Making of TOU

Here are some pictures from the early stages of TOU.

1. Picture. This is where it started. Those boxes represent ships. Dumbfire was the first weapon =). TOU was started with Borland C++ 4.5, which's memory usage was restricted to 640 kilobytes! Boy, those 200 x 200 pixel levels were small!
2. Picture. Troopers came in very early stages.
3. Picture. V-shaped, but 3d rendered ships were kind of cool ;)
4. Picture. The first graphical level in TOU.
5. Picture. Second map that was loaded from a file. And it had water streams. Collapser was new weapon.
6. Picture. First things first, running water was already in the very early versions of TOU.
7. Picture. Some Photoshop-plasma levels. Still the size was 200 x 200 pixels.
8. Picture. Lots of new weapons and blood.
9. Picture. The ships had shadows! (look right below them).. This feature isn't even in the current version of TOU =)
10. Picture. Explosions, smoke, gun bitmaps, fonts... This was the first decent Watcom-version of TOU and thanks to new available memory (I had 16 megs that day) it was possible to do all those explosions and huge levels. TOU started looking a bit like a game.

And the rest of the old (dos) versions don't even work on my present machine because of their odd 320x240x15 resolution. TOU was made with Watcom 11.0 for a quite long time.

After a long pause, I decided to convert TOU to Visual C. The first release of TOU was in October, 2002.

The GG (ground/grand generator) has also vastly improved during years. Take a look at these early stage pictures. Pretty tight areas, wouldn't you say?

1. Picture. This shows the original Earth theme for GG.
2. Picture. It also had a candy theme, inspired by Worms.
3. Picture. And an ice theme. Can you find a bug in this picture? :)