, unless the compiler used supports this... my version wont work. Will have to make this part more robust further on, also in regards to big/little endian. This since a linux version can be both. This should not be so hard, since those flip functions are already in place. Still, saving structs is generally a baaaad idea for portability. Also had to put down lots of time on the dialog code again... sigh. Hope to have it working fully now, even the custom dialogs. Now i can finally start a scenario and see my char lying in a bed in Fort Talrus Also added the mouse motion code so the mouse cursor changes as it should while moving around the mouse. The code for clicking anything is totally crap though and instantly crashes the game. This will be my next priority. Also a small and odd bug is that the location string under the terrain pic says "Fort Talrus" and in the original game it says "Guest Quarters" (i think it was... at work now so cant check). Dont know how this can happen, will have to look into it. In any case, i'm closing in on getting it actually running

Yes, for now i'm not touching the gameplay. The goal is for it to work like the original version. /Mikael

Time for a small status report again. This weekend i at last came to the point that i would be able to press the make party button on the start page This however soon made me realize that i'd totally missed the point that the game has recursive dialogs Using the GtkDialog widget suddenly was not usable for this. Hence i had to rewrite the whole dialog code, which was no fun at all. Yesterday though i managed to get it working at last. Now i can create a party at last. This however also brought forward the save_file function. Hence i'm at the moment working on the load/save game functions. Also noteable is that i rewrote the whole main drawing functions to make it more consolidated and clean. It still has some bugs, especially with regards to resizing the window. I'm soo looking forward to actually be able to start a game... maybe next weekend if i get some more free time then. In any case, i hope i have most of the major gameplay functions done now that the dialogs seems to work. /Mikael

I've not thought much about where to host this. It will stay on my hd only until it actually works. I'm not especially proud of my code but i've atleast so far managed to get the main drawing functions working and also this mess of a dialog system. I'm woking on adding the rest of the functions to actually be able to start a game. In the process i'm also rewriting my drawing code to be more clean, flexible and quicker(like not redrawing whole window each time...). When i'm satisfied with the function of the game, we can do this. As for answering to the second question about modular code... I would not say it is. At this stage i'm just replacing needed windows functionality into GTK ones. This is pretty much very integrated in the code, so such and approach has not been taken. I just want to get the game up and running and have no intentions at this stage for much else. Since i use GTK and SDL it should be decently portable to various platforms i guess, but at this stage my focus is 100% linux. /Mikael

Equivalent is not totally true for RC->glade. Since the dialog engine of the game is custom i was unable to convert it into GTK+ dialogs. Hence i have converted the RC dialogs into structures using my own little awk script I also must say that i have no idea how you managed to get allegro to work with GTK+. As soon as the gtk_main function starts, allegro crashes. Seems its a known problem when i look around the net. I really dont care since SDL work fine for my purposes. The game is in C and not C++, so ive had no problems with that. As for wxwidgets and QT, they are more C++ centered and hence didnt feel right for this. I have no plans for putting it in any repository for now. If and when i ever get it up and running, we'll see then.

My little project is still going slowly forward. I dont have as much time as i want, but who does. Yesterday i came to the part where you add and remove spells and monsters from the menus. At that point i noticed that the itemfactory i used for the menus is already deprecated I'm now trying to port my menus into the new uimanager. Then i'll have the fun of trying to add/remove items from the menus somehow... The next tedious work is to add the rest of the dialogs. For now i've only added the Tip of the day dialog since it came early in the program. Since there is no .RC file under linux, ive added it in the code in other ways. Oh well, enough status info for now

I have all intentions of finishing it, but for all means make your version portable No harm in having choices is there. Didnt really think much about it being portable at all. Just thought about linux since there is already a working windows version. My version should be pretty portable as i'm using GTK and SDL. Should work pretty much as is on other platforms having GTK and SDL. The porting thing will have to be the work of someone else when i've come that far. For me i'm only interested in getting it up and running under linux. /Mikael

Hello! I'm new on this forum and joined for telling people my little story For like two months ago i went back to the Spiderweb site since i remember loving to play the Exile games. To much surprise i noticed that the source code had been released for Blades of Exile. I quickly searched for someone who had done a Linux port but was unable to find anything but people who wrote about doing it After some consideration i decided to try it myself. I've not done much coding since my good old Amiga, so it was gonna be a funny side project. Firstly i thought that SDL would be great for it and tried to do it. I quickly noticed that SDL was not really suited for this kind of game with menus and so on. Hence i quickly went for GTK+ instead. One funny thing i quickly noticed was that its not a good idea work with the whole code at once... That way i would never be able to try the code for each step i took. So now i add the functions as they are needed while going through the steps. While going through the functions i quickly ended up at the sound handling code. This is where a big shortcoming of GTK+ came up... It doesnt have anything related to audio. I tried many different systems for sound and finally found that allegro fit my bill. ie. it was veeery easy It worked well for me until i noticed that allegro wont work with the gtk_main() function In the end i had to take back SDL for the sound part and it works great. One of the biggest challenges was to choose how to draw the graphics. I fooled around with draw areas, goocanvas and gnomecanvas. In the end i ended up with the Gtk Layout which works for my needs. All the graphic handling in the game centers around the rectangular draw function. This is what probably has taken me the most time to fix so far. Mostly cause of the whole pixbuf and pixmap crap in GTK. I'll not go deeper into details but i've got 4 different rect draw functions Another important part is the drawing of strings and Pango fit the bill for that (being a part of GTK and all). Was a bit tricky, but in the end i managed to fix the font, fontsize, bold, italic, color... ie. everything to work. With all this and lots of little bits and pieces i got the main screen to show Some more tweaking with timers and the little animation also plays. Sigh, now the code suddenly needed to show a tip of the day. This meant it was time to implement the dialog code. It was no picnic so that part is now in place and working. One can even go through the tips and press done to close the window This is all ive managed to do in a couple of months... mostly cause i decided not to write wrapper functions around the windows specific ones. I've replaced them directly in the code. For example such a trivial thing as the difference between RECT and GdkRectangle... SIGH. Anyhow, i've now started on the code for handling mouse clicks in the main window. That is one huge function and it will probably bring in much of the functions left for me to add... so dont hold your breath. Anyway, there will probably come some other port of this for Linux long before i finish. I just see this as a funny project and a good learning experience. I'll keep you posted on my progress /Mikael