Hi all,
I've played BT1 on the Amiga long ago and liked the graphics and feeling there very much. When I wanted to replay it, however, I found disk loading times so awfully slow that I gave it up pretty soon. Then I tried the msdos version, where the loading time are very fast, however, the graphics look so awful that I dumped that too.
So I planned to write a clone of BT1 and here you can see the first step. So far, you cannot do much: walk around in Skara Brae (with the amiga look), enter the buildings (with graphics, except for the towers and the castle), get the street names. However, it's fast and quite nice, since you can go everywhere in town without any monster beating you up. The code for loading the levels from the 'levs' file is also there, but the graphics and logic is not implemented yet. However, I'm planning to do that soon. If you want to take a look: download
btdist.zip (see link at the beginning), then do
Code: Select all
unzip btdist
cd btdist/src
python bard.py
What is also included is the code for the Huffman decoding, loading of indexed files and conversion for some of the msdos graphics files (see the file src/testing.py for which files can be decoded right now). At this point I need to say thanks to some of the people here (Maven, Darendor, Horpner, Caracas, hope I didn't forget anybody whose input I used). It would have taken me months to decipher all that stuff on my own. Really great work, I'm still wondering how you figured out the Huffman decoding scheme.
Currently most of this information is spread over some threads in this forum; I think it would be great to gather all that information in one place. So I started a project on github (https://github.com/btdevel/bt), with the source for the algorithms I've implemented and also a doc directory where I plan to put all information on file formats used in the different BT versions. The docs are generated automatically and put on readthedocs.org, see http://bt.readthedocs.org. As you can see, it's not much yet.
So, I would appreciate any input on this, or contributions to the code or docs, or if anybody wants to join that project... feel free.[/url][/b]