Writing a computer game

Alpha Centauri (SMAC) is one of my favorites. Been playing it since it came out, in 1999. Brilliant game. Complex in a lot of ways. Not perfect, there are some small flaws, but they're small. PC Gamer gave it their highest-ever score ranking (98, not matched by Skyrim, HL2, etc).

Been out of print for years. GOG carries it for Win/Mac, which is great. But eventually even that won't be good enough.

So I'm writing a clone of sorts.

A better-looking clone. Probably a simpler clone--there are a lot of things in SMAC that I have never had to use or understand. Granted, I have never played online against others, and maybe those things are more important in that case.

The level of detail that went into the tech/research-tree, and all the other little details about what can/can't be done when/where by what, just marvelous.

Customizable in so many ways. Largely irrelevant was my experience. I don't know how many times I've played through. This is a really long game (like playing Monopoly all the way through to the solo end), it can take 100-200 hours each time, so my play-through count isn't huge, probably a dozen or so.

I'm going to snarf most of the details, leave out some things that seem like unnecessary complexity.

Already I have a better-looking opening screen/menu sequence, and I've begun creating the classes in Java for it. As Java, it has to be OO, which I suspect the original was not...I have a terrain generator of sorts, but I'm not happy with it yet. Still thinking about how-to details for various aspects.

As Java, it will run on just about any platform that runs a complete Java JSE+Swing, incl Linux, but probably NOT any JME.

I'll try to do some 3D GUI stuff. That's a retirement project, to create such a thing.