🐔 Chicken Invaders 1 Remastered #03

Let’s take stock of what we have:

  • The original game was created in 1999.

  • It’s a pure 2D game using DirectX 6.0 (and later DirectX 7.0). Specifically, the “DirectDraw” part.

  • The game is a single source file (“compilation unit”), and another one for the UVE engine. It’s a total of 2377 lines of code (excluding blank lines, but including comments). Ah, simpler times. As a comparison, CIU is 321351 lines of code as of January 2023. That’s 135 times bigger. Is it 135 times a better game? Uhh… moving right along.
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  • Native resolution is 640x480, 4:3 aspect ratio.

  • Fixed frame rate of 26 fps 25 fps.

  • The only graphics necessary for the game proper are these:
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  • There are also some ancillary graphics, if you want to count those in (time travel note: it turns out that we’ll mostly ignore these for the remaster):
    image

  • All source assets for the game are in a single folder. The entire source assets folder is about 18MB for a final data size (WAD) of 9MB. Shall we compare this to CIU? 23GB (plus another 2GB for the upcoming CI soundtrack masters) in 21445 files and 1006 folders for a final WAD data size of 426MB. Again, simpler times.
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Actually, I was lying just above when I showed the graphics arranged in neat textures. CI1 graphics are actually stored as individual files, and the screenshots shown are the output of an automatic transformation step that removes the color keying (converts it into “alpha” transparency) and organizes them into textures (that can be used by more modern versions of the UVE engine). I originally wrote this program in 2009 (apparently, judging by the file dates) for the CI2 remaster, and I tweaked it slightly to also handle CI1.

There are also 23 .WAV files for sounds, but I’m not going to focus on those, since they will mostly be straightforwardly converted into .OGG and used verbatim. They are of predictably low quality, but I no longer have the original sources and even if I did, I doubt their quality would be any higher. I think they’re part of the charm of the original game anyway.


Next part in the series

Start at the beginning

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image
(so, would you fix these stray pixels?)

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320k lines is insane yo, congrats for the achieved progress

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Will you release the remaster in Steam? or only in the website?

Yes

Only website, initially. Also:

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