Leaderboard

Colors have shifted a bit over time, yes. The game is semi-stuck in 256-color land with a custom 256-color pallette that I do something to mess with once in a great while. I've been a programmer of HC for over 20 years now and what working on it looks like continually changes. When I converted from tester to programmer there were four of us programmers, one working on the platform editor and the rest of us on everything else. At the time my real job was running my own IT contracting firm but to be taken under the wings of a genius Harpoon programmer was an amazing gift. There were a ton of surrounding people, I don't say supporting because I was no more important than the people creating platforms in the database. Anyone can learn to sling code but to sift through mountains of articles to derive platform data, that is a special skill! The collaboration was efficient and rarely were there insurmountable agreements. You ask about the to-do list and being infinitely long, there is always something of particular personal interest to build or improve when a break is needed from the drudgery of maintaining a 36 year old piece of software. A fraction of the to-do list is illustrated in the Issue Tracker here and the Wishlist forums. For the last decade or so I've put I'd say around 1/3 of my effort into the ExportDLL interface that allows those without the game source code to write addons. That has brought fresh life to the game as you see from donaldseadog's addons and will allow it to live on when the rights holders (Bond & Carlson) pull the plug on the publishing of the game. Maintaining a semblance of backwards compatibility is a huge but rewarding burden. Many times in those early years we nearly dropped all legacy BattleSets to reduce that burden but we always left them in and accepted the burden. I went even further sometime after 2007 and started writing saved game format converters. Between 2002 and then we would periodically enhance/break the saved game format (not the scenario format) meaning we didn't commit to saved games from a previous build being able to be opened in the current build. These days I'm the only one programming the package that you get from Matrix games; one other pops in every few years and does something amazing. Most of the administrative tasks fall to me as well, it is a tiny group compared to what we had. You've seen some passionate testers here and amazing scenario authors but they are few in number. There are interesting times ahead with much opportunity for someone to come along and re-build a strong community that can get the best out of each of us. Much more help is needed to make efficient use of myself, donaldseadog, and when we provide the tools for them, the database editors.