Making this game has been quite the journey especially because of the fact that the game is open source. There are all sorts of extra challenges in trying to do an open source game which you just don’t have in closed source development with a team.
One of the biggest difficulties in developing Hardwar has been the art pipeline. There are lots of great frameworks out there that simplify the art pipeline however they all either cost a lot of money or have some license restriction which means we can not use them for an open source project.
There really has not been a great way of being able to create art for the game while we are building the game. In the past I tried solving this by building my own editor into the game so that I could build levels while developing but this is way too far out of scope. I don’t want to be building a graphics editor, I want to be making a game! Instead I have decided that the best route of action is to join forces with the Ogitor community and get their editor up to scratch. This way everyone wins.
Right now I have been working tirelessly over the past few weeks to get more features implemented into Ogitor to be usable for making Hardwar and so far it’s going quite well. There are a few issues that I can see currently that I am working on fixing.
Firstly it should be easy for artists to simply drop their files into the editor and have them work regardless of what format they are in. This is the single biggest pain that I have come across in collaboration on any game in any engine and I’m hoping that will be implemented quite soon with the existence of the asset importer library.
The second biggest problem I can see at the moment is that the file format that Ogitor uses doesn’t include all the textures one uses in it’s “OFS” file. So it’s not quite as convenient to share files with others. This is something I’m working on right now and hopefully will have a patch ready for Ogitor soon.
There are a few other small issues however it’s refreshing to be able to see a clear path forward after mucking around in the dark for so long.
Nice to see that Hardwar is still alive.
Almost wrote Hardware. lol
I might not post very often but it’s not an indication that the project has halted. I do this in my spare time, by myself, hence why progress is slow and I don’t post often, any spare time I try to spend it coding.
How is the story line? have you made changes or added anything? I do remember the game having some holes. I do have alot of ideas for this game feel free to get intouch with me
Hey I don’t know if there is anything I can do to help, but if there is let me know, I’m sure I can get plenty of people here to help out with the coding if you let me know.
No news in a year, is this still on ?
I played (and finished) th original game, I still have the boxed copy somewhere, but last time I tried installing it, it would not run on modern PCs…
I really would like to replay it some day…
This is my personal project that I work on by myself, if you’re waiting around for a product to play then you’re going to be disappointed since no one else contributes enough to make that a reality.