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Pathways into Porting...
Posted By: PerseusSpartacusDate: 1/2/13 12:36 a.m.

After all the recent discussion of PiD, I started getting a strange feeling about the game. Looking back at Ron Hunsinger's various posts regarding weapons, crystals, and various other things, I can't help but notice just how... primitive PiD was. It's coding is very basic and quite artificial. Everything is fake 3D, not even like the 2.5D of Marathon. Even the system of weapons was terribly artifical, if you know what I mean.

Because it's so archaic, it's also very simple. If it weren't for the fact that the inner workings were encrypted, we'd know all the secrets of the game by now. Even so, the efforts of people like Hunsinger have provided us with fantastic knowledge of how the game works. We've got the necessary numbers, and we've got the necessary math. It's time we put it to good use.

I know this post probably won't have any effect on people, and to many of you what I'm saying may sound crazy, but I would like to propose that a new project be started: a port of Pathways into Darkness to Mac OS X, and hopefully even to Windows. Think of it as Aleph One, but for PiD.

The beauty of this is that, because we're doing the game from the ground up, we can tweak stuff to work a bit differently. I'm not thinking so much the core mechanics as the surrounding stuff. For example, PiD is built in such a way that even tweaking the maps slightly can completely crash the game. We can change that. We could design it to provide the basic mechanics of the game, but not the exact details. The game could operate so that all the workings of the levels are designed within the map itself, not in the game's firmware. As such, you could make whole new scenarios for PiD (or, more specifically, the OS X port of it) without crashing the program on a consistent basis.

All we need is a knowledge of some basic mechanics, and we can work out the rest. We already know a lot of that stuff, so at this point, it's just a matter of converting that to something that can work on Mac OS X and coming up with innovative ways to recreate the rest. It may be a tough process, but it could work. PiD is, as far as I can tell, so much simpler than Marathon in terms of it's inner workings. It could be done. I know it could. All it takes is a little persistence.

I hereby propose that a project be put under way to turn PiD into something that could work on Mac OS X. Whether you guys will take it or leave it, is all up to you. As Stevie Wonder said, 'Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I'm Yours...' ;)

If you need material to start the project up, take a look at these links:

Ron Hunsinger on Weapons - Hunsinger provides some great data here regarding Weapons.
Ron Hunsinger on Crystals - Hunsinger strikes again with some interesting stuff about Crystals.
Hopper on Crystal Recharges - Hopper provides some additional information regarding Crystals.
PerseusSpartacus (aka me) on the Cedar Box - A list of all the items which can actually fit into the Cedar Box, and some of the interesting behavior which ensues.
Ron Hunsinger on The Labyrinth - Ron describes how the Labyrinth is constructed.
Ron Hunsinger on Item Specs - Ron strikes once more, this time with a huge table containing numerous Item Specs. Truly remarkable.
Hopper on Scenery Corpses - Hopper describes the connection between active monster collections and pre-placed monster corpses. Interesting stuff.
Hopper's Archive of Saved PiD Games - Raiding these archives will provide you with tons of saved games files to dig through. You never know what data you'll find on a saved games file!

Hopefully that should give you a good head-start in determining how the game operates in principle, if you want to take up the banner of this project and get things going.

Vale,
Perseus

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Pre-2004 Posts

Replies:

Pathways into Porting...PerseusSpartacus 1/2/13 12:36 a.m.
     Please stop *NM*treellama 1/2/13 3:48 a.m.
           And now for something completely differentGodot 1/2/13 10:59 a.m.
                 Where's the like button for this? XD *NM*Destiny 1/2/13 11:14 a.m.

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Pre-2004 Posts

 

 

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