Reanimating the dead

Todays topic involves a lot of nostalgy. One day surfing the web I stumbled upon Danc's blog. Danc was a part of the developement team responsible of creating an RTS game. 12 years ago, that is. For some reason or another the game was never finished and now Danc has published the graphics on his site for download.

The game was called Hard Vacuum (a term somehow realted to space phenomens?) and it boosted some innovative features, that have only now been gradually implemented in modern RTS games. Read the whole story here to get the idea.



Anyways, as you might guess, I got instantly intrigued by the idea of actually developing this game. Now, the original design was made some 12 years ago, as are the graphics, so it's made for 320x200 resolution :p

Not being downhearted by that, I've allready made a working map editor using the given tiles. The map is basicly just a two-dimensional array of integers and the integers tell which tile to draw by having the tiles in a row inside one image file and multiplying the given integer by the width of one tile. So the tile # 3 is in (40, 0, 20, 20) (x, y, w, h).

The map is then saved in a file and can then be read into the game engine itself. Idiotic or brilliant? At least easy.