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DOS Game - Galactic Conquest v9.00 test (Announce)

posted by Arjay, 11.12.2009, 11:11
(edited by Arjay on 11.12.2009, 12:07)

Hi Jason,

> (GMail won't let me email it because of the .EXE in it), so this link will
> be updated with a new host as soon as I can procure one.
 I tend to rename .EXE's to .XEX that way it's still "fairly" obvious what it is, I seem to remember this was also fairly common back in the BBS days.

> The zip file contains the game, the source code, the font editor, and
 the kitchen sink ;-)

Ok, having not seen this game before my initial comment on opening the ZIP is well pretty much everyone else: you need to heavily prune the contents of the ZIP. Here is a list of what I think needs to go myself:

1)The DOSBOX installer (I second all the comments above).
10/06/2009 23:03 1,460,010 DOSBox0.73-win32-installer.NOTE

2)The screenshots should really be on a website not in the ZIP or to put it another way if I can load the game to look - why do I need a screenshot?:
18/09/2009 18:01 4,760 galcon_001.png
18/09/2009 18:03 6,342 galcon_002.png

3) All the TPU's - why? Well if it needs TP7 and you've supplied the units then people can create the TPU's themselves. (I'll come back re your own CRT)
14/08/2009 19:54 4,496 FADEUNIT.TPU
17/09/2009 20:35 15,296 GCEND.TPU
17/09/2009 20:35 54,272 GCINIT.TPU
17/09/2009 20:35 17,664 GCTITLE.TPU
18/09/2009 00:15 112,368 GCTURN.TPU
17/09/2009 20:35 78,240 GCUNIT.TPU
17/09/2009 21:50 61,568 GCWAR.TPU

4) PC Magazines's Fontedit
03/06/1993 06:59 2,944 FONTEDIT.COM
Why? Well not for size but copyright reasons:
FONTEDIT 1.0 (C) 1988 Ziff Communications Co. ■ PC Magazine ■ Michael J. Mefford

Now firstly concerning point number 4 - I seem to remember sometime back Ziff started following up with various organizations (Simtel being the main one I seem to remember) to get all PC Magazines utils removed across their sites.

I believe it had something to do with Ziff wanting to charge people to access to download their utils.... Anyway... whatever the reasons, most Simtel mirrors you will come across now days don't have the PC Mag files available for download even if they have a list showing them being available - usually they aren't. (Some good examples of exactly that here and here and here). Note: I also used to "legally" (so I thought at the time!) distribute their utils on my BBS via a legally purchased copy of the Walnut creek "simtel archive" CD-ROM's....

Anyway it's obvious that the FONTEDIT you have here is the original assembler one (not the C++ one which is called fonted16.zip) and I believe that was just distributed as FONTEDIT.COM + FONTEDIT.DOC, somewhere I'd expect there is a FONTEDIT.ASM as well. So from a legal standpoint if you want to stick with it I'd suggest that it is probably best to mention the name of the original PC Mag archive in your documentation instead of distributing it.

I also doubt most people playing the game will know where to start with regards to editing fonts. And those of us who do will have our own tools etc. I can see that INTVFONT.COM was created with FONTEDIT, not sure if your loading it using a call or a direct read but this old posting explains the basic FONTEDIT format for anyone else interested.

Which brings me onto my next point. I do have TP7 code that I wrote for loading Windows FON/FNT fonts - I've been thinking to open source that code :)


Other points:
+ galcon will compress down at least between 50-60% depending on which EXE compressor you use. Again this will make the ZIP file considerable smaller.
+ You could easily build COMPNAME.DAT + COMPRANK.DAT from within the EXE if they are not present in the current directory.
+ Indeed I'd stick as much into the EXE as possible but that's just me.
+ I would also recommend sticking the source into a ZIP within the main ZIP.
+ dosboxstart.bat is hard coded and is basically I would imagine unusable by anyone except you and those still familiar with how to modify/use batch files.
That may seem like a odd comment to make but I've been amazed by people who knew DOS really well back in the day, yet now act like newbies with it. Thus better to assume your batch is going to need to be simple to use by end users and easy to edit by people who may be a bit rusty with their own DOS skills :)


ZIP file size
If you remove all the redundant stuff I/others have called out then even without any EXE compression (or merging files in) the contents of your ZIP go down to 474,006 bytes. Compress the EXE and your go down to below 370k.

Your ZIP file *should* be around 160k vs the 1.7Mb that it is right now ! :-)



> **Please note that I've changed out my CRT unit for a newer one with more
> functionality, it has not been included yet, I'll work on getting that out
> if I can.**
 Ok, now to come back to this point. There are now many CRT replacements available, so if possible perhaps it might just be easier to alter your games code to fully use a "public" CRT instead? e.g. Frank Heckenbach's NEWDELAY (see also Dr J.R Stockton's excellent pages). If your using Frank's NEWDELAY.PAS then you don't need to supply that EITHER but rather just call it out in documentation and provide a link to this library or better still a link to Frank's website: http://fjf.gnu.de/.

> Also, I'm still writing the documentation for it when I can (work has been
 Documentation is always a pain.... but an important one. It always seems to take longer than the time it takes to write software in the first place !

> For testing, you can choose levels 1-5, or an insane challenge with level
> 99.
> to converting it to something else. In the meantime, enjoy the game and
> let me know what you think of it. I might make a few more tweaks here and
 Ok I'll see what testing I can do since believe it or not I haven't even played the game yet, so this is just my initial feedback based on the contents of the ZIP - will see if I can play the game later on a DEV box.


Regards Richard

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