dinomaster on 18/12/2007 at 23:48

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Hello to all Overworld Zero fans ;)
I've got great news, the first (?) playable Overworld Zero remake is done!

Overworld Zero from System Shock 2 is my favorite minigame but sadly you don't find much about it on the net. It seems there have been several attempts to do a remake but they never seemed to have any result. So I've decided to do it myself, and after a long time it is almost done!

I'm saying "almost" because even though it's playable from beginning to the end, the code is a real mess, and I'm now at the stage of cleaning it up, before I'm going to fix any bugs which may be left in there.

If you want to play it, you can download a preview at the project page: (http://sourceforge.net/projects/owz/)
(You should really read the manual.txt included in the download, because saving the game state is a bit odd at the moment!)

I've decided to code it in Java because this was easiest to do for me at that time, so you will need Java 6 runtimes (eg. from sun (http://www.java.com/de/download/manual.jsp)), but once I cleaned up the sourcecode it should be portable to other languages.

edit: forgot to add a screenshot ;)
Yes this is the remake, not the original :)
http://i254.photobucket.com/albums/hh118/gavaldor/owz.png

RocketMan on 19/12/2007 at 18:44

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Awww that is sweet. Great job!

As an aside, I'm a java programmer in training (made a few apps for work and some for practice) but want to see some real cool stuff in action. Are you releasing the source code?

dinomaster on 19/12/2007 at 21:54

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First, thanks for the comments!


Yes, the game sourcecode will be released after it's cleaned up. At the current state it won't be of any use to anyone but me I guess :p

Though since I've made the code GPL and someone wants to insist on his right to see the it I can send it to him, but trust me you'll be better off waiting until it's cleaned up if you want to actually understand the code :)


I can't tell since I never learned coding in Flash - to me it seems like Flash concentrates on simplifying graphic and interface coding with the downside of making game logic coding more complicated (sorry if I'm wrong here, I don't know much Flash ;)) Once I've cleaned up the code it might be portable to other languages, if someone feels like it - to be honest I also think there are better languages than Java to use for the visual interface, but this can still be worked on later.

I won't do remakes of any other SS2 GamePig titles because I don't think they are worth the time needed for a high quality remake. Overworld Zero just was an original concept by itself, which the other games don't have. (I never played SS1 so I don't know if it has any good ones).

The reason to chose Java is the way I was coding the remake. I've started to study Overworld Zero at the beginning of 2006 - only in my free time of course, so progress was slow. It took me a whole year to figure out how the important stuff works. Results are *lots* of test data which I'm using to verify my implementation stays close to the original. I needed a language where I could integrate the test data easily, so I've considered both C# and Java, the only languages I know which offer the features I needed. I've made a C# prototype too, it actually still exists and is somewhat playable but much more buggy. I've decided to switch to Java because automatic testing is more friendly there and it seemed a bit more Windows-independant :)