Obsidian by SegaSoft and Rocket Science Games

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SnowyThing
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Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2009 9:35 pm

Obsidian by SegaSoft and Rocket Science Games

Post by SnowyThing »

I haven't seen anything mentioned about this game on the forums, by doing a quick search.

From the Wikipedia page, it appears that the game engine was just a specific video player named mTropolis. Doesn't appear that many titles were developed for it either.

As someone who doesn't know anything about the way engines and programs work, is this a difficult one that they developed the game for?
digitall
ScummVM Developer
Posts: 1172
Joined: Thu Aug 02, 2012 1:40 pm

Post by digitall »

I assume you are referring to:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsidian_(video_game)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTropolis

Not sure what question you are asking... The reason why they have few games is listed on those pages fairly clearly i.e. the tool went EOL, partly due to various limitations which newer / custom systems transcended.
SnowyThing
Posts: 3
Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2009 9:35 pm

Post by SnowyThing »

Yeah, referring to that game and engine in the links.

I forgot to ask the main question, whether that game and its engine is on the radar at all for ScummVM?

I also see that this whole question should have been put in a previous post on this forum, sorry about that.
digitall
ScummVM Developer
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Joined: Thu Aug 02, 2012 1:40 pm

Post by digitall »

No WIP on this AFAIK... but we shall see.
OneEightHundred
Posts: 8
Joined: Sat Mar 19, 2022 5:30 am

Re: Obsidian by SegaSoft and Rocket Science Games

Post by OneEightHundred »

I've been looking in to reverse engineering mTropolis to support Obsidian, so here are some preliminary findings for maybe future use...

Good news: mTropolis data doesn't appear to be compressed or use any sort of complex encoding (except for "mToon" encoding for animations, which I'm not sure of the encoding of), and its feature set is relatively compact. A lot of its assets are just stored as inline files, all of the videos are encoded with Cinepak, and it mostly works via modular object behaviors of which there aren't very many of. It'd probably be possible to reverse engineer its high-level structure without TOO much work and implement its behavior modifiers one at a time.

Bad news: Unlike Director games where XObjects are mostly used for utility functions and basic kit, Obsidian depends on native code extensions for some of its gameplay elements (probably because its scripting capabilities are quite weak). In particular, the code and data for the dictionary puzzles in the first chapter are contained in the "RSGKit" native extension, which is a DLL, so would probably have to re-implement all of them and read the data from the DLL. There are 7 modifiers in RSGKit, 3 related to the Bureau word games, but a few of them it's less clear what they do.
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