Wurlde - Game Development Forum

[ibisum]

I've been going through it, and it is indeed enormous amounts of code to understand, but .. he wasn't stupid. He left a lot of clues behind and documented things in a way that a careful follower might be able to pick up the pieces. I think he wanted that.

So anyway I'm going to keep trying to understand the Wurlde codebase and if anyone else wants to discuss it, lets do it. Maybe we should try to start a thread of "Understanding <Twilighte Game in Focus> sources..."

[jbperin]

Can someone explain the status of this game ?

There are 5 disks on oric.org

Are there real releases of the game or rather some quick build of the last known state of source ?

This game is so beautiful .. I would love to reach the scene with the windmill that turns .. but I'm stuck at the cliff (that freeze my Oricutron). any clue?

[Dbug]

Neither Times of Lore or Wurlde are finished.

Wurlde has been through numerous versions, with different ways of navigating and how the world was rendered, I believe he was happy with the latest set, but it was still very much in development, not stored in an efficient way, it was mostly "rough out of the graphic editor", which is why it takes so much room.

[ibisum]

I managed, a few years back, to build WURLDE (and also SWIV) from the sources, and have spent a few hours reading the code - but there is *much* to comprehend, and Twilighte was a very keen and efficient thinker who made decisions along the various paths he took, which often meant back-tracking a bit .. and to keep up with this, you really have to also read his forum postings during the time, where he did take quite a bit of effort to describe his approach to various things such as AIC, creating game levels, generating animation code at runtime, and so on.

If you can find it, his exposé on PULSOIDS development was a great thread, and there are interesting subjects, such as how he chose to use colours specifically for each game entity .. I regret I don't have time to search, but I do have the threads in PDF somewhere, in case you go spelunking and get lost ..

It'd be amazing to take SWIV to completion. Of all of Twilighte's last projects, thats the one that seems to be the low hanging fruit, and would be appropriate to prepare for the WURLDE adventure, as I believe Twilighte was very much a lessons-learned kind of programmer...

[Symoon]

It'd be amazing to take SWIV to completion. Of all of Twilighte's last projects, thats the one that seems to be the low hanging fruit, and would be appropriate to prepare for the WURLDE adventure, as I believe Twilighte was very much a lessons-learned kind of programmer...

SWIV (actually O-TYPE) was really ambitious from what I recall. Check the CEO special issue, I tried back then to recollect all that Twilighte shared about it. It was to be massive, but with ideas changing with time.

[ibisum]

SWIV(O-TYPE): Indeed, it is a big leap in what can be done - multi-layer graphics engine with scripting.

The engine is there. The scripting is there. I think collision is 'mostly' done and maybe Twilightes' plans for audio are not yet realized.. but on the other hand there might be some bugs/todo's left to fix, but I reckon the biggest issue is the content itself - i.e. the scripts to actually compose a full game. Maybe a bit of artwork and story-telling.

I think WURLDE is in, relatively the same shape albeit with other game-play experiences intended - i.e. with a scripting system, but with generally different graphics requirements. I might be incorrect, but I think WURLDE was to be disk-based? Oh, but I do remember that the Oric Sprite Script language is common to both projects, and therein lays a lot of jewels for the polish ..

[Symoon]

I might be incorrect, but I think WURLDE was to be disk-based?

I guess so, by the amount of detailed HIRES graphics.

[Dbug]

I've been through all the Wurlde dsk files, and I updated oric.org with the screenshots.

You can also see them here.

[ibisum]

It really astounds me to see WURLDE over the years, it is just a truly timeless place.

Every time I wonder at the reflections and the delightful solutions to Oric's unique colour capabilities, it just transports me into a world that could have been.

Those fountains!

Twilighte you delightful human being, showing us the machine was as worthy of a mans whimsy as any other.

If there is any way to get the current wizards' heads together to triage this project, and bring it to fruition - eyes on you, DBug! - I would be happy to participate as a Patreon or whatever...

[Dbug]

If there is any way to get the current wizards' heads together to triage this project, and bring it to fruition - eyes on you, DBug! - I would be happy to participate as a Patreon or whatever...

Nope, sorry, as I wrote on Twitter, I'm not going to lead any such project, but I'm willing to help now and then to take a look at complicated stuff or suggest ways of doing this or that if whoever work on the project is stuck.

What I would suggest is to pickup some online collaboration platform (github, gitlab, whatever you are comfortable with), and have the existing project copied there, unmodified, with whatever document it came up with, all the existing builds, etc... and then have that in a branch that will never be modified: It's the reference material you can always come back to.

Then, the first part is to try to rebuild the stuff to regenerate the equivalent of the latest builds made by Twilighte, see if it's actually complete and all the stuff is there and actually work.

This will probably require some trials and attempts, so all that should be documented, things that don't work as well as things that work, and any issue, bug, missing things should also be listed.

The next step is probably to do a documentation stage, trying to explain what everything does and how everything was done:

• Which tools were used to create assets (sprites, backgrounds, sounds, etc...) with the right versions, and how to use them
• Documentation of the code, what file does what, is everything used, is there some place holder or legacy code
• Documentation of the entire build process, how do you get from "I changed a pixel on a sprite" to "I can now play it in Oricutron"
• Documentation of the game itself, how the scripting is done, the texts, game triggers
• Documentation of all the scenes, how they are linked together, what you can do there, the story line, etc...
• List of all known bugs (crashes, visual corruption, non working interactions, buggy animations)

And then a battle plan need to be defined, with clear objectives, like for example the amount of time spent trying to make the entire existing project work on a single DSK where you can access all the scenes without crashing, that's an order of magnitude easier than having the entire game finished, but that could be a good first step and good for the motivation.

Obviously that means that all the file formats need to be documented, typically Jonathan wrote "compilers" which is basically his name for "tools that export the editor format into something suitable for the final game", else there's no way you can fit Wurlde on a real floppy, and nobody wants to play a game that requires 4 floppies

From experience, for this type of project to succeed you need a limited number of people with a clear vision, and who have the technical knowledge to see what can be done or not ("realistically"), if you have a team of 20 people and trying to get everybody's opinion on what the game should be, it will fail (been there, done that).

When asking for help, all the preparatory work should have been done in advance:

• When asking for help on graphics, the entire "how to make graphics" has to be explained somewhere, fully documented, how to run the tools, how to use the tool, how to save, etc... because it's not uncommon that you find helpers who never used an Oric before but are intrigued, so don't expect them to know how the emulators work or even know the Oric resolution and constraints.
• When asking for people to test stuff, make sure to also provide a list of all known issues, else they will report these issues and think their job is done. Ideally you want to fix the issues first, except if the objective is to actually make a list of all known issues, in which case you can just say that, give a list of the known problems and ask people if they found anything else weird and how to reproduce it.

So there you go.

Obviously, if there are some improvements to the OSDK, libraries, tools, etc... that could help, this can be done, but that has to be clearly explained and motivated, because Time is a valuable resource.

Ibisum: You've told us for years you wanted to start doing some Oric development, I think it's a great opportunity for you. Pickup either Wurlde or Otype, and give it a serious try. OType is probably easier than Wurlde, mostly because the game itself is way less ambitious and pretty much complete in term of gameplay: You can fly, you can shoot, there is two player support, part of the intro, sound, it's just a matter of gluing all that together in a complete package. Then, based on this experience, you could continue with Wurlde, which is probably going to be wayyyy more difficult.

[Chema]

The problem here, I think, is that I doubt Wurdle existed as anything more than a set of experiments, failed attempts and small ideas of different approaches and game mechanics.

Putting all that together with a story will be a nightmare.

But maybe I missed some info here..

OType, on the other hand, is much more doable. Even if it had some complicated plot and.

And Times Of Lore? What is its status?

Oh, and regarding tools... you may find tools that are not usable directly. Twi sent me a version of Wave for 1337 which never had a compiler to export the generated music, and I had to strip many things out to make it for the old version.

So, yes, it would be an enormous project only to document everything and make all the pieces work.