NightHawk / News: Recent posts

Yes, folks. We finally got a nighthawk-4.0 out. Now on a much larger window, and cleaned up sound. We've even found some bugs and removed them.

Files are available in the Files section, and so far are available as either tarball or deb package - good for Ubuntu/Debian/Debian-like systems. In addition, the Debian users will finally have unencumbered sound to play Nighthawk.

Enjoy!

Yes, Dion confirmed it a few days ago - that GrayLight can be compiled, and does execute under OS X (on x86), there are slight changes to be made to the makefile to support extra parameters that are needed for the Frameworks that OS X uses. Be aware that to compile GrayLight under OS X, you will need the SDK, apparently available from the OS X DVD. I'm not totally sure if it works on the PPC platform yet, so I'll confirm this when it does work.... read more

This is a big welcome to the project's original author. Drumroll..... Jason Nunn! Along with this comes more code from Jasos, a trial sound engine so that we can all hammer-bang on the code and find whatever weak points there are. Some points: it's a trial, and I'll (viking667) be testing this on other platforms than Linux, such as BSD. Secondly, I'm not clear yet whether this is for GrayLight or for 2.x.... read more

It seems that /dev/audio works acceptably as a /dev/dsp substitute on NetBSD and OpenBSD. The game works fine on OpenBSD, but not so fine on NetBSD. Sound works but not graphics.

Will return when I have more news.

I'm mad. Officially. I've got all three publically-available BSDs on my machines, so that I can develop Night-Hawk further, and I've just pulled down
NightHawk to my OpenBSD install, which is the only BSD I haven't seen a NightHawk package available for. That, and of course, OS X (Darwin). Just to let you know that yes, I am still investigating options, and still working on stuff.
Jason (the original author) has been in contact with me and offered me some help in regard to revitalising the sound engine, so we shall see where we take the project from there.
Cheers, all.

I compiled Nighthawk-2.3 under Solaris, after changing a function slightly in nighthawk.cc to call lockf() instead of the BSD-esque flock(). It compiled. It even ran! There are still some slight problems however, and bugs popping up that I hadn't seen before. The sound engine didn't compile, of course, but that's because I haven't found some sound-related stuff under Solaris. Sound's not essential, but it'd be nice. Final problem I note here is: on Solaris, they use gmake rather than make, so I'll have to add some instructions for SolHeads to compile.

I compiled Nighthawk-2.3 under Solaris, after changing a function slightly in nighthawk.cc to call lockf() instead of the BSD-esque flock(). It compiled. It even ran! There are still some slight problems however, and bugs popping up that I hadn't seen before. The sound engine didn't compile, of course, but that's because I haven't found some sound-related stuff under Solaris. Sound's not essential, but it'd be nice. Final problem I note here is: on Solaris, they use gmake rather than make, so I'll have to add some instructions for SolHeads to compile.

Well, now that Sourceforge have fixed their CVS problems, hopefully for good, now you can see the stuff I've been working on. You ought to be able to take a look at the night-hawk-3 module too, which is GrayLight.

Cheers, SourceForge.

Very quickly, there's a new level posted to the CVS, and it's a doozy. Currently it's called "NightHawk", and it is not easy. When Sourceforge fix their anonymous CVS, it'll be there to pick up.

Cheers.

I've just realised we've been on sourceforge.net for over three years! Woohoo! In that time not a lot has happened, though the initial author gave his blessing to me (viking667) a long time ago to tweak his sourcecode and eventually to post it up here as a project. I then became project head as Jason wasn't interested in keeping it - after all, the project had languished for over seven years at that stage.
Since then, I've prodded and poked at the code, it's crashed, it's crashed the X server at times, and I think it even locked up the machine at one point. However, it seems to be rather addictive, especially when I added my own level to it just to test proof of concept.
The editor needs major work so I can use the editor to work with droids directly, instead of manually adding droids with a text editor. I've added the FreeBSD patches into the 2.3 tree as a separate directory until I work out how to integrate it into the main sourcecode. I'll also get in touch with the FreeBSD package maintainer (assuming (s)he's still doing it) and Adrian Bridgett (the Debian package maintainer) and ask what further changes they want to make.
Still, it's been fun. Hope we can do something special for the ten year anniversary of NightHawk.
Here's to you, Jason!

Yes folks, two years after Jason gave me his copy of NightHawk-3 (which I subsequently codenamed Gray Light), I've finally got off my cachucas and placed it into the CVS tree, as a separate module. When Sourceforge get their CVS problems sorted out, you can probably access it by normal anonymous CVS using the modulename night-hawk-3.
The CVS page here gives further directions if you need them.
Dion has already provided the first patch to the sourcecode, correcting a bug with parsing commandline parameters. I'm going to provide further parsing improvements. It's high time we got this puppy on the road.
There is a pre-compiled nighthawk binary in the CVS sourcetree that may eventually get removed but for the moment, it shows a proof-of-concept that yes, this really does work. Make sure you have libstdc++5 on your system when you run it, unless you decide to compile your own. Tarballs will appear real soon.

I tried out Gray Light on a better video card yesterday, and was pleasantly surprised when I found that it worked well, especially in full screen mode. I found no appreciable lag in framerate below about 30 fps, and indeed for static pictures, the framerate on my Celeron Coppermine 766MHz with Radeon 7000 (64Mb) sits just under 50 fps. Pretty good.
There are some really nice goodies about Gray Light, namely when you clear a level of droids, the whole level (except the droid) goes dark, just like the original Paradroid screens did. Not only that, but the droids actually change colour as you take armour points off them, from white to green, and eventually to red. I could possibly hack this back into 2.3.
More news - I FINALLY corrected the incorrect droid in the last level - weird that Jason missed it until he released Gray Light to me, and mentioned it in HIS readme file. So now it's a 810 instead of a 816 that doesn't exist.
I have some more work to do on both 2.3 and Gray Light, namely:
* getting my head around basic Xlib and GL programming.
* Gray Light will need MUCH more tuning just to work on non-GL machines without crashing the program.
* I also have to add the Gray Light sourcecode to the CVS sourcetree so y'all can have a look.... read more

Let's face it, folks. Configure is an old, stinking, inaccurate mess.
Well, maybe not a total mess, but it has its' bad parts. One of those is the inaccuracy of the result gained for later Intel/AMD chips. Especially now that we are approaching x86_84 chips, I don't quite know what to do here. Junking the sound layer in favour of sdl seems better, but requires more coding than I know how to do. So, in short, I need help to rewrite the "configure" script so that it does sane things on most people's machines.
You can reach me at my sourceforge email address:
viking667@users.sourceforge.net
and I'll get any emails that come my way.... read more

3 Aug 2005 - Again, it's been a loooooong time since the last update. However, I do have a little news to tell. I've imported the nighthawk-2.3 project into Eclipse IDE, and I'll probably import Gray Light as well. Another thing: I've had a couple of little bugs reported due to exposure by another player. It seems the score doesn't get reset if the player exit's the level (gets killed), and when the demo runs, the score keeps getting incremented. And way back in January, I noted that details in the "Computer Terminal" screens weren't always correct.... read more

Jason, the original author, decided to modify the project so that it could use OpenGL, hence, the name Gray Light - if you think about what alpha is, you could almost think of it as gray ... well, yeah. Anyhow, there is quite a bit of work, especially in the keyboard-handling queue - things have changed a LOT.

I will throw it up on the site, so you can see what you think of the new code. The greatest thing about it all is that you can now have game windows of whatever size your machine can handle. I might think about seeing if OpenGL can do the fullscreen thing properly.
The key handling needs a work over, as sometimes you can end up in a wall, and subsequently exit the game (via the nasty sigsev).... read more

I have released tarballs and patches through the SF File Release System, and will look at making of RPMs and Debs.
Took me a while, but I finally got off my rear and did it.

It's been a while - and all I have to show for it is a identd-HOWTO, and lots of paper rinted up about groklaw. Still, I AM still around. I still want to kill bugs.

I have returned.

The Viking

Yes - I forgot, we have RSS feeds available. Simply go to the project page and click "RSS feeds for this project", and add what feeds you want. Be aware that they will be low frequency.
I also have to tweak the night-hawk news page to include links to the news. I'll get on to that over the next week.

More web pages have been added, the latest one describing how to create levels for this marvelous game! How about you lot create some levels and send them into us?

Sorry there aren't any pictures of this - AND - you have to enable compiling of tools by editing the options.h file at the top of the source dir.

I've also tidied up the rest of the website so it looks a bit better.

Recently, very little has been done on the project - I put in a few formatting changes today, but really need more help to nail down some of the more obvious problems.
Sounds are important, and I am on the way to at least finding some decent files I can use.
Cheers.

Just a bit of nip-n-tuck, more to come. I may well split this page into two or three, and find some more links to fill that rather empty-looking left column. Let me know what you think.

Patched the sourcefiles so the droid can now move diagonally, and use the keypad to move and assign the mouse exclusively to the window (mousegrab())
Still have not adjusted build files.

On recent attempts to compile under modern CPUs - Deschutes, Celeron, Katmai, most failed to be recognised as Intel-compatible CPUs. The fault is believed to be "... deep within the bowels of the configure system, which probably needs an overhaul", project maintainer The Viking said.

"Possible candidates are the lack of selection of HOSTTYPE and OSTYPE - so if these env vars are not set within Make (mixed results on systems Viking has tried), then the sound engine will NOT be compiled, even though there might BE an Intel-compatible CPU in the machine - currently the only way to override this behaviour is to rewrite src_sound/Make.common, which is NOT really what I want to do."... read more

Adrian welcomes new maintainer, mentioning "Fantastic! ... I've not been able to include 2.0 as it's got star wars sounds in it, Debian won't include these for legal reasons". He also brought up the heavy CPU usage of the program.
I have since invited him to co-develop the project.

I've added common things that need to be done - sounds are needed to replace the Star Wars FX, compile errors have been found within Solaris 8 and FreeBSD, while configure complains about Darwin; it cannot determine machine type.
See Bugs and Tasks for other details.