This is just a quick update about the current progress to satisfy the one-post-per-week requirement but I’ll have another more elaborate post in a few days. Hopefully by then I’ll have a more featureful main loop than now.
The feature I was mostly occupied with during the last few days—and that turned out to be unexpectedly complicated (nothing major but many slight annoyances)—are walking maps. My plan to quickly implement that and move on failed spectacularly. 
The maps are stored in a slightly weird bitmap format so obscure bugs were abound. Of course, once I actually added them successfully a whole other set of subtle animation bugs was exposed (the lack of relative coordinate support being one of them 
) so that also took quite a while. However, I’m proud to say the dragon animation can now be moved around the room correctly. Yay!
Naturally, life would be too easy if this was to be the end of my troubles. I realised shortly afterwards that there were some 6-byte Pascal reals stored in the data files (and very vital ones at that, if I want to implement scaling the dragon properly). This means I had to decipher their format; a task I’ve tackled successfully… I think. I have implemented a Python prototype of the converter and it seems to work fine. This means I’ll add scaling next and then move on to making the dragon walk from location to location itself (this means pathfinding and it makes me shiver).
I think that’s it for now. Getting back to coding!
Pascal reals, eh?
Sounds interesting.
Speaking of the walk animation, for me the dragon just jumps at the position, faced always to me and walks in the air. Is that intended behavior? If not, it may be connected with the fact that under FreeBSD variables are not autoinitialized with 0 as they are on some OSes.