well... its only me for now but how many out there want one of the greatest games ever made for iPhone ??? please some dev look here !!! ;-)
It's a great game and would be a nice match for the device. One problem to solve is who owns the rights to the game these days. The last publisher to put out an official game based on the IP (Sentinel Returns) was Psygnosis, who I believe was acquired by Sony. If the rights remain with Psygnosis, it's unlikely that we'd see an official remake on the iPhone.
welll maybe someone can call it S3ntinel and do a clone a la Rainbow Arts style ;-) finger crossed that one day I'll be playin' it on iphone...
Your wish is my command! Random that I should find this thread, but I actually have a Sentinel style game in review right now - it's called "The Watcher" and should have passed cert by the end of next week. Nice that somebody out there remembers the original, I feel rather old whenever I think about it. It is a great match for the device BTW, the touchscreen is perfect to move your view about. There's 75 levels and also a configurable random level generator, so you can make infinite levels at your own skill level. Here are some pics of The Watcher :
Hah! You wait for months, and then two come along at once! Mine is still a work in progress, as the strange sideways buttons demonstrate, but it is getting closer to completion...
Great stuff James, can't wait to see it finished! When you submit don't do what I did and use commodore 64 or The Sentinel in your keywords though - mine would already be out if I hadn't of done that Are you using the colour buffer or maths for the picking on yours BTW?
Thanks for the kind words - good luck with your remake too. I knew the rules regarding trademarks, so I'm not going to have Sentinel in the title. Or anywhere else in the game for that matter. Also, I had a Spectrum, so no mentions of C64s either! I'm using maths for the picking. The colour buffer method would need re-rendering for the player's picks, and again for the Sentinel bad guy's observations. The maths route ought to be faster, and since the landscape can be considered a bumpy checkerboard, the maths isn't too tricky either.
Great to see some look-alikes coming. I have searched for 'Sentinel' in the App Store a few times in the last year; with copyrights in mind perhaps that wasn't the best approach anyway . Had it on Amstrad CPC like 20 years ago; at one point I did go hard out on it and if I recall I had the level codes for up to at least 100. Good times. Good luck with approvals!
I think you're way better off with maths for the picking, if I was doing it again that's what i'd use. It's not so much that there's a speed hit with the extra rendering, given the nature of the game you don't notice. It's that getting the colour buffer working properly was a bit of a pain - it always seemed to be a bit imprecise re. what came out vs. what went in and took me a while to get it sorted. Should have just bit the bullet and done the math!
That phrase comes to mind when I think of parts of my code! Sure you would never notice any speed issues for the player's picks, but what about the bad guy? He's got to be continuously on the look out for stuff to absorb. Is his rotation speed slow enough that you only need to check once in a while? What about multiple baddies? Or are you doing this stuff in a totally different way?
How I do it is every time the board alters I do a very basic logical render from the view point of each baddy towards any new object of interest and if it can be seen then cache the angle, so that as the baddies rotate they already know what they can see without any further renders. The logical render is incredibly optimised too - untextured, unlit and all the non-flat terrain is pure white on a white background so it can be easily discounted. It really is so fast you don't notice it happening, but it's true it would be a really crappy method for anything other than a very limited problem domain like the sentinel and your math based solution should trounce it in absolute figures (you can still save some cycles by not running the routine every frame though). The problem I had re. framerate was much more about pushing so many textured polys with two smooth lighting passes on the original touch/iPhone. Took a lot of optimization to get it really snappy!
Any idea when The Watcher might become available? I loved the Sentinel, so this should go down a treat....
It's available today, although it doesn't seem to have come through to any of the main pages yet - if you search for "The Watcher" it's there though, in the applications section. Hope you enjoy it! If you notice any bugs or anything then let me know here and i'll fix them asap. I already have an update almost finished which: Adds a fourth world, Ice, with 25 more levels Radically improves rendering speed (helps 1st gen touches mostly) Increases max level size Makes browsing levels quicker Fixes a few other small bugs, like grass world 21 not being quite right. Now if only Apple would give me any kind of exposure I might sell more than 3 copies!
you got the wrong idea... its not sentinel earth/mars defense by origin8, its the sentinel! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sentinel_(video_game) of course, i've never played this game as im only 13 (it seems like a meh game to me)
