Okay... anyone up for Car Wars? :-)

[wolfwings]

I'm now the proud(?) owner of a collection of the new 5th Edition Car Wars stuff. =^.^= And shortly I may have the Vehicle Design Rules as well. :-)

Now... I'm reading the new and simplified rules (VASTLY simplified, no more thirty options for every last component, only a couple with a couple different levels now) and looking things over... and wondering... why the hell hasn't anyone looked into making a multiplayer version of this for PalmOS or similair platforms? :-)

So now... I'm downloading a PalmOS emulator and devkit, and pulling out the old fast-sprite-rotation and fast-line-drawing code, both of them with anti-aliasing, that I wrote years ago... and starting to ponder seeing if I can get two Killer Kart's running in an unbounded Arena, and just drop the finished product on SJGames with full source code and rights, let em' sell the thing. :-)

Of course... the other option I'm considering is pulling this over to GBA systems instead... hardware sprite rotation, let it handle all the nitty-gritty, all I need to do then is deal with the engine itself. Would be giving up some raw CPU power (16Mhz versus 20 or more Mhz) for hardware that could handle the rotations and such automagically for me, though without anti-aliasing so it'd look chunky. :-)

But still... which do you think is more realistic? Car Wars on everyone's GBA, or Car Wars on everyone's PalmOS handheld and wristwatch? :-)

Comments

I still have a copy of the original version

[ex-space-wo.livejournal.com]

Little plastic snap pack. First edition. Collector's item now I suppose.

Re: I still have a copy of the original version

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

They just about went all the way back to first edition and built the rules out from scratch apparently, and it shows. It's markedly different in the nitty-gritty details from, say, the last Compendium. All the old stuff got pitched with a couple exceptions I'd need to go over a first edition ruleset to point out, but it's very much streamlined now.

Though what used to be hours spent pouring over the rulebooks and laying out an arena is now hours spent cutting out all the *censored* counters... At least the scale's three times larger so you won't need tweezers though. :-)

[sebkha.livejournal.com]

The real fun of Car Wars for me was always the design of the car, so I'd be keen to see a good editor as part of the game.

Would be nice, wouldn't it? :-)

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

Though currently, the Vehicle Design Rules were pushed back to the end of this year back in August... and now according to the Car Wars Yahoo Group... they're no longer in Playtest, being pulled back for a possible full revision, so they may not be out at all this year either...

So I'm actually bothering to reverse-engineer the stats and weights and such for the existing cars. Ah... the wonderful things cryptographic experience is useful for! Reverse-engineering 'rules' for a game's design system. :-)