Dune II: The Building of A Remaster

[BlitterObject]

In the style of the "diary of a game" articles from back in the day, Dune II: The Building of A Remaster documents the development process for making a remaster of Dune II from scratch, specifically for AGA and OCS Amigas...two new versions!

Dune II for the Amiga never got a dedicated AGA release, and even though the game was really popular, what did get released had some problems. This project was started to right all of the wrongs and give the Amiga community the Dune II they deserve.

https://www.patreon.com/DuneIITheBui...Remaster/About

[NovaCoder]

Cool

My old AGA port requires an 060 so would be nice to see a new version with lower system requirements.

[DisasterIncarna]

liking the sound of this already.

[klx300r]

Originally Posted by NovaCoder

Cool

My old AGA port requires an 060 so would be nice to see a new version with lower system requirements.

Nova you saying I missed one of your ports

ah found it on good ol aminet and working fine with RTG! Is it possible to pick a RTG screen resolution or can I just use the scale feature?

[Evillord68]

Thats are really good news.

[sokolovic]

Wow wonderful news ! Nice to see a membre of the original Westwood team leading this project ! Thanks !

[NovaCoder]

Originally Posted by klx300r

Nova you saying I missed one of your ports

ah found it on good ol aminet and working fine with RTG! Is it possible to pick a RTG screen resolution or can I just use the scale feature?

Cool


I think the scaler/zoom factor changes the screen resolution from memory.

Don't forget that it has camd MIDI support for that awesome dune music.

[mahen]

Ooooohh... Lovely ! Definitely gonna support it :-)

BTW, is the main objective to make it as close to the DOS version as possible, or to make it Amiga-ish in some ways ?

Thank you !

[Predseda]

Dune II is full of small undocumented tricks and details, that players discovered and and benefit from them. Since you were in the original team I hope you are aware of them and will keep those in your new version. Some sequels like Dune 2000, missed all those and they resulted into absolutely sterile games.

[alexh]

Backed. I hope that it is an interesting journey and successful.

[Don_Adan]

Nice project.
Good luck.
BTW. I have one question.
Do You have access to Dune II DEMO for Amiga?
V1.0 text on title screen was replaced with DEMO text.

Many years ago, I had this version.
Unfortunelly I copy full version on demo disks.
Seems it was very rare version, because I cant find this version on the net.

[dlfrsilver]

Ok i have tested the intro compiled by Robert, and it appears that the graphics and animations are corrupted on my A1200 with 030. It works however with OS3.2 with 2mb of ram and 68020.

[BlitterObject]

Thanks for the well wishes, everyone! <3

@mahen: The goal is for it to be as close to the DOS version as possible. I'm treating it as though I was (still) at Westwood and given the task to port it to Amigas.

@Predseda: I will keep as much as possible (ideally everything) from the DOS version. There will definitely be a different campaign mode that fixes many of the bugs the DOS version had (making it _much_ harder, heh).

@Don_Adan: Wow...I have NO memory of a demo version! It would be easy enough to do for the new version(s) though.

@dlfrsilver: Thank you for the feedback! I will take a look.

[gimbal]

Nice to see an O.G. pick up such a project. Dune 2 is cool, but to be honest just give me a free play mode which is essentially the last level with less of a limit on how many buildings can be placed in the map. The progression in the game wasn't really all that inspiring, no story to speak of. You get a new building and maybe a new tank which will immediately be the only one you'll use from that moment forward.

I'd rather just skip right to the meat and potatoes. You don't live until you're fighting three enemies at once, and the bloody missile of course.

And also to be honest... I can do without the ornithopter mosquitos. All it takes is some missile turrets and they're immediately a non-threat and you'll be building those anyway to protect your base from bloody carryall sneak attack drops. Ditch the ornithopters and do more carryall drops I'd say to put on the pressure.

The worms though... those can use a buff. It's kind of lame that in the original game they just vanish when consuming three enemies, because it doesn't even matter which enemies they eat. Just send three lowly troopers or trikes at them and poof - worm problem solved.

[Calabazam]

Wow. I remember well the day i bought Dune II.
I was a teenager in Paris at Micromania store of Forum des Halles where there were several shelves full of Amiga games. The new games at the time were Syndicate from Bullfrog or Dune II from Westwood. Of course i was a huge fan of the books and of Dune from Cryo, but i did also like Bullfrog games including their previous Populous 2.
But i had only 349 francs to spend (both those games were amongst the most expensive games, usually it was 249 to 299 francs on the Amiga). I hesitated a long time and went with Dune 2 and i didn't regret it. It was one of the few games which made me carry my A500 Plus with me as if it was a laptop. Funny you said it was released with problems. I had no bug at all, and could finish the game with no problem. No one could say the same from current games of 2020's.
For the record, i never had Syndicate on the Amiga but played Syndicate Wars a long time after that, on the PC. No doubt Dune 2 was better.
349 francs from 1993 would be 85,97 euros now, corrected with inflation.

[Predseda]

Originally Posted by gimbal

The worms though... those can use a buff. It's kind of lame that in the original game they just vanish when consuming three enemies, because it doesn't even matter which enemies they eat. Just send three lowly troopers or trikes at them and poof - worm problem solved.

- which is exactly one of those undocumented secrets I was talking about and which make Dune II so special.

[aeberbach]

Originally Posted by Calabazam

It was one of the few games which made me carry my A500 Plus with me as if it was a laptop. Funny you said it was released with problems. I had no bug at all, and could finish the game with no problem. No one could say the same from current games of 2020's.

It was one of the greatest Amiga games for sure. I remember the day I first saw it, went to a university friend's with two others one Sunday because we had a big C++ assignment due Monday. But then we just had a quick look at a couple of new games he had picked up... No C++ was done that day, only Dune II. I had never heard of the books but I read them after playing the game. Also bug-free and I completed all houses many times.

[fgh]

Great project, and very cool that you’re one of the original developers!

Any chance we’ll get an optional ‘select multiple units’ feature ?

(I didn’t even know about the ‘follow the leader’ feature back then. Does it even work in the amiga version?)

[klx300r]

@ BlitterObject

Looking forward to the Patreon updates and the AGA release


@ NovaCoder

yup that CAMD midi Dune music is sweeeeet

[Solo Kazuki]

@BlitterObject
I hope You finish at least AGA version. I have also some questions.
I suppose game would be hard disk friendly?
Do You plan add additional features? E.g. selecting multiple units?
How music and sfx would be played? I mean some mixing routine (at least for AGA) to more channels is planned?