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Quest Designer:
First Part of Open Zelda's Project

Open Zelda's Project License

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

Concerning Open Zelda

Open Zelda is a 2D page scrolling game engine for Win32 that uses scripts or rules, sprites, and a number of sounds to render many types of 2D based games. Its uses, with a little of immagination and creativity, can vary from the classic Zelda-style orthogonal views (on which the engine was based) to the popular side view scrolling view, and even fake 3D isometric views!

The Quest Designer, as his name suggests, is an editor of quests. A quest, in Open Zelda, is nothing more than the set of sprites, maps, sound and rules that make all this types of games possible.

Quest Designer

Motivation:

In the dawn of games, Nintendo gave us the SNES with Zelda 3 and opened our eyes, but after some great years, SNES sadly expired. It was not over, and not everything was lost, for the emulators came and gave us back some hope.

Soon our hope was diminished when we finally knew by heart the whole game, and we just yearned for those long gone days when we first played Zelda 3.

Oh, but then there was Greg Denness, who gave us the light and showed us new ways with his magnificent creation: Open Zelda and the Quest Designer. Our joy ended soon when he had to stall the project, but it was once again restrengthened when he released the source code. Now we are illuminated with all the existent possibilities, and for that we are deeply thankful.

Greg said when he released Quest Designers' code:

"This program was created rather hastily, as such it's not the best piece of programming in the world =). In fact if you wanted to completly recode it all and make it look nice I certainly would not take offence."

This words of wisdom and sincerity opened new doors for us but that was just the beginning...

Goal

Our goal is to build a fully featured quest editor for Open Zelda. The intended Quest Designer will have a much robust and user friendly interface along with a better file management for smaller quest files and higher efficiency in their use than the current Open Zelda's Quest Designer by Greg Denness.

The road ahead

This is my small effort to completely rewrite Quest Designer, although now, Quest Designer, will have a slightly more solid foundation that the original version, it is still a long way to go until we can have something real useful.

During the next months we are going to build the strong basis needed to fully develop this software, and there are going to be several steps we are going to take in order to accomplish our goals.

Step 1: Opening pandora's box

The first thing we need is to understand Greg's code. And to understand someone else's code is no easy task, but we are digging hard on it. There's not much more we can say about this step, just read, read, read...

Step 2: Building the foundations

Start coding the fundamental application, using fast, small, and reliable programming tools and methods.

It has been decided that the Quest Designer will be programmed in C/C++ in the Win32 plataform using DirectX libraries. Also, Quest Designer, will not make use of the nice, but slow and heavy, Microsoft Foundation Class (MFC) Library. Instead we are going to base the code in the ATL/WTL libraries.

Desing, architecture and documentation of the software will have an important role on the development of the project, Doxygen has been chosen to documentate the code, CVS control system will take care of the code control, but most important, intensive and meticulous bug and error detection techniques and a rigorous quality control will be applied on every module in every stage of the process. Making of Quest Designer a robust and reliable tool with strong foundations.

Step 3: Graphics and DirectX

DirectX modules to handle graphics and classes to manage the sprites and sheets and scripts will be created at this point of the project.

Generated on Wed Apr 16 19:12:22 2003 for QuestDesigner by doxygen1.2.18