C-evo-x
A freeware empire building game.
Missing Pieces
Getting started with the C-evo source code was an exercise in yak shaving. Step one: download the source. Step two: find a copy of Delphi 4. That turned out to be easy; the WinWorld software archive has a great collection of old software, including Delphi 4.
Step three: build the Delphi code. The build fails with an error: “Could not
create output file”. Fortunately I’ve found Vasilii’s and Jiří’s
C-evo forks. By reading through their early commits, I figure out that the
.dof files have absolute paths in them. After some poking around in Delphi,
I figure out where the output directories are specified in the project
options. Let’s put all build output into a tmp\ directory.
Step four: begin build automation. It turns out that Delphi 4 can’t create the
output directories you specify if they don’t exist. Most developers in that
era just built into the source tree, but I hate doing that. Fortunately for
me, Delphi ships with Borland’s version of make, so Makefile to the
rescue. Also, the Delphi compiler is perfectly happy to build a whole project
if you give it a .dpr file. I like being able to do everything from the
command line.
Step five: run the game. Now I’m seeing lots of alert boxes with the message
“[FILENOTFOUND]” followed by “Runtime error 216 at 00002F28” and ending
with an “Application Error” alert. Looking around the source files, I can’t
find any graphics or sound files. This stumped me for a while. I can see
where commits in Vasilii’s and Jiří’s repos where the resource files are added,
but no mention of where they came from. I look through the C-evo site, but
nothing on the Files page or elsewhere. Finally it dawns on me: all the
graphics and sound files are installed with the game. I look in C:\Program
Files (x86)\C-evo\ and find them all.
I copy the resource files into corresponding location in the build output
directory and now I can build from source and play the game. Cool! I add a
Resources\ directory to the C-evo-x project, add the binary files and write
out about 100 new targets in the Makefile to copy each file into the build
output directory. This is tedious but once it’s done, make will always do
the right thing.
Now I’m down to two missing pieces: there’s no project to build the installer,
and I can’t find the source code for StdAI.dll.