The Chaos Engine saga (13/9/98)
Despite some suggestions that it may be approaching release, The Kindred's port of Chaos Engine is in a reported state of limbo due to some internal difficulties involving the licence holders, the Bitmap Brothers.
It is difficult to say more at this stage, but The Kindred are still optimistic about the project despite the difficulties.
StuntRacer Editor Improved (10/9/98)
A new version of the Stunt Racer 2000 track editor has been released featuring many major improvements over the version released by Nathan Atkinson of VOTI a few months ago. The editor is based upon the code written by the authors of the game, FedNet, from their own in-house track editor but the first public release had a number of incompatibility problems, was only single tasking and lacked simple instructions for use.
Improvements include:
- Fully multi-tasking
- Two styles of toolbar
- Animated surf
- Load and save both compressed and uncompressed tracks
- Easy piece repositioning
- Supports interactive help
A StuntRacer 2000 section is under construction for Acorn Arcade so send your tracks, cheats and saved game files along to sr2000@acornarcade.com for your 5 minutes of fame!
Iron Dignity Still on Track! (29/8/98)
Acorn Arcade has learned that Artex, of Ankh and Exodus fame, have teamed up with Frank Föhl to bring us Iron Dignity. In case you haven't heard of the game, Iron Dignity has been under development for quite a while now, and features some stunning graphics. This 3D strategy/warfare game should be released at some point next year.
The preview, which is quite old now, can still be downloaded from here (1.8mb, SA recommended). More information about Iron Dignity will be made available at Acorn World 98.
Artex also recently revealed that TEK will unfortunately not be ready for Acorn World 98, but hopefully a new demo will be available to show how they are progressing with the project.
Artex were preparing a TEK demo for the hard disc of the new RiscPC 2 but this sadly won't be much use now though hopefully Artex will release it soon for us all to inspect!
BotKiller 2 (1/9/98)
Artex software have just announced that they are working on yet another Acorn title following the release of Exodus and Ankh. As the name suggests, BotKiller 2 is indeed the sequel to the original BotKiller freeware platform game from Artex. BotKiller 2 will feature the same genre of puzzle solving whilst jumping about killing monsters on platforms as its predecessor but will have greatly improved graphics and gameplay. BotKiller 2 is due for an early October release and will retail for about £10.
Richard Wilson is taking on most of the programming for the BotKiller 2 project whilst Jan and the team in Germany will do the graphics and marketing. A very early demo of the basic game engine behind BotKiller 2 has been made available to Acorn Arcade and we're pleased to be able to report that everything's looking very promising so far. The features implemented in the code so far include a wide range of weapons right through to missiles and also key card activated doors. The Artex team are currently hard at work producing the graphics for BotKiller 2 in time for the planned release date of sometime in October.