Ambrosia Software Web Board: Inside Delver Engine - Ambrosia Software Web Board

Found this document over the weekend while doing some site maintenance, figured you'd guys would find it interesting:

Inside Delver Engine

And on an unrelated topic, mondo blobbo public beta demo is now available as welll...

gandreas, on Sep 7 2004, 02:41 PM, said:

::Looks::
::Reads::

Hmm...very similar to the old (now freeware) game Taskmaker (and the sequel Tomb of the Taskmaker). The game was built entirely from tiles and props (where several of which were constantly re-used) only far less refined than Cythera. Many areas seemed very rugged and uneven, often having no transition floor tiles. Stand-Alone props and tiles could not give off light, People said only a few things (each thing determined by there mood), the view was a poorly-rendered top-down, and all of the 'walls' were full 8x8 tiles. 'Eggs' as mentioned could be activted by various things: throwing a swithch, pressing a button, stepping on a special tile...but what could happen was very limmited. One redeeming feature was that after you beat the game you were granted a 'Master Menu' with which you could add and remove people, change map tiles, and associate "special" tiles with eggs. For the longest time I had considered converting the game's terrain to look like cythera's (and adding the apropriate people to stand in for Cythera characters (The good king Zehner in place of Alaric etc.). But after giving it some thought I decided that cythera would be too complex a game to translate into such a simple game without doing some hacking (a skill I have not yet mastered--I wish Bryce was still a regular). In any case I found the article intruiging at the least, and downright fascinating at best.

P.S. during my escapades in exploring cythera code-wise I discoverd that the bulk of the encoding of the sourcecode can be cracked by a statement outside the encryption area; It seems that we have all been foiled by a simple datafork scrambling algorithm, one that is 'undone' every time cythera boots up and loaded into memory.

-All the best, the vIsitor