OpenH&D or Hidden & Dangerous III

[(UGF} Corporal Desola]

Hi guys,

I know it's been ages since I posted here last, but more to the point, there are plenty of reincarnations of classics like PACMAN and TETRIS, more recently, DooM, Quake and MoHAA, why shouldn't H&DII be put on the list?

All H&D-ers complain about how close H&D and H&D2 is/was to the perfect WWII gaming experience, but since Illusion Softworks has not heeded to the call, why don't we heed to it ourselves.

Make an open, free incarnation of H&D and H&D2 combind and improve on it and call it something like OpenH&D or Hidden and Dangerous Free (sort of saying the third volume in the series and that it's free at the same time). Something with an completely new engine, to shake the problems of converting to Insanity3D or LS3D formats, and definitly shake the encripted H&D2 .DTAs.
Another concern is that soon 32-bit code, what H&D and H&D2 executables contain, may not run at all on future systems, just like how Intel 16-bit code became totally obsolete in 2008.
i.e. You can't try to load MS-DOS 4.5 (6.5 may run, it was only part 16-bit, mainly an 32-bit lead up to Win95) on Intel Quad-Cores which according to Intel are the first IA-64 only processor of theres.

So now that voids the original Wolfenstien, DooM and GTA, only after fifteen years of 32-bit x86 processors and operating systems, in another 15 years will we still be able to kick back and enjoy some old-school H&D2 - probably NOT!

How we beat this is if we start on something open now, and create an project directed to an 'pure' merged clone of H&D and H&D2, much like FreeBSD is an open UNIX clone which obeys the 'UNIX-disciplines', then latter forks could occur and we end up with many different flavours of H&D, but they'd always be the base absolute clone of H&D and H&D2 ready for download, and porting if need be.

[Jason]

Yes it would be nice to have an Open H&D game, there was a team a while back with the same idea for H&D1 but we never saw more than a few renders. The original game really needs to be updated. Are you merely suggesting the idea? or are you offering to lead such a project?

[-ViTaMiHnM203-]

in another 15 years will we still be able to kick back and enjoy some old-school H&D2

Don't get rid of your old systems.

[(UGF} Corporal Desola]

Me an project leader, no way, I never been in such an position because I'm no good at telling people what to do.

And as for being an member of such an team, I would have an few requirements such as an daily-active IRC server specifically for the OpenH&D dev team.

I love H&D and H&D2, but we do want to move forward don't we? Plus as none of us have the source code for Insanity3D, I suppose upgrading it to render in ether OpenGL, DirectX 9, or Direct10 plus compiling it to 64-bit systems without starting from scratch is an little impossible.

As for keeping ur oldie systems, anyone here have an working C64 Commodore to run Z-80 programs in real mode, and an IBM punch tape reader to load CP/M 1.0, not to mention the CP\M punch tape, or an ''5.6 floppy drive and the CP/M floppy diskette??

Also spreading the word of an H&D Free (III & Free, hahaha) once we have some awesome renders and maybe an site or two might bring new blood, plus if we wrote it from scratch there'd bound to be an way to integrate Google SketchUp moddeling into the new dev tools for the new engine, that would be bound to fast-track modeling.

Hey and what about an seemily endless H&D world (like in Microsoft's FlightSims) instead of sequential levels, just run/drive/ship it!/fly/parachute/land/invade/raid all over europe, it would probably enable the results from one raid to effect the next commando raid\mission in another or the same area, we could make up an old-school mode for the whole sequential level arena, because sometimes nothing beats an scripted story-line, packed with H&D gameplay.

[Jason]

I have a old PC I want to keep for playing H&D, Red Faction and Dark Reign 2 and other games.

Once upon a time I lead a mod called Blue Faction, for the game Red Faction but that was a long time ago. I do enjoy level design and I would like to get into 3d modelling (just need to find time). But programming a game has no real appeal to me, despite the fact that I love Web Application Programming.

You are thinking big with your ideas, but we really need some good C++ programmers in order to develop a game engine and I would imagine that is no easy task. It would be good but until we get some more programmers interested in the game it probably won't happen. We could use the engine of another game and do a total conversion.

[(UGF} Corporal Desola]

My thoughts are maybe if we keep calling someone might answer, and C++, thats over rated, C programmers are all we need, I can migrate them to C++ if need be.
Windows 2000 took up over 1 billion lines of code, all written in C, with it's boot loader and CRT written in an C\Assembly mix, OpenGL, Linux and Unix were all C too.'

But my main question is, if an engine for OpenH&D\H&D-Free suddenly apeared, would anyone be interested in an total conversion for it?

Truely, I love H&D soo much, but just me on this would take 30-40 years, this is what makes me all the more pissed at Illusion Softworks, and the fact they hang in Czechovakia makes me want to move there. Perhaps someone in thier face with my passion might get something done about the H&D situation.

[Jason]

Let's just wait and see what happens after Mafia 2 comes out. I am sure they will announce something good for us all

[Jason]

This is a bit of old new but Unreal Engine 3 is now open for all to use: http://udk.com/

Could start a nice update of H&D1/2, I'd be in on the project for sure if someone created it, but would not lead it...