D2TM Development History

[MrFlibble]

Hey Stefan, your project had gone a long way from the first Arrakis game to Dune II The Maker in its current state over all these years. I thought that it could be of historical interest if you recounted on how it all started, and how your Dune 2 game evolved. Perhaps we could even write an article in our FED2k Wiki about the history of D2TM. What do your think about it? :)

[stefanhendriks]

Yeah it has been a while (what is it? ten or more years?).

Basically it started with Arrakis when I was around 15 years old. Very premature versions arised, but they where far from complete. Later on the age of 17 I practically wrote Arrakis 1.0 in 7 days (yeah, 7 days of 12 hours of programming straight. it was fun :)).

Arrakis is made in QuickBasic. I wanted to learn C/C++. So I tried something there and had a very, very, very premature version of a real Dune II Clone. I wanted to use Dune II graphics. It looked quite nice.

After that I have been absence for a few years working on RealBot (in C/C++). Later I 'came back' and continued to work on the premature version until it became more complete. I believe it was until 'v 0.9' it was developed. The code was 'bad' and I felt like it could be done better.

Since then I have rewritten the engine over 3 times more up till the version now. Pieces of the very first version still are used today.

Now I have been absence for quite some periods of time due my study, which is being finished in the end of June. I am still working on it, but due my grown experience at work (as a Java developer) I am not horrified by the code I have written. So now I am a bit unsure if I should continue working on this version, or start over again. For now I am still working on it and refactoring bit by bit.

If you have more questions, or need something, let me know :)

[stefanhendriks]

Hmm, come to think of it. Dunedit was my very first attempt to create a dunish game. But hey, i was very young back then (13?). I have to look up when it was made and such, but I recently found some cool stuff, from 1999... These 'premature' arrakis engines and such. :)

I am born in 1983, so you can do the math ;)