Ripping sprites is a tiresome old business. There you are, hour after hour, carefully grabbing screen shots and going through video files frame by frame, adjusting the positions and sizes of all those bitmaps… And then, of course, you find you’re limited by what was drawn in the original game. Want to have, say, a bunch of dolphins rescuing people when they fall out of your helicopter and into the sea?* Is it not in the original game? Well you’re screwed then, aren’t you?

Luckily for me, there’s a fair number of freely-usable 3D models out there. So with a little tweaking and adjusting, we can have something more akin to Sovietand Nuclear Strike.(Only better.)

Here’s a couple of work-in-progress screenshots. The first one is just after getting the polygon landscape routine working. The second has a larger landscape, with a weak fill-in for the sea, and realtime shadows from the helicopter. You can’t see it (and VirtualDub keeps crashing when I try to make a video) but both the main and tail rotors are animated. (Also, that tail rotor is more accurate to the real Apache than the sprite-based one, which had a Comanche tail for some reason. Another benefit of using a 3D model.)

*Not that I want to. Just sayin’ is all.