There was this guy, see. He went by the handle Arkiruthis, and he was going to do a remake of Powermonger. He had a blog and everything, and some excellent screen shots and video. This got me really excited, and I did some work to help him out.
Then real life intruded and his blog went defunct. And I was sad.
But now he’s back, baby! Tanned, rested, and ready for another go-round! And you can see what he’s doing here.
Now, I have to reveal that one of the reasons he became disinterested in the project was because he got some flak from people when he revealed he was going to update the game rather than do a “straight” remake. Most of those people found out about his project from the Retro Remakes forums…because I posted about it there.
So, I’m sorry Nick if I brought unwanted pressure upon your project and maybe gave it more exposure than you were ready for at the time.
Simon, no worries! 😀
Projects can go a number of ways. A good example is the “Driller” and “Head over Heels” remakes that sport beautiful new graphics, but are essentially the same game underneath (and you can probably superimpose screenshots before/after in photoshop and they would probably line up!).
Others like to go a little further and actually have the graphics identical as well.
I prefer the former, simply because to me it’s the icing on the cake. Also, having non-scaling absolute sprites (different from billboarding) in 3D just didn’t look quite right to me.
But the actual game itself I want to be as close as possible to the original. With the map at the top left, the scales and compass bottom left, and the table (and 3D map) viewed as in the original game.
Once the game code and remake is done, I’m wanting to take the AI into a seperate engine for the B&W2-esque version.
Also, I’m thrilled it got the exposure that it did! The Retro Remakes crowd are great. And most importantly, Big Brother Google would have found it soon anyway. I guess I’m just a bit camera shy. 🙂
Anthony, DOH! (haha, just wrote an email to colleague called Simon)
It’s okay, Simon’s a cool name 🙂
Please believe me when I say that I wish you nothing but good fortune in your endeavors.
Thanks Anthony (ah, got it this time!)
Oh, your post about the random number generator got me wondering whether it’s possible to reverse-engineer the number generator from the original game?
(or whether there was a recommended algorithm in use at the time)
The Amiga, ST and PC versions must have used the same customized non-compiler-specific RNG in order to get the same results from the seed numbers in the original MAP data.
The code is currently event driven for everything, so I imagine multiplayer should be easy as the player will get a ‘handle’ to a captain in the single player anyway and control him via timestamped messages.
The most common RNG for a long time was a simple Fibonacci series. Start with two numbers. Add numbers 1 and 2 to get 3. Add numbers 2 and 3 to get 4, etc. If the number overflowed, it would automatically wrap around. This was very common on 8-bit systems and if Powermonger only needed numbers from 0-255 the Bullfrog boys could very easily have used the same system. Simple, repeatable (since the same two seed numbers would always produce the same results) and cross-platform.