mjr

Thank you very much!
I also wish it would be possible to "finish" P.I.D.
However, due to number of reasons, it cannot be finished. It can only be recreated. I give list as of why's.

-Stavros never made it past the rolling demo. The rolling demo is lost, I tried to search for it but in vain.
-I could only describe the game and what happens in it, or what was supposed to happen, from my memory, as what I remember from my discussions with him. And he didn't necessarily tell me everything.
-Legally, the project is property of Housemarque, and their permission would be needed
-The way background graphics is built is time-consuming to the extreme. I would not want to go building the levels they were originally meant to be built, therefore making it run on stock amigas would be impossible. You would need at least 8mb ram and HD install support.
-I don't even have all the background art and car sprites, as I wasn't so heavily involved with those. They could be mined from Housemarque's A1200, but again that would take time. And they were not all finished.
- Even if source code could be located and recovered from A1200 hard disk that is at the HMQ storage room, it is probably highly optimized spaghetti which would be extremely difficult to build upon. You would need to re-engineer it and build it from the scratch in order to be able to work with it. Also, the cars had surprisingly complex physics (each wheel was modelled and had their own traction, you could do sliding and other driving stunts that are common these days in car games but were absent back then). It would take time to figure it all out and make it run 50fps on unaccelerated Amiga. Technically the game was every bit as ambitious as Elfmania, which had some unusually complicated things (such as neural net and individual strong/weak points for every character and AI that was able to exploit it) running under the hood.

To summarize it; recreating P.I.D would take years and hundreds of man hours, and it is likely that Stavros would not be pleased, if other people would start messing around with his baby. Even though PID is legally owned by Housemarque, not Stavros (AFAIK), I would still advice against recreating the game. Just believe me on this one.

Best thing I can do, and I would be able to do some day maybe, would be to create mock-up video using animation software which could give you an illusion of what the game could actually have been. To make them run on amiga under some code would be tempting, but that would quickly lead to other things, and I don't want to open that particular can of worms. I am sorry.

Same goes for Elfmania datadisk: Elfmania is already built-in to support the data disk, but most of the character art is unfinished, and making the characters for that game is exceedingly laborious due to memory-saving tricks: after animating the characters, the sprites were sliced in horizontal parts, which were recycled all over the sequences in order to save the memory. And sometimes you had to alter the animation in order to recycle more parts. And thats why the animation in that game was smooth but bit flat, really. And I dont even want to think what it would take to figure out how the code for Elfmania works.