KaM Remake Development Blog

KaM Remake was started almost 7 years ago now and at that time I had little knowledge of SVN. No wonder that KMR repository was created flawed. It missed “trunk/branches/tags” folders, which are an industry standard for SVN repositories. We have added them only few years later (in 2011). That did not mattered until now, when we need to migrate from Google Code and that is a good time to switch to Git. Problem is – Git import tools don’t like unusual SVN repositories, like ours.  That means we need to go back in time and fix the KaM Remake repository.

Thanks to simple SVN tools that can dump whole repo in editable text format, restoring SVN structure seems to be working well. I’m splitting the repo into pieces and rearranging them so that now creation of “trunk” folder happens in r1 instead of r1641. That shifts all rev numbers by 1, but luckily I was able to find an early pair of revs I can join into one (r25 and r26). And instead of r1640 that created the trunk I’m inserting a placeholder rev.

Old chain:
r1..r25
r26
r27..r1639
r1640 trunk created
r1641..

New chain
r1 trunk created
r2..r26 known previously as r1..r25, old r26 adjoined with old r25
r27..r1639 as they were
r1640 placeholder rev inserted
r1641.. as they were

That gives us perfectly valid repository meeting required standards. Spent around 1 day on that.

As part of conversion we need a list of all the authors who commit to KMR repository with their emails. We have 15 different authors registered. Finding their emails took another 2,5 hours.

Upcoming perils are due to conversion process. Git cannot work with latest SVN repositories directly. Giving error

Expected FS format ‘2’; found format ‘6’

That is solved by starting local svn server pointing to the SVN repository, so now Git has to work not with a file:///C:/PathToRepo/ path, but a svn://localhost/. 2 days of research trial and error.

Now git cloning is rolling in background, happily processing 1 revision in 2-5 seconds. Which gives us 6740 * 3,5sec ~= 6,5 hours of machine time.

Hope that will work out now 🙂

We’ve been asked a lot recently, why is it that KaM Remake does not inherit all of the TPR (The Peasants Rebellion) features. Surely it is a remake and it needs to do that, right?

The explanation is pretty simple – unlike common belief, that a remake should be based on latest game from the series, we decided to pick TSK (The Shattered Kingdom) as our golden standard of KaM gameplay and reinvigorate it by adding only those features that are fit for TSK, looking at TPR as only one of the alternatives.

Here’s a small diagram showing how exactly features distributed themselves between TSK, TPR and KaM Remake:

Text libraries appeared in KaM Remake missions and campaigns quite some time ago and proved to be real handy. Now they are undergoing some changes and improvements.

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