Wednesday 12 June 2019

Bringing the POX cross-platform

- or a few things on the extended RTTI and new inline variables presented in 10.3.



Having figured out the internals of the POX file format used in the game Siege of Avalon, and it's sibling from the modding community: Ashes of Avalon, Pillars of Avalon and Days of Ahoul to name the larger ones - enables to revise the tooling used for the engine - most of it closed source or requiring jumping through hoops while juggling.

So the first thing I brewed together is a POX file viewer/player with an export function. A preliminary test was done in the previous post, but I redid it using the FMX multi-device UI framework that comes with RAD Studio/Delphi/C++Builder - so that modders using for instance macOS, do not need to run in a virtual OS - and it all comes for "free" when using FMX.

Saturday 8 June 2019

Cure for POX found in Avalon

- or how reverse engineering makes a game engine portable.



One thing that can stop software from being portable and surviving the decay of time, is when closed and proprietary file formats block any chance of progress - the game Siege of Avalon has the POX.

Wednesday 5 June 2019

Take a "leak"

- or introducing Deleaker - now available for Delphi/C++Builder/RAD Studio



Since we in RAD Studio need to be able to master the fine art of manual memory management - things might leak if you do not pay attention and follow the rules. The most basic rule being: What you create - you must "destroy" (read free).