Porting Day of the Tentacle to Linux | Hacker News Reader

Porting Day of the Tentacle to Linux

cheesetalks.net

116 pointsthiagoharry20 comments

I just bought this game last night. It's worth every penny (no DRM, and you can switch back and forth between operating systems without trouble; I've played on Debian Jessie native as well as wine..)

This is a funny but mildly challenging game that kids seem to like too, and it's not scary, adult, or violent; I half expected to see the Mystery Mobile pull up and Scooby and Daphne jump out.. or maybe Cruella De Vil. The music is a perfect fit.

I never played the original, but this seems like a nearly flawless remaster with great new art, audio, and animations and seems to be like a perfectly working Linux port. Even cooler, you can press F1 in any scene and see it morph into the old pixel art.

It's $8.99 at GOG while on sale[1]. Absolutely worth it and kudos to Cheese for a great Linux port.

1. https://www.gog.com/game/day_of_the_tentacle_remastered

If you liked this, you might also want to checkout Grim Fandango if you haven't already.

And the first two Monkey Island games, that got a remake.

The remakes haven't been ported to Linux.

Oh, that's a shame. Got to keep playing the un-remade versions on ScummVM then.

Super glad to hear you enjoyed it :)

I wish GOG was more transparent about native vs. emulated titles. I'm much more inclined to buy a native port like this than something that uses DOSBox.

I think GOG's non-remastered versions of many older point and click adventures use ScummVM, which is about as close to native as many of them ever were - a lot of them were written in various forms of machine-independent bytecode running on an interpreter.

For those who aren't yet aware, Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick (of Secret of Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion fame) are currently developing Thimbleweed Park - due to release in early 2017.

Dev blog here: https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/

Nice write-up Cheese! And good work on the Linux port.

I'm Mark Cooke, CEO of Shiny Shoe and producer on both the Day of the Tentacle and the Grim Fandango remasters. If anyone has any questions about the production of the remasters I'd be happy to try to answer.

In technical terms: What is process of remastering an old game? How much of the old game do you use?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjF4eMrYfG0

In the case of DotT a significant amount of the original game code was re-used. Both the C run-time as well as all the original SCUMM code, a domain specific language invented by a team at LucasArts for creating adventure games.

On top of that is a modern C++11 engine harness that inter-operates with the original code, provides platform services, adds a brand new rendering system and art pipeline for the remastered art, etc.

Thanks Mark!

I feel like I inherited a solid and well designed project, and I'm so thankful for the thoughtfulness and skill of the many people who've touched this game and its engine over the years :D

This is an interesting article, and mirrors my experience of porting. I really loved seeing the advice from various other developers he consulted. It's a nice way to expand it from being just his experience to a more general statement about what it's like to port software. I never ported a commercial game, but did quite a bit of porting to Native Client. The parts about knowing your tools, knowing the project, and the process of porting are spot on.

One thing he didn't mention (or I missed it), is how it feels when your port starts to work. I found it to be thrilling to have a big pile of code that doesn't work at all, and it stays that way for a while, until suddenly almost everything seems to come together. It's very different from normal software development, which is more gradual. Porting software feels more like solving a puzzle.

It's interesting - I feel like I've experienced that more from working on my own games/projects than doing this port.

Perhaps it's difficult for me to reflect on that with regards to DotT at the moment - all I remember feeling whenever I got something working was relief, and that was usually fleeting because there was always something else that needed attention.

Poetically, I feel a little cheated that having the renderer work out of the box meant I didn't have an opportunity to get screenshots of any cool mangled visuals (although I am glad I didn't have to touch the renderer at all) :D

It's possible that I'll feel differently after the dust settles. If that happens I'll definitely update the article with some extra thoughts!

FTA: Ryan Gordon's Serious Sam porting changelog: https://icculus.org/~icculus/dotplan/SeriousSam-CHANGELOG.tx...

I need to step up my changelog game. This is fantastic.

For some of us it feels like DoT came out yesterday and we had insane fun with it. But if you cite something and your peers just stare at you, you realize those peers are 10 years younger or more. This is a shame, I will certainly setup a friday afternoon session and see if I can get my younger peers into it.

DoT must never be forgotten.

I love this game and the others from the Golden Age of LucasArts (monkey island, tie fighter, fate of atlantis etc).

This artcle was surprisingly difficult to follow with all those comments

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