Friday, October 3, 2014

The Elder Scrolls Travels

    Spurred on by my last post, I decided to attempt and create a launcher for the TEST games. Of course it can't include Shadowkey, but best just ignore that for now.
    I managed to find all three of the available TEST games, Stormhold, Dawnstar, and Oblivion. The first version of Stormhold I found was a Russian translation, but I opted to find an English version. I then found an emulator to run them, KEmulator.
    I decided to try and put them all into a launcher, like the ill-fated attempt with the Ultima games. This time, however, I wanted for the person to put the game folder wherever they wanted on their computer and still be able to run the games. Because the games open up through a shortcut, I needed to make the shortcuts relative. This was not that easy. Queue an hour or so digging around on Google until I found a way of doing it (You can thank this website for the idea). With that done I needed to create the actual launcher.
    I decided to use Virtual Basic again, as I had some knowledge on how to use it. Setting up the layout was easy enough; I just placed a few buttons and put the title. The hardest part was, again, making the path for the launcher to start the games relative. I dug around until I found the first instructional video on making a game launcher for virtual basic that I watched, as I remembered the video showed how to make the launcher relative. I found it and did what it said, and it didn't work at first. It turned out to be my fault, I had forgotten a slash. I tried it again and it still didn't work. And, again, it was my fault; I forgot to build the version (really stupid).
   In the end, I actually got it working. The games aren't that good, but it's cool none the less.
Elder Scrolls Travels Oblivion running in KEmulator
The launcher interface

Here is the download: The Elder Scrolls Travels Launcher
    Thanks for reading and I hope you come back next time!

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