Good work making this port, great to see people still care a lot about old shooters like Blake Stone. Thanks

Hi,

Good work for created a Source port,but I have a problem.

how am I supposed to launch it on Windows ? (I am under Windows Seven,64 bits) because I don't find any executable/exe".

I have visited your home page,and it's says under the 'Profile" topic that the port use Windows,so I am assuming it is compatible with Windows.

Note anyway: I have tried a Google search and read the "readme" but I have not found the answer to my question.

Thanks you in advance.

yeah... not retrying it. if it still ONLY supports OpenGL, it would still work horribly on my toaster.

no point using a source port that works worse than DOSBox, which in theory oughta use more resources than any sourceport of a DOS game.

Hi,
1) On home page click "Download latest release (Windows)" then select appropriate archive for your system.
bstone-bin-win32-x.y.z.zip - runs on 32 bit or 64 bit Windows.
bstone-bin-win64-x.y.z.zip - runs only on 64 bit Windows.
Where x.y.z is port's version.
2) Extract archive's content into a directory with a game.
3) Run bstone.exe.

P.S. Sorry for late reply.

You're my hero! I'm loving this! Going back to play now.

Thank you very much Bibendovsky. :)

Oh, wow, thank you very much! Just TODAY I was trying to reconfigure the DosBox installation (As Galaxy messed up my old configs) and found this!

I've tried directly and it works like a charm (WASD, mouse, quicksave, quickload, WOW) on Windows 7!

I have some questions/suggestions:

* Which is the minimum list of files needed for the game to work? I've got both games, so I was thinking on creating "custom installations" for both Blake Stone and Planet Strike, but I guess that most of the files in the original gog/galaxy installation aren't needed.

Here are the Galaxy installation files and my port installation folder with almost everything stripped.

I've left the icon for shortcut purposes, removed all the DosBox, gog and unistall related files. And thats all that is left. Most of the files are *.BS6 extension (and I guess the game will need most of them), and the FILE_ID.DIZ, which is basically a text file advising against uploading the game to... bulleting boards.

So, which files does the port need (minimum) to launch the game? (And Planet Strike).

* Can we change the folder in which the application stores the configuration? (Maybe a cfg file pointing towards the folder?). This is more for personal preference, as I hate applications leaving stuff behind on AppData/Roaming.

Again, thanks for everything!

1) Here is list of essential files for each game

Aliens Of Gold (shareware):
AUDIOHED.BS1
AUDIOT.BS1
IANIM.BS1
MAPHEAD.BS1
MAPTEMP.BS1
SANIM.BS1
VGADICT.BS1
VGAGRAPH.BS1
VGAHEAD.BS1
VSWAP.BS1

Aliens Of Gold (full):
AUDIOHED.BS6
AUDIOT.BS6
EANIM.BS6
GANIM.BS6
IANIM.BS6
MAPHEAD.BS6
MAPTEMP.BS6
SANIM.BS6
VGADICT.BS6
VGAGRAPH.BS6
VGAHEAD.BS6
VSWAP.BS6

Planet Strike
AUDIOHED.VSI
AUDIOT.VSI
EANIM.VSI
IANIM.VSI
MAPHEAD.VSI
MAPTEMP.VSI
VGADICT.VSI
VGAGRAPH.VSI
VGAHEAD.VSI
VSWAP.VSI

2) IMHO User's profile is best place to store data (always available and writable).
Exact location pattern in profile (...\AppData\Company\AppName) choosen by SDL developers.
Not comprehensive list of solutions:
a) Command-line option to specify such folder.
b) Command-line option to use executable's folder as profile folder.
c) Special file (for example, bstone_profile.txt) alongside with executable which points to profile folder (as you proposed).
d) All above solutions together.
e) ???

Think that if you put all the stuff in the same folder, you get a portable installation without many problems. Also, I hate that standard xD, my experience is that no one cleans up after the application is uninstalled and the folder end up cluttered with saves, config files and extra shit.

I would vote for b or c. Could be added a switch in the option menu (Together with the other switches) to select either the /Appdata/ folder or the application root folder?


Aaand thanks for the info on the folders!

In case of switch in menu where we should store it's value? Solution with special file in game's folder can do the trick. In my opinion presence of special file in game's folder looks more preferable.

Uhm, I came from a Java development background... can't you ask in c++ the "home" folder for the application, so you don't need to store the value anywhere?

It's possible of course.
So, by default game will use application's dir (where executable resides, not working one), and if command-line option not override it. What about this variant?

P.S. I do not want to add menu option because (in my opinion) profile dir should be resolved at startup.

I agree that the profile dir should be resolved with a commandline switch, but I think it's a bad idea to store the profile in the same directory as the executable, because that directory should be read-only on any modern operation system.

Btw.: Hi Boris.

Before v1.0.0 profile was in working dir. Also I wrote above my opinion about current location of profile.

Yes. I know. I've patched my copy of the source code to use ~/.local/share/bstone instead. I just wanted make clear that I don't think it should be changed back to the old behaviour.