Creating a Dreamcast shmup using the HOR engine

[Christuserloeser]

I think that HOR has potential for some great homebrew shmups.

Reading that I thought I should try to help anyone that's interested to create a shmup game for Dreamcast with HOR. I'm going to try to answer all the questions you might have about how to work with the engine.

- You don't need any coding expierence to work with HOR! -




#Chapter1: Introduction


HOR is based on the Beats of Rage engine and it basicly works the same way - just for shmups.

Official HOR website:
http://openbor.net/hor/

Latest available engine demo showing some of the basic features (Dreamcast version):
http://openbor.net/hor/downloads/HOR_DC_Version.rar

Screenshot:


Original Forum (discontinued!):
http://openbor.net/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=35&start=0


Lord Ball is still working on the engine itself! Just a few days ago I recieved a PM saying that he currently is dedicating all his time to HOR for a really big project he's working on...

An interview with Lord Ball from October 2006 at BoRGeneration.com:
http://www.borgeneration.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=503




#Chapter2: Needed Tools


Some great tools for extracting PAK files and editing a Beats of Rage game are available at BoRGeneration.com:
http://www.borgeneration.com/tools.shtml

• The PAK Extractor itself extracts the content of a PAK file which is storing the game's data.
  
  
• With WAV2BoR you can convert a .wav file to the compressed .BOR format to create your own soundtrack for the game.
  You can test your .BOR music files with the WinAMP plugin.

#Chapter3: Recommend Tutorials

• The BOR-Edit pack 1.2 contains some important information on how the original BoR engine works. I would say that 90% of this information also applies to HOR.
  It's available at Senile Team's website:
  http://www.senileteam.com/downloads.php?d=5
  and at BoRGeneration's Tools section:
  
  
• HOR manual (with all the implemented commands):
  http://openbor.net/hor/
  
  
• The OpenBoR manual is also useful and available at BoRGen's tools section:
  http://www.borgeneration.com/mods/engines/tools/OBM.rar
  This manual has information about many general things about the BoR engine and some of these also apply for HOR.

[To be continued as time permits]

[Dull Blade]

Thanks for the Tutorial, I've got some spare time. I'll give it a shot.

[Christuserloeser]

Great. If you need any help let me know. I might find the time to continue the tutorial then.