![]() ![]() The '30s (sepia) mode was a nice touch, but I remember it was noticeably slower at the time as it was an additional pass over the screen, so the framerate was dropping quite noticeably. The game was running 60 fps on a Pentium 2, so that was good enough for us. I remember I quite optimized sprite drawing routines for instance, most sprites are RLE-encoded as a way to quickly skip transparent pixels, and to avoid compiled sprites because there was simply too many sprites to compile them all without having memory issues. I think i was positive that computers were fast enough for it, and in fact it did work quite well. When I reimplemented the game, I went for full screen drawing, without dirty rectangles. BTW, "RM" stands for Roasted Moths of course some classes in the source code begins with "FP" instead that's "Falling Pumpkins" which was the original title of the game. I saw in the code that the list was called "OTList" and, while the name obviously rings a bell to me, I don't recall what it means. I still remember the joy of finally *understanding* polymorphism, and that's when the RMTask base class was born, and the idea of having a list of RMTasks that could be anything by simply reimplementing the draw() call. I think it's been the first real world C++ object-oriented program I have ever written, so it's obviously very stretched towards using inheritance everywhere (new toy!). The game engine is quite easy, as you have seen. One of the few things that I brought over was the pathfinding code, and in fact I think it's quite obvious from its look that it's been written by a different hand. I wasn't familiar with it at all (Luca had written it up until then), and thus decided to rewrite it from scratch. The publisher insisted on reworking the game with 16-bit graphics, and porting it from DOS to Windows it wasn't trivial to port the existing code (Mode X stuff!), plus Luca couldn't handle it in his spare time, so I had to take over the game engine. That included myself, but Luca declined (for personal reasons) that meant that I was able to work on the game full-time, while Luca only in his spare time. In 1998 we got a deal with a local publisher (Prograph/Protonic), and part of the team got paid to finish the game. I remember the game engine was using dirty-rectangles at that time to optimize drawing. I live in Florence and one of the artist (Sergio) was in Naples I still remember that we used a direct modem connection on the phone line (so basically he dialed my home phone number with his modem, to setup a 14.4 kbit connection) and then send me the first 4 room background arts through it they were an early 8-bit version, but I was in love with them :) I also remember our lead artist (Valerio) sent me the first version of the park map (hand drawn wireframe) by fax the original thermal paper is now a picture hanging on my home wall :) At some point, in 1997, it became clear that we need to gather together to get to a decent point, so we organized a one-week crunch session in a alpine hut in northern italy we worked 18-20hrs a day for a week, ate lots of pasta, and completed an early version of the first 4 rooms. We were a distributed team of 5-6 people working across Italy, and we were using Fidonet and BBS files areas to share files. IIRC Luca wrote the game engine and I wrote the MPAL preprocessor (yuk!), compiler, linker and interpreter. Luca Giusti and I wrote the first version of the game engine, and it was based on DOS and 8-bit (palette) graphics, with the venerable Mode X for achieving smooth scrolling and higher resolution (320x240), and compiled sprites (!!!). The game originated in 1996, I was 17 back at the time. I went though the pull review code and of course lots of memories sprang to mind, so I'm happy to post a few things. The following is extracted from the original post. The original developer, Giovanni Bajo appeared on the scummvm-devel mailing list and offered some insight into the development of the original engine. The ScummVM project recently added support for Tony Tough and the Night of the Roasted Moths. ![]()
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