OpenDUNE.org

A quick update to give a small progress report:

Windows binaries are more stable, decompiled code is better, game is much more stable, and first parts of C are create.

Yesterday we made the decompiler a bit more clever. Completely unexpected it solved the problems on the Windows platform (although it is seemly silly that this solves it). Today more updates will be added to the decompiler, making the output more readable, and should ease up converting to plain C.

The core pools are converted to plain C, and show how converting C can be done. Documentation about memory structures is coming along just fine too. All in all: progress is going smooth and forward.

For the 1st of November the first release is planned. So far we unlocked most of the options up to lvl5 for all houses. I am sure before the 1st of November we even mapped more of the higher levels, which hopefully means you can finish the game with our first release. No promises of course

All the good news there, there are still a few issues which seems hard to fix:

• Randomly memory corrupts, leaving artefacts on the screen, but also sometimes just makes your units disappear, gives you tons of money, …
• When you go to Mentat, your mouse will no longer work. So don’t got there

Both are problems of the emulation layer, which we can’t seem to find. Not a real loss, as the game is good playable.

Interested in helping out? There is enough to do, from simply playing and reporting crash-logs, up to creating real C out of C-like structures. If you like to help, drop by our IRC: irc.oftc.net/#opendune. See you there.

Hello everybody,

As of yesterday we are proud to anounce the following:

The release of the second Pre-Alpha teaser, this time WITH support for Windows

With the help of glx, the team managed to get the current codebase to compile and run on windows.. while this is far from a completed product (the pre-alpha should have given that bit away, really), this is a major step towards functional code.

The link to said release can be found on the forum ( here )

This new development should also open things up for people to help; if you think you can help us with the project, feel free to drop us a line through mail or on irc (#openDUNE on oftc).

What’s up ahead?

With this hurdle out of the way we can now focus on the code, with some brilliant help from nsz we managed to increase our database of decompiled parts by miles, but there’s still much work to be done.

As it stands, most of the code is still in a semi-ASM-like state, where simple things like loops are scattered across dozens of functions.. our task now is to tackle all that, and turn the (for now) ugly code into neat, runnable (and fully functioning) code, to bring us closer to the first Alpha build.

Now to not get people’s hopes up for nothing, this task will take a long time, think of it as a huge 3d jigsaw puzzle.. only one that’s mostly black with some markings here or there… and around 10000 pieces of them.

As I said above as well, if you feel like you’re up for the challenge, every and any use will be greatly appreciated.. you don’t need to know ASM for this, though some C knowledge helps a great deal in figuring out.

Wait, there’s more?!?

Correct!

We decided to abort our idea of using Redmine .. as it’s proven itself more than unstable with a repository the size of what we already created (and there will be more), frequently crashing itself after eating up every single byte of spare memory (including swap).. Instead we have swapped to two new systems:

bugs.OpenDUNE.org

Using the Mantis bug tracking system, this will be where we will deal with issues that may arise in the future.. for now it’ll stay quite calm as we don’t have a (semi)stable product just yet..

svn.OpenDUNE.org

A slightly customized installation of WebSVN, this will show you the changelog of the repository, and allow you to browse our code from a browser.. ofcourse we also have a proper svn implementation for your favourite svn client, at svn://svn.opendune.org/

Time to wrap this up

Seeing I personally dislike walls of dea^h^h^h text, I’ll keep this simple with the message that the public front page ( http://www.opendune.org ) might be taken down at some point to be replaced with functioning code.. this shouldn’t take long, but you might experience some interruptions.

- The Team

In the past few months we created an application which can decompile 16bit real mode applications to C. As a result we can produce C code from the Dune2 binary. Together with a DOS emulation layer, we can create a working Dune2. This will be our initial version.
From this version we will slowly grow to a cross-platform, real C application. Of course it will take a lot of time to get there, but we have that time.

Currently, we have a big problem with the overlays used in Dune2, which doesn’t allow us to create a static version of Dune2 (we do have a working version when we attach a JIT). Till this problem is solved, we won’t release any source. We of course hope to solve this problem soon, but it is pretty complex.
If you have any questions, suggestions, ideas, please post them here or in the appropriate subforum. Your opinion counts, so don’t be shy.

Update:

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