Westwood Studios and I have a long-standing love/hate relationship going on. I own a ton and a half of their software, and I've always had my eye on working there. On the other hand, their HR department feels that taking two months to look at your resume is acceptable business practice. Throw in that time that Sam Lantinga and I talked our way past two locked doors to get inside Westwood to hand-deliver our resumes, and then got escorted back out of the building after the head of HR gave us hell, and you can see where the mixed feelings come from.

Still, however you slice it, Westwood makes good games. The Command and Conquer series of games have become Westwood's major gaming franchise. I would have put my money on their Dune series being the big money maker, but C&C wins out. The combination of real-time tactics and the joy of squishing small, ant-like troops with large tanks is a winning concept.

The FreeCNC project is an attempt to reverse-engineer the original C&C engine for Unix-based platforms. Like most cross-platform games, the new engine uses SDL as a wrapper to the OS-native libraries. Since a variety of documentation is available on the various file formats and compression schemes of C&C, it's actually pretty feasible to try building an open version of the engine.

When I first heard about the FreeCNC engine's development, I downloaded a copy of the project's source code and started tinkering with it. I tightened up the movie playback code a bit and added a decode-and-playback mechanism for the game's ADPCM background music. I doubt any of my code exists in it's original form in the current FreeCNC codebase, since the maintainers have rewritten those two subsystems a few times since I submitted those patches to the project. These days, I just silently cheer for the project whenever I see word of a new update having been released.

You can see more information on FreeCNC here: