The end of the year is approaching fast, and just like
last year, I want to use this time for some retrospection.
First of all, what happened in the last year?
- berenm added support for building xoreos with CMake, by the way of parsing the automake files used for the autotools build system. This way, xoreos can now be built with either CMake or autotools. I was skeptical at first, especially since I harbour no love for CMake, but it is working reasonably well and I am quite happy with it. In hindsight, I was wrong to reject this pull request for so long.
- I focused on supporting all the different model formats used in the Aurora games, and then I made all the games display their in-game areas with objects.
- xoreos adopted the Contributor Covenant as its Code of Conduct, in the hopes that it helps foster a friendly and welcoming community.
- The big one: our first official release, xoreos 0.0.2, nicknamed “Aribeth”.
- I overhauled the script system, making it more generic. This way, I was able to apply it to all targeted games, except Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood (which doesn’t seem to use any scripts at all). This included figuring out and implementing four new script bytecode opcodes: two for array access in Dragon Age: Origins, and two for reference creation in Dragon Age II.
- I implemented reflective environment mapping for Neverwinter Nights and the two Knights of the Old Republic games.
- I added a new tool to the xoreos-tools package: xml2tlk, which can recreate TLK talk table files out of XML files created by tlk2xml.
- With these changes, I decided to push out xoreos 0.0.3, nicknamed “Bastila”.
This is all old news, more or less already discussed in previous blog posts. However, since then, I added yet another new tool to the xoreos-tools package: ncsdis. It’s a disassembler for NCS files, the stack-based compiled bytecode of the C-like NWScript, BioWare’s scripting language used throughout their Aurora-based games.
It basically replaces the disassembler within the old
OpenKnightsN WScript compiler, with various added benefits. I’ll write a bit more about this tool in the near future, so for now I’ll just leave you with an example
assembly listing it can produce, as well as a
control flow graph it can create (with the help of
Graphviz). As you can see, it already groups the instruction by blocks and subroutines. It performs a static analysis of the stack (to figure out subroutine parameters and return types) and it also analyzes the control flow to detect assorted control structures (loops, if/else). I plan to grow it into a full-fledged NWScript decompiler.
Additionally, I also added support for BioWare’s
Neverwinter Nights premium modules, like
Kingmaker, to xoreos.
