Saturday, May 31, 2014

FMod - Making Things Simple

I received an e-mail from a person trying to use Abiathar who apparently does not understand English well. From my understanding, he is having trouble getting his modified levels to work with Keen in DosBox. This is the most difficult part of using Abiathar (despite it being outside the scope of level editors) because it requires knowledge of CKPatch, batch files, and the entire idea of patching.

To help simplify the process a little, Abiathar ships with the CKPatch executables. But, now that I have an extremely powerful level editor working smoothly, it's time to expand Abiathar's capabilities. Two people have now inquired about patching, and it has been very hard for me to explain what needs to happen. Therefore, I am embarking on a project to integrate the creation of basic (very basic, like just the map head fix and maybe the EGA resources) patch files.

It'll probably be under some sort of "Compile" or "Emit Patches" option under File, separate from "Save" (to prevent overwriting of a real patch file). When activated, it will dump the appropriate CKPatch executable, write the patch file with the appropriate %ext and %maphead commands, and create a batch file to run the game. I'll need to add some things to the configuration file to handle this, but it shouldn't be a dramatic revamp and will help a lot of people.

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