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"Another World" (game) Code Review

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Re: "Another World" (game) Code Review

#2

Post by thristian »

If you're interested in the story behind the game's creation, Eric Chahi (the original programmer) gave a postmortem talk at the Game Developers' Conference a year or so ago:

http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014630/Classic-Game-Postmortem...

If you're unfamiliar with the game, there's an essay/review of it here:

http://www.actionbutton.net/?p=431

(press the "fist" button at the top-right of the page to cycle through a variety of ironically ugly colour schemes until you find one you like)

Re: "Another World" (game) Code Review

#3

Post by lloeki »

Seeing the background being drawn in slow-motion has quite a wow factor. At the time I assumed they were bitmap but did not know enough for the game size to raise a flag. The whole design of this game looks so clean.

Re: "Another World" (game) Code Review

#4

Post by mrspeaker »

I was pretty surprised to see it used it's own vm when I was rummaging through Gil Megidish's port to JavaScript - http://www.megidish.net/awjs/

There are a few huge base64 encoded data files, and the rest is just the bytecode, and converting the drawing functions to canvas.

I was surprised that "back in the day" you could take the hit of a vm - I always thought you had to get as close to the metal as possible!

Re: "Another World" (game) Code Review

#5

Post by brohee »

mrspeaker wrote: post #4

I was pretty surprised to see it used it's own vm when I was rummaging through Gil Megidish's port to JavaScript - http://www.megidish.net/awjs/ There are a few huge base64 encoded data files, and the rest is just the bytecode, and converting the drawing functions to canvas. I was surprised that "back in the day" you could take the hit of a vm - I always thought you had to get as close to the metal as possible!

It wasn't too action action packed, see the number of title from that era and even before that used the SCUMM system. Running in a VM was SOP for point and click games.

Re: "Another World" (game) Code Review

#6

Post by bstar77 »

lloeki wrote: post #3

Seeing the background being drawn in slow-motion has quite a wow factor. At the time I assumed they were bitmap but did not know enough for the game size to raise a flag. The whole design of this game looks so clean.

The Links golf game rendered the same way: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSBojv19gU8

Difference is that Link386 rendering was not exactly in real time. You'd have to way for the scene to render before you made your shot. Painful back in the day.

Re: "Another World" (game) Code Review

#8

Post by bni »

Seeing the background being drawn remind me of the Last Ninja on C64. Each screen started with the world being laid out using 2D sprites, in slow motion.

Anyone know if this was done for effect or if it actually was as fast as it could be?

Re: "Another World" (game) Code Review

#9

Post by onosendai »

There used to be an open source Another World interpreter available called RAW, created by a guy called Gregory Montoir, which eventually shut down the project at the request of Eric Chahi (the creator of Another World) around the time when the game became commercially available again. The original project page is still on archive.org:

http://web.archive.org/web/20070124142934/cyxdown.free.fr/ra...

Eventually another project cropped up called New Raw, which as far as I can gather was a fork of the then deceased RAW, but it didn't go anywhere. You can still download the source, however:

http://newraw.svn.sourceforge.net

I remember dusting off my floppy copy of Another World years back and running it through RAW on Linux, it ran the game pretty flawlessly, with a bunch of added features like high resolution (the game is all vectors).

edit: corrected a link

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