When I was a kid I saved money for weeks to buy a copy of DIV Game Studio and I loved it, but it seems that after a few years the community was slowly
disappearing, eventually this website was down.
I’ve checked every couple of years to see if something may have changed, in today, just by accident really, I found this website working?!
I’m super excited to play around with DIV once more (as a professional software engineer and not just a kid who wants to build Dragon Ball Z games).
Can anyone tell me who is responsible for reviving this project? And what was the reason behind it?
Yes it's live! Div-Arena is back baby! It was bought back by the amazing Mike Green, who is currently working on translating DIV into Windows as
DivDX, and it even has Mode 8! (the psuedo 3d mode)
As for the reasons behind it, I'm not too sure myself. I guess it might just be personal passion? If that's the case I'm hoping there's enough passion
to carry it to the land of 16 or 32 bit colour, as the restriction to 256 colours is pretty much the main thing stopping me from using it myself at
this stage. Well that and the Mode 8 editor crashes :p I've been using Bennu, which is a Windows port of DIV made by a group of hobbyists. It was
bought out before Mike released a working build of DivDX, so that's what I'm using for my current project, CyberCrisis.
Then there's Dom Cook, working on a remake of the peerless Battle Zone 3D, and Joaxxan, The fugitive man being worked on by RichardStation. They're both looking really promising!!
Mike's still working on DivDX and hopefully with time and some good games being made in it, it'll attract more new users and Div-Arena will be full of
new people eager to design and build their own games
When I was a kid I saved money for weeks to buy a copy of DIV Game Studio and I loved it, but it seems that after a few years the community was slowly
disappearing, eventually this website was down.
I’m super excited to play around with DIV once more (as a professional software engineer and not just a kid who wants to build Dragon Ball Z games).
Can anyone tell me who is responsible for reviving this project? And what was the reason behind it?
Sadly DIV died along with DOS, and there was little we could do to stop it. Shortly afterwards I stopped working for fasttrak and the domain never got
renewed.
I should build a list of people who started with DIV and went on to have successful programming careers based upon it! It would really inspire the
next generation
Well, that would be me, and in short I have never lost interest in DIV, and I always wanted to finished what I started, so about a year ago I
contacted Daniel Navarro and he sent me the DIV code, which I then set about porting to all the modern platforms. It took a while, but it works.
Windows, Linux, consoles, Mac, Android, and the icing on the cake - play DIV games in a browser - something we never could have really imagined!
At some point I really do hope to restore all the games on the site and recover the old forum. It's difficult because the old hard disk is kind of
dead and needs money spent on it to recover the data, but I guess you never know...
At some point I really do hope to restore all the games on the site and recover the old forum. It's difficult because the old hard disk is kind of
dead and needs money spent on it to recover the data, but I guess you never know...
I used to be on div-arena a lot back in the day, had no idea it was still going/had come back - browsing the site brings back a lot of memories.
Mike, talking of people who started with DIV, I've been a software developer for about 10 years now (I suppose you could even call it a career!),
mostly .NET stuff, and its all because of DIV. That dang box lying to me saying "Create your own games in minutes!", but for some reason I stuck at
it.
I might grab the github code out of curiosity, but I'm not much for c/c++, so I wouldn't hold your breath about committing anything
It's difficult to see it's future though, the markets so much more saturated with game maker software now, but glad to see it's still being worked on,
even if only for its own sake.
Now, you see this little community is alive and we work on DIV DX to get finest running builds on seperate operating systems like windows, linux,
macos and much more.
I'm searching the old DIV-Arena too, like you but did not found. Last year, a crazy man sent me an email with DIV questions and this crazy man was
Mike. Since this moment, i landed here at DIV-Arena and don't want to go away. In the DIV break, i used Blitz Basic for making games, but now, i play
around with DIV - again.
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