Flashbacks from the past...

Today, I delighted myself by stumbling on one of my old school WarBots projects. Before I started ArcLib, the project was actually called WarBots and was meant to finish a game that me and my friends attempted to build in High School but never got very far because the lame school admins shutdown the project from their lack of competence (grrr... see: http://warcoders.sourceforge.net/ for more info on what the project was meant to be and how far we got).

Anyway... I ran the exe and amazed myself at what I could accomplish in 2005 with limited D and OpenGL knowledge back in the day, when compiler numbers were still in the .70's and one had to write their own bindings from scratch.

For the curious, here's the way to access the files via SVN.

1. svn co -r 172 http://svn.dsource.org/projects/arclib/ warbots/
2. cd 'warbots\trunk\current'
2. Run 'game.exe'

To interact with the game, click the building, click 'train unit,' type 'miner' then hit enter. Then proceed to witness the miner vehicle collect metal scrap on the map. It uses per-pixel collision detection and a lua script to define the miner's AI.

I'm also amazed that SVN actually kept /EVERYTHING/, I'm afraid to know how much space my project takes up on poor old dsource.

The part that gets me is that I didn't even realize how far I got on that project.

And, as time passed, I decided I needed to write a good generic 2D game library before attempting to write any more game code. I've discovered that large projects have a 'point of no return' where, once the project reaches a certain size or complexity, more and more manpower must be used to achieve less and less of a result.

WarBots reached that complexity for a 1 man project, and ArcLib was the answer to reduce it. Look how far it's gotten me ;)