Nighthawk is a tribute to one of the most playable and contagious games ever written- Paradroid by Andrew Braybrook. It was so good, it was worthy of my attention span for 6 straight months, and was the subject of conversion at school for many months as well (it was back in 87 ;). It was quite amazing seens that I've never really been into "playing games", the only other game that lifted my skirt happened in 1992 with 3D-Wolfenstein (the pre-cursor to DOOM).
It all started when I was in year 10 (1987). A friend of mine gave me a copy of Paradroid on a cassette tape (that was the common media for C-64's among my friends at the time), and that was it!, I was hooked.
Nighthawk was named after the second ship (level) of the original game. It was extremely difficult to get to this level. If you could slate the Paradroid level AND Nighthawk level (let alone the other dozen levels), you were very good, and would have been highly regarded among the governing pimply faced C-64 evanglist aristocrary at my school.
In October 92 (during the end of my degree I was doing at the time), I attempted to write a Messydos PC game like this, but didn't have enough technical knowledge about real time systems and PC's etc. Four years later, in October 96, I started working on this game.
Nighthawk has been exclusively written for the Unix/Linux X-Windows GUI. It also has sound and music.
I few people have provided patches to the current revision of nighthawk (2.2). They are:
- Cascade transferring patch (nighthawk-2.2-1-Rafael.patch) by
Rafael Laboissiere
- Level continuance patch (nighthawk-2.2-1-TK.patch) by
Tanel Kulaots
Nb/ these patches are mutually exclusive I'm afraid, until they are reconciled into the distribution. Somebody once asked me to convert Nighthawk over from xlib to one of the more popular libraries like SDL or something (which allow scaling and better keyboard handling). maybe, one day... but at the moment, I'm on to newer and better things ;).
Other Acknowledgements-
| Vincent Voois... | "Rescue from Vega" song. |
| Adrian Bridgett... | Modifications and Debugging in 1.x. Re-did instructions etc. |
| Nelson Minar... | Some small code mods in 2.2. |
| Eero Tamminen... | Did up the manual (a very funny and excentric fellow. Very good coder/hacker. I wonder where is he now ? ;). |
| Wolfgang Scherer... | Vulcanised build scripts in 2.2, added autoconf support. |
| 4-matt of Anarchy... | Introtune song (used in the games demo mode). |
It's pretty sad. It's in the archives as well-
It's available here locally: centrion.tgz