EE C++ Remake

Firecrackericebreak · 2024-04-14 02:58:57

Hi everyone!

Everybody Edits is written in ActionScript, a programming language used to create Flash games. As we all know, Flash has been dead for multiple years now and with Flash went official support for Everybody Edits. There have been many attempts at translating Everybody Edits to modern programming languages without much success. It seems that either the projects are released as very primitive versions of the game with little features / plans for future updates, or are incredibly ambitious and are never finished in a releasable state. For anyone still playing the game, they must play on a client based on a platform created in 1996. As someone who has put countless hours into this game and wished to see it succeed, I felt that I should take a shot at making my own remake of the game. This is no promise that I will be fully recreating the game, but I will at least be giving it a decent attempt in the near future. What appeals the most to me about having a recreation of Everybody Edits is being able to play with a smooth, 100 FPS display of the game and play in a larger resolution. So far I have spent about one week on this project and have seen decent results.

Here is the EX Crew Ice Level TAS by OrangeCrix, running one-to-one as it would in EEOffline:

Current State of the Client

Can see every tick of the game (100 FPS)
Scalable window size
Perfect functionality for gravity arrows, solid blocks, and god mode ONLY
Supports LukeM's EELVL file format
Renders all foreground, background, and decoration blocks (no shadows)
Has imported a decent portion of game data (block IDs, block textures, block packages, block tags, smileys, ...)
Can run EETAS files
Lacks functionality for the majority of action blocks, one way gates, half blocks, and ice.
No editing capability

I plan to be open about the state of progress, as I believe many people who have tried this in the past made no attempt at keeping people up to date.

Thank you to Kirby, LukeM, and OrangeCrix for guiding me with porting things over!

Please feel free to ask any questions about the EE port, I am looking forward to hearing any feedback.

Discord Server: https://discord.gg/DMzVjQ9w

Kirby, N1KF, mutantdevle, Rivelka, Edilights, ExFabian, Abiqi, Priddle, Blackmask, Gosha, Onjit, MartenM, Pqwerty, skullz17, Snowester, John, KyYay

N1KF · 2024-04-14 04:33:44

Very cool! I remember seeing it a while back and I'm glad to see you've stuck with it.

Firecrackericebreak · 2024-04-14 04:43:28

N1KF wrote:

Very cool! I remember seeing it a while back and I'm glad to see you've stuck with it.

Haha I'm assuming you are referring to https://forums.everybodyedits.com/viewt … p?id=40946. That was something I made years ago with way less experience than I have now. It is completely unrelated to this but I think it gave me a few good foundational principals for rendering the game screen. This project was started one week ago.

N1KF · 2024-04-14 05:30:21

Wait really? I guess that was somebody else who messaged me about an EE remake in C++!

Zumza · 2024-04-14 13:54:12

Firecrackericebreak wrote:

There have been many attempts at translating Everybody Edits to modern programming languages without much success. [...] For anyone still playing the game, they must play on a client based on a platform created in 1996.

Just to be sure I get this right: As rewriting EE to modern programming languages wasn't successful, your idea is to rewrite it in a language first released 11 years prior to Flash?

Gosha · 2024-04-14 15:59:43

holy **** dude nice

Onjit · 2024-04-14 16:05:58

ee is dead dies another day

N1KF, Pqwerty

Firecrackericebreak · 2024-04-14 17:01:26

Zumza wrote:

Firecrackericebreak wrote:
There have been many attempts at translating Everybody Edits to modern programming languages without much success. [...] For anyone still playing the game, they must play on a client based on a platform created in 1996.
Just to be sure I get this right: As rewriting EE to modern programming languages wasn't successful, your idea is to rewrite it in a language first released 11 years prior to Flash?

Lol by modern I mean still updated but still that's kinda funny. Realistically the three best choices for a clone are Unity, C++, and JavaScript though

ExFabian · 2024-04-14 19:38:40

I tried once to port EE Offline to the 3DS using devKitPro (which uses C/C++) but I couldn't manage to get the physics right and it got banished to my limbo of unfinished projects. This project is looking really promising, and maybe when it's done you could let me use your code to finish my port?

MartenM · 2024-04-14 21:07:53

Dadyum that looks quite amazing.

Any plans to make the open source it? I'm very curious to how everything works.

Pqwerty · 2024-04-15 00:52:13

Firecrackericebreak wrote:

This project was started one week ago.

Looking forward to seeing what you have done next week. Very cool

Firecrackericebreak · 2024-04-15 15:07:28

Hello again!

I wanted to mention what I plan on working on next, which may or may not be a very stupid idea. My original plan was to implement action blocks one-by-one until they are all complete, but I am now considering another approach. Almost all code related to physics lies in the tick() method, a method that is called 100 times every second. By implementing the action blocks into this method one-by-one, I believe it would just make it take way longer than if I just implemented all action blocks simultaneously. So that is my new plan, a plan that could get the game to a much closer to working state or completely break my existing code. I will have backups, so if anything goes very wrong I can always restore an old version of the code.

If this goes well I will try to release a public version which I expect will be very buggy and unpolished. Hopefully by doing this we can find bugs faster though.

ExFabian wrote:

I tried once to port EE Offline to the 3DS using devKitPro (which uses C/C++) but I couldn't manage to get the physics right and it got banished to my limbo of unfinished projects. This project is looking really promising, and maybe when it's done you could let me use your code to finish my port?

MartenM wrote:

Dadyum that looks quite amazing.
Any plans to make the open source it? I'm very curious to how everything works.

I have been thinking about this a lot, and at the moment I cannot decide whether or not to open source the code. If I ever did get to a point where there was online play, I think open sourcing the game would encourage hackers like it did in the original client. If I ever stop working on this and the code is not in use on some multiplayer client, I'll probably open source it. I might open source it before that happens also, but I'll need to think about it more.

Zumza · 2024-04-15 18:22:18

Regarding this community's hacking capabilities a internet facing C++ client would be quite worrying, wouldn't it?
Unlike modern programming languages, C++ has weak memory protection, which could in a worst case scenario lead to remote code execution.
Also there is the possibility of a vulnerable supply chain of client updates, which exploited could compromise users computers completely unlike the browser containerized Flash and or JS.

Non-tech talk: If this client would have a security issue similar to EE, not only your EE passwords would be stolen, but all passwords stored on your PC.

ExFabian · 2024-04-15 19:57:22

Firecrackericebreak wrote:

I have been thinking about this a lot, and at the moment I cannot decide whether or not to open source the code. If I ever did get to a point where there was online play, I think open sourcing the game would encourage hackers like it did in the original client. If I ever stop working on this and the code is not in use on some multiplayer client, I'll probably open source it. I might open source it before that happens also, but I'll need to think about it more.

Yea, you don't have to release the source code if you don't want to, especially if you plan to have online features in the future. I'm really looking forward to it!

Firecrackericebreak · 2024-04-15 19:59:31

Zumza wrote:

Regarding this community's hacking capabilities a internet facing C++ client would be quite worrying, wouldn't it?
Unlike modern programming languages, C++ has weak memory protection, which could in a worst case scenario lead to remote code execution.
Also there is the possibility of a vulnerable supply chain of client updates, which exploited could compromise users computers completely unlike the browser containerized Flash and or JS.
Non-tech talk: If this client would have a security issue similar to EE, not only your EE passwords would be stolen, but all passwords stored on your PC.

Honestly you are right about this. Thank you for bringing this up. I am definitely no expert so I appreciate any other advise anyone wants to give. It's probably best for me to stay away from online play with this client, or at least switch programming languages to something more safe for a single developer project. Still in offline mode there can be risks of loading level files, possibly leading to code execution. Gonna put developing on hold while I think about this a little bit more and then I will post some sort of update for this project.

Zumza, ExFabian

N1KF · 2024-04-16 03:16:59

C++ can be compiled to WebAssembly or asm.js, which are containerized in a web browser. I'm guessing this would be safer than running a native app.

You would still need to use standard web protocols like HTML, canvas, and WebSockets, though.

Zumza · 2024-04-16 11:48:59

N1KF wrote:

C++ can be compiled to WebAssembly or asm.js, which are containerized in a web browser. I'm guessing this would be safer than running a native app.
You would still need to use standard web protocols like HTML, canvas, and WebSockets, though.

The current problem with webasm is that it has copy overhead interacting with JS. The 100 FPS this client has natively could easily become 50 FPS because of that if not worse.

Nonetheless, it could worth a shot.

Firecrackericebreak · 2024-04-16 18:37:11

N1KF wrote:

C++ can be compiled to WebAssembly or asm.js, which are containerized in a web browser. I'm guessing this would be safer than running a native app.
You would still need to use standard web protocols like HTML, canvas, and WebSockets, though.

I looked a little into this, but it seems like SFML, the library I use to render graphics, is not really supported by these containers. SFML does have a C# version, so I think this will be the first place I will try to take the project since the language is similar enough to C++. C# also has the benefit of being the original language that LukeM wrote the EELVL reader for. If that does not pan out well, I am going to try and port the game to Unity or Javascript.

On another note, I made a discord server for this project. Anyone is free to join if they want to provide input on the project or are just interested. https://discord.gg/DMzVjQ9w

NoNK · 2024-04-20 02:23:02

neat thread

Official Everybody Edits Forums

#1 2024-04-14 02:58:57, last edited by Firecrackericebreak (2024-04-16 18:43:32)

EE C++ Remake

#2 2024-04-14 04:33:44

Re: EE C++ Remake

#3 2024-04-14 04:43:28

Re: EE C++ Remake

#4 2024-04-14 05:30:21

Re: EE C++ Remake

#5 2024-04-14 13:54:12

Re: EE C++ Remake

#6 2024-04-14 15:59:43

Re: EE C++ Remake

#7 2024-04-14 16:05:58

Re: EE C++ Remake

#8 2024-04-14 17:01:26, last edited by Firecrackericebreak (2024-04-14 17:02:38)

Re: EE C++ Remake

#9 2024-04-14 19:38:40

Re: EE C++ Remake

#10 2024-04-14 21:07:53

Re: EE C++ Remake

#11 2024-04-15 00:52:13

Re: EE C++ Remake

#12 2024-04-15 15:07:28, last edited by Firecrackericebreak (2024-04-15 15:10:28)

Re: EE C++ Remake

#13 2024-04-15 18:22:18

Re: EE C++ Remake

#14 2024-04-15 19:57:22

Re: EE C++ Remake

#15 2024-04-15 19:59:31

Re: EE C++ Remake

#16 2024-04-16 03:16:59

Re: EE C++ Remake

#17 2024-04-16 11:48:59, last edited by Zumza (2024-04-16 11:52:31)

Re: EE C++ Remake

#18 2024-04-16 18:37:11, last edited by Firecrackericebreak (2024-04-16 18:42:17)

Re: EE C++ Remake

#19 2024-04-20 02:23:02

Re: EE C++ Remake

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