@mcc I wasn’t really familiar with Symantec back in the 90s, but something about that name made my brain itch. Looked it up, and Avara was originally written for Symantec’s THINK C compiler! The first thing @vertigo had to do was convert it all to C++. We’ve also developed new asset formats (and conversion utilities from the old formats) so unfortunately GreatWorks may no longer be directly compatible. Can it output plain text files? 😆
@silverfox @vertigo oh!
What I meant was, I think the original Avara used PICT draw format? Which if I remember right both ClarisWorks and GreatWorks could open. I definitely opened Avara level files in one of those two.
I'm really curious to try the Avara revival!
@mcc @vertigo it absolutely did! The game read the PICT/QuickDraw opcodes to assign colors, positions, and/or dimensions to objects. Additional properties (including position/size for the third dimension) were specified via text blocks within the PICT data. It’s almost like the PICT was machine code for some level-building VM. Pretty brilliant! These days we use a much more boring XML-based format, but…QuickDraw isn’t exactly around anymore.