CorsixTH Beta 8 Released

The latest version of CorsixTH is now out. Beta 8 is really quite close to a playable game. Essentially at the moment it is Theme Hospital with a few features missing and a better screen resolution.

See the OpenTH blog for more information.

As is probably fairly obvious, I have no time to work on OpenTH at the moment, and nor does Paul. However, we did vaguely think about rewriting it in Scala, just because it would be fun to do a proper project in Scala. At the moment we are all too busy, but it’d be nice to keep it in mind. There is still a place for OpenTH I think. Whilst CorsixTH is really like the original, which seems like a nice thing, it also means that it hasn’t really progressed. The new user interface that was developed for OpenTH is actually really, really nice.

Corsix was definitely right though that we made a mistake being true 3D. The idea was that we restricted angles and such enough to make it still appear like the original, despite in fact being 3D. It had many advantages, but just made the code so much more difficult. It also meant we had all the 3D problems of clipping and such as well. It did result in speed boosts though.

As may day job has less programming in it now (replaced with research & development) I probably will start to get the will to carry on with a programming project. But as of yet, there is no time.

CorsixTH Beta 8 is nearly a complete game

The Making of Theme Hospital featured in magazine “games™”

The UK games magazine games™ recently (Issue 113, Sept 2011) had a section about the development of the game “Theme Hospital”.

The game way programmed by Mark Webley, Gary Carr, Andy Bass and Rajan Tande. Webley says the following in the interview:

“[Using fictional diseases] was actually Gary’s idea. I started off using real illnesses but Gary was rightfully concerned that people might find it distasteful. Using made-up illnesses gave us the opportunity to use humour as well as being able to make up our own curses. We went with British Earling Comedy/Carry On kind of style – we definetely played it for laughs to try to keep it light.”

Talking about diseases which did not make it into the final game:

“Animal Magnetism would have been people walking into the hospital with animals stuck to them. We also had Saturday Night Fever, when the patient walked in wearing the white suit and black shirt, and as they did all the floor tiles would up underneath their feet!”

The latter idea there seems really good, and it’d be great to see it somehow implemented in CorsixTH. Later he speaks about how Kings Sydrome was supposed to be called Elvis Impersonator, but could not be as they could not get permission from the Elvis estate. The KitKat vending machines in game were also apparently rewarded by a box of chocolate bars being sent to them.

It also mentions about a Telegraph article entitled “Sick computer game used by BMA to train senior management”, although I cannot find any references to this article online.

You can download scans of the article here.

CorsixTH Christmas Release

Corsix has released a version of CorsixTH, his Theme Hospital clone, in time for Christmas. It is actually fairly complete.

CorsixTH is a ‘rival project’ to OpenTH, or its ‘sister project’ as it is described in the blog post about it on the OpenTH website. It’s not really a rival though, as we are hardly in competition. In fact, I think CorsixTH has a wonderful design. Much of the code is done in Lua instead. OpenTH uses Lua but only for behaviours, not for actual coding. I will carry on working on OpenTH though, I think there is space for both projects. The only thing I want to know is how the hell Corsix got this done whilst being at Oxford 😉

I will also be posting on the OpenTH mailing list later.

Also check out Corsix’s blog post about it.

A screenshot of CorsixTH taken from the Christmas 2009 version