Gwynne's Blog

At last, an update!

1. Absolutely nothing visible to the user has changed whatsoever.
2. The internal structure of the code has been significantly reorganized.

As with the lament of all programmers faced with the demands of the technologically disinclined, I’ve accomplished a great deal, but since it can’t be seen, it might as well be nothing at all. Wasted time, the hypothetical slave driver- I mean, boss- would say. But it isn’t, I swear to all two of you who read this blog!

And now, another math rant.

Once again, as with so many things, the way Mike did things in the original code was correct and logical for the time he did it, but doesn’t fit into the object-oriented model I’m cramming his code into, despite its pitiful cries for mercy from such rigid structure. There are days I wish we were living in times when code could be so freeform as his was and still be comprehensible, but you can’t do that in Cocoa. Oh sure, I could port all the Pascal functions 1-to-1, but the Toolbox calls would be sticky at best. Anyway, in this particular case, I was trying to wrestle with the radar range calculation.

The original code reads something vaguely like: screenPos = Planetabs - (Playerabs - Playerscreen)  inRadarRange = n <= screenPos / 16 <= m. Translating, this means that whether or not a given entity (a planet in this case) is within radar range of the planet is dependant upon the Player’s position in screen coordinates, as well as in the game’s absolute coordinate system.

In the old days, this design made a certain amount of sense. He already had the screen coordinates immediately handy, so why take the hit of indirecting through A5 to touch a global for the absolute position? However, my design makes the screen coordinates a bit dodgy to use. So I had to recalibrate n and m to represent distances in game coordinates.

Algebra to the rescue. The code above, reduced and replacing the inequalities, becomes the algebraic equation (x - (y - z)) / 16 = a, where a is the radar range coordinate. The only screen coordinate term in this equation is z, so solve to eliminate z:

(x - (y - z)) / 16 = a
x - (y - z) = 16a       - multiply both sides by 16
x - y + z = 16a         - distribute the subtraction over the parenthetical expression
x - y = 16a - z         - subtract z from both sides

But, because both a (the radar range) and z (the player’s position on screen) are actually constants, all I had to do was take Mike’s original numbers (let’s use 64 for a and 268 for z) and calculate 16*64 - 268 = 756. Then, retranslating, the equation becomes the inequality inRadarRange = (myPosition - playerPosition) <= 756;. Repeat for the lower and upper bounds of x and y coordinates, and boom, no screen coordinates at all and I can calculate whether or not an object's in radar range based on nothing but its offset from the player.

To be clear, what I did up there was to eliminate a term from the inequalities so that they could be evaluated based on the position of the given entity in game space, rather than on the position of the entity's sprite on the screen.

I can't believe it took me a week to doodle out that bit of math.

Skip the roleplay blurb

I’ve accomplished surprisingly little in the last couple of days, in functional terms. I can sum up why pretty easily: I’ve had to stop and puzzle out exactly how Michael did some of the things in his code. Player velocity, especially, is giving me grief.

This isn’t Michael’s fault. He didn’t write obscure code (well, a little…) or implement anything stupidly. The problem was his confinement to old Mac Toolbox APIs in Pascal. One does not simply toss around floating-point math in System 7. (Nor does one simply walk into Mordor, but that’s another story.) Pascal had a floating-point type (REAL), but in those days it was slower than my brain on a Monday morning. I’m not sure why, since almost every Mac since the Mac II had a MC68881 or better FPU, but we were always told to use the FixMath package for efficiency just the same. So we used fixed point types and did fun little things like this:

integerPart := trunc(Fix2X(fixedValue));
fractionPart := fixedValue - Long2Fix(integerPart);

With math like that, and manual compensation for overflow going on, I think I can be forgiven for having to stare blindly at the uncommented code for about two hours before it finally made sense to me. It’s been quite a few years since I’ve worked without native floating-point, and a lot of that time was spent dredging up the memories. 21 lines of Michael’s Pascal code, all of them necessary in the environment it was written for, boil down to a single line in modern C, and in fact a single assembly language instruction too if you care to look at things at that level. In these days of multimedia CPU extensions, if I thought it were necessary for performance I could write it such that all the calculations for all the game objects that needed to move around were done in one vector instruction (SIMD add). I don’t think it’s necessary, but the fact that I could is a sign of just how much CPUs have changed. It’s also a tribute to all those people who did it the hard way 15 years ago.

Other progress includes implementation of the sector object map (meaning planets and starbases, and their locations), reconversion of the rather broken SapirSans font (just opening it in Font Book made ATSUI whine quite loudly, and the italic variant was progmatically indistinguishable from the plain one) into a correctly-formed font suitcase by the very helpful if cryptic FontForge font editor program, and cargo, personnel, and crew management code. As usual, all of this stuff is backend and not visible in a build yet, so I have no screenshots to show. I will soon, though; now that I’ve figured out how the player moves around I can at least make the viewscreen work. Stay tuned.

P.S.: If there’s anyone who follows and enjoys the little roleplay blurbs, speak up in a comment and I’ll continue them. It only takes one voice!

Alliance Headquarters
Stardate 2310.13816640048673

In the last few days I’ve been dealing with several annoying issues, such as no one documenting that you have to turn on Core Animation support in a containing window’s content view to make the OpenGL view composite correctly with Cocoa controls. Four hours wasted on one checkbox. Sigh.

Still, there’s some progress to be had.

1. The loading bar now displays and loads all the various data needed.
2. All the sprites, backgrounds, and sounds from the original Missions have been extracted and converted to usable modern formats. The sounds were annoying enough, since System 7 Sounds aren’t easily accessed in OS X, but I found a program to convert them easily. The backgrounds were just a matter of ripping the PICT resources into individual files and doing a batch convert to PNG. The sprites… those were a problem. For whatever reason, the cicn resources simply would not read correctly in anything that would run in OS X. Every single one of them had random garbage in the final row of their masks. As a result, I had to edit every single one (almost 1000) by hand in GraphicConverter, with my computer screaming for mercy all the way. Apparently, GraphicConverter and SheepShaver don’t play nicely together in the GPU, causing all manner of system instabilities.
3. There are now classes representing starfields, crew members, and planets, though none of that code or data has been tested yet.
4. I’m now building with PLBlocks GCC instead of Clang. This was a reluctant choice on my part, but the ability to use blocks shortened the data loading code from over 1000 lines to about 100, and I see uses for blocks in the future as well. Pity the Clang that comes with 10.6 refuses to work correctly with files using blocks and the 10.5 SDK.
5. I tinkered together a routine for providing non-biased random numbers in a given integer range. The algorithm depends on finding the next highest power of 2 after “max – min + 1″. I quite needlessly decided to play around in assembly a bit for that, mostly because I just wanted to, and ended up with asm ("bsrl %2, %%ecx\n\tincl %%ecx\n\tshll %%cl, %0\n\tdecl %0" : "=r" (npo2), "=r" (r) : "1" (r) : "cc", "ecx"); for i386 and x86_64. I fall back on a pure-C approach for PPC compilation. I haven’t benchmarked this in any way, and I know for a fact that doing so would be meaningless (as the arc4random() call is inevitably far slower than either approach). It was mostly an exercise in knowing assembly language.
6. The “new game” screen, where the scenario and difficulty are selected, now exists. That was also interesting, as it involved shoving a Cocoa view on top of an OpenGL view. I can use that experience for all the other dialogs in the game.

As always, more updates will be posted as they become available.

Alliance Headquarters
Stardate 2310.12630998555023

Progress today was unfortunately small, interrupted by a sudden power outage and further stalled by an Internet service that refused to be restored, but here’s the usual list of what was accomplished.

1. Cleaned up the code a bit more
2. Made the main menu buttons draw and interact. Mostly, anyway; they highlight for mouse clicks and key presses, but they don’t do anything else yet.

Yep, that’s all *shame*. I suspect I’ll have better luck tomorrow.

Alliance Headquarters
Stardate 2310.11526541942353

P.S.: Neither the gibberish in the report nor the numbers in the signature are random. A copy of the latest build will be sent to the first person to correctly guess what either of them actually mean in a comment on this blog.

“For all we know, at this very moment, somewhere far beyond all those distant stars, Benny Russell is dreaming of us.” – Avery Brooks as Benjamin Sisko, Star Trek: Deep Space 9, “Far Beyond the Stars”.

Working on Missions at the level I am so far, I feel about that far away from the game’s universe. Still, there’s been a bit of progress today.

1. First off, I went to grab the main screen out of the original Missions. This time I didn’t have to play around with PICT resources (I did anyway, but that’s besides the point). There was a nice non-composited Photoshop document sitting around with all its individual layers to play with. I tore into it with a vengeance – poor file. In the end, I didn’t do much, just added my copyright to Michael’s and erased the UI buttons.
   
   Erased the UI buttons?
   
   Well, yes. Having looked through the old code, Michael had used QuickDraw as it was meant to be used and been drawing the user interaction with the buttons by writing over the bitmap data with DrawString(). An time-honored and venerable way of doing things in the Mac Toolbox, but not at all suited to efficiency in an OpenGL application. Wiping out the buttons was the first step in separating them out entirely for compositing as OpenGL textures. Probably overkill anyway in the end, but keep in mind this is a learning experience for me and I figured I’d use the general code instead of special-casing this screen more than necessary.
2. Once I had the main screen image re-composited into a nice PNG (bye-bye PICT!), I plugged that into glTexImage2D() and voila, the main screen now displayed in the window! Of course, that screen was bereft of all the nice details that make Missions what it is, so I set about adding the little touches back in. The most obvious of these was the version number in the lower-right corner of the screen. It took me a while to figure out how to get the arcane combination of string drawing in NSImage and writing into an OpenGL texture object correct, but I got there in the end thanks to a little timely help. Incompatible coordinate systems and swapped RGBA/BGRA component ordering were the order of that couple of hours. Whew. A few calls to -[NSBundle objectForInfoDictionaryKey:] and several searches online for versions of the embedded fonts that worked properly later, I had the version number composited neatly on top of the background. Progress!
3. Of course, the code was a disaster at this point. I’d gone through so many dozen iterations of fixing my snafus… well, long story short, I took some time out to reorganize, and got my texture loading and sprite management all neatly separated into their respective classes, including having the sprite class (replacing Michael’s use of SAT in the original code) do the necessary coordinate transformation so I could use the numbers from the original code cleanly. Not to mention some carefully managed global constants to hold useful values, such as references to the fonts and custom colors being used.

And here’s the reward of all that hard work:

First draft of the Missions of the Reliant main screen

I know it doesn’t look like much, but as with all programming, it’s the infrastructure behind it that counts. It’s something most users never see and don’t realize the sheer difficulty of maintaining, but it’s there and it’s important. With all that structure in place, once I’ve gotten some sleep I can make much faster progress tomorrow.

Stay tuned for further updates.

Alliance Headquarters
Stardate 2310.11299452429843

Those who have been using Macs for at least 14 years may or may not remember a space game for old Macs that went by the name “Missions of the Reliant”.

It was a really fun little game with a few missions in it, changable crew members in your ship, powerups for your ship, a nice big galaxy to hang around in, systems that took damage and could be repaired… if you’re thinking Rescue!, don’t, Missions was much better.

Anyway, like all the old Mac games, it’s long since nonfunctional on modern machines. But I wasn’t willing to settle for that, so I pulled up my e-mail and wrote a letter to Michael Rubin, the original author of Missions, asking if I might get the source code and take a crack at porting it to OS X.

His enthusiasm was beyond anything I could have hoped for. I’m very grateful to him for the opportunity he’s given me to bring a classic back to the Mac. I’ll be posting updates here regularly about my progress on the port.

Progress Report 1

Well, I’ve got the code, and I’ve looked it over. Ah, the old glory days of Pascal, inline A-traps, GWorlds, manual event handling… The Mac Toolbox did almost nothing for you; it was a true low-level interface to the OS, something I feel we’ve gotten away from in these days of Cocoa. Sure, OS X has the POSIX interfaces, but they’re a whole different world. Anyway, the code is a real trip back to olden times, and I love every minute of it.

First step was to create the Xcode project. That took about three hours.

Wait, what? Three hours? Well, once you figure setting up the project settings, the target settings, tweaking the things Xcode’s templates don’t get quite right, editing the pregenerated files to not have broken line breaks and incorrect heading comments, and writing the entire Info.plist for the application, that’s a lot of work! I had to look up Info.plist keys, UTI listings, sweep the original source code for the proper value of NSHumanReadableCopyright, and ask a question or two about semantics in the #macdev IRC channel.

Next step, I figure, is to sweep up all the original visual resources – strings, pictures, icons – and reorganize them out of old-style rsrc files into a modern application’s Resources folder. Yes, I’m aware you can still use resource files in OS X, but I feel if you’re going to do something, you might as well do it right!

After that, I have to take a little time out to brush up on my OpenGL 2D, it’s been awhile since I used it and I never did use it for anything this complex. Binding several dozens of textures to represent all the various sprites should be a fascinating undertaking.

I’m enjoying the hell out of myself *grin*. Thanks again, Michael!