Devlog #041 - Reconstructing Quickstart

Quickstart is one of the friendliest features in Darklands.

Press Q on the main menu and the game gives you a ready-made party. A short series of screens introduces the characters and the starting situation, then you arrive in a German city and begin playing.

From the player’s side, it feels almost effortless.

Inside the game, Quickstart has quite a lot to arrange. It has to load four characters, prepare the temporary party data, choose a starting city, set the calendar and time, build several illustrated cards, fill the permanent party panel, and finally turn the last card into an interactive choice.

The reconstructed engine can now follow that complete route.

Pressing Q Means Pressing Q

The previous devlog ended on the real Darklands start screen. The new work continues from its original Q and q keyboard branch.

That point matters because Quickstart is not a command invented by the modern host. The host reports a key. The reconstructed start-screen controller handles it, just as the DOS game did, and transfers control into the original Quickstart setup path.

This path was considerably larger than the label on the menu suggested. What looked like a simple shortcut turned out to be a chain of file handling, character setup, random selection, resource loading, text presentation, and state publication.

We rebuilt it in that order rather than starting from the city and working backward.

Loading the Default Party

Quickstart begins with SAVES\DEFAULT, the original party supplied with the game.

The reconstructed path reads the four active character records and performs the same setup needed to make them the current party. It also reproduces the temporary CHARACTR.TMP exchange used by the DOS code.

There is one modern safety improvement at the boundary. The temporary exchange happens in memory, so running the development host does not alter the user’s original Darklands installation. The bytes and decisions seen by the reconstructed game remain the same, but the host does not need to leave a temporary DOS file behind.

This is a good example of where fidelity belongs. The game should receive the same data and follow the same logic. The operating system does not have to pretend it is 1992 when that would only add risk.

Letting Darklands Choose the City

Once the party exists, the game chooses where and when the adventure begins.

The new route uses the original random-number behavior and the original city records. It does not always send the party to one convenient test location. Any of the 90 cities available to Quickstart can be selected, along with the corresponding starting time values.

For tests and visual comparisons, we can provide a fixed seed and obtain the same city every time. During an ordinary run, the choice belongs to Darklands.

Keeping that distinction helped expose assumptions that a single fixed location had hidden. City names vary in length. Local records carry different flags. Later screens may publish different rows depending on the selected place. A route that works only for the city used in one screenshot is not yet a Quickstart route.

Four Introductions and One Decision

The visible part of Quickstart comes from $PARTY02.MSG and a series of matching pictures.

Cards 2 through 5 are informational. Each one presents part of the setup and waits for an acknowledgement. The player can press Enter or Space, or click anywhere, to continue.

These cards do not contain selectable rows. Treating their text as a modern dialog with a hidden “Continue” button would produce a similar interaction, but it would not reproduce the original controller. Darklands has a specific acknowledgement phase, and the reconstructed route preserves it.

Card 6 is different. It publishes the first genuine choices.

The resource contains five encoded rows, but the original owner exposes only four of them in this situation. Those four rows use the original positions and heights. The fifth remains hidden. Pointer movement now changes the highlighted row, and clicking or pressing the appropriate key selects it.

This is where Quickstart stops being a sequence of illustrated pages and becomes gameplay.

Rebuilding the Whole Screen

Displaying the correct paragraph was only part of the visual work.

Each Quickstart card combines an indexed picture with decorative borders, illuminated initials, the original bitmap font, and the permanent party panel. That panel includes four shields, four names, statistics, values, and the small graphic layers shared by many Darklands screens.

The new compositor builds those pieces from the original resources. It does not use a screenshot as the background and place live text over it.

We compared the result against a captured frame from the DOS game at the original 320 by 200 resolution. After correcting the old VGA color conversion and the position of the party statistics, the images matched everywhere except two pixels at the far right edge. Those pixels belonged to the DOSBox mouse cursor, not the game screen.

That comparison did more than certify one attractive frame. It corrected reusable color and layout rules that later MSG screens now share.

The First Choice Produces a Real State

Selecting the first visible row on card 6 now follows its original handler. The handler copies the required text, returns its raw result, passes through the owner’s local dispatch, and publishes the next game state.

That state is 001Dh, the original route into the first urban presentation.

The clean Quickstart session does not know that because someone attached a friendly destination called “go to the city” to the row. It knows because the reconstructed owner returned the same state value that the original game returned.

The difference is important. Text can suggest what a choice probably does, but only the executable tells us what it actually does. The other card-6 choices remain closed until their handlers are reconstructed with the same level of evidence.

Quickstart Is Now a Route

The complete clean path now looks like this:

main menu
-> Q or q
-> load the default party
-> choose the original starting city and time
-> present PARTY02 cards 2, 3, 4, and 5
-> present the interactive card 6
-> select the certified first row
-> return state 001Dh

This route is available in both the deterministic console host and the SDL frontend. The console version makes exact behavior easy to test. The graphical version lets us experience the same sequence through pictures, sound, pointer movement, and keyboard input.

Most importantly, it begins at the real start screen and ends at a real game state. There is no fixture pretending the party already exists and no host button teleporting directly into a city.

Quickstart now earns its name. It is the shortest honest path from launching Darklands to making a decision in its world.

The next devlog follows that decision into the city.