I now crown you "Master Of Digging Out Old Stuff From The Void"! MODOOSFTV for short. Pronounced "Mo-doo-sif-tiv". Hahah. It's like every time I think it's a dead end, you find something :D
I can't write this off completely now. This has to be on the list to support at some point. I've saved what you just posted. I'd like to think I'll do this someday, I just can't say when. But it would be really cool to achieve this, now that I have the specs!
Hahah, glad you like your new title.
Well that would save part of the work, but still there has to be some data level conversion since the "mask.pcx" file is a black & white image which is literally used as a mask at the pixel level in their rendering engine, while mine is actually just a full colour image that is laid over the top of everything. So like I described earlier, when converting an old level, the mask.pcx has to be used to copy the graphics from the actual level background and paste them into a new file.
And as for the sprites, I would still need to interpret the gob data to know how to interpret the sprites.pcx files to find the images and their hotspots.
Those points are really where the bulk of the work is...
Argh you're right. I found the problem - Godot is including my custom folder in the package, so the game is using the files it's finding internally in its data.pck rather than the ones from the actual external "custom" folder. I found the export settings to correct this and fixed the problem, but I spent most of the day creating an export script that will one-click export all platforms and external files and then push to itch.io, so no human error can be introduced :)
Once again, possible, but not free :) Definitely something I'd look at for the paid version, because I can appreciate the benefits. It's not the technical considerations, it's the design considerations. I made this game to support 4:3 screens, it doesn't seem right to re-release it and not have it played in its original style - I have an arcade cabinet that uses a real CRT and want to keep playing it on that (and I was contacted by someone else doing the same thing!) so adding support for widescreen levels would mean handling what happens when it's on a CRT - probably labelling them as "widescreen" in the level select interface, and either popping up a warning and just cropping out the extra space (and letting the players get lost off screen), maybe instead zooming out (but that would be hard to see on a CRT), or just locking those levels altogether... you can see how this affects development from a design perspective! Open to ideas though.
Ok you can be the first to test if my magic script did its job properly! I fixed the bug and all the builds were updated with the script. Try it out and let me know!
Also this interface is horrible for long conversations - next order of business is getting the forums up, so I'll let you know and you can post there from now on.
