My first post, Hi-Octane from Bullfrog

[woalexan]

Hello,
as this is my first ever post in this forum I wanted to take the opportunity to introduce myself: My name is Alexander, I live in Austria, and I am already 41 years old (time is unfortunetly flying). I am very happy that I seem to be not the only one thinking back about the great games from my childhood (and DOS times) from time to time And I am very thankful that I found this forum.

I can still remember when I first played "Hi-Octane" from Bullfrog somewhere around the year 1995 at a 80486 computer at someones computer during a visit. I was completely blown away, I since then somehow this game always followed me during my live. Around 2010 when I was at the university I tried the first time if I could somehow recreate this game (at least partly) myself. I made a crude craft model in Blender, and was able to open it in a self written program. But I gave up pretty quick.

Around 2021 I was looking around the internet, and just by sheer luck I found out that around 2017 some people did reverse engineer most of the necessary file formats of the original game (HiOctaneTools project at Github). The user also introduced this project (a level editor) in your forum, as far as I saw before. For me this was a real game changer, and I immediately decided to start another attempt to recreate this game myself somehow based on this new information. Another blessing were the informations I was able to find on the DOS Game Modding Wiki about this game as well. Especially about the used sound and music formats.

Some years later I have a playable version of the game, but of course there are still problems and bugs to fix, and many improvements to be made. I also started working on a level editor for Hi-Octane myself recently. Some things in the map can already be modified, but there are still most of the things to be implemented over time.

I just wanted to let you know that there is this project out there, in case there is someone else that really liked this game as much as I do. Unfortunetly my project is almost impossible to be found otherwise. If you want to check the project out: https://github.com/woalexan/hi-octane202x

If you have any feedback, thoughts, questions or ideas regarding this project, please let me know

Have a nice day, with Kind Regards,

Alexander

[woalexan]

Hello MrFlibble,

Thank you very much for unlocking my first post, I guess it was you I am very happy that I was able to join this forum, and I hope in the near future I am able to maybe learn something interesting during my project that I can then give back to this forum and community. I am also thinking about maybe extending the information at the ModdingWiki one day. I already have a little bit more information than is shown there. I just need to learn how to add information there. And maybe get to know the people behind this projects a little bit first (if possible). I think it is really great that there are other people as well that still like and think about older games as well.

Thank you very much, Have a nice day

[MrFlibble]

Hello, and welcome to the forums! Apologies for the belated approval of your posts! You'll see it's pretty quiet here these days.

Personally I'm a big fan of source code/engine recreation projects, although I myself lack the skills to make any meaningful contribution to this field. There are many recent and promising reverse-engineering efforts with some impressive results (like SDLPoP, The Force Engine, Rigel Engine, DevilutionX or Dethrace), as well as a good number of successful engine recreations by observation, such as ReDuke. I wish you the best of luck with your project too!

As a matter of fact, I might have seen your project before, although it does not appear to be mentioned at OS Game Clones, which is a big database of similar endeavours and other kinds of game "clones". Anyway, enjoy your stay!

[woalexan]

Hello, thank you very much for the friendly welcome to this forum. No problem that the approval took some time I can understand why this forum is more quiet these days, but this makes this forum even more important and interesting, because I am sure without this place it is even more difficult to be able to talk with someone that is interested in this great gaming times as well.

Thank you very much for wishing me luck with the project, I am sure it will help me moving forward As I also wrote at my Github page I was only able to start with a project like this, and continue with success because of a lot of other people before me, that did great reverse engineering and also (very important) shared their knowledge with other people. And I just want to try my best to continue this path collecting information about Hi-Octane, and putting it into source code (that is one day hopefully useful or interesting for other people as well).

To be honest I develop my project currently simply based on observations from playing/testing the original game. I also spent weeks of real disassembly and reverse engineering of the original games binary files in IDA Pro Free, and I made some progress as well (I know how the game renders the screen, I know in which functions things are loaded and so on), but after quite some time I gave up (at least for now). Because I saw the benefits from disassembly compared what I can achieve in the same time simply writing my own code (with own ideas how I could do things) was so much more rewarding and efficient.

But of course this means my project will 100% likely never be a real copy of the original in all details. Unfortunetly. It will be so interesting to see how the project I am working on will develop in the near future, and if some people will found it interesting or useful.

Thank you also for mentioning the link to OS Game Clones, I was not aware of this great website

Have a nice day