[Reaper_Man]

Going to re-release Grins of Divinity, in the meantime I made a demo reel. Blast from the past, enjoy 11 year old content.

[Jimmy]

Awesome, I really enjoyed this project the first time I played it, and I've love to see it brought up to snuff since it was way ahead of it's time (and got held back in some ways.)

[Reaper_Man]

Captain Awesome, on 01 December 2011 - 02:21 PM, said:

Awesome, I really enjoyed this project the first time I played it, and I've love to see it brought up to snuff since it was way ahead of it's time (and got held back in some ways.)

I had to cut out a lot of stuff, I am also going to release these "tech demo" files that we used behind the scenes that shows some of the planned but not used, or planned but cut features.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure if a full rewrite into eDuke32 can happen. I've been looking for the past few days, but I seem to have lost my original code from the TC. This is a problem because:

[03:22] <msleeper> i have the release version, but back then it was the cool thing to do to "compress" the cons and strip out pretty much anything
[03:22] <msleeper> so it's effectively unhumanreadable
[03:22] <Daedolon> ouch
[03:22] <TerminX> what did you do, run it through that hilarious "optimizer" in OGLBT?
[03:22] <msleeper> yeah TerminX in like 2000
[03:22] <TerminX> that was around the last time the author was seen I think
[03:23] <TerminX> it was a function in OGLBT by James Ferry
[03:24] <msleeper> anyway, question was, does anyone know if it's even possible to reverse the cons
[03:24] <msleeper> i have minimal hope of finding the originals, i can't seem to find any of my old duke codes
[03:24] <Daedolon> you can easily parse enda and ends to have linebreaks after them
[03:24] <Daedolon> stuff like that
[03:25] <TerminX> you could reverse it somewhat by adding new lines before and after { and } I guess
[03:25] <msleeper> yeah that was my plan
[03:25] <TerminX> you'd still have the removal of defined constants to deal with though
[03:25] <TerminX> and that would be a mess
[03:26] <msleeper> there are a ton of really weird oddities in it, especially with menus and such
[03:26] <msleeper> i'm trying to avoid major rewrites, just getting it more friendly with eduke
[03:28] <TerminX> msleeper: it's going to be a bunch of work no matter how you look at it

[Jimmy]

That's a bummer. I remember those cons being a headache now actually, I think the first time I bothered you on AIM I was trying to figure out what was up with those CONs. I think I was trying to figure out how you did the gibs. Heheheh. I do think, however, that almost all of this stuff should be a cinch with EDuke32's capabilities, but that would be quite a bit to rewrite.

I think it could benefit from some touch ups on the art. There's a bit of conversion dirtiness in many of the sprites (like the M-16.)

Speaking of GoD and releasing stuff, whatever happened with the GoD2 stuff? I think the only stuff that ever got released was Alejandro Glavic's map Welcome Home, and apparently many of the unfinished maps in City Crackdown were re-purposed GoD2 maps.

[Reaper_Man]

I don't have any GoD 2 content, from my memory it was never really officially planned. The project director basically wound up hating working on TCs because it was a monumental amount of work.

A good thing about the art is that we used really high resolution images (at least for the time), you can tell when you view an enemy or a pick-up and it snaps down to size. But still, it would be even better if we had the original 3D models that we generated sprites from, but I don't have any of that stuff either.

[Reaper_Man]

Added a second video of our beta testing maps, used to show off effects. Jump to 8:55 for most of the stuff that never made it into the final game.

[Mblackwell]

I think in the end I didn't like this mod, not for the effects or anything but just because it didn't seem all that cohesive. The project leader wasn't very welcome of criticism either (had a very, "My Shit Is Gold" attitude and was more interested in making excuses rather than leading his people to make things better), so things were never updated/changed. Always good to see a project re-released though. It would be even nicer to see things streamlined/updated/etc but I wouldn't expect that to ever happen (it's just not really something worth spending time on).

[The Commander]

Realistic civilian AI!

[Simon_Croes]

Hey Reaper_Man. Glad to see that you want to bring this classic TC back. I remember playing this. The effects were new to me and couldn't understand that this was all possible with just duke3d 1.4
I saw that you had problems with the compression of the con code, well more a pain in the ass than a problem. I've done 1/3 of the decompression. Would it help you if the con was fully decompressed? If I work hard, it could be done by today. Just let me know if it could come in handy

And also, nice videos. Brings back memories!

[Reaper_Man]

I'm planning on making a demo reel of AWOL, but I've ran into a really bizarre snag with eDuke32 itself.

If you want to decompress the CONs then by all means, please do. Believe it or not I actually managed to get in touch with the project director for Grins of Divinity, he said he had "memorabilia" from it and I'm hoping that is things like the original code, original artwork, and so on. If so then it could be possible to really revamp Grins of Divinity - but don't take that as a promise and don't hold your breath.

But yeah if you want to do that then definitely go ahead and send them my way. I would like to make some minor fixes here and there, nothing major, but just something to bring the game up to par in terms of fixing bugs.

[Simon_Croes]

Alright, will do! It's 2/3 done. I need some sleep right now, so I'll finish it tomorrow. I hope I don't dream about organising con code tonight, haha

EDIT: 3/4 done. Almost there! This is crazier than I thought

[Reaper_Man]

What can I say, it was a crazy time and I was the only person crazy enough to make it work.

[Daedolon]

Didn't the SST TC have compressed con files too?

[Simon_Croes]

Yes, that's true Daedolon. SST and GoD were the only TC's, I know about, that used the compressed cons.

EDIT: Wow I really underestimated this thing, lol. But I'm done very soon. I'm busy with the money system now. The one with the addinventory and ifpinventory. A few more blocks of code and I'm done! Can't even imagine I'm reorganizing a complete game.con! I'll PM you as soon as I can Reaper_Man

[Jimmy]

Well, if things get underway and you're actually able to start working on this I'd like to pitch in some help here and there on the artwork, and perhaps some other things. Hopefully that guy is able to dig up some cool stuff.

[Hank]

Simon_Croes, on 04 December 2011 - 01:14 PM, said:

EDIT: Wow I really underestimated this thing, lol. But I'm done very soon.

This is good news! All the best!

[Father-Marrow]

It's truly great to see interest for the project still alive today! Thanks a lot Reaper_Man, Simon_Croes and everyone else for actually planning a re-release!

I'd like to find and release all the original files, but I'm afraid I couldn't find anything at my first attempt in searching my archives. I'll continue this evening and keep you updated if I find it on old disks in boxes somewhere.

That being said, I feel I must apologize for neglecting to maintain the community informed and updated as much as I should have after the release. The project drained me a lot at the time (as others from the team I am sure). After the release I was truly exhausted and the prospect of planning future releases and sequels seemed insurmountable. I was pretty young also, with the skills and the maturity of the 16 year-old that I was, and had a lot going on in my life at the same time. All this combined perhaps made it seem like I didn't care, but I did, and am truly admiring and thankful for the hard work all the TC team did for the project. Well, it had to be said I think!

[Jblade]

Cool to hear from you I think it's understated how stressful modding can be when you're leading a team of people at a young age - to be fair I thought you were older! so at the very least you did a good job from my perspective of maintaining a profesional exterior even if the second episode did never materialise.

[Simon_Croes]

Alright, the decompressing is done! From a 1000 lines to more than 10.000. That's insane when you think about it
Only the actor names are still compressed, they're just numbers. But that doesn't matter at the moment. The con code is now readable.
And also glad to hear from you Father-Marrow! Only 16 years, that's really young. It's really great to do such many work and leading a team at that age. Nice job!

Attached File(s)

•  Game(Decompressed).con (169.36K)
  Number of downloads: 330

[Reaper_Man]

GoD was released in 2002, so that would put me at 16 as well.

Simon - Thanks a lot, I'll start looking into things now. I really appreciate it.

[Simon_Croes]

No problem Reaper_Man. Glad I could help out

[ReaperMan]

Looks like i'm going to have to change my name to avoid confusing everyone.

[Jimmy]

I remember playing GoD shortly after it came out in 2002, and that would put me at like 10 years old. Good grief. It's always been a mod I have remembered fondly, even though it does have it's issues, which I hope a re-release can fix proper.

[Reaper_Man]

ReaperMan, on 06 December 2011 - 08:25 AM, said:

Looks like i'm going to have to change my name to avoid confusing everyone.

haha Sorry! I had my name as "msleeper" but nobody remembered who I was.

Captain Awesome, on 06 December 2011 - 10:02 AM, said:

I remember playing GoD shortly after it came out in 2002, and that would put me at like 10 years old. Good grief. It's always been a mod I have remembered fondly, even though it does have it's issues, which I hope a re-release can fix proper.

Thanks to Simon's great effort de-compressing it, doing a bugfix is a very real possibility.

As much as I would love to do a HRP update/patch/release and do things like rewrite enemy AIs and fix some other problems... I just don't know if I have the time to really dedicate to that. If anyone is seriously interested in doing something like that then please don't hesitate to contact me, I just don't know if I can sink the kind of time needed to be a programming lead on an eDuke mod.

[The Commander]

ReaperMan, on 06 December 2011 - 08:25 AM, said:

Looks like i'm going to have to change my name to avoid confusing everyone.

I told you that you were not the only one here. lol