The World According to Nils » Wasteland

Red Rider Air Rifle in World of Warcraft

Nils — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 20:36:20 +0000

Hah! I just found this in WoW:

Red Rider Air Rifle? I wonder if at this point this is a reference to the original, to the Christmas Story, or to Wasteland…

Project Dragongate and Project Deadland

Nils — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 16:18:56 +0000

I couldn’t believe my eyes: I have found a bunch of old screenshots on an ancient CD. First of all there were five additional screen shots from Project Deadland, an attempt to build an isometric tile engine in the style of UFO/XCOM.

But it gets even better: In 1995, two years before I wrote the Deadland engine, I was attempting my hand at an U6 style tile engine. That project was lost a long time ago, due to combined hard disk and floppy-disk failures. There was even a whole design doc for this one, complete with a worked out story and all. It was a really big setback to my game programming ambitions when I lost all of that. Still, it’s cool to have at least some screen shots – I had thought that none survived.

Attentive readers (Hi, Pedro) will probably notice that some of the tiles look a lot like the one in U6, and indeed that did serve as the basis for many of them. But already you can see in these screens that I was working on replacing them (the walls, for example).

Project "Deadland"

Nils — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 13:06:41 +0000

I have unearthed some memories from my early coding days. Back then, I was experimenting a lot with programming, inspired by the heroes of my day – the guys and gals who wrote all the fun games I loved so much. This particular project was named “Deadlands”, and it was basically my attempt at building a post-apocalyptic computer role playing game.

Deadland was inspired by two games in particular: Wasteland and UFO (sold in the United States under the “XCom” brand). It was written in turbo pascal with large sections (ie. the graphics routines) written in assembler. It didn’t run too well, the stand-alone graphics demo these screenshots were taken from, ran at about 9 fps. There was also a stand-alone character generator, of which unfortunately no screenshots remain.

The map consists of, if I remember correctly, two layers; the floor and the walls are seperate, allowing for more combinations and less graphics work. The darkness effect is achieved by having the same color palette in several levels of brightness in the global VGA palette, and shifting a pixel down before painting it. Easy optimization here is to pre-calculate tiles in different color levels, but that would have eaten a lot of RAM. And, yes, I did draw those graphics myself – pixeling them in fine detail in Deluxe Paint II enhanced.

Deadland was the successor of my first tileset engine, for the Dragongate project, which was more of a top-down implementation and had a much smaller field of view.

I think I lost the complete source code to this game in one of my hard-drive crashes. This is alright, because now the code would have historic value at best. Still, it’s too bad I never completed this game.

Needless to say, I am still kinda proud of what I did back then

_Update, 2007-07-13:_ I have found a few additional screenshots.