What Modesty Did Next

[Ant Attack 3D] Breakthrough

2005-01-15T23:25:00.000Z

As you can see...

...the guys and gals at Blitz3D have shown me the way. I can now code on the TabletPC which will give me the time I need to move it forwards.

Beats reading a book on the train, the others using their laptops will be putting in last minute changes to Power Point. I'll be figuring out how to get more ants to attack you :)

Well gosh this is painful.

2005-01-15T15:30:00.000Z

Now you see why, you should always do stuff for yourself and not other people. And never, ever, put dates and time to things.

Because I haven't had a chance to work on Ant Attack as much as I have wanted to, I've let myself become guilty for not doing it. And then fear coming to the blog because it'll remind me how I've not done stuff I said I would do.

Anyway, I've gotten over that now, even if it's just to say, "not done anything this week" :)

On a slightly different side, I'm starting a job in Febuary, which involves sitting on a train for 40mins each way. Great I thought, that'll be an hour I get to myself to code each day. Well yes and no, yes in that I can code. No in that I can't test it. Blitz3D (or normal Blitz) for that matter don't seem to want to work on a Tablet PC, even "Hello World".

The second you try to run something it just hangs around. I think this is because a Tablet PC's display can be in two modes, landscape and portrait, so when it reports it's screen resolution it may be tagging an extra bit of info on the end that throws Blitz, i.e. "1024*768, 32bit, landscape", where the last orientation part confused it.

Ah well, I'll see if I can get an update that fixes it.

[Ant Attack] Hello RetroGamer

2004-12-11T17:11:00.000Z

Woo, just seen this months bumper issue of Retro Gamer and Ant Attack is in it.

Sorry to say though that's it's not quite finished yet! However, I'm just going to wrap up a couple of loose ends and upload my latest build for everyone to play with. That should be going up on Tuesday Thursday (Had a lousy couple of days involving the dentist and pain killers) so check back then.

Also hi Jean-Yves who checks out this blog now and then. He's also got a write up in Retro Gamer about Midnight/MU, this project is looking really neat and interesting. I'm going to be spending a whole bunch of time trying it out.

. o O ( Wish I still had Summer Holidays!)

[Ant Attack] Progress and Screen Shots

2004-11-28T14:46:00.000Z

Phew,

Ok, I've gotten round to doing what I should have done ages ago, sorting out some of the deep internal code. There's a point at which things can suffer massive slowdown and I've been trying to pick apart where that happens. I've not fixed those code, as really there's nothing to fix, it just slows down. But I have added code that tries to detect when it's slowing down, so it can just ignore controlling the Ants until the speed picks up again. These does mean they wonder off for a short while but does solve the issue.

Here's a new splash screen...

800x600 58kb gif

I've also recoded the menu system, mainly so I can expand it and use it in other project (ssshhh, secret!). At the same time I've been having a think about the interface while playing, here's a first person perspective shot...

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I was quite pleased when I first moved to the "wide-screen" look, with the black strips at the top and bottom. Then without thinking about it I went and put things in that space like the score and so on. Now those nice spaces are all filled up again. I think I'm going to move the scores and such like into the game play area, thus freeing up the black borders again. I really like the though of having un-used screen space.

Games went through this point where they got quite complex. 'cause of course initially there's so little memory to write a game that by it's nature the game has to be fairly simple. As computers got bigger and better you could have more in a game and so there was more information to display, screens got cluttered. In the last few years people have been trying to remove the clutter, giving feedback about health etc. in different ways, using mini icons and so on.

Myself, I have nothing against showing numbers, it's old skool and yet I still don't want to fill the screen with clutter. So I'm going to move the feedback into the game area. I've been keeping the score/time/health layout the same as the original game, now though that's going to change. I'll post the screen once I've done, and explain why I've done what I've done.

Couple more isometric shots, one standard the other zoomed out...

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800x600 64kb gif

You may notice I'm still using the old ant and player graphics, I've had a little bit of time to mess round with these, but I'm going to hold that back until another post.

[Jottings] Engadget Barcode Password Hack

2004-11-18T09:39:00.000Z

So here I am trying to catch up on all the great Engadget Podcasts. They're now all downloaded onto my Tablet PC, I've got the head phones on and listening to each in turn.

I'm on #3 now and this just cropped up. I needed to make a note of it so I don't forget. File under "Things to look into". At 14mins in, there's talk about "scanning" bar codes with mobile phone cams and then it checks the price with Amazon or whatever. Nothing new there. But an interesting idea about storing passwords. You create a impossable to remember password (for something that's important but you're not going to need often, like "84hdkn349df7286kdjh764sk439wpreg", convert that to a bar code. Print out the bar code, stick it on a card and keep it in your purse or where-ever. When you need the password just "scan" the barcode and you have the password.

Of course you don't tell anyone what the bar codes are for though. And I'm pretty sure you could hack the barcode reading software to just rot13 the results and then shift it all 2 ascii values up or whatever anyway, just to be sure your bar code results aren't off the shelf.

Anyway something to play with later.

I'm back

2004-11-08T14:49:00.000Z

Right that's it, everything is out of the way and sorted. So Ant Attack is back on track along witha couple of other things I've Just started working on.

New Screen Shots in a couple of days!

Still Alive...

2004-10-10T22:53:00.000Z

...but everything, as you may have noticed, has/had gone on hold for a short while.

Normal service will resume in November :)

Mod.

PS. Thanks for your emails.

[General] Guardian Games Blog

2004-08-15T17:01:00.000Z

Just jotting! Finially came across the Guardian Games Blog, dunno how that slipped past me for so long.

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/games/

Normally I turn to Bluesnews for all gaming news, it's a great aggregator and I normally click on all the Tech Info links to follow up the tech stories and find out the latest Game Release info, but it tends to not push an opinion on things, which is an editorial decision I believe.

Recently I've been reading http://www.joystiq.com/ because it's small, light, fluffy and you can leave comments. That last bit is quite important to me as it increases the usefulness of a site ten fold, just because other people can expand on the information and add links and sometimes put the other side of an argument.

I read http://www.gizmodo.com/ and http://www.engadget.com/ both cover gadgets, but http://www.engadget.com/ takes the edge because of the comments.

On the other hand, I avoid message boards and full blow communities because, frankly they just suck time away from you hard and fast. So many people say so much stuff, most of which I want to comment on that I could happily be there all day and not get anything else done, and boy do I have a lot of everything else to get done!

Anyway, back to that Guardian Blog, not really found anything to comment on yet but I'm sure I'll be adding my thoughts sooner or later.

[General] Make mental note

2004-08-10T20:12:00.000Z

Post, *before* going away on Holiday :)

Back now, new graphics, new ammo, new models all coming pretty soon.

Everything is looking sweet and A-ok.

Mod

[General] Moving servers

2004-07-16T05:58:00.000Z

Gah, Moving the image and file server from one side of a road to another.

Thus, no images for a while!

[Ant Attack] Where everything is at

2004-07-13T19:06:00.000Z

Well, been a while since the last update. Two reasons for this, one I've been busy. Two, it keeps the link to the download post at the top of the Blog :) I'll hack the template about a little to add a permanent link somewhere over on the right soon.

Anyway, I've spent the last few days taking a much needed break from coding and instead I've been knocking together interface graphics. They're not all in there yet, there's still the loading and building progress bars, better health etc. interface and credits screens, overall though it's looking much more like a game!

Here's a couple of screenies...

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800x600 58kb gif

Once those graphics are done I'm going to add the grenades in and then work on the ant and player models, that'll take me a couple of weeks just to get up to speed with Max!

Phew, hard work!

[Ant Attack] Commenting on Comments

2004-07-13T18:43:00.000Z

Woo! I've had comments. I wasn't sure if I should reply to them in the comments section or mention something here, so I'll go with here.

*

First off I was really please to get a comment from Jean-Yves, the guy behind Multi-User Lords of Midnight a game I loved when it first came out. Jean-Yves is doing great things with it. I bought a copy of RetroGamer 5 as there's a whole big thing about Ant Attack in there (oh if only I'd finished this a couple of months ago!) Lords of Midnight was written up too, I initially scanned the article planning on going back to read it later, but the phrase "Multi-Player" jumped out at me and I though "That's a really cool idea!". A couple of days later Jean-Yves is commenting in my Blog, how very cool. Now if only I has some free time!

*

Iain of the fully paid up game forum Slate State mentioned a little about the game running too fast and needing some Frame Limiting. Just when I though I did have Frame Limiting. This means either one of two things, my Frame Limiting code isn't working, which is quite probable, or, Iain is getting to old and can't handle the speedy gameplay anymore ;) as 80fps is the speed I'm shooting for!

*

Seems like I'm about to induce an epileptic fit in Jo with the screen flashing red when you get bitten! Sorry to say the flashing isn't going away any time soon. Although due to tuning two things were going on, the "Bite Delay" for each ant was set to only 200 milliseconds, so they cam rather thick and fast. And the ants didn't stop for a short pause after biting you, which they should have done. I've re-tweeked these things now so the bites don't come quite so thick and fast.

Why flash the screen red? Well in the original it'd pause a little while and say "Bitten!" at the bottom of the screen. Now-a-days(tm) I wanted to keep the action moving along without the pause so I needed some other way to signal the bite. The red flash comes from the Alfred Hitchcock film "Spellbound" where a couple of the frames of the otherwise black and white film tinted red, by hand I assume. Which, I imagine would have taken some people by surprise, just because you can only film in black and white doesn't mean the print can't have colour on it. As I've been aiming to keep AA black and white to I though the first splash of red would be kinda dramatic!

*

Right, enough rattling on the for moment, back to coding.

[Ant Attack] New Alpha Download

2004-07-05T05:16:00.000Z

A bit late in the day but I've got a new version uploaded!

Download here.

If you've been messing around with maps then just extract the ant-attack.exe and the media folder.

What's New?

Well I've worked on the game framework a fair bit. So it's holding together much more like a game. Everything is pretty much a placeholder at the moment but nearly everything that needs to be in is in.

Plus, there's now more of a point to the whole thing. If you're playing the Antescher map then you can attempt to rescue the 10 girls. It's a bit tricky at the moment as you still don't have ammo, even though the gameplay is really pulling together.

There's not really much more game to add, mostly once the ammo is in, it'll be tuning and adding the final graphics and sound. All in all I'm quite pleased with how it's coming along.

[Repton] Competition Remake

2004-07-04T11:47:00.000Z

Well thought I'd better start Blogging the Repton remake.

Complete so far 0.00%

More news v.soon, Ant Attack update later today.

[Ant Attack] Alpha Download

2004-06-23T15:16:00.000Z

Ok, I'm going to risk it and offer a download...

http://www.prettyrandom.com/AntAttack/ant-attack.zip

Please read the readme.txt file as it has all the controls in. Feedback welcome, let me know if it worked!

Bugs so far
When you duck to go under something, you don't stand up straight away on the other side.

[Ant Attack] Screen Shot de Jour

2004-06-23T12:27:00.000Z

I've gone wide screen, see...

1024x768 50kb gif

Two Three reasons why...

It looks cool.
More-over it looks more like those cool 1970s SciFi Films I keep going on about.
It's reduced the render area by 30% thus speeding things up slighty.

And that's good enough for me.

[Ant Attack] Todo List (hope I don't get sued)

2004-06-23T12:18:00.000Z

Right, I'm going to release an Alpha Hardware test soon but I have a couple of loose ends to tidy up first. Thought I'd better jot down the outstanding things before I forget them. Not all of these are to be done before I upload a download thought!

Fix map reading bug when running in 16bit mode
Add a "loading" message when loading in a map
Add a "Game Over" message when you die
Add a time limit
Work out a better way to display health, time etc.
"Stun" the ants for a short while when you jump on them :)
Upload file for people to download.
Add the person you're supposed to be rescuing, thus adding a point to the whole game
Add grenades so you can fend the ants off, this will stun them for a long time, but not kill them.
Allow you to change maps from within the game rather than the .ini file
Add an optional .ini file for each map so you can set the timelimit

I think that'll do for the moment.

[Ant Attack] Optimizing

2004-06-21T14:11:00.000Z

Well here's a screen shot...

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...and here's another...

1024x768 19kb gif

...spot the difference?

Yeah, there are less polygons in the second shot!

I decided that I really should reduce the poly-count. Antescher runs fine on my machine, but I've been playing with more complex maps, some of which really slowed the whole thing down. Something had to be done.

In the murky past I'd written a Quake level builder that converted NetHack style ASCII map to quake levels. This found the most efficient way of grouping tiles into bigger tiles using all sorts of cunning tricks. However the payoff for getting maximum efficiency was that it'd take a short while to figure it out. This isn't a problem for Quake levels, as once you've done it, the level is "compiled" and you don't need to do it again. I want the levels in Ant Attack to be loaded in on the fly each time, so it's got to be fairly quick.

This means that I opted for a just good enough solution. At the simplest level, if you could join up each tile with the one next to it, you've cut the number of faces in half right away. It's possible to do slightly better than that. But the most I've gone for is merging 3x3 tiles, then 2x3, 3x2, 2x2, 2x1, 4x1, 3x1, 2x1 and finaly 1x1.

You can see the effect that has in the shot below...

1024x768 11kb gif

There's another good reason for not going over the top and merging as many as possible. The base of the wall along the side could be made up of a really long single tile, but then you start running into tiles that start a long way infront of you and finish somewhere behind you. Computing wise it's slightly easier to break this down into smaller units so those behind you can be ignored.

Figures!

For Antescher
Before Optimizing: 33,972 polys
After Optimizing: 13,612 polys

So number of polys was reduced by about 60% The effects on frames per second is an average of 15% speed increase, which is really 0% increse in places where the frame rate was high anyway, and increases of about 30% when the scene is complex.

[Ant Attack] New View

2004-06-13T14:25:00.000Z

Showing off now, just updated the camera so you can now look up and down. You would have thought that this is something that should have been in there from the start, but no! Anyway you can now look over the edge at the swarming ants below.

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[Ant Attack] Maps!

2004-06-10T15:28:00.000Z

I must confess I've written a mini Ant Attack level creator before, in JavaScript no less. It wasn't really for making levels though, it was for building interesting looking 3D shapes and forms. I still like to think of this project as half art, half game. So making shapes and maps should be relatively easy. Which is why I opted for using .bmp files as the basis of map creation.

It's not the easiest way to create multi-level maps, but it sure is the fastest for anyone to get going with. You can, in fact, open up Paint Brush in Windows now, pick an image/map size, scribble some walls in, drop in a magenta pixel for the player start and then load it into the game. There 30 seconds you have a map!

Once you've gotten over the joy of running round a scribble you can go back and start refining the map. This is normally done by writing your name and then running round that! After that it's time to expand upwards, each .bmp file is given the name levelxxx.bmp where xxx is the height. Shown below is level1.bmp (scaled up!) of a 17 level map, the last file unsurprisingly called level17.bmp

Below is the full 17 level glory (well not full as you can't see the top, but you get the itea).

1024x768 71kb gif

I found that using PhotoShop and keeping each level in a layer worked well.

Levels can be any size, within CPU power I guess, as long as all the level images are the same dimension. So above we have a 32x16 size map, I've also played with 512x512x8 sized maps with no problem. For the record the original Antescher is 128x128x6.

Some people may say, "well wouldn't it have been easier to create a custom level editor". My answer is well, maybe, that's still possible, just as long as the editor outputs .bmp files. Consider the .bmp file the level file format and anything that can write .bmp files a level editor :)

[Ant Attack] Gazillions of Ants...

2004-06-08T19:57:00.000Z

...well maybe 80!

Here's what a swarm looks like...

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The dark blue ball, roughly in the middle of the swarm is the player. Who, thankfully for them, doesn't have a health value to be depleated yet.

Below is a shot taken a few seconds before with the normally invisible tracking smells turned on. If you look in the bottom right hand corner you can see a couple of circled ants. The lower one can't see the player but can see/smell a tracking scent left by the higher up ant. The higher up ant in turn, dropped a smell when they couldn't quite see the player but could see a much stronger smell dropped by an ant right next to the player.

This is how the ants end up swarming around the player!

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The neat part about how ants are handled now is that we had already implimented some speed limiting code. So that as PCs get faster the game will still "run" at the same speed, i.e. it'll still take 10 seconds to walk along the side of the city. To get this to work we have a little code that basically just burns cycles with some handy calculations. The ant handling code is within that loop.

As PCs get faster there will be more spare CPU time to burn up, thus the ants will get updated far more often meaning either...
1. You can have more ants.
2. The ants you do have get their brains updated more often and so act "smarter"

Anyhow, I'll be talking about the Woo-ness of maps next.

[Ant Attack] Ant Hunting Update

2004-06-05T19:47:00.000Z

Ah ha, I've had a break through (kinda).

I've tuned the hunting code where the ant tries to track the player or track another ant who's already tracking the player.

First off I tweeked the ordering of the "Can I see the player or their trail?" checks, so I can throw out further checks as quickly as possible, without having to bother with a line of sight test.

Secondly, I made sure that the smells that make up the trail are always ordered by their strength, strongest first. Basically this means that as soon as all three checks are valid...

1. The smell I'm checking is within a certain distance.
2. The smell is within my "Field of Vision" i.e. infront of me.
3. I have Line of Sight to the smell.

...I can stop checking any more, knowing that I have found the smell closest to the player.

The worst case situation is if all the smells are infront of the ant and within range, but it only had Line Of Sight to the weakest.

Third and finally I stopped myself from doing something really stupid. I had set it up so that all the ants only recheck their targets once ever second. The theory being that at least it was better than rechecking every game cycle.

But now, I do recheck the targets each cycle, only I do it one ant at a time. So instead of doing 20 ants all at once, I can do 20 ants spread over 1 second.

I'll mention more on why this is "good thing" in a later post. Suffice to say for now though that I'm a very happy bunny indeed and things are running well.

[Ant Attack] Screen Shots

2004-06-04T16:53:00.000Z

Ah ha, as promised, 2 new shots...

Zoomed out view...

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The Church...

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[Ant Attack] Snags

2004-06-04T10:17:00.000Z

Natch, just when you think you have everything worked out!

I was hoping to give an update on how the Ant Tracking Player thing's worked out but I've had no time to deal with it. I was also going to post a few more screen shots, but again that'll have to wait until this weekend. Deadlines, dontcha' just hate 'em.

In the mean time, here's a To Do list...

To Do

Take (and post) more screen shots.

Tune Ant Hunting skills.

Move the map "data" into folders, so you can pick different maps.

Post about maps (because they are cool!)

Screen shots of maps in action.

Add the Girl/Boy to be rescued.

Add damage status.

Release Tech Demo.

Add weapon.

Add Options screen.

Release Alpha Demo.

Drink tea.

[Ant Attack] The trouble with smells...

2004-05-26T10:35:00.000Z

...it seems is that there are far to many of them and it's really making the program chug.

The problem stems from the number of smells that are being dropped. Each ant has to do a Line of Sight (LOS) test against each smell, to figure out which is the strongest. The LOS is being done by Ray-Tracing from the source ant to the target smell and this takes some work.

Things I've tried to speed it up...

Increase the interval between dropping smells and increase the rate at which the smells decay. I reduced the dropped smells by the player to about 1/4 of the original amount. This doesn't seem to have effected the ants ability to track the player, so that good.

Done the same to the ants, so they drop smells less often too.

I've added a Field of Vision (FOV) check and a distance check between each ant and smell before doing the more complex LOS check. So if the smell is behind the ant or too far away, I don't even bother with the LOS. Even then I check the LOS to the player first, so if I can spot them I don't bother with any of the other smells.

Finallyy, I don't check the smells every game cycle but once a second. So each second the ants will re-check their targets.

Problems!

Well I thought that had done the trick. I had about 8 ants all running round tracking me down once they'd gotten a wiff of me.

But then I tried it on a slightly lower spec machine and it was painful. Every second there'd be a small lag as the LOS checks went through.

The other problem is that as soon they find a smell they start dropping their own smells, other ants spot those and drop smells too! Soon you end up with too many smells. Speeding up the decay rate helped a little, but then reduced the usefulness of the smells, I may as well just resort to LOS to the player.

Things to Try Now

1. Tune the settings some more. Make the smells get dropped once every 2 seconds and last maybe 8 seconds, so each player and ant will only have at 4 smells on the go at once. You can cover quite a distance in 8 seconds so it should still help tracking once the player has moved out of sight. But the distance you can move in 2 seconds is so great that the player can run through relatively open areas with leaving at least one smell. Although I wouldn't want to push it up any more.

2. Make sure the order that the smells are checked in is strongest first. So as soon as there's LOS to a smell the rest of the checks can be aborted. This should be easy as everytime a new smell is created I can push it onto the top of the smell stack.

3. The trouble is when an ant can't see any smells, they'll run through the whole list, that's where we'll really suffer. Conditions where this may happen are when an ant is far away from the smells, so tuning the distance check and cutoff may helps to.

I want to see if I can get about 20 ants running around, that's the goal!

[Ant Attack] Smelly Ants!

2004-05-25T18:06:00.000Z

This is more for me than you but anyway.

I'm been trying to figure out how to make the ants 'home in' on the player, while still playing fair, i.e. not being able to see through walls or have knowledge of the player that they shouldn't really have.

In the original game they just headed towards you, so if you were to the south and a little to the west of an ant, it'd just move down south until it was level with you and then turn west. Even if you were on the other side of the outside wall.

Now I'm not strong when it comes to AI so I've been left with 4 choices (probably far more, but these will do).

1. Head directly N/S,E/W toward the player
Basically just that, each ant figures out where the player is in relation to them and heads off in that direction. Along the axis with the greatest distance. i.e. if the player is 12 tiles south and 6 tiles west, we'll head south first and then zig-zag in when we get to 6 tiles south and 6 west.
Pros: Fastest to calculate and in keeping with the original game.
Cons: Unrealistic and unfair. Can get trapped when there's an easy and obvious way round an obstacle.

2. Line of sight (LOS)
We check to see if the ant has line of site to the player and if so head directly towards them.
Pros: Still pretty fast, we only have one line of sight test per ant. Difficult to get trapped, as being trapped normally means there's no LOS.
Cons: Feels like it'll be too direct, very easy to hide from. As soon as LOS is lost you've got to figure out what to do next. Maybe keep going until you reach the spot where you last spotted the player and then go into some form of searching pattern?

3. A* Path finding algorithm
All about that here. It'd work because our map is tile based and the "cost" for moving is either free (in open space) or blocked (in walls). However it doesn't really fit our needs, as you're either always trying to find the best path from the ant to the player, in which case you're cheating and assuming knowledge of the player loaction, so this only solves the getting stuck issue of #1. Or you don't assume knowledge of the player, in which case you may as well use LOS #2 above.
Pros: Will be able to track down the player without getting stuck.
Cons: Will have to impliment A* path finding algorithm and I'm too lazy.

4. Using Ant Pheromones

1024x768 119kb gif

Now I'm not sure what the technical game programming term is for this but this is the option I'm hoping to get working. I'm thinking about using the principle of smells. The player is smelly, as they walk around every second (or fraction of) they drop a scent marker, shown as a green cube in the screen shot above. Over time the scent markers fade until they're gone.

Every few game cycles the ant does a LOS test on each scent dropped figuring out which is the strongest one they can "see", the player themselves being the strongest. If the ant can see at least one marker they then drop their own scent at about 80% of the strength of the strongest one they can see.

So if a player has run through an area fairly recently an ant will be able to "smell" than and start following the scent trail, dropping their own scent (shown in red) to alert other ants. In theory a player may be in the top left hand corner and visible to an ant in the bottom left corner, who'll drop a scent, that in turn is visible to an ant in the bottom right hand corner. Thus the farthest away ant can still start to track the player, even though they cannot see them.

This strikes me as quite Ant like, so it's the one I'll experiment with for a while.

Pros: Good and tracking down a player once they've moved out of site.
Cons: Gunna be computationally heavy.

/goes off to do some coding.

Ant Attack 3D

2004-05-25T13:46:00.000Z

I just can't get away from messing with a perfectly good past! Ant Attack on the spectrum broke new ground with it's isometric soft-solid graphics. It had a cult following and is still remembered fondly by many to this day.

So where does the messing come in? Well I suddenly though, "what if, you took the game, kept it pretty much untouched, but put it on a modern PC with a 3D graphics card? You'd actually be able to step into the city of Antescher and wonder round"

Exhibit A - the isometric view on Antescher.

(1024x768 111kb gif)

There are other conversions of Ant Attack around, which is all well and good. But I think they've missed one of the key aspects. The Cool look and feel of the original.

There was a certain aspect to the stark monochrome that reminds me of those odd concept sci-fi movies of the 70s. The ones where an hour can pass with 3 lines of dialog spoken but lots of atmospheric background music.

Sandy's an artist and a sculptor, so the strong visual theme was not accidental. So to try and "update" the game with modern flashy graphics is removing one if it's strongest facets. It becomes just another run round a landscape game.

Exhibit B - a first person perspective

(1024x768 56kb gif)

Here, we are stepping into the world. I'm hoping that what I'm building here is the ability to get into the original game, just like sticking a 3D card directly into the Spectrum itself. The game itself is the same, but with more graphical horse power.

Exhibit C - one of the many buildings

(1024x768 56kb gif)

There we have it, I'll be posting more progress reports as I work on the code. Maybe even a download soon :)