Ok I've waited for someone to make a laserdisc engine long enough, so I've decided to take matters into my own hand.
I'm proud to announce the start of two new projects.....
ALE (American Lightgun Engine) and LAE (LaserDisc Action Engine)
The purpose of these two projects is to develop two forms of robust scripting language.... One for twitch response lasergames like Dragon's Lair and another for aiming/lightgun games like Cobra Command and Maddog. And as a nice side-effect, I will have to write a small, stand-alone graphics engine for both of them. I've already started work on ALE and I already have a simple engine that can display video, sound and graphics/text displayed overtop of the video. I will start work on LAE after this engine is further developed as it's engine/script will essentially be a dumbed down version of the ALE stuff.
Ok enough of the hype, Let's get to the Key issues:
The Good News
If any of you know me from my reputation at BYOAC you know that I don't start projects and leave them unfinished. So now that I've announced the start of these projects you can be assured that evenutally we will have some sort of workable engine and scripting language.
I'm also making a guied editor that's similar to a timeline style editor that you would use in movie editing. This should help development as you won't have ot have proramming skill to make a game, just some common sense about the structure.
I have the scripting system almost finished. It's extremely generic, but because of this you should be able to do things I never intended. The script uses a "on this frame do this" or "on hitting this box do this" style of doing things, with commands as simple as "jump to this frame" or "display this sprite". In total there are only about 3 commands with 3 sub-commands each. But using these in the rights combinations, you can do anything I've ever seen done in a laserdisc game and even a few things I havne't seen done.
The Bad News
I don't have a lot of time to dedicated to developing a fancy graphics system from scratch. Because of this I've decided to take the cheap way out and develop a quick and dirty engine in vb6. Yes, I said vb. Yes it does actually work, the engine already does everything graphically it needs to do. The only drawback to doing this is a vb6 engine takes more resources. It seems to work fine on your average modern pc though. Go ahead and insert your flames about this decision here.
Fortunately the scripting language is saved in an ascii file and since laser games only need to take input, and display sprites over video, a new engine could be made by someone else quite easily if the system proves itself. I could even see it easily being added as a plugin to daphne. In other words if it catches on, I'm almost expecting someone else to takeover and port it to daphne, so it can, in turn, be ported to other operating systems.
There is one other thing..... My recent tests have found that the wmp plugin (what i'm using to render the video) doesn't like the m2v/ogg combo very well. It is technically doable, but it would cause me a lot more work. Because I don't have a lot of time to work on this project... I've decided the best thing to do would be to only support regular mpegs and mp3s, preferably with the audio and video merged into a single file. It's just easier to deal with things that way. Again... if someone writes a new engine these issues would be removed.
The Test Project:
I've thought about this for a long time and I figured the best way to test the engine/scripts would be to make a fairly advanced and complete game. Unfortunately making a lasergame from scratch would take a loooong time. So long that this woudl become another dead project.
My solution: To take an existing game's graphics and use them to make an entirely new game.
What I came up with was
Badlands: Advanced
Badlands is the perfect game. I will take the simple "press to shoot" twitch response gameplay and replace it with a full-fledged lightgun game. I've looked at the death and attack scenes and feel that they will translate very well for lightgun use. I'll probably even render a new intro and title sequence so that it feels like less of a hack.
I would appreciate help with the following:
I need advice on how to best convert m2v/ogg files back into more traditional file formats. Any reccomendations in regards to utilites and techniques would be much appreciated.
If possible I would also like to get ahold of either a good laserdisc of badlands or a better rip of the laserdisc. Before anyone starts offering illegal copys let me assure you that I want to aquire this legitimately. -If need be I will buy the disc outright. Of course I'm not made of money so if anyone wants to starts a collection so we can buy hardware/software for this project then it's fine with me.
I'm not begging for handouts though. I can still make a nice end-product with what I currently have and if need be, I'll bite the bullet and fork over some cash.
Now I realize that at this point many of you are thinking "another vaporware project that won't get anywhere." I assure you this isn't the case. I'll post pics and maybe some sample vids as I get farther along with the project. Right now I'm roughing out the graphics layout for the game. Hopefully I can get some screenshots up soon. One of the main things I'm doing is making sure sprites look like they belong on modern games and not games of the 80's. Nostalga is good and all, but I want to update soem things just a little.
Ok enough of my over-hyping. I'm just very excited about this and wanted you guys to know exactly what I am up to.
Questions, comments and suggestions are welcomed and would actually be appreciated.