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JA2 Code Documentation and doubts?[message #102401]

Mon, 29 May 2006 22:29

SamRock

Messages:4
Registered:May 2006
Location: India

HI,

I recently downloaded the JA2 source code.
Thank U for making it available.

It is one of the greatest gift for all the
"Want to be Game Programmers" community!!

Well I m not a fulltime C programmer, but still I could make out most of the code myself.

I would like to know if some manual or documentation is available for the source code.
I m looking for information like :
1. How the Isometric Engine Works?
2. What Path finding technique has been adopted?
3. How graphics are extracted to be Drawn on screen?
4. What format the graphics and merc animation is stored?
5 etc
These are some of the doubts I have ...
I would love to hear from U all...
Thanks

Samuel Roshan

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Civilian

Re: JA2 Code Documentation and doubts?[message #102402]

Thu, 01 June 2006 22:41

defrog

Messages:234
Registered:March 2004
Location: Austria

ok, since no one seems to be answering you... I'm hesitant to do so since I don't have all the answers.

1) not sure what you mean? looking for a general tutoral on isometic tiling engines? I'd have to search to see if I have documents written somewhere on basic tiling engines. simply put all elements are tiles and the tiles are placed bottom left to top right... or was that the other way around (can't remember what edwin said). Anyways... JA2 isn't a fancy tiling engine as it only supports currently 2 Z-axis layers (yes I know that typically each of those has sub layers, although I haven't played with that portion of JA2 code at the moment)

2) Haven't looked yet... Sorry (time is tight lately)

3) Crudely Smile

They simply use DX sufaces for everything... actually the have multiple surfaces for each image. A surface is basicly a video/system buffer bit block with the image in the format for the video's buffer so that it can be blted (copied) to it. And the images are pulled from the .stl collections via table look ups in the file manager.

4) hehe... custom... They use an encoding that saves all images 8bpp with 0x00-0x7F as valid color codes. Other values represent control bytes that tell you repeating pixels in an effort to reduce size of the bit stream. Most of this can be found in the lovely assembly functions in the engine.

Animations are just sequences of images, the animation tables store the start and count of images for an animation.. the are stored in sequence (or atleast thats what I remember)

Sorry, my memory is a bit fuzzy lately, way too much work here and it has been a while since I was in the those areas of the source.

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Sergeant 1st Class

Re: JA2 Code Documentation and doubts?[message #102403]

Wed, 21 June 2006 00:31

SamRock

Messages:4
Registered:May 2006
Location: India

Hi DeFrog,
Thank U for ur reply.
I just have been going thru the JA2 code, trying to make out how things work. I had lot of doubts so I posted my query here.

I really wanted to know more about how the patfinding in JA2 works. Its so cool!!

Regarding Isometric Engine.. well I have fare knowledge about that. I only wanted to know how JA2's iso engine works.

U know JA2 inspired me to develop my own Isometric Map Editor. It is developed in VB. Smile

Check out my credits to JA2 on
http://www.geocities.com/sams_gamerock/Sams_GameWorld.html
My Isometric Engine:
http://www.geocities.com/sams_gamerock/samisoeditor.html

From your reply... I feel that you are/were part of the JA2 Team. Are you one of the team member?!!!

Anyway ... Thank U again for your reply.

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Civilian

Re: JA2 Code Documentation and doubts?[message #102404]

Tue, 11 July 2006 04:23

defrog

Messages:234
Registered:March 2004
Location: Austria

No, I was never employed by SirTech.

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Sergeant 1st Class

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