The primary XCMD challenge was in rewriting a very old Director XCMD called "playmovie". We were able to convert all the original XCMDs to Revolution scripts successfully. The code compression was quite amazing and the resulting handlers ran faster than the original HyperCard XCMDs. Without exception, dozens of lines of C++ code translated to only a few lines of script in Revolution. Revolution's native feature set allowed easy conversions of these XCMDs, and speed is not an issue with Revolution's very fast engine. This was relatively simple for the most part the only reason XCMDs were used in the first place was because of HyperCard's limited animation capabilities and the slower speed of early CPUs. The first requirement was to rewrite the aging HyperCard XCMDs as native Revolution handlers.
While you travel you can play music on the working tape deck or dial the phone to call other characters, though if you get a wrong number you'll have to listen to the operator and you may get stuck on hold. Use the ship's warp drive to visit all the Osmo worlds. Rewriting all of that in any other language would have been prohibitive and expensive.Įven with 90% of the conversion done automatically by Revolution, the other ten percent represented a fair investment of time and resources, and provided a few challenges. This was a big consideration, since Cosmic Osmo consists of hundreds of cards contained in 22 stacks, several hundred animated movies, almost 1500 sound files, a handful of embedded "mini" games (including a very amusing spin-off of a breakout game,) and five custom XCMDs written in C++. In addition, almost 90% of the code base could be used without alteration, saving a tremendous amount of time and resources. This capability allowed all the stack structures, controls, images, custom cursors, and icons to be immediately transitioned without any effort at all any other development environment would have required rebuilding all the object structures from scratch. Not only does Revolution support virtually all HyperTalk syntax, but it can automatically import, convert, and run HyperCard stacks as well.
Since my company specializes in HyperCard conversions, Cyan contacted HyperActive Software to do the port to Windows. Cosmic Osmo won high accolades when it was released for Macintosh, and recently Cyan decided to bring the Osmo adventure to Windows users too. It is an expansive universe of discovery, charm, and whimsey spanning nine different worlds where surprises happen with every mouse click. Cosmic Osmo was, in fact, the inspiration for Myst and was one of the very earliest in the adventure game genre. Cosmic Osmo is a commercial HyperCard game created by Cyan Worlds, the makers of the Myst series.
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