The Exploits of Plouj » games http://www.plouj.com/blog A blog by Michael Ploujnikov Wed, 01 Sep 2010 17:05:46 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Why did I get addicted to Demon’s Souls? http://www.plouj.com/blog/2010/08/19/why-did-i-get-addicted-to-demons-souls/ http://www.plouj.com/blog/2010/08/19/why-did-i-get-addicted-to-demons-souls/#comments Thu, 19 Aug 2010 18:17:59 +0000 plouj http://www.plouj.com/blog/?p=443 The first time I heard of Deamon’s Souls game for PS3 was when my co-workers made a joke about the tongue-twister pronunciation of its name: “Demonses Soulses”. Other than that, I got the impression that the game had some unique ideas (eg: other players playing the same level showing up as ghosts in real time) and an high difficulty level – my co-worker hasn’t beaten the first level before he had to return the rental. Overall, I had pretty low expectations when another friend lent it to me among a stack of other of PS3 games. In fact, I even left playing Demon’s Souls to the very end, when the other games failed to keep me entertained and the weekend was coming to an end. All that to say, as you can guess from the title, that I ended up getting hooked on this game. I played almost non-stop for 7 hours straight (it was not fun waking up for work early next morning). Since then, I haven’t had more time to play the game, but I did brainstorm various reasons why I couldn’t put the controller down. Here is the list I came up with:

  • As the Gamespot review alludes, the fighting mechanics start out simple and smooth, but soon reveal a more complex and rewarding quality. Combat got more and more fun as I learned various tricks and became more proficient at it.
  • Multiple, intertwined paths through a hand-crafted world
  • Magnificent views from the tall points in the castle
  • The ability to retrieve dropped souls at the place of death appealed to greed for more game points and provided a reason to continue playing even after dying numerous times, sometimes even on the way to collect the souls.
  • Various parts of the game reminded me of other video games I’ve played:
    • The first thing that popped out to me during the tutorial was the foggy mountain range in the background. It portrayed the same lonely feeling as the Phobos skyline in Doom 1.
    • The Boletarian castle with its colour schemes, ambient sounds and zombie-looking bad guys looked like it could be one of the medieval themed Quake 1 levels. The Nexus hub was a more complex version of entrance map in Quake. The Phalanx enemies were similar to the Spawn.
    • The only other game I know with an equally unforgiving set of enemies right from the start is Ecstatica.
    • Oblivion was my previous experience playing in a non-linear fantasy world with real-time melee fighting.
    • The meele fighting on its own reminded me of games like Rune and ChaosUT2 Duel.
  • Lastly, I could play as a knight in shining armour!
]]> http://www.plouj.com/blog/2010/08/19/why-did-i-get-addicted-to-demons-souls/feed/ 0 HOWTO build DXX-Rebirth for Windows with MSYS/MinGW http://www.plouj.com/blog/2009/03/07/howto-build-dxx-rebirth-for-windows-with-msysmingw/ http://www.plouj.com/blog/2009/03/07/howto-build-dxx-rebirth-for-windows-with-msysmingw/#comments Sun, 08 Mar 2009 00:07:32 +0000 plouj http://www.plouj.com/blog/?p=243 Introduction

In this post I’ll document the steps I had to take to build DXX-Rebirth (a modernized Descent game engine) for Windows using MSYS and MinGW.

MinGW, MSYS

From  Pantokrator’s blog:

  • install MinGW
    • choose a lowercase install path: c:\mingw
    • choose to download and install current version
    • enable g++ (for physfs)
  • install MSYS
  • install msysDTK

SDL and SDL_mixer

Also from  Pantokrator’s blog:

  • download the SDL source
  • in the MSYS shell, compile it with
./configure --prefix=/mingw && make && make install
  • download the SDL_mixer source and in a MSYS shell, build it with the same command:
./configure --prefix=/mingw && make && make install

PhysicsFS

  • Compile with the same command again:
./configure --prefix=/mingw && make && make install

SCons and Python

From Globulation2 MinGW instructions:

PATH=$PATH:/c/Python26:/c/Python26/Scripts
  • to the end of /etc/profile in MSYS so that SCons can run from the MSYS shell.

Subversion

DXX-Rebirth

  • checkout DXX-Rebirth from https://dxx-rebirth.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/dxx-rebirth
  • change the SConstruct script to call sdl-config as ‘sh sdl-config ‘:
...
Flags and stuff for all platforms...
env.ParseConfig('sh sdl-config --cflags')
env.ParseConfig('sh sdl-config --libs')
env.Append(CPPFLAGS = ['-Wall', '-funsigned-char'])
...
  • finally, in the MSYS shell, built with:
scons sdlmixer=1

Final Remarks

I had trouble with the latest version of PhysicsFS (1.1.1) because it uses cmake. For some reason it failing to find some prerequisites in MSYS. I also had trouble with version 1.0.1 of PhysicsFS (this is the version the official d1x-rebirth_v0.55.1-win.zip is built with) because the built failed with the following error:

warning: cannot find entry symbol _DllMainCRTStartup@12; defaulting to 00401000
...
undefined reference to WinMain@16

If you notice any problems or mistakes in this post, please mention them in the comments.

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