Draci Historie demo in ScummVM

This is a video of the Draci Historie demo I had prepared in my ScummVM branch (my project is to recreate the DH engine inside ScummVM). The demo enables one to load the game's scenes and move between them by clicking the left/right mouse buttons. The video shows that the game's animations are handled correctly. Any apparent graphical glitches are probably due to recordmydesktop (the software which was used to make the video).

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• scummvm
• dracihistorie
• draci
• historie
• dragonhistory
• dragon
• history

[Templayer]

Sec... wait i am not that type. Just a sec, why are you trying to run DH in scummVM? Some developer reasons? Because you can use DosBox to play it :) . Ale je to hlavně pro lidi co umí česky :D

[dkasak13]

[split in two posts because of the character count limit]

It also enables one to fix bugs which may be present in the original engine and to employ various graphical filters/scalers to the game transparently, etc.

[Templayer]

Now i remember !! I did install it using DosBox with my ORIGINAL disc (my rarity :) ) and it did not run normally. So i did install special XP version and it now runs perfectly, with soud, without bugs. So i still do not know why are you trying to incorporate. (other than the platforming) Besides, its name is not Draci Historie but Dračí Historie :P :D :)

[dkasak13]

As I already said, porting DH to ScummVM basically guarantees its immortality, along with enabling better graphics (google scalers such as hq3x), an opportunity to fix bugs present even in the original engine (not many, but they do exist; some are particular to the English data files which were not extensively tested), the ability to play even on a multitude of platforms (Linux, OS X) along with some 'weird' platforms (such as the Nintendo Wii).

[dkasak13]

[continued]

The original code was pretty much a mess of interrupts and proprietary DOS-only features (meaning that it runs on a DOS emulation layer even on Windows) which made it only a matter of time before something stopped working right. This rewrite allowed to implement it on a much cleaner codebase which will be easier to maintain, make the game more efficient in terms of speed (important for lower-end platforms) and possibly even add new features (or polish old ones).

[dkasak13]

[continued]

Another important aspect which I neglected to mention in my last post is that this will enable people to design custom games that run on the DH engine.

Simply put, the world is not Windows. ;-)

[dkasak13]

[continued]

P.S. This was my Google Summer of Code project and I was mentored by Robert Špalek, one of the original programmers of the game. Also, my mother tongue is Croatian which is also of Slavic origin so I am aware of the proper spelling. I commonly transliterate fricative graphemes to their Latin counterparts, however, because many systems are touchy about them. :-)

This is getting lengthy enough for Youtube; if you'd like to continue the discussion, please contact me privately. :-)

[seriouslyWeird]

but of course it's not bad to have it available for vdm sound neither

[seriouslyWeird]

VDM sound runs this game per-fect-ly

[Templayer]

ok :)

[dkasak13]

No, you cannot. It runs but it's very, very slow (slower than you would expect it to, given that it's emulated) and AFAIK, no one determined the cause yet.

Even if it ran perfectly, however, it's still an emulation. What is being demonstrated in this video is a complete Draci Historie engine rewrite for ScummVM which would enable you to run the game natively on every platform that ScummVM runs on (which is a lot of platforms) provided you have the data files for DH which are freely available.