Akella seadogs games file formats info

[corsair91]

Akella seadogs games file formats info

AlexKimov/seadogs-file-formats
https://github.com/AlexKimov/seadogs-file-formats/

Russian & English
Scroll-down for English


Covers Akella Games:

Sea dogs (2000)
Age of Sail 2 (2001) (incorrectly listed as Age of Sale 2)
Age of Sail 2 Privateer’s Bounty
Pirates of the Caribbean (2003)

Age of Pirates: Caribbean Tales (2006)
(Sea dogs : Caribbean Tales on GOG or Steam)

[corsair91]

All Events > Sea Dogs: To Each His Own - Pirate Open World RPG Events >

Source Code revealed!

Help us make Sea Dogs even greater!

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/223330/view/3013444995188538670


Ahoy!

We are pleased to share the news that we have received permission from the copyright holder to open the source code of Storm Engine.

We believe that this will help us make Sea Dogs better and we urge everyone with programming experience to join the work on the engine legally.

You can find the source code here:
https://github.com/storm-devs/storm-engine.


Game engine behind Sea Dogs, Pirates of the Caribbean and Age of Pirates games.


see steam News thread for Further Info

[corsair91]

Stumbled over this


Quote:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7345306

Hacker News

ekianjo on March 5, 2014

Yeah, source code release for ancient games would be nice, to say the least. I don't understand why NOBODY does it. (apart from Mechner)



vidarh on March 5, 2014 [–]

In a lot of cases the source code did not really exist in a meaningful way - lots of people on 8-bits wrote source code in a machine code monitor, with no comments or labels of any kind - rather than in a macro-assembler.

And even when they did, the source often stayed with the author rather than with the distributor, and may only have been "archived" on a single floppy in their personal collections, which may have stopped working, ended up in an attic or gotten thrown away.

Keep in mind that many of the early games were "throwaway" projects of a few weeks or months of freelance work for the people involved, and often conversions from other platforms where the lack of importance ascribed to source was demonstrated in that many conversions were done without access to source code or even design documents. E.g. some arcade conversions were done by playing the arcade game a lot to figure out the graphics and level designs and overall musical style....

For a lot of these games, your best bet is to crack out a disassembler and reverse engineer them.
On the upside, most of the ancient games are tiny and fairly easy to figure out. E.g. for C64 games, use a freezer cartridge, and check the address stored in $EA31 and $EA32.
It contains the address of the raster-interrupt. Almost everything in most C64 games hangs off the raster interrupt. That + 6502 assembly + a book explaining the C64 registers is all you need to get a good start at reverse engineering the workings of 90%+ of C64 games, and most of them will consists of at most a few thousand lines of code
(The rest includes various oddities - e.g. Sid Meier's Pirates for C64 consisted of high level logic written in BASIC plus a bunch of asm subroutines to speed things up and/or save space).


ars on March 5, 2014 [–]

Doesn't ID software do that too?


ekianjo on March 6, 2014 [–]

Well ID does not really do it, you should rather say Carmack. Now he's gone and we don't know if ID will continue to release source code in the future. Besides, I was referring to older games, in my book anything from Doom and onwards is relatively "recent" in the history of videogames.



ac29 on March 5, 2014 [–]

Yep: https://github.com/id-Software

[corsair91]

Akella

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akella
https://www.mobygames.com/company/akella
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/resources/directory/company/akella


naval games developer & publisher
(including pirates themed games)

The company is named after a Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book character, Akela the wolf, and its logo is a wolf.

During 2012 the company was amid multiple lawsuits totaling ₽200,000,000 (roughly $6,000,000), that combined with the significant developmental difficulties and commercial failings of Postal III pushed Akella to the verge of bankruptcy. As a result, the company, while technically still existing, has effectively ceased operations since 2012.


Notable Age of Sail naval games


2000 Sea Dogs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Dogs_(video_game)


2001 Age of Sail II
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Sail_II


2002 Privateers Bounty: Age of Sail II
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akella#:~:text=2002,of%20Sail%20II

2003 Pirates of the Caribbean
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirates_of_the_Caribbean_(video_game)

2006 Age of Pirates: Caribbean Tales

2007 Swashbucklers: Blue vs Grey

2008 Buccaneer: The Pursuit of Infamy (Russian Publisher)

2009 Age of Pirates 2: City of Abandoned Ships

2012 Sea Dogs: To Each His Own

[corsair91]

Storm Engine

Game engine behind Sea Dogs, Pirates of the Caribbean and Age of Pirates games.


History of the Engine

https://storm-devs.github.io/storm-engine/kb/0001-history.html

Storm 1.0 Sea Dogs 2000
Storm 2.0 Pirates of the Caribbean (2003) (aka Sea Dogs 2)
Storm 2.5 Age of Pirates: Caribbean Tales (2005)
Storm 2.6-7 CT expansion Dead Man’s Chest.
Storm 2.8 Age of Pirates 2: City of Abandoned Ships (2007)
Storm 2.9 Sea Dogs: To Each His Own (2016)


Storm Engine Knowledge Base
https://storm-devs.github.io/storm-engine/


Older Storm Engine Games
https://www.piratesahoy.net/categories/older-storm-engine-games.62/


Storm Engine Open Sourced
https://gamefromscratch.com/storm-engine-open-sourced/

source code
https://github.com/storm-devs/storm-engine