Cave Story Engine 2 (portable)

Cave Story Engine 2 is a decompilation of Cave Story.

This branch migrates the engine from WinAPI to SDL2, and addresses numerous portability issues, allowing it to run on other platforms.

Background

In 2007, a Linux port of Cave Story was made by Peter Mackey and Simon Parzer. Details about it can be found in Peter's old blog. This port received an update in 2011, including two shiny new executables. What Peter and Simon didn't realise was that they left huge amounts of debugging information in these executables, including the names of every C++ source file, and the variables and functions they contained.

Another important element was that, when Pixel made Cave Story, he compiled it with no optimisations. This left the generated assembly code extremely verbose and easy to read. It also made the code very decompiler-friendly. Additionally, the EXE's Rich Header told us exactly what compiler was used: Visual C++ .NET 2003.

The last thing of note was that some of Cave Story's source code actually saw a release: the game's Organya sound engine was released on GitHub in early 2018. This provided an insight into Pixel's coding style, and made decompiling Organya much easier.

Together, these findings are a goldmine of information on the game's inner-workings and source code, making a decompilation feasible.

Dependencies

SDL2
Freetype
FLTK
GLEW (if the OpenGL rendering backend is selected)

Building

Makefile

Note: this requires pkg-config

Run 'make' in this folder, preferably with some of the following settings:

Name	Function
`RELEASE=1`	Compile a release build (optimised, stripped, etc.)
`STATIC=1`	Produce a statically-linked executable (so you don't need to bundle DLL files)
`JAPANESE=1`	Enable the Japanese-language build (instead of the unofficial Aeon Genesis English translation)
`FIX_BUGS=1`	Fix various bugs in the game
`WINDOWS=1`	Build for Windows
`DEBUG_SAVE=1`	Re-enable the ability to drag-and-drop save files onto the window
`RENDERER=OpenGL3`	Use the hardware-accelerated OpenGL 3.2 renderer
`RENDERER=Texture`	Use the hardware-accelerated SDL2 Texture API renderer (default)
`RENDERER=Surface`	Use the software-rendered SDL2 Surface API renderer
`RENDERER=Software`	Use a hand-written software renderer

Licensing

Being a decompilation, the majority of the code in this project belongs to Daisuke "Pixel" Amaya - not us. We've yet to agree on a license for our own code.

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