HZ - a real-time action strategy engine by David Jeske

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What is HZ?

I started this project about a year ago, and talked about it at least a year before then. I work on it in my spare time, although recently (June '98) I've found some more energy to make progress.

My original intention was to clone the classic real-time action strategy game Herzog Zwei (english pronuciation close to 'he-a-tsuk zvei'). This game combines the action of a real-time action game, with more strategy than the current offering of what I have started to refer to as 'real-time action tactics games' such as Warcraft II, Starcraft, Command & Conquer, etc. See my Herzog Zwei Tutorial.

However, as work progressed, I decided I want to go far beyond that. I set out to make a general engine for real-time strategy games. I was inspried by the idea of the Tactics Engine which is the core of Dark Reign. However, I found the Tactics Engine to have little more external expandability than unit icons, and property value setting. A short list of features I set out to include:

third person unit control (HZ style)
god style unit control (Warcraft II, etc)
unit properties and physics in scripting language
no special cases in the engine like "phazing" ( specifically unlike the Tactics Engine)
FAST, by using the 2d hardware blitter
16bit color support
networked play
automatic level/script module downloading

Currently, most of these have come to fruition, and the feature list grows far larger.

Game Scripting Language

At first, I looked at using a Scheme variant for a scripting language, primarily because Abuse successfully made the C/Scheme combo work. However, after some preliminary performance comparisons, I decided that a little known scripting language called Lua would much better suit my needs. The licensing is unrestrictive, it's much faster than any of the available Scheme implementations, and it's very easy to interface with C. It's proven to be a great choice.

David W. Jeske (jeske@chat.net)