by Chuck Remes
Arena, the networked car battle game, is coming to you this February 25th at Engineering Open House. A team of programmers has been hard at work developing the code that handles the graphics, networking, artificial intelligence, sound, and interface details. After a total of 7 months in gestation, this project is ready to be born.
The history of Arena is a little bizarre. The game was conceptualized over a year ago. Before a Macintosh version was started, a DOS version was attempted. This original model was done using 3-D projections instead of the 2-D playing field of today's game.
A few months after the DOS version was abandoned, I emerged as the new team leader. I began writing it on the Macintosh from scratch. I had never before written a full-blown Macintosh application, so although it sort of worked, it was doomed to never be any good without a complete rewrite. The coding was stopped after two months.
Four months later, in July of '93, a completely new version of Arena was started. It was based primarily on code examples of games that had been procured in the months before. A basic no-frills version was ready for the first Arena Project meeting in the Fall '93 semester.
Since then, full screen scrolling has been added, as has rudimentary networking. (See next monthÕs issue for a more detailed description of Arena networking.) As of late, this game has been positioned as a direct competitor of the popular Macintosh network game Bolo. Arena will initially have only AppleTalk networking, but the Internet will be supported with UDP at a later date.
It is my fervent hope that the networking will be stable enough to allow up to 30 people to play simultaneously. Barring that, small four- or five-person games should be feasible.
So if you plan on visiting Digital Computer Lab during EOH, please stop by the Arena Project tables and sit down to play a little bit of Arena. A suggestion box will be available for users to jot down comments which will affect the release version due after EOH ends. We'd like to see your suggestions, so come on by! To join the project, send me email at c-remes@uiuc.edu or stop by the ACM office Wednesday nights at