Knights and Merchants.net Forum

You're doing a remake?

Yes some guys here are working on a remake.

And patching the game then moving it to a jump drive works just fine, as expected.

Cool!

I know that sort of thing is pretty hard, but if they use something like DARK Pro they'll be able to turn out quite a decent sprite-based game. I'd offer to help but I stopped learning C++ to focus on my college work...

Did you self-teach yourself C++?
I'd like to learn how, for the sole (or at least mostly) purpose of helping with the remake.

remake is delphi code?

Yeah, I was thinking that, but my point was that I would like to learn how to code things...

Self teaching I didn't get far. The problem with learning C++ is that the guides were all written in incredibly, unnecessarally, esoteric and inaccessible language. Even the supposedly 'easy' ones! They'll spend four-five pages explaining the absolute simplest things in a completely mindless and complicated way. You can, quite literally, spend five or six hours going through a couple of pages - and then be able to sum up everything they were trying to say in a single sentence!

The problem with beginners code books is they tend to be written by professionals who just don't understand that they need to explain things in a way beginners can understand and end up talking in a language that only makes sense to people who have been coding professionally for years.

And then they scoff when you say you want a book that SHOWS you how to code instead of one that TELLS you how to code in a very dry and inaccessible way with very few demonstrations or projects.

Which is why I say DarkBasicPro it's a bit of an old program - but they don't talk down to you and you can integrate the program with C++ using Dark GDK when you are ready.

C and C++ may be a bit hard to learn at first. You could try and take the same path as I did though, start with C# (newest, lots of info available online) and when you feel like you learned it well enough, move back and learn C/C++ (learn some basic C, especially about pointers and such, as C# doesn't really need/use them and in C++ you may not be able to get around using them. Try and get a basic feel of C, then tackle the, now not that hard anymore, in between C++)

I would try something like that but I'm worried about getting confused between similar types of code.

Can't you guys look up some of the developers and ask for the source code? It is so cool when your old school buggy game gets updated by a team of nifty modders. If you guys know Warzone 2100.. It was a great game with alot of bugs: severly bad network code, crashes, hefty imbalances, hefty AI problems (exactly like K&M) and now modders are completely reviping it with bug fixes, high resolution support and updated network code. So ye..

Here is the facebook of main programmer Peter Ohlmann of K&M..
Search for query Peter Ohlmann on Google, click the first hit and voila..
Who has the courage..

Already been done. In fact I started a petition and got 368 signatures. I sent these in an email to Peter Ohlmann. He replied and said that he did not own the intelectual property rights, but the publisher ZuXXeZ did. He would be happy to release the source code if they agreed. I emailed ZuXXeZ about it and after a few emails they politely but firmly declined.
It's disappointing but I can understand why. KaM is still on sale in many online games stores and I think that ZuXXeZ gets a cut of the profit from these sales. Releasing the source code effectively makes the game available for free. Yes there are ways to change that but basically they don't want to. You can read about it on some old thread in this forum about the petition.

I suggest you check out the remake projects going on. Fans (including myself) are rewriting the KaM engine in modern languages. There are currently two projects, KaM The Kingdom Expanded and the KaM Remake project. (I am part of the latter) There are some playable demos available.
In many ways this is better than the KaM source code because it was written in 1998 whereas these projects are in modern languages designed for modern computers.
The source code would still be useful to check exactly how the game files are encoded and thing like that, but we can do it without them. We understand most of the game data fine.

As far as the intelectual property goes for these remakes, I can only speak of the project I am involved in, the KaM Remake. From ZuXXeZ point of view, we are just providing a new EXE file that uses the original game resources. If you do not own a copy of KaM, you cannot play our Remake because we do not distribute the sprites, sound effects, fonts, etc.
In a sense the KaM Remake is a "mod".
This means that if anything, the KaM Remake will encourage people to buy KaM because they will need to do so to play it. A new updated version of the game will create more sales than an old dodgy one.
We will ask people to buy KaM from a site like gog.com before they can play our Remake.

thanks for the reply. I find it hard to believe ZuXXeZ is still succeeding in selling KaM but its their stuff ofc.

Very nice to hear of these remake projects (Kingdom Expanded seems dead though). I will keep an eye out for this.

I think its better if we (fans of KaM) get rich, start a company.. pay ZuXXeZ some unreasonable of cash for the product and hire elite programmers and new art designers+sound engineers and make KaM 2 happen . Or maybe learning c++ would be better

Hello there,

I've got a question on the translation issue. The game copy on my hand is in Dutch, I patched with 1.58 SR2 and English translation pack successfully.

However, after I installed the 1.60 SR3, I can't install the English translation pack, the text of my TPR is in Dutch but the speech is in English now. Please kindly tell me what should I do to solve this problem?

Is it me or aren't the downloads working anymore?

Both mirrors seem to be working for me. I double checked that the "Mirror 2" downloads on my site are still working, try them if the main one is offline.