Hey All.
So, I'm a bit of a sucker for management simulations of pretty much any variety. Sports, business, mercenary groups, space civilizations... if they need someone to balance the books and make the big decisions, I'll play it.
Over the years, Trevor Chan and Enlight Software have put out a pile of games in this category, from Capitalism 2 to Restaurant Empire 2. One of the lesser known of the bunch is Virtual U, where you are put in charge of running an American university, trying to keep the alumni happy and generous while not having faculty made up entirely of old white men, etc, etc. Virtual U was first released around the turn of the millennium. Around 2002, they released the source code with a pretty permissive (but not quite boiler plate) license. I think I downloaded the source back then, and determined that the original authors were using a C++ compiler far more permissive than my own, was intimidated by the resulting 1,000 build errors, and moved on. Recently, I began remembering Virtual U fondly again, and decided to go download the source and see if my decade of programming experience since it first went public would have changed my perspective. Sadly, the original website that hosted it was gone. Undeterred, I hopped over to the wayback machine and got my hands on both the main game installer and the source code.
I've spent the past week or so getting the source code building in VS2013, then removing a bunch of old switches in the code that were meant to allow it to continue to build the 1.0 and the 2.0 versions. So, now it feels like it's time to at least get the source code back online in an easily accessible form, and maybe do some more care and feeding.
To that end, I've created a space for it over at google code:
https://code.google.com/p/virtualu/I've also stuck the most recently patched game installer up in my google drive, since I wasn't sure how easy that was to find online anymore:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1R6V1WHPZRkSnZsVko0NDNnN0ERight now, it's still a bit of a mess on modern rigs. I find I have to force the exe to shut down, because I just get a black screen when I click its quit button. I'm pretty sure it has crashing issues. So, some of my near-term goals are doing some general code cleanup (it's pretty obvious whoever wrote it came from a quick-and-dirty C background... looking at the code makes me grateful for more modern languages and branching strategies than they had in place when this was written), and hopefully get the program running in windowed mode rather than its current hardcoded 4:3 low-resolution fullscreen mode.
I welcome anyone's advice, big reports, assistance, etc. While I trust my coding skills, I'm an absolute DirectX neophyte (I'm partially using this as a way to see some real-world DirectX 2D examples), and I know from experience with myself that I'm far, far more likely to maintain momentum when I'm working with others compared to when I'm flying solo. If nothing else, maybe someone out there has never seen Virtual U before, and finds it to be in their wheelhouse.
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Topic: Trevor Chan's Virtual U (Read 2726 times)