Live progress #4 – throwing old stuff away

Today’s went under the “Throw away old stuff” flag. Since the code is our property and art assets are mostly not, they all have to go. The process has started a few months ago already, but today it was mostly finished.

The game looks really empty at this stage. There are no replacements yet, except for a few elements. It is a fresh start, like an empty canvas ready to be filled with new stuff.

So what’s been thrown away – read under the cut:

• Sprites – can’t use any of the old ones, all thrown away. There are few exceptions – a few dozens of country flags and minor elements we have added ourselves, those will be re-added.
• Fonts – replaced with new ones (I’ll post a story about searching for fonts sometime later)
• Sounds – can’t use those either
• Texts – those are mostly okay, as they are pretty generic. Had to cut out old credits text as obsolete.
• Defines – were all moved to code and will be XML serialized later on (btw, tileset surfaces are already in XML)
• Music – sorry, nothing is left. We’ll see later if Andre allows us to use score he wrote previously

Summing up – NG is stripped clean from artwork perspective.

Now to creation side – been busy reworking sprites usage. In the older days all sprites were harcoded, so e.g. build menu icon ID was 383 written right in the code. Now, when everything needs to be replaced this is very inconvenient. Borrowing solution we previously used with texts – every sprite gets its own named constant that can be used around, e.g. ST_GAME_MENU_BUILD = 1 // equals to 1 cos thats the first new sprite now. Another change in the code, which is being applied everywhere, is that everything is counted from 0, for simplicity sake. In case with sprites – 0 is reserved for ST_NO_IMAGE that will be used to mark missing sprites locations.