Ant Colony

Feb 2000 – Aug 2000 · age 18

What it was

A real-time strategy engine about ants, in C++ and fixed-function OpenGL, built mostly in June 2000. It scrolled a window over a 256-by-256 heightmap with an orbit camera and classic edge scrolling, packed colour and texture tile into one integer per vertex, and let you drag a box to select units and send them to a point. Units steered around obstacles by trying three deflected headings. The ant idea was the layers: a surface plus four earth strata, with buttons to page underground, though the earth layers stayed flat placeholders. Around it grew a real toolchain: models exported from MilkShape, converted and packed by six small tools, with each prop's collision outline derived from its own mesh at build time. The animated ant was finished three days before the last build and never loaded.

Wins, for the age

• At eighteen, Jeff built a toolchain, not just a program: converters, packers and batch files feeding a game that read only their outputs.
• Derived collision footprints from the art at build time, finding on its own what the Quake BSP compiler (1996) already did.
• Declared units, props and the world in data files from day one, the lesson Doom's WAD files (1993) taught an industry, relearned by one teenager.
• Chose a stratified underground map, the cross-section SimAnt (1991) had shown, and built the UI for paging through it before the layers had content.
• Selection drawn through the light map for free, and a complete avoidance loop in twenty lines. This ape's first pathing code.

What it taught

• The whole shape of an RTS client: viewport over a big map, drag-select, orders, a GUI over the 3D view.
• Separate source assets from built assets, and declare content in files the code does not name.
• Slope-intercept line math is painful; the vertical special case said so.
• Once a project has a pipeline it needs version control. The final source had simulation switched off, with no note saying why.

Genealogy

Ancestors: Zen Risk: a strategy map where a click becomes a command. Descendants: Evolution 4 K: the next OpenGL game and hand-rolled model format. Kitchen: engine, asset tools and data-driven content, grown up. Pack Unpack: resource packs, many files in one indexed blob. Z3D Warp Engine SDK: the engine pulled out into a reusable DLL.

Epitaph

Here lies Ant Colony, which learned to scroll, select and give orders across five layers of earth, and whose only soldier was a box, because the ant arrived three days before the last build.