For most of 2018 I've been working on a port of an upcoming commercial game, details of which are under NDA. The game itself represents a scale & complexity I've not worked with previously, and has helped focus attention on the areas that most needed work. At a high level:
- Several months were spent improving the AGS code parsing so that the converter could, in this case, automatically produce 36,000 lines of equivalent C#.
- Time was spent further optimising the Editor and build tools to handle the large volume of game items and assets, in such a way that re-ports can still be iteratively performed quickly.
- Font handling was rewritten to convert .ttf, .sci and .wfn formats to XNA-style spritefonts.
- Support for 'new-style' AudioClips & AudioChannels was introduced. DynamicSprites and DrawingSurfaces were also partially implemented.
- AGS scripting coverage jumped from 39% to 64% for properties and 50% to 62% for methods.
- Engine script-threading was re-written to more closely align it with AGS (i.e. Global & Room threads) and with some events being queued rather than run immediately.
- The AGS Exporter plugin now optionally uses Potrace (for vectorising walkable areas) and ffmpeg (for converting all audio to .ogg).
- The runtime now uses the latest version of FNA with FAudio handling the .ogg files.
- A runtime debug console was added using Dear ImGui & ImGui.Net, with a custom inspector and logger added to help with debugging.
There have been 745 commits to the XAGE source code repository in 2018. Counting commits is not the best metric, but it is a metric, and hopefully one that gives some indication that this project is very much a going concern.
Seeing the port of [REDACTED] progress from thousands of compile errors to a close facsimile of the AGS version has been very rewarding. It's not quite there yet - there is still plenty to do - but there have been times recently when debugging where I've forgotten whether I'm playing the AGS or XAGE version of the game. If the same rate of change can be maintained then with luck you'll be able to play [REDACTED] on Xbox One and other fancy platforms sometime in 2019.
