Prince of Persia

First of all congratulations, SDL-PoP is an amazing project.

Considering this port is backward compatible with original levels and mods I suspect that all game data limitations from the original DOS version are still there (max 13 levels, 24 rooms, 1 enemy type on a single level etc.). I'm wondering if SDL-PoP aims to lift them somewhere down the road to allow greater modding possibilities compared to the original game. Does something like a true SNES PoP levelset (more levels, traps, background images, elements, enemies) will be possible in future, or maybe other than bug fixing current features are the end goal of this project?

swit wrote:First of all congratulations, SDL-PoP is an amazing project.

Thank you!

swit wrote:Considering this port is backward compatible with original levels and mods I suspect that all game data limitations from the original DOS version are still there (max 13 levels, 24 rooms, 1 enemy type on a single level etc.). I'm wondering if SDL-PoP aims to lift them somewhere down the road to allow greater modding possibilities compared to the original game. Does something like a true SNES PoP levelset (more levels, traps, background images, elements, enemies) will be possible in future, or maybe other than bug fixing current features are the end goal of this project?

Well, Poirot is making a mod in SDLPoP with more than 16 levels, and more than 24 rooms per level: viewtopic.php?p=18061#p18061
The current state is here: https://github.com/ecalot/SDLPoP/tree/top

Also, there is an SDLPoP mod with a few new potion types and other small stuff: https://www.popot.org/custom_levels.php?mod=0000153

swit wrote:Considering this port is backward compatible with original levels and mods I suspect that all game data limitations from the original DOS version are still there (max 13 levels, 24 rooms, 1 enemy type on a single level etc.).

Yes, that's absolutely correct!

swit wrote:I'm wondering if SDL-PoP aims to lift them somewhere down the road to allow greater modding possibilities compared to the original game. Does something like a true SNES PoP levelset (more levels, traps, background images, elements, enemies) will be possible in future, or maybe other than bug fixing current features are the end goal of this project?

I suspect that SDLPoP will at its core stay close to the original feel of Prince of Persia 1 for DOS. Although that's not to say that expansion isn't possible, of course. If you fork the source code and make your own changes, anything goes

The editor feature created by poirot increased the number of rooms per level, so that's quite possible. However, this currently works by defining the number of rooms per level at compile-time, and some additional work would be required to make the game truly 'agnostic' to the number of rooms per level.

Extending the number of levels to more than 16 would likely cause some upheaval in the code base, because many data fields describing level information are arrays with an exact length of 16.

I think it may feel a bit 'wrong' to disrupt the code so thoroughly... although maybe that's just me.

Note that I am not very actively contributing to SDLPoP development at the moment.
(Although if David asks me to do specific things, I'll definitely do it)

Falcury wrote:(Although if David asks me to do specific things, I'll definitely do it)

David, an opportunity to come up with some kind of crazy plan...