While i had the plan to write about Preemptive Fire yesterday, there was little time so i pushed it back a day.

First i will give some infos of Return Fire, since it is the base i start working from.
Return Fire was an arcade game for Windows 95, running with 256 colors at a 640×480 or 320×240 resolution. If you had windows running at 16bit or more you had to reduce to 256 colors, which was rather annoying. The objective was to find and recover the enemy flag, hidden in one of many flag towers. For reaching that goal you had 4 different vehicles, a jeep, a tank, a rocket tank and an helicopter. The Jeep was fast, but would be destroyed with 1 hit, but was the only vehicle able of carrying the flag and it could blow up the tires so it could swim over water. The tank was the working unit, neither fast nor slow with medium armor and firepower. The rocket tank was very slow, but had great firepower and the best armor. Additionally it was able to lay mines, which were frequently used for laying onto of the enemy bunker in a 2 player game. The helicopter was fast and had 2 different weapons, strong short range air to ground missiles and weaker air to air rockets. But it had a very weak armor and fuel was always a problem.
Speaking of fuel, every unit had a gas tank and limited ammo, but could refill each in either the own bunker or some resupply stations all over the map, but like all buildings in the game, they could be destroyed rather easily.
For defense there were rocket towers, in multiplayer each side side had some, in singleplayer only the AI had them, since the AI wasn’t able to control vehicles. That was one mayor reason why singleplayer was skipped by most players.
The multiplayer game however was brilliant, for that time. Still it had its problems, since it was split screen only the game was limited to 2 players and when both players were using the same keyboard it often happened that some key strokes were not registered since many keyboards were not able to register 6 or more keys at the same time. So it happened frequently that 1 player was not able to fire while the other was moving in circles around him firing everything there was.
And this is where Preemptive Fire comes into play. Some features i plan on implementing are 4+ player network games, AI controlled vehicles for single- and multiplayer and the support of the original music and maps of Return Fire. Maybe i can even add new game modes like cooperative play or deathmatch. I can even think of game modes like chickenrun where you have to hold the flag as long as possible and so on.

This should be enough right now, next time i will most likely write about the printer daemon i build.