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Damocles is a game that came out in 1990, for Amiga and Atari ST, that allowed the player to explore a whole solar system, on foot and with various vehicles. A remake for MS-DOS was supposed to come out in 1995, with textured graphics, an orchestral CD soundtrack and (if used with a VFX-1 head-mounted display) a stereoscopic display mode. Unfortunately, Psygnosis cancelled it mere weeks before its release, and despite unsubstantiated rumors of a demo based on Mercenary 3 being released, it never saw the light of day. And this is where TADPSID comes in. Like Bobby Brown says: "If you want something done, you gotta do it yourself.". So, with the released screenshots as a reference, I started modelling objects and making textures to populate a virtual environment that I created with Irrlicht version 1.5 and Irrklang, with the goal to recreate as closely as possible the look that Damocles for PC was supposed to have. How close? Well, take a look at a sequence of comparative screenshots and decide for yourselves. On the left, you can see the original Damocles screenshots. On the right, you can see what that environment looks like in TADPSID. This renders its graphics with Direct3D 9, which makes it compatible with all modern forms of stereoscopy, from the eDimensional glasses, to the nVidia 3DVision kit, to head-mounted displays like the VR920 or the Z800. It's turned into a specific story, based on his ideas for a 4th Mercenary episode. |
