Info: So, what is this, anyway?

Have you ever played Ronny Wester's original games, Cyberdogs and C-Dogs? If you have, you'll remember that they were incredibly fun games. They had plenty of interesting concepts, and were a blast if you had another person to play two-player mode with.

The original games had their drawbacks as well. First, they weren't programmed for a Windows environment, so they had some compatibility problems at time. Second, they weren't multiplayer. While being able to do cooperative play and Dogfight in C-Dogs was a lot of fun (heck, I still enjoy it!) it just couldn't do network play with multiple players. Third, the original games are just old. I didin't say they weren't cool or fun, but they are old, and graphics that looked great five or so years ago aren't looking so hot anymore.

So, enter this new project. Cyberdogs 2001 is a project to make an entirely new Cyberdogs game from scratch, and pick up where the others left off. CD2001 will be Windows native, and use DirectX 7. It will feature higher-resolution graphics and greater color depth (800x600 and 16bpp color). It will still be a 2D game, and include many of the features of the old games. This one, however, will have multiplayer support, and I am aiming to have support for as many players as you want to squeeze in a game. Finally, I am working to make this version extremely editable, in the tradition of the Unreal and Quake engines (although maybe a little easier). In fact, I am studying the Unreal engine now, and am planning to build somewhat on some of its concepts. Expect a powerful game editor to come with the final version.

This project would not be a true Cyberdogs project if not for one thing: this version is still going to be freeware! That's right, in the tradition of the originals, this game will be available to the public for free. I may make a deluxe CD edition with a special manual, and some other special junk that could be bought for the price of S&H and the CD, but that's looking too far ahead, isn't it? :-) Not only will the game be free, but I plan to make it open source as well, when I do the final release. This should help mod makers understand the engine better in order to make better mods.

So what's the basic, non-wordy run down for the things I'd like to accomplish? Here it is: