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A bit of a long post, part 1 (not much about Chocolate Keen, yet)
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Now, what does anybody think can be a good way to test Chocolate Keen's goal of authenticity?
That's right, reproducing vanilla demo playbacks!
Oh, but wait, is there such a thing at all? Keen 1-3 don't have this feature.
Well, no problem. The original Keen 1-3 executables (at least for version 1.31 as released by Apogee Software) do contain some unused demo-related code. With some amount of patching, these can be made useful (at the cost of losing the ability to restore saved games).
See the following link for a topic about that, with variations of the patch for all Vorticons episodes and sample demo files:
http://www.keenmodding.org/viewtopic.php?t=1749
The patch has also been uploaded to the KeenWiki and added to the following page:
http://www.shikadi.net/keenwiki/Patch:Demo
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A bit of a long post, part 2 (now about Chocolate Keen for sure)
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Anyway, how is that related to Chocolate Keen again? Well, basically, the patch's behaviors can now be optionally replicated in Chocolate Keen itself, using the new -vorticonsdemomode command line argument. So you basically have the chance to check if a demo is reproduced in the exact same way on vanilla Keen and Chocolate Keen altogether.
As expected, this leads us to a new release.
Oh yeah, for anybody interested in the SDL 2.0 executable for Windows: If it doesn't work, try adding -opengl. Alternatively add -renderer, followed by opengl or software. An earlier issue regarding sound playback should be fixed, though, thanks to an update to SDL 2.0 itself.
*** See the first post in this thread to find download links for the last release.
Changelog
July 29th, 2013 (v0.8.6):
- The bundled SDL2.dll file has been updated, solving a minor sound bug
in case the SDL 2.0 path is chosen on the Windows platform.
- A new "Vorticons Keen demo mode" has been implemented. Basically, it lets
you record and playback demos, as do vanilla Keen 4-6 (although Keen 4-6
can't just playback new demos without importing these in some way). It has
also been implemented as a patch for vanilla Keen 1-3 a bit earlier, so these
can be used for finding NON-vanilla bugs in Chocolate Keen. It is actually
the case that the vanilla Keen executables (without patching) contain
some unused code handling demos. The patch takes advantage of that.
- As a consequence of this, a fix to a function used for setting "game ticks"
(a kind of a moment measured in internal time units) has been applied.
- Furthermore, a typo in a function responsible for calculating jump heights
(and more) has been fixed, again as a result of demo playback tests.
- On an unrelated note, a minor fix to the main menu code has been applied.
- A minor error in the vorticon walk function has also been fixed
(before implementing demo playback). It's again all about == vs = in C...
- Furthermore, yet another instance of invalid memory access and a possible
memory corruption in some drawing function has been fixed, reproduced during
the Keen 3 finale when an image loaded from a file to a chunk of memory
generally used for map data is to be displayed. To anybody wondering about
the usage of map data storage for an image, that IS vanilla behavior.