The Frogs Of War Saga

While working on an example application for Rahner James's RJgraph EGA video C libray Linus Sphinx had very strange dream.
In this dream he was a giant Lizard/Frog guy slave mining a far off asteroid. Coring it out by driving a robot egg with a frog's legs and leaping capabilites leaving platforms for moving around like logging roads as it cored. Suddenly a revolution erupted. Tools turned to weapons friends turned to foes and the epic struggle of life and death on the corporate fast track was on. He dreamed of playing this game, of using the mouse to move his alien frog hands across a four lever dashboard, clicking to manipulate the fingers and pilot his craft belching green slime as he went.

This was not his only idea for a video game, but it was certainly one of the strangest. The time to market for anything of any size was around two years at the time, pc's were slow and tools scarce, he plodded on, coding in his spare time. EGA sank into the tar pit, he dumped all the old code, re-painted and drew new images, never quite finishing the game as it was ported from os to os, video hardware to newer video hardware, graphics library to newer graphics library, language to new fad language, it looked as if, "The Frogs Of War", would never be released. Ten years go by, Microsoft introduces DirectX as the ultimate game programming platform. Another idea popped up, he would re-write a few of his earlier tools and make a rapid game development framework for it the way he used to for MSDOS and use, The Frogs Of War", as his proof of concept application. Windows and DirectX were around long enough to finish. Then a most heinous thing happened. Suddenly MS cut off all access to the latest versions and bug fixes for DirectX except with a subscription to Microsoft Developer Network. So here I was, expending all my free time developing free games that would make Windows a more attractive and poplular operating system and now to top it all off I was going to have to pay for the pleasure. I kicked them to the curb and have been living MS free ever since. I am no longer their un-witting stooge, I like my platform am free, it's PROGRAMMERS PROGRAMMERS PROGRAMMERS! We own the platform as well as the application. It is my fondest hope to make LINUX the most popular and attractive operating system on earth and keep it free forever thus burying the evil empire. It will take me a long time to get around to porting all the things I wrote for Windows, this will be one of many as I pay penance for ever helping them in the first place, may I live long enough.

The EGA Life Forms sprite description language was born as a way to short cut the production process by eliminating hard coding and needless recompiling of sprite data. An ongoing project using text files to slice bitmaps into animation sequences or, "sprites", and rapidly transform them into interactive graphic programs. By using ELF sprites behavior can be edited, sounds or palette changes added, animation sequences fine tuned, maps altered and all without recompiling the interpeter.