Prelude to Darkness

[asf]

In 2002, Pyrrhic Tales released Prelude to Darkness, a game more or less in the vein of the later Ultimas (except 9 which is terrible):

https://www.mobygames.com/game/18459/py ... -darkness/

A fun RPG, quite innovative for its time, but plagued with endless bugs. The original version was nigh unplayable with endless crashes to desktop and memory corruption issues . Even though it got quite a few patches in the following years, the game remained very unstable.

Fast forward a couple of decades, some nagging from @Konjad and the original devs eventually released the source code for the game in 2022. Since then, I and a fellow developer from rpgcodex put a bit of effort in rewriting parts of the source for better stability, including:

• Replacing old Directx 7 with full opengl graphics;
• Several fixes for memory leaks and other bizarre memory issues;
• Rewrite of the audio framework to use miniaudio;
• Full port to linux;
• Inclusion of 64-bits version;
• Fixes for events and other in-game issues;
• Few qol stuff like double click for certain UI interactions and camera modes;

This work resulted in a new, much more stable version of the game.

Since joos have been jooing in rpgcodex, I decided to move shop here. Even though last updates were still in 2022, last reports we got was that game was much more stable. Since I should have some free time in the next few weeks, I might get back into fixing bugs if any get reported.

If you are interested in playing, you can get the full game here, thanks to rusty and his vault:

https://f.rpghq.org/mWyr9bQciOYV.zip?n= ... rkness.zip

It contains both a win32 and a linux executable.

If you just want the patched version, or want to look into the source, you can get it straight from gitlab:

https://gitlab.com/ptd3/ptd-1

Regarding the game itself, I recommend not touching gui.ini. Don't try to run it in windowed mode since it won't work. The game currently uses the desktop resolution, maintaning the old 4:3 with lateral black bars. If there is interesting in changing resolutions or using the older ones, I might rework that a bit. More advanced stuff like full support for widescreen might be viable, but will require some further changes.

If anyone is willing to play, I will be interested in hearing reports about stability, particularly any bug you might find, which is what this thread is for. Overall, the game is quite fun and worth at least one playthrough.

[Konjad]

Perhaps it would be better to keep PtD posts in one thread? Easier to find later
viewtopic.php?p=838-prelude-to-darkness

EDIT: Oh, this one is in dedicated to modding subforum, nevermind then.

[asf]

play the game and report bugs

[wndrbr]

Custom portrait for the main character, I've made it exclusively for HQ. Just extract into game's dir and confirm the replacing.

https://f.rpghq.org/cYpuKtG4SwVG.zip?n= ... rtrait.zip

[NotAI]

Impressive!
Sounds like a huge effort.

Never heard of this game before at all.

Nothing happens when trying the 64-bit executable...do some other packages need to be installed or go with wine?

[asf]

Should work fine in linux without wine, check debug.out see if any errors, or just send it to me.

[NotAI]

This probably is the issue? (from debug.out)

"glfw error 65540 Invalid scancode -1"
[long list of the same error repeated]

then seems no errors until near the end:

"no mesh for item DF6EEAD0
no mesh for item E094D1B0
no mesh for item E09926B0
D3DXUninitialize"

Edit. It may be a common nvidia driver bug with originally 32 bit stuff. Since when trying in WINE:

ERROR: "...broken nvidia RandR detected..."

So might be nothing wrong with your code. Just a recent nvidia driver issue.

Edit. The gpu itself is working fine. Tried the vulkan renderer with gpu in Godot just now as a check.

Will try some other stuff later to check.

[asf]

Works fine with nvidia drivers in one of my boxes here, so I doubt that is the problem. More likely some weird x11 behaviour. I will take a look later today.

[asf]

The glfw errors seem to be some bug in glfw related to non standard keyboard languages, and it seems most people just ignore it. None of these errors seem to be related to a lack of window in your case, are you sure you get no window? The game always abort with a proper error message when glfw fails to create the window.

[NotAI]

Ty for figuring out the error messages

Yep no window

Will try on a different system that has other packages including a different environment (BG3 eg worked for sure on that)

This system does run straight vulkan code when compiled, unreal, and godot but some things probably quietly broke with updates

[asf]

Send me the entire debug.out, let me dig