Iron Dignity

Latest preview here

December 1999

Latest preview pictures - click to view at full-size:

A release date for Iron Dignity has not yet been announced. Artex have referred to negotiations with publishers for the rights to the PC version, but no deal has yet been publically announced.

^{Screenshot from an earlier version}

Iron Dignity began life as a non-interactive rolling demo produced by Frank Foehl, and it was only later that Artex Software took over the project and brought development in-house. Artex's successful track-record includes Ankh, Exodus and Botkiller 2, and they are also working on the forthcoming TEK. Frank Foehl has been responsible for such top games as Oregan's 3D asteroid game, Magnetoids.

The picture nearest above shows the game running on an Acorn machine in a 16 million colour mode at a resolution of over 480x300, complete with texture-mapping, real-time reflections and translucency effects. Artex are producing the graphics, sound effects, music and films for the game, as well as the overall designing. They're also handling the presentation, playtesting and marketing. The most recent public demo of the game, intended to be run on Acorn's now long-abandoned 'Phoebe - Risc PC 2' machine, was included on the Acorn User 200th edition cover CD-ROM in autumn 1998 - quite how the game has evolved since then (and been retargetted at the slower, existing Acorn hardware) is not entirely clear.

The first announcements about this game were made quite some time ago, in April 1997. Dated from back then, here's an earlier article on this game:

Iron Dignity is an ambitious campaign simulation game set in a fictional world, which will allow players to control troops of soldiers, giving orders to single units or groups thereof. You can also take a first-person perspective view and control of any unit at any time. Although the demo contains just a landscape, a walker and a ship, the final game will contain many features, including forests, cities, vehicles and various animated objects, as well as buildings with doors you can enter through.

The demo will run in different colour-depth modes - as supplied it runs in a 24-bit mode - and features such effects as transparency, light-shaded and texture-mapped robots and ships, Gouraud-shading and a circularly-graduated sky. The resolution can be changed, as can the level of detail, allowing the game to run more acceptably on slower machines, although a StrongARM remains highly desirable. This demo doesn't have any shadows, but these are planned for the finished version, thankfully. Many graphical niceties such as lens flare, sky features and triple buffering have still to be implemented, and in general the graphics engine is not yet complete. But as a taste of what is to come, this is a highly tantalisting demo!

You can download the demo from the URL ftp://sidonie.imag.fr/AcornDemos/FtpArea/3D_engines/, choosing the files Demo020_1 and Demo020_2, but be warned that in total they are 1,864,515 bytes long! And you'll need !PackDir or !SparkFS to decompact them.

The programmer can be contacted by email: Frank Foehl, foehlfk@tick.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de. There is lots more information about the proposed game available within the downloadable demo archive, or if you just want this text file you can click here for the !Help file from the game (which is copyright the author, of course).

...this page last updated: 18/12/99...
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