Welcome to my new blog: 'RichieSam's Adventures in Code-ville'. This will be the place I share the coding experiences have and learn while working on my various projects. With that said, who am I and what am I working on?
I'm a 21 year old, fourth year student studying at The University of Texas at Austin. I'm majoring in Mechanical Engineering with a minor in Computer Science. I thoroughly enjoy programming, both the thrill of gettting something to work and the science/math of algorithms and data structures. The majority of my programming projects have revolved around games. The first major project I did was creating an application that tracked guild currency for my guild. My latest project is a suite of tools to let users install, modify, and create game asset modifications of the game League of Legends. It required reverse engineering quite a few file formats and learning how to hook the game process in order to allow run-time asset swapping.
The two big projects I'm working on right now are The Dargon Project and Z-engine for ScummVM. The Dargon Project is the aforementioned suite of applications. Z-engine is my project for Google Summer of Code.
Z-engine:
The Z-Engine is used in the games Zork Nemesis and Zork Grand Inquisitor. Marisa Chan created a C implementation of the engine, but it is only for desktop and requires configuration files. The project aims to create a ScummVM engine using Marisa Chan’s implementation code as a guide into the Zork file structure and engine design. That is, it will not simply adapt the current implementation to the ScummVM engine structure. Rather, it will create a new engine, using the file structures and event implementations in Marisa Chan’s code as a reference. ScummVM will allow these games to be played on a variety of platforms and a redesign will remove the need for configuration files. Lastly, it will mean that ScummVM will support all of the Zork point'n'click adventure games.
I'm absolutely thrilled be one of the lucky people to be a part of Google Summer of Code. ScummVM is an amazing group of developers and I'm really looking forward to being a part of that.
Well, I guess that's it for now. My next post will most likely be about that start of GSoC.
Until then,
-RichieSams
