Well, I'm working toward my Java Certification. I should be taking the Programmer's exam either end of this week or early next week.
I'm an experienced C/C++ programmer with a good resume. Unfortunately I'm now out of the job and don't see that rectifying itself anytime in the immediate future
Now I'm moving on to my first Java project, so check this out:
See
http://freesci.linuxgames.com/ . I'm attempting to use this C project as a base to develop an SCI interpreter for Java. This is bound to be a major challenge, since a lot of the original SCI dealt with memory management (which is all behind the scenes in Java), as well as a very low level parsing of files. If I'm successful, however, any old SCI adventures, such as Space Quest III and King's Quest IV will be playable on any platform!
There's two phases to this project (at a bird's eye level, anyway): 1) Get the current functionality of FreeSCI going. 2) Get 256-color and SCI32 games working. FreeSCI is working on the latter, but they seem to be taking a while doing it. If they haven't accomplished this by the time I'm ready for it, I'll need to do some reverse-engineering of the SCI engines laying around in my old DOS Sierra games.
If someone reading this isn't familiar with SCI (shame on you -- you call yourself a true computer gaming historian?) here's the quick lowdown: In the early 80's, a little company named Sierra Online created adventure games based around an engine called AGI, or Adventure Game Interpreter. As technology progressed, they decided to scrap AGI and build a new game engine from scratch, which they dubbed SCI or Sierra Creative Interpreter.
Some of the most famous series of games that were written in both AGI and SCI are Space Quest, King's Quest and Police Quest. I, for one, and both a Space Quest and King's Quest addict.
This will be really cool to bring this to the Java platform. The original games weren't super resource intensive, so I don't think the performance problems of the Java platform will be a big problem. Imagine hearing all that old MIDI music on your new General MIDI card using Java's Sound API! I also plan on porting over the 256 color dithering features of the FreeSCI project to make the game screens look more up to date.
This will also be the first time that I'm aware of an SCI interpreter actually being written in an object oriented language.
