Can a GZDoom-like engine be made for Build games?

[Graf Zahl]

All links to actual files, both source and binaries are dead. So where can it be found?

[irukanjji]

check the builds

https://www.mediafire.com/folder/i1s9g3jbeh9y3/

[Rachael]

Is there a source for this?

[Kinsie]

Is there a source for this?

The source code has been deleted from GitHub (and apparently wasn't updated past a minor bugfix release in favour of bickering with the eduke32 dev team) so for the purposes of what Graf wants it's about as useful as an ashtray on a motorcycle.

[Rachael]

Is there a source for this?

The source code has been deleted from GitHub (and apparently wasn't updated past a minor bugfix release in favour of bickering with the eduke32 dev team) so for the purposes of what Graf wants it's about as useful as an ashtray on a motorcycle.

Exactly.... just a red herring.

[Graf Zahl]

Did this even go beyond the planning stage? They promised perfect support for the game but this disappeared faster than it materialized. So, was this actually more than an elaborate piece of vaporware?

From my impression there isn't really much need to tinker with the play code itself, even the archive Kinsie linked only has one version of it with the only change for 1.2 being minor tweaks to the weapon code. The big problem is that all the various ports did some more or less inept hackery to the main game loop and how it interfaces with the mostly broken net code.
I hope that once that gets cleaned up (and the net code best removed in its entirety because that will drag any port down for sure!) there is some chance of getting the game back on tracks - at least for single player.

[Phredreeke]

ICD has a habit of doing this. Starting a project, making an initial release then moving on to the next.

[Graf Zahl]

Which would be ok if he didn't delete the old one. Now nobody can continue with it, now that the source repo is gone.
But from what I gather it doesn't look that any kind of substantial work was done here anyway, so probably no big loss.

[Hendricks266]

What's the dependencies this needs? It doesn't have a MSVC project so I can't tell for sure how it works on Windows. So far I haven't managed to get it compiled.

Don't bother messing with SWP. Work on VoidSW, the SW port using EDuke32's engine, is ongoing. There are growing pains getting it up to speed with EDuke32's APIs and feature set.

It's worth noting that all the Shadow Warrior ports out there at the moment are based off the original source code release from 2005, which was a patched up copy of an incomplete archive of pre-release source code, and as such was just a little bit rough in some regards (saving and loading was unstable, and multiplayer in general was utterly trashed). Earlier this year the sources to the retail builds were salvaged via a combination of spelunking and reverse-engineering. They're still MS-DOS code, but they may be useful.

I had heard something like this from other developers in the past, but NY's work on the exact compilation matching and source rerelease project showed that the 2005 release was very, very close to final code. There were more changes from the original source release prep process (removing TEN, etc) than there were version differences.

There is Shadow Warrior ICED Port by ReaperAA

Without re-litigating some extremely frustrating discussions, this port was going to have significant problems. It's not by ReaperAA either, they only made a thread asking where to find the builds.

[Graf Zahl]

What's the dependencies this needs? It doesn't have a MSVC project so I can't tell for sure how it works on Windows. So far I haven't managed to get it compiled.

Don't bother messing with SWP. Work on VoidSW, the SW port using EDuke32's engine, is ongoing. There are growing pains getting it up to speed with EDuke32's APIs and feature set.

Good to hear, but is this happening in private? The current code from the repo compiles but doesn't really work.

I managed to patch up the menu to accept input but was still running into two problems, one with uninitialized lists used by the TRAVERSE macro and a crash that was puzzling me and wanted to compare with SWP. Turned out that it was the trackers in the map data which revealed a rather stupid out of range memory access that seems to have been in the game from the start.

Ultimately SWP was indeed a waste of time as it didn't help me at all with this and was a pain to set up (with large parts disabled like the assembly sound mixing routines.)

[MartinHowe]

Sorry for late reply re SWP, especially about dependencies, though Hendricks266 has already answered - don't bother with it For the record, to build it on my system I had to hack up an unholy mess of MinGW32 & MSys plus various versions of libraries pulled in from other places; I forget in total, but it was a nightmare. Though it was fully functional, if buggy.

[Graf Zahl]

I was actually able to build it on Visual Studio, but I had to use the null sound system because the real one has assembly dependencies and I had no need for working sound with it.
In the end it helped me with one thing, i.e. finding out what scale the mouse movement needs to be calculated with - but that's it.

Overall this code highlights quite well what fucked up mess the Build engine was - I really cannot understand how somebody could have written such bad code and manage to get the engine into several released games. TBH, I think at some point there needs to be a concerted effort to completely rewrite the engine using sane coding standards and clean room engineering to ensure that no trace of the original survives - and rid the world of this code once and for all...

[MartinHowe]

And the kicker is ... I got a ticking off on the EDuke32 forums for cursing the code and some choice, though obviously not entirely serious, remarks about the state of the code in SWP ... your's make mine look tame

[Hendricks266]

Overall this code highlights quite well what fucked up mess the Build engine was - I really cannot understand how somebody could have written such bad code and manage to get the engine into several released games. TBH, I think at some point there needs to be a concerted effort to completely rewrite the engine using sane coding standards and clean room engineering to ensure that no trace of the original survives - and rid the world of this code once and for all...

That is not a fair assessment. You're looking at the SW game code, not the Build engine. The two are distinct.

[Phredreeke]

I thought Shadow Warrior was supposed to be the "cleanest" of the Build games codewise? (while at the same time hardcoding nigh everything even as far as the level names)