Another adition to the program will
be that the game's characters will gain experience as the game
progresses, so it will be vital to protect your armies in order to make
them stronger and better, giving you an edge over the
opposition.
The adition of cooperation is another new feature
in battlecraft. In order to win the later levels your race has to team
up with others
that have certain abilities. Thus having
just the cutting edge on the battleground needed to win.
Peter de Boer says it's impossible to win the later levels without cooperation, so you'd better be ready for
some diplomatic bargaining!
Because Peter de Boer is converting all the original graphics and sounds to the amiga there could be the
question if the project is entirely legal.
Because of this he has contacted the original makers of the warcraft-II
game for the PC (Blizzard entertainment) and has asked their permission.
The company didn't have a problem with him using their graphics for the amiga,
because they weren't doing an amiga game themselves.
There was only one snag to it all.
If Peter de Boer used their graphics in his game he wasn't allowed to make a big
profit out of his project. Because of this he has decided to release the finished
version as a ShareWhare program.
He will ask a small payment for his work,
allowing him to use the warcraft-II graphics and maps.
Future additions to the BattleCraft game will 'maybe' include TCP/IP suport which allows
Internet games to be played.
But first he has to find out how these internet protocols work.
At the time he is also busy at perfecting his
sound routines. Because of the low Chipmem of a base ECS-Amiga he has to keep
his samplebank below 512kb. This allows each character to have only 2-4 sampled speech
files and few other samples. If he finds a way to buffer the samples in expanded ram he will
include bigger sample banks for expanded machines (e.g. a1200/a4000).
In the future there
may also be an AGA-version of the game. At this moment there is only one problem. Peter de Boer has
an ECS-Amiga himself and no money to buy an AGA-Amiga. Maybe if the game brings in enough cash
he will buy one and release an AGA-Update patch for users with advanced machines.