Right! Well through a series of strange events I've ended up creating a blog devoted to the Commodore 64 game Space Crusade. Originally a board game published jointly by Milton Bradley and the Games Workshop it was brought the computer world by Gremlin Graphics and remained almost identical to the board game for which it's named.

As it turns out I have a bit of free time on my hands (which is unusual) and happend to have found my old Space Crusade cassette (yes it came on a tape). Better yet those grand guys at www.remakes.org are hosting another remkaes competition and... putting two and two together I've decided to rewrite Space Crusade into the year 2006.

Instead of being a 'true' blog this is simply going to be posts of my progess with Space Crusade.

So, to begin here is the offending box which started it all along with screen shots from the commodore version.


This is the a mission in progress. The space marines (the yellow blobs) are deployed from their docking claw and can be moved around via the icons at the bottom to do ... stuff. I forget which mission this is. I think it was necessary to destroy a weakend part of the derelicts hull to complete it. Hell bent on stopping the intrepid squad are the evil gene-stealers, chaos marines and the war machine 'Dreadnought'. In a nasty twist it was sometimes necessary for one squad to destroy another to win the mission.


This is a shot of the game in isometric mode. It wasn't possible to do anything but did look pretty. Curiously the Commodore 64 and Spectrum versions showed more detail than the later Amiga and IBM PC versions. Guess thats progress for you.


Now the actual work done today: Started by modelling one of the space marines, just his helmet and shoulder pad so far which took about an hour and looks completely crap (which is why I haven't posted a screen shot) but hey! I'm not an artist.

On the programming front I decided I wanted awesome wicked cool explosions so I got to work on my long neglected particle system. It's coming along quite nicely and I've completed what should be the final spec. For those who care it's very similar to the DirectX flexible vertex format in that particle system properties are indicated by flags and then just enough memory is allocated per particle for those properties. All the particles are allocated from freelists and I've tried to go with sensible defaults for flags which are not specified.

For instance not specifying UV coordinates will give the particle (0,0) -> (1,1) as a default. What fun! ;)

Of course instead of actually being productive I spent most of the day looking at reference and trying to work out how SpeedTree did their leaf particles. Incidently SpeedTree is the tree drawing system that Oblivion and Unreal 3 use. Very cool.

Which brings me to the end of today, give or take a few minutes.

Later!