In my last blog post I described that one of the perks of being part of a small community is the ease in getting to know the important people. Last time it spoke about the porting wiz Szilárd “BSzili” Biró. This time it’s Daniel Müßener, also known as Daytona675x. He is the main programmer at Cherry Darling, and they have released several games like Ace of Hearts, Voxelbird Saga and Voxelnoid. He is also the programmer for the remake of Battle Squadron. I got to know him in 2013, when Battle Squadron was announced for AmigaOS 4. I asked him if he would consider a MorphOS port and he said no because he didn’t have a working compiler. So I dug up a working one for him and he promptly changed his mind. Both Battle Squadron and their later releases have MorphOS support, and I feel a little boostful for playing a big part in it. Lately, Cherry Darling has started to port for AROS too. The 10th of December the remake of the Amiga classic WWI flying game Wings was successfully funded at Kickstarter (after several failed attempts). One of their streatch goals was possible ports to NG Amiga systems, but in reality it wasn’t possible from the start. Wings Remastered was based on Unity, and could not be used on NG Amigas. This annoyed Amiga users, including Daniel. I also donated to that kickstarter and the game was released last year. It’s not terribly bad but not terribly good either. And the graphics look cheap. And of course no NG Amiga release was made or been announced. So Daniel decided to do something about it himself. He told me his plan to make a similar game and we started to exchange ideas. One was to make it a WWI 3D dogfight game from the perspective of Russian pilots. The reason was that Russians always play the villains but never the heroes. But as the game progressed it became clear that you couldn’t be too ambitious. So the idea was dropped in order to concentrate on the game element. A couple of weeks ago I got my hands on the first beta version, and it is still in the beta stage but getting closer to an official release. With the permission of Daniel I’m gonna show you the game as it looks in it’s somewhat unfinished state. When finished, the game will be sold on CD:s, and exclusively for MorphOS, AmigaOS 4 and AROS. Note that the game will probably be too heavy for you Classic Amiga users with PPC cards. Installing the game is simple. Just copy the game where you want it and double click on the icon. You will then be asked what resolution you want to use. Since I’m playing on my 2.7 GHz Powermac G5 with the R400 generation X800 graphics card I can play on the highest solution of 1920×1200 with no lag. But for the sake of this blog I have chosed window mode so no such requester will appear this time. The Cherry Darling Logo. This is something cool. Since AmigaOS 4 is pretty behind on it’s 3D drivers Cherry Darling made their own for the RadeonHD cards. Just to show “them” it can be done. Since I’m a gold user (for being a beta tester) the logo is not black but golden. There is a different message depending on what NG system you use. This is the one I get for MorphOS. If you click on the flag you can change language: German. French. Hungarian. And Swedish. Translated (poorly?) by me. This is the Main menu. If you look at the top and bottom you will see different messages pass by. I also get a greeting in there. In the Options menu you get the usual choice of settings. In the Graphics settings you can choose quality and other related settings. The Yoko (Japanese: side) settings means that you use a normal screen, and if you change it to Tate (Japanese: stand) you can turn the monitor 90 degrees, which is better for a two player game. Gameplay settings is what it sounds like. At this point, even with the best CPU Intelligence the computers are pretty stupid. We can hope for improvement there. Rankings from the Main menu shows high score. This is from an earlier game with one of my friends who came over to try the game out. And this is the online version. Now we have looked at that we can start to play a game. You can chose to play a local game (Start) or a LAN (network) game. We chose Start LAN Game. The settings are very simple. Change the settings as you please and press Start. But before that we take a look at the Map settings. This is the Map settings. It’s the same for LAN games as well as local games. Now we start the game. I do have another MorphOS computer connected via a router, but it’s off right now so there are no player joining this game. I press Cancel. This is the Join LAN Game. I press Join and let the computer look for a game for me. Of course, there is none so I will not get pass this point. I click Cancel again. So lets play a single player game instead! I set the game as I want it and press Start. You can also play up to 4 local players on the same keyboard. You can change the control for the players in Main menu –> Options –> Edit Players. Get Ready! Note the Wonderbaum scented tree at the top. It made me giggle the first time I noticed it. Looking at the radar at the bottom I can see that one of my enemies is on my left. There he is! And he got company! Playing cat and mouse here. But they are very elusive. I fire, but miss badly. Note the sun flare. And also the FPS metre on the bottom right.  Not bad! You can also turn the metre off. That didn’t go to well now … This is also another scene you might see a lot. This is what it looks like when you crash. Daniel has told me he intends to make it look better. It is a beta version after all. Victory! I manage to beat the computers despite the misfortune above. Not that difficult since they are, as noted above, still pretty stupid. My impression of this game at this point is that it needs some tweaking to make it more fun. The problem now is that you tend to just run around in circles until you smash into each other, or some player finally start flying straight. But Daniel is very much aware of this so we can be sure that the final version of the game will be a formidable dog fight game. The difference between the earlier and the later betas are noticable (for once, the computers was a lot more stupid before). Cherry Darling once again show us their skills.