Today we want to present another Game highlight of Ogre3D based games. This time: Hyper Ultra Astronautics
We asked the team behind the game if they could share some insights into the Ogre3D usage and how the game was built in general, and Mikko was kind enough to provide those:
Hyper Ultra Astronautics is a space arena shoot’em up for 1-16 players on a single PC, designed from ground up as party/couch game. It features solo, competitive and co-op game modes, wide selection of weapons, semi-realistic thruster based controls and support for various controllers.
I had previously been using my own game engine written from complete scratch, but it was very limited in functionality and took too much time to maintain. I needed to create a new one built on cross-platform open-source components. After evaluating my options I ended up with Ogre3D 1.x, Bullet, GLFW, OpenAL, Ogg Vorbis. The most important reason I chose Ogre was the clean well-structured C++ source code.
That was nearly a decade ago and I have been very happy with my choice. I hid the other components from actual game code by wrappers that make them look and behave more like Ogre, so that I can keep my game code clean and consistent. For example, I use Ogre’s vector and matrix classes everywhere.
The reason I never upgraded to Ogre 2.x is that the 1.x is very stable and has all the features that I need. I also like to aim for maximum compatibility and low system requirements to keep my games playable on old hardware.
Hyper Ultra Astronautics is my second released game using Ogre3D (first was Lockdown Protocol).
I have a habit of spending years on every game project, because I work on them on my spare time, only when I feel like it. This was no exception, it took about four years from first prototype to release.