This page contains a list of posts referencing the Rebuilding Birthright: The Gorgon’s Alliance series of posts. These posts detail my journey in compiling the game’s source code and creating patches.
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Fixing Community Adventures in Birthright
The more I work in various programming projects, the more I see that the majority of issues are resolved with hours of debugging resulting in one- or two-line changes. I have fixed the bug that brought me back to compiling Birthright last month. Around this time last year, I was hard at work documenting how to create and play community1 adventures in Birthright when I noticed a very disheartening issue: picking up the quest item in any community adventure would crash the game to desktop. -
Optimizing Our Build Process
Now that we’ve released our first build, I’ve done some thinking about improvements we can make to the build process and the builds themselves to make them more useful to not only me, but also anyone downloading and using them. During my conversation with juanitogan, we touched on binary reproducibility. In theory, compiling source code should be deterministic. This means that the compilation process will produce the same output for the same input; every time. -
Releasing Our First Build
The No CD Fix When I briefly looked at removing the CD requirement before my last post, it seemed fairly straight forward until I noticed there was a InstallationType variable that changed a bit of behavior in a few places. I figured this could be a source of issues if the CD were suddenly no longer available. To explain why, let’s cover a bit of video game history. If you’re not interested, feel free to skip to the next section. -
Rebuilding Birthright: Organizing the Project
Now that we’ve compiled Birthright: The Gorgon’s Alliance, it’s time to get everything of consequence into version control so we can manage and update the code effectively. Based on some of the batch files included in the source leak, it seems likely that Synergistic saved changes in ZIP files. While that was potentially a reasonable approach at the time, based on the tools available, it’s definitely not a good idea today. -
Rebuilding Birthright: A New Beginning
Somehow, it’s been over a year since we started Rebuilding Birthright. In that time, I’ve almost finished BRUT, the Birthright Resource Utility for viewing, modifying, and extracting files from Birthright’s resource files. I’ve also done enough research to put together the beginnings of a Birthright Modding Reference for creating custom adventures. Unfortunately, I’ve run into a bug. The game crashes when picking up the quest item (the item that marks the adventure complete) in custom adventures. -
Rebuilding Birthright: Misdirection
The first day involved mostly figuring out which dependencies were needed where and how to get them installed. You can read about that here. We’re going to take advantage of the developer’s (theoretical) wisdom in building their own project and use their make command, MAKE.BAT dos: Building RELEASE NOVA.EXE for DOS makefile(795): Error(F46): Illegal character value 1aH in file Error(E02): Make execution terminated 'grep' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file. -
Rebuilding Birthright: The Gorgon's Alliance
What? For the last few years, I’ve been hosting and updating instructions for installing a game called Birthright: The Gorgon’s Alliance. Birthright came out in 1997 and was published by Sierra On-Line, which dominated the PC game market at the time. The game was a PC adaptation of the fantasy world Birthright. Birthright was a campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons, meaning it provided a world, lore, and some extra rules and creatures for players to roleplay in.