TimeGate Studios is a new face in the gaming industry, but their first title, "Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns", looks like a winner. KIS is a real-time strategy game that strikes a good balance between strategy, tactics, diplomacy, and teamwork. All in all, really good stuff!

There's an interesting span list-based rendering engine inside of KIS that gives the game engine the ability to display many, many sprites at the same time with no pixel overdraw. Also, the game uses a number of specialized assembly-based blitters that contribute to the speed of the game's rendering engine. Mickey Kawick's book Real-Time Strategy Game Programming Using MS DirectX 6.0 has a terrific sample implementation of a span list renderer, in case you were interested in learning a bit more about it.

While I spent a large portion of time dealing with the assembly code within the game engine, I spent even more time coordinating with Timegate Studios. At the time I began porting the KIS codebase to Linux, the Win32 codebase was still under development. It wasn't too long before large patches were being sent from Loki to Timegate Studios and back as the Linux tools caught things that the Win32 tools didn't. As the Win32 codebase stabilized, both the Linux codebase and the Win32 codebase were rock solid.

... but boy... it's a lot of work to do simultaneous development on two platforms from two different locations. Quite an experience for both the Win32 and Linux folks involved.

These days, the Linux port of KIS is being maintained by Transgaming. Actually, the Transgaming version of KIS isn't a native port, but rather the Win32 version compiled against Transgaming's proprietary libraries. I have my doubts about this approach to maintaining KIS, but time will tell how successful it is.

You can see more information on Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns here: