Alice Averlong🏳️⚧️yep. you can have it load you right into a level. you can't save a game there, but you can restore one.
weird.
it doesn't save your keys or if you have the access card, which means you could be trapped after reloading a mid-level save
It saves where the duke is relative to the hallway, even if not his actual position.
I just loaded two different saves of Duke in the first hallway. Didn't press any other buttons... but he appears in different places!
I know this function is a far call (not a "fall car", as my fingers somehow typed it) so I just need to look for JMP 208e:1bb0, right?
> Exception while decompiling 208e:4094: Decompiler process died
this would be easier if Ghidra would STOP FUCKING CRASHING
turns into
EB 09 ; JMP +9
Although it does... okay I think I may have figured out why they did this. One moment while I test.
so, they don't save your position or level state when saving a game, but there IS an exploit: the gun powerup
So you enter level 4, collect the gun powerup, and save. quit and restore your game. You now have the gun powerup, and you can collect it again, getting you to gun level 3. Save and restore again, and now you're max gun level (4).
so you can't use this trick.
now I think they could have solved this in another way: make the save function save the state of duke as he entered the level. They already save that for restoring the player when you die
oh interesting.
the game does reuse a dialog box!
just one of them: The main-hallway hints and Dr. Proton's security-camera taunts? They're literally the same system, with the two sets of text intertwined.
The problem is that they're handled as two 16bit integers, not a single 32bit integer.
So sometimes a function fill be like void foobar(int a, int b, char far * string)
and ghidra will be like "oh it takes 4 parameters!"
honestly real mode x86 is such an abomination of nonsense that we should pretend it doesn't exist.
if only for the minor problem that nearly all PC software and games were written in it for like 12 years
ugh. I don't know what this function even does but I can already tell that the only difference between two adjacent functions is which pointers they use.
TODD, PARAMETERS. PARAMETERS TODD
I'm really doubting the function duplications has anything to do with aggressive compiler optimizations because there's one very small function to determine if something is onscreen or not. It's a couple additions and 4 compares. prime inlining material!
it's not inlined. it's far-called from 148 locations
oh god it even does it for static things like doors
apparently every frame it loops through the doors array and checks if the player is standing in front of them and then checks if the player is pushing the up key
random-ass number.
todd replogle didn't really understand C programming but unfortunately did a lot of it when he made duke nukem 1
I hope I'm wrong
does add_score take two 16bit integers or one 32bit integer? who can say?
anyway I think I've found them all and there's 29 mostly-copy-pasted functions for updating all the various objects in the game.
29 arrays.
29 number-of-items-in-array variables
WHY TODD
okay I'm too fried to keep working on this anymore today.
but at least I found out the function 1097:7b68: process_floppies
CuteFloor
Niko (lethal_guitar)
Jay
Chris [list of emoji]I get the sense that late-80s-era gamedevs tended toward high INT, low WIS.
Timberwolf
Lizakowski
PixelArtDragonGame developers today: "oh no I need to use fancy algorithms to make sure I only check the door the player is in front of"
Game developers then: "I will literally check every possible door each time."