Schiffbruch Versions Save

This release was made for the One Game A Month challenge, but in order to submit the game, I wanted it in a playable state. The treasure map bug mentioned in earlier releases made the game to a certain degree unplayable. As such this patch release doesn't add any new features and instead mainly fixes the rendering of the treasure map, which in turn fixed the credits rendering as well, and the intro/outro animation.

The intro and outro animations didn't play properly because of some if-statement which the original author commented with "if-statement need (strangely)". Well it indeed turned into "strangely" and by removing it, the animations started to play without issues. Haven't investigated too much, but I'd guess it would have something to do with initialization.

While the animation bug was fixed rather quickly, I spent a few hours trying to figure out the rendering bug. The way textures/surfaces are represented seems to have changed and with it the pixel ordering. In the end I used SFML's graphics module to save an image of the treasure map to the disk. Unfortunately I haven't figured out why the blitting makes the treasure map and the credits slightly blue/green-ish. I'd again bet on some strange changes with the way DirectDraw handles surfaces, but the technology is just too old to get some informative answers. I then simply decided to not spend more time on it and rather make sure DirectDraw gets refactored out as soon as possible.

For this release I've packed the executable with UPX. If you experience any issues because of that or other reasons, don't hesitate to contact me.

Yes, as you can see Schiffbruch now runs in "widescreen" that is 1280x720. This is probably the main feature for the players. For the developers the more important change is the replacing of DirectInput and the custom window code with SFML. The game uses now an sf::Window for creating a window and the sf::Keyboard and sf::Mouse classes for input. Not only is this a step closer to the end goal where no DirectX is used anymore, but this finally allows for proper debugging of Schiffbruch. Before every time the game would crash or pause at a break point the input devices were completely locked up due to the way DirectInput works.

Bugfix

• Placing SOS signs won't create water sources anymore.

Known Issues

• The treasure map generation seems to be broken
• Intro and outro cut scenes don't render properly
• The credits don't render properly
• Some sounds may be missing
• When scrolling too far to the top or right, the entities won't be rendered anymore

After quite a few hours of dissecting that huge source file into more manageable bits, while slowly starting to understand how everything more or less fits together, and with another few hours of patching some of the rendering bits, we've finally arrived at a playable version of Schiffbruch.

The port seems to run smoother on my machine, but on the other hand has some rendering and audio issues, which I hope to address for the next release.

With the game being playable we've reached one of the most important keystone towards modernizing the code base. Because without being able to verify modifications it would be nearly impossible to transform this 10k lines of code into a well structured application.

Known Issues

• Intro scene doesn't fully render
• The credits don't render properly
• Some sounds may be missing

This is the original version of Schiffbruch with only minor changes to get it to compile with Visual Studio 2013.

As attached binary file I didn't use the one built from this code base, since it was not usable, but instead added here the original and official Schiffbruch installer.