IRE - The Flat

IT-HE Roleplaying Game Engine

The Flat - 1991

The Flat was originally a DC-World game, a joint project with my brother, before I was familiar enough with PC programming to develop my own engine. The Flat used DCworld version 2.1, which was obsolete even then, although I would not know it for another 6 years.

I wanted to do a modern/future game, in blatant defiance of the medieval/fantasy tileset provided, so a little hackery was in order. Using XTree I changed the names of many characters to more modern things, e.g. Guard -> Taxman, Dwarf -> Autoporter, and many others.

It was intended to be released through Moon PD, a stillborn 'commercial' venture in the style of the recent dot-coms, dedicated to selling freeware and public domain software for the PC, which at the time, worked well for the Amiga and Atari ST. Hence, there were many references to Moon PD throughout the game.

It looked like this:

1991 Intro

1991 In-game

The Flat '91 download

If you wish to see the old version of The Flat, I've made it available.
Since it isn't open source, it's not hosted on Sourceforge, but you can get it by clicking here for the last known snapshot (Sept 1991).

It's about 172k.

The Flat - 1998-2000

When IRE began to take shape, I needed a decent world to test the game engine.
I chose to re-make The Flat.

2000 - In-game

The Flat has shipped as the IRE demo world with all versions of the engine since 0.4, and will probably continue to be shipped in the future.

The re-make is not as complete as the original, and is not presently being developed much further, other than to keep it working as the engine evolves.

All creative development is currently being put into the False Messiah project.

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