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Buccaneer is a 17th-century Caribbean 3D adventure that blends high-seas combat with resource management. Opt for combat-only, engage in ship-to-ship battles or lead crew boardings. Dive into the buccaneer world through campaigns. Plunder, negotiate, survive, and live to tell the tale!
I’ve been contracted with consultation and bugfixing of the game in preparation for a digital release on Steam and GOG. I shipped appropriate DirectDraw and CD Audio wrappers and rolled out a stub DirectPlay wrapper to remove an invasive dependency on a legacy Windows component not installed in the OS by default, gracefully disabling the game’s obsolete networking functionality.
The original game was released in a terrible state and barely worked even back in 1997. Although many problems were addressed by bundling DDrawCompat, I also had to fix numerous original game issues ranging from crashes, memory leaks, and lack of error checking, to unimplemented basic features – like the SFX volume option not loading from the settings, or the game crashing when attempting to select empty save slots. Although the game’s mediocre quality is still evident, with my fixes it can be played without major blockers.
The game’s source code has been lost, so all work was done via reverse engineering.