HackAddict

Now that we finally have a tank you project blog i think we should start with a little retrospect in the history of this project. Allthough it seems unbelievable and is quite embarassing this project (resp. it's ancestor) was founded in 1997 under the name "Martes Zibellinae" (latin for sable). The plan was to build a simple clone of worms with little sables instead of worms. We loved worms very much, but thought that quality got lower with every sequel. Since we were still attending school we had a lot of spare time to invest, so we startet without much experience in game development and only basic coding experience.

The first attempt was developed in C++ and used plain Direct X. We got suprisingly far with this attempt and had some demo with destructable terrain, mines und so called "rubber ducks", but without movable sables. "ruber ducks" where supposed to be a special kind of mine which detonates if a sable leaves once he stepped on it. Due to our missing expierience the code quality war aweful and the hole project was hardly maintainable or extandable. There was a bug in the "rubber duck"-ignition logic which we were not able to find no matter how hard we tried it. Finally we declared the first attempt dead and started new right on from the scratch. I would love to show the old demo with it's pixel-graphics to you but unfortunatly it got lost druing a hdd crash (we had less experience in backups and version control too ;) )

In the second attempt we tried to construct a fundament on which we can build a game, so we tried to make a little sprite-engine as abstraction from Direct X. The thing was calles HASE (german for bunny) which is a backronym for (HackAddict Sprite Engine). It could handle animations and had a cool algorithm for the automatic distribution of the sprite graphics on resolution sized offscreen surfaces. I can't remember why the second attempt went wrong, but it did. I guess it was when we left school and had to server our military duty of ten month in the german army (resp. air force). We haven't much spare time and in the little spare time we were busy to waste our payment on drinking ;)

In the third attempt we switched from Direct X to SDL in first instance to make the game plattform independent, but it turned out to be an improvement in nearly every way. SDL is really a nice engine, but that don't kept the project from falling asleep over time.

In the meanwhile we become professional software developers and at work we are developing java applications. Although java hasn't the best reputation for game developement we decided to give it a try and started the forth attempt. We looked into slick but decided to switch to technical 3D and jMonkeyEngine. It worked quiete fine but we had a lot of trouble in terraingeneration and again a lack of experience this time in 3D development.

After this java excursion we went back on C++ and SDL. We builded an engine which i am still very proud of. It handles extendable XML-described game content and was very flexible and performant.This attempt died when we found out that hardware accelerated rotation would be really usefull. SDL support only very slow software rotation and the OGL integration requires much OGL knowledge which we didn't had.

After failing again we decided to change the game concept radically from sables to tanks and the actual design. Sixt time is a charme. As you can see we're back on java with Slick and realtime physics in (j)box2d. We are old and experienced enough and know what we are doing, the only problem is still the lack of spare time which can be invested in TankYou.

Now we're very hot on finishing this project.