In all the previous months FreePrince became a playable game. By the beginning of March we had released the last pre-alpha version (FP0.4). The next version is going to be the first alpha and have guards, timing and better moves coordination. Screenshots may be seen at the freeprince screen shots page. FP0.4-pre-alpha-soc (the first release of FP0.4 was compiled under GNU/Linux, FreeBSD and windows).
During the month of February our new volunteer became our new webmaster and normalized the site to be html 4.01 strict according to the W3C standards. The page is now supported by console browsers and the sites now presents a right separation between presentation (CSS styles) and data (HTML information).
Check out the Princed Programming contest awards 2005. It is about the coding of a compression algorithm used by the original game. Check out the bases.
Today we could came up with the first windows version of FreePrince. We used LCC and added a new makefile. The port can be downloaded from the CVS, by compiling the source using LCC and the makefile.lcc file you can get the exe file. The file res_conf.h requires to be generated and is a need in the compilation. This file can’t be generated in windows in an easy maner, bacause it uses awk. Any Linux version of the game can generate the file, so there is no problem at all. To compile you need to download the SDL and import the libs into LCC using the import facility at the utils menu. Don’t forget to put SDL.DLL in the game directory.
Mac Os X users can compile the game but PPC architecture isn’t fully supported, we need to upgrade the resource module code in FP from the latest PR sources. The rest of the source is ported.
There is a new FreePrince screenshots section in where you can find the latest shots of the development. Today’s addition is the windows shot.
During the Second Lugfi Conference we got the Freeprince kernel and graphics running, for the following weeks we’ve been redisigning and rewritting the FP kernel. FP is now in an advanced pre-alpha. Our kid can run, jump, couch and do all the movements depending on the pressed keys. It is read from the original dat files from disk and loaded into memory. The titles are also going fine, maps are read and loaded into memory in several object-oriented-structures and there is an interesting key binding event manager. We believe that a working version could be released before the end of the year. Interested guys may go to the FP project home page and take a look at the remaining tasks or offer any help.
I’ve been working in the debugging of PR 1.0 beta -that is very buggy- and fixed a lot of bugs. I want to thank the creators of Valgrind and Gdb for those two great tools that helped a lot finding bugs and memory leaks. The release is not delayed, when PR 1.0 beta was released I decided to keep this as the last released version for a very long time until I come out with PR 1.0 after at least 6 months of testing. The current problem is in the compression stuff, that is the most difficult code to debug and it has at least 2 known bugs (reports corruption when it’s not and reads wrong the memory). Those bugs could keep me busy for a long time -I hope not-. After fixing all bugs I’ll send people some copies so they can test it (if you are interested just mail me). For those who can’t wait, if I had to schedule or say an approximate release time I would say PR 1.0 could be finished in September. Who knows, may be it comes together with FreePrince 
FreePrince is in the way: we have decided to code it in ANSI C, using the SDL library but adding an abstraction layer in case we need to use any other library. For the moment the target platforms will be Linux, Windows and Mac. The file structure of the game will be the same as POP1 but adding an “exception DAT file” where the mirror, the mouse and other special game features could be saved allowing a better edition without any source compiling. In the original game those features were hard-coded so the only way to modify them was hex-editing the file. If you have the original game you would be able to replace prince.exe with freeprince.exe and add the features dat file to play the game with the old art. Due to legal stuff we won’t distribute the original dat files, but we will use owr own art instead.
It was 1989 and I was 7 years old when I went to play to a friend’s home. This day was different from the other days, my friend wasn’t at his room, so I went upstairs and found him playing with his new computer. It was the first time I’ve ever seen a personal computer, and I was very curious. My friend was completely captured with the game, he didn’t say hi, he was just moving this funny kid in white clothes all over the dungeons. After a while he said: “wanna play”. My answer was “no, just keep playing, I’d rather watch”. This day I decided to make my own game, a game like this, so I started learning programming and computer stuff.
Years later I’ve browsed the whole net looking for a kind of editor of this game, I had spent all my primary school drawing levels of the game in papper and I wanted to play them! Being unsuccessful with the search I’ve opened the levels file to see if a could edit something but, without any success.
In 2000 I’ve started again, but this time I knew more coding stuff, so I could edit some parts of the game. Once again I’ve been looking for an editor and found that there had been one! but I could only read some russian stuff I didn’t understand. The only thing I’ve got was the name of the author of this game that was in some BBS, Alexandr Larionov. As the editor wasn’t very functional I stopped looking for an editor and started princed project. I have to belive that Kirill Terebilov got the editor in a BBS and used it to come up with his own Prince of Persia version “POP4D” in 1994.
A bit behind schedule, the stable, fully functional version of PR that supports cathegorized extractions was completed and succesfully ported to Windows, GNU/Linux, Mac Os X, SunOs, FreeBSD and NetBSD .This version can import and export resources from all the DAT files from Prince of Persia V1.4 except for the CGA and EGA graphics. The last tests are being performed, and once done the release will be available immediately in the sourceforge.net download section of the princed project. We are focusing on the last pvl format checks. This is to avoid format problems between plv versions.
Future releases: We do not know whether there will be a third release of the version 0.9, but we are sure that this version is very close to the version 1 of the program. Perhaps the only changes will be regarding resource cathegorization.
