h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

And came and came and came.

The madness has settled down now, but our servers are still pretty busy. It's been a hectic few days, but I finally get to add another journal entry. Now h2g2's launched and the initial hysteria is dying down, maybe I can do some work on my other project (the h2g2 game) for a change. h2g2 has definitely taken up more of my time than it was supposed to, but now I'm looking forward to getting lots done on the game again. We'll see how it goes.

While I'm here, if there are any really good Mac games programmers living in the UK, who would like to work on the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy computer game, please email me with your CV etc. at [email protected].

Also, if anyone has any input on the issues with making a real-time 3D game on less mainstream platforms such as Linux and BeOS, why not post something on this entry? See below for the discussion link. I'm mainly interested in issues with standard libraries for OpenGL and sound support, etc. i.e. what is a safe baseline set of libraries/support to expect. All that kind of stuff.

Coo - this site is useful after all, isn't it?
 
 
 
 
 

what about Amiga?

Amigas? The last time I checked, they had limited support for OpenGL and 3D hardware accelerators.

Plus, like, they suck. And make BeOS look like a mainstream platform.

Duh

Tim

Well, last time I checked, there was Warp3D (a virtually straight OGL port) , and also Permedia2 and 3dfx gfx cards are available. - This is only the "Classic" Amiga - The new architecture OS5.0 machines coming later this year (or so they say) will have top notch OGL code.

(and the last time I looked, Quake on my Amiga ran faster than N64 Quake does - that's without any hardware acceleration at all!)

So basically, if the code is written using OGL, it will be a simple re-compile job to make the code Amiga compatible (as long as you don't use excessive wintel specific stuff)

but I don't want to turn this into a flame war - put it this way, people are still buying machines with AmigaOS installed as standard, and the largest shareware archive in the world is an Amiga site (Aminet) - which still gets lots of uploads every day.

Can this be said of these "More mainstream" OS's?

>Well, last time I checked, there was Warp3D
>(a virtually straight OGL port) , and also
>Permedia2 and 3dfx gfx cards are available.

My own view is that, having given up on a dying platform once already (Acorn/RISC OS), I'm getting pretty good at recognising them .

>The new architecture OS5.0 machines coming
>later this year (or so they say) will have
>top notch OGL code.

Last I heard, the new Amigas are really just Intel PCs running a new version of the Amiga OS - is this still the case? This was when GW2K took over the Amiga rights.

>(and the last time I looked, Quake on my Amiga
>ran faster than N64 Quake does - that's without
>any hardware acceleration at all!)

I'm amazed Quake runs on the N64 at all, to be honest. What CPU does your Amiga have?

>So basically, if the code is written using OGL,
>it will be a simple re-compile job to make the
>code Amiga compatible (as long as you don't use
>excessive wintel specific stuff)

Assuming the companies involved deliver what they promise. The day I see an Amiga in a high street shop will be the day I think about doing an Amiga port of our game.

Tim

>but I don't want to turn this into a flame war

Good - I have no interest in flame wars. Or platform wars, come to that.

>put it this way, people are still buying
>machines with AmigaOS installed as standard

Where from?

>and the largest shareware archive in the
>world is an Amiga site (Aminet) - which
>still gets lots of uploads every day.
>Can this be said of these "More mainstream" OS's?

I don't know - I'm not sure how much I trust "biggest archive" claims. Besides which, we weren't planning on releasing our game as shareware.

As for BeOS, to be honest, even a BeOS release is very borderline for our game - especially since I checked their web site to find out how many different graphics cards they supported. Executive summary: Oh dear.

Tim

Does it have to be on sale?

I mean, does propping open the door to the stock room count?

Sean.

A full third of my friends use Linux at work or at home. Half of those use xWindows. (bear in mind that *ALL* of these kids are self-proclaimed computer geeks)
Then there are the NT users. Here at school there are 3 majors (encompassing over 2,000 students - 1/8 of our enrollment) that *REQUIRE* all incoming freshmen to have Pentium II's that are running NT. It's big. A lot biiger than Amiga (no offense).

Note that none of this applies to me, though, since I still use Win98, despite the derision it causes me from the aforementioned geeks. I'm sure they'd all be proud of me for posting this.
Heh heh heh

Well, I mentioned Linux in my original journal entry, if that helps.

As for NT, that will be supported as we'll be doing most of our development on NT, assuming Microsoft doesn't totally blow their NT5 release schedule. I hear beta 3 has much better 3D card support so it'll be NT all the way...yay!

Tim

>Last I heard, the new Amigas are really just Intel PCs running a new version of the Amiga OS - is this still the case? This was
>when GW2K took over the Amiga rights.

Well, sort of, the "proposed" (as in idea abandoned) development machines would
have been x86 style processors, running an emulator engine of the new processor.
However most of the computing press misunderstood this, and assumed it meant that
Amigas would simply be rebadged clones.

However, in a way this way be true, since the main kernal is being based on QNX,
which is a totally scalable and platform independant realtime os, so there is a possibility
that AmigaOS5 will get ported to the x86 platform

>>(and the last time I looked, Quake on my Amiga
>>ran faster than N64 Quake does - that's without
>>any hardware acceleration at all!)

>I'm amazed Quake runs on the N64 at all, to be honest. What CPU does your Amiga have?

It's a 50mhz 68060 (the chip above the last 68k used in Macs before Apple jumped ship
to ppc) - which gives roughly the same Q performance as a P100.

Have you played the text adventure hitchhik? It was around on IBM PCs
when 286s were a fantasy dream. Still, the game was the only Hitchikers
Guide game I've ever seen. I could never get the Babel
Fish from this giant dispensing machine--the game drifted from the bool
plot at times--and so stopped playing. Four years later I had a dream
about playing the game and solved the puzzle: when I dug out the disk
with my copy of the game on a tried my new soloution blow me if it didn't
work. Will your game be so obscure that it takes four year of subconsious
thought to solve?

Any one out there with a copy of hitchhik.exe please contact me as I've
lost mine. I got stuck on the Heart of Gold shortly after getting my
Babel fish and I'm convinced that in another four years I'll wake up
with the solution but have no copy of the game to try it on. You can
contact me at [email protected]

see me.

Of course this would be breach of copyright and you would be barred from this site for life, so I think that you probably just want to know where you can BUY a copy don't you....

Surely, it's a peice of shareware or freeware

well, there are freeware infocom interpreters, which I know will happily read the datafile
from the original ibm h2g2 game (called hitch.dat, iirc), so if only your executable is corrupt,
you should be able to download a replacement intepreter

It was also available at the comic relief site at one point wasn't it?

it was running via a java applet, but wasn't actually freely downloadable

An interesting idea, and the one which lead me to believe that it would be freeware anyway as so far as I could tell when infocom made their interpreter freeware they effectively made all of the games freeware too.

My problem is that I have physically lost the game, I have no idea where the floppy with it on is and I lost the c: drive copy when my faithfull 286's power supply failed and wrote off the hardrive.

this argument is silly, the interpreter is freeware, but the datafile is not

You can download the quake executable for free, does that make the entire game freeware? no, because you need the original pak files from the original game CD