It’s been a couple of weeks since the last release, and that’s because of all that back-end nonsense I’ve been fiddling with. The most important new addition is a menu-based front-end, so that you can change resolutions, switch antialiasing on and off and choose fullscreen or windowed modes without having to download extra stuff.

You can also pick up the lone MIA who’s chilling out on the beach just north of the start location and return him to the ship you start at. Don’t know if he’ll thank you for it, though - he looks like he prefers the beach to me…

Download Release 7 (9.0MB zip)

This week I’ve been fiddling around with artificial intelligence. Actually, that’s a lie - I’ve really been fiddling around with an artificial intelligence interface. I’ll be using Lua for the actual AI, which means that the enemies (and friendlies) will all have their brains spread wide for you to meddle with, if you feel like.

I’ve also been playing around with reducing things graphically to speed up the game. For instance, I’ve changed the way the water is drawn, but it doesn’t look significantly different from the other screenshots. The main thing there was reducing the texture resolution; the altitude of the camera means that we just don’t need high-res water. I’ve also reduced the number of polygons in nearly all the models, which has given me quite a boost. I’m almost up to sixty frames per second now, but then I’m using an Athlon 64×2 6000+ and a NVidia 8800GT. Hopefully it’ll make things smoother on everybody else’s computers too.

I’ve been thinking about the next release, too. I’ve written an online update/launcher program (originally for Target; 2008!) which I’ll be attaching to this project sooner or later, but I’m not sure the next release is the right time for it. I’ve also been thinking about how useful a little bit of ‘phoning home’ would be. It’s difficult to get real details on hardware and performance from forums and blogs (especially when you’re not sure how many - if any - people are reading in the first place), and so I don’t really know if my optimisation efforts are having much effect. The only other system I can test on is an older one with a 6600GT graphics card, but that’s still a little higher-end than I’m hoping to reach. (My third system is an Asus EeePC. The only way this game’ll ever work on that is if I render out all the graphics and turn it back into a sprite game.) Unfortunately a lot of people are not big fans of such things. Ho hum.

I’ve added in a ship for the player to launch from, and also a Harrier. The first one’s quite large, so you’ll have to click it to view it:

The folks on the Retro Remakes forum got it first (and did some vital testing - cheers OogyBoogy and Ian!), but here it is just a day later. Now you too can fly a little 3D gunship around and drag some entirely unanimated soldiers along on a rope!

You can download the first zip here. If you don’t have a high-end graphics card and want to switch off the shadows and antialiasing, get this zip too and use the executable in there. (Yes, this means the next version will need an actual options screen!)

Disappointingly, I’ve not yet got out another playable release yet. The main reason for this is that in switching to 3D I’ve made a whole new set of problems for myself.

If we take a look at the last demo, we had four helicopters working in a split-screen environment, able to pick up friendly soldiers with rope ladders and drop them off at a friendly landing point. As soon as we switch to 3D, there’s the immediate problem of what we make the environment out of. Then there’s finding legally usable 3D models to replace the sprites we currently have, and then animating those models. And finally there’s the issue of those oh-so-simple-in-2D rope ladders. There aren’t many 3D models of ladders around, to be honest, so I finally decided to just use a rope. A length of 3D rope with a small physics simulation attached.

So that’s the current version. I’m currently working on making that rope a little nicer to look at, and also having it pulled up into the helicopter when not in use. And then we’ll finally be at exactly the same point we were last week. It’s an awful lot of effort just to tread water, isn’t it?

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.

Remaking somebody else’s game is a strange exercise. Some people like to recreate the original game precisely. (Usually a waste of time if you ask me.) Some people like to recreate the gameplay precisely, but update the presentation - better sound and graphics, that sort of thing. That’s what I did with Target; 2006. But The Tenth Crusade isn’t going to do either of those things. Instead, I’m going to take the original graphics and sound (albeit from different versions) and use them to create something similar but different.

I’ve got two sets of design plans for the game. The first from when I started coding, back in 2006, and the second from last Thursday. In both of them, the first thing that got binned was the mission structure.

Back in the day (as they say) Desert Strike’s missions were a little unusual. Each of four levels was split up into a series of objectives such as destroy a bunch of radar dishes or kidnap an enemy general. Theoretically they could be completed in any order, but in practice it wasn’t so easy. In any case, there were only really two types of mission - pick someone up, or blow something up. And they all had to be completed for the mission to be declared a success.

I’m a fan of non-linear games. For me, a story’s a lot less interesting when you don’t really have anything to do with it. Deus Ex, for example, is one of the best games ever thanks to its non-linear elements, while the sequel is not, because nothing you do makes any difference at all. Deus Ex 2 gave you lots of choices, but no consequences.

War, like life, is a non-linear chain of events. In World War 2, the Allied commanders were far from certain that the Normandy landings would be a success. General Eisenhower, the man in charge, had a second speech prepared in case it all fell through and the Nazis won. And, no doubt, he had another set of plans for kicking Nazi arse from a different direction.

Playing Call of Duty 4 recently has been an exercise in frustration. While there are some very clever elements, and the game is generally enjoyable, it is nonetheless disheartening to find the entire game comes to a halt when, say, a particular NPC tank is destroyed. That wouldn’t happen in real life, would it? In real life, if you’re not dead you just pick yourself up, dust yourself off and get back into it. Or if I accidentally wipe out a bunch of friendlies in a bombing raid - sure, there’ll be consequences later. But I shouldn’t get instantly ejected by my copilot.

Which brings us, in a roundabout way, to my plans for the missions in The Tenth Crusade. Non-linearity is, for me, very important. It should be near impossible to have the game end other than by the player dying. And even then, I don’t think the player should permanently die. I’m not sure about the idea of lives, but I’m rather taken with the idea that the player respawns with another helicopter and can go pick up the pilot of the helicopter he just crashed. I’m also considering ways in which a Cannon Fodder style ‘Boot Hill’ could be worked into the game.

Anyway. Enough meandering for the moment; I’ve got a new version of the game for you. Player One gets the cursor keys and the right CTRL key as fire, Player Two gets WSAD and the left CTRL key, and players three and four get joysticks (if you have any). F2-F4 select the number of players, if you want to split the screen.

Release 5 (3MB zip file)

So here we are, another development blog. Target; 2008 hasn’t grabbed much attention yet, but a random upload of some stuff more than a year old to the Retro Remakes forum got a whole lot of interest. And despite my best efforts at ignoring the game and getting on with my other projects, I’ve been adding features to that small demo anyway.

Which brings us here. There’s a lot to do, some of which I’ll talk about in the coming days, weeks and months it’s going to take to get this somewhere respectable. Some of it I’ve already talked about on the RR forum here. But for the moment, here’s a screenshot from the current build: