Does anybody wish this could have included flying on planets or with the extra plot elements of Frontier? I always thought planet landing (e.g. Aviator-style?) could have been possible on the Beeb. With expanded BBC Micro's the game could have been fully enhanced rather than colour+another ship on the Master versions.

Doubtful whether there's anybody around who could do/find time to do 3D graphics now but on a 128K machine there would be 64K of memory potentially to play with and mission/planet-related data could be fed in from the other RAMs when docked or landed..

Not entirely what you're describing, but I trust you've seen Elite-A?

Sam.

Yes I was thinking more of Elite 2 for Beebs fully exploiting the extra memory possibilities.

Aside from the technical issues, I'm not sure it'd get too far from a legal standpoint, isn't David Braben quite "protective" of the whole IP?

In that case, maybe the best approach would be simply to ask his permission first - he can only say no.

I think if you stayed under the radar - i.e. don't try and earn money for it and don't use licensing terms that infer you're claiming some kind of ownership of the brand, I think he'd probably just ignore it. Oolite has been around for a while and seems to be doing OK. He only acted last time, he said, because he felt compelled to assert his rights, as he felt - rightly or wrongly - they had been threatened.

A Beeb project as well is also much less likely to get attention than a release on a modern platform.

Sam.

So basically this is adding another game to standard Elite really; i.e. once you are docked it's not just about trading. If someone wanted to write just that part of it (and perhaps leverage some of the 3D plotting routines), it could fly... but I'm nto volunteering - far more important stuff to do!

Yes although there'd be some integration needed with the main program. Given that Angus reverse engineered it that could be the easiest part!

Precisely what I was thinking when I posted... I remember it being reverse engineered, so you could add in patches to swap out to a different game - essentially - from sideways RAM or disc.

I remember getting somewhere with a proof of concept of a Zarch type landscape scroller running in a very small MODE1 - I was telling DaveM about this - very much along the lines of the April Fool that was in one of the magazines. I toyed around with doing proper 3D routines but of course the Beeb never had the horsepower - and I worked on some fast plotting routines to do a landscape from optimised hard-coded data (i.e. use lookup tables rather than calculating). I bet it was on one of the duff discs we couldn't image!

If you could plot the landscape, then to get a couple of tiny ship with shadows, some trees, and flying debris is not that hard... it was also using double buffering.

Somebody else claimed to have a landscape generator like Zarch - see L&F on Stairway to Hell. It'd be interesting to see yours or anybody's!

Couldn't find such a reference on STH L&F - just looked - but I would be so happy to find my effort again... it was one of the last things I was toying around with on the Beeb but then I moved onto the Amiga.

As I say, to generate a 3D landscape from cleverly defined lookup tables is really easy, and it interested me particularly because I'd got into maths a lot at that age. The clever bit was being able to avoid CPU intensive 3D calculations - so (from memory) lookup tables would exist for the Y-offset from 'sea level' given a particular altitude, and then scaling that by Z. You then build up a matrix in memory that kind of tells you all the coordinates on the screen where the colour changes into that of the next tile, and then use that to drive a line-by-line raster plotter.

That's as far as it got, I think, and you could use the arrow keys to move in different directions and it would plot in a 2nd buffer and switch it at the next screen blank interval.

Never did the smooth scrolling bit though - i.e. moving around in 'part-tiles' rather than whole ones; wouldn't have been a huge step to do that though. Trees and stuff would have been a bit more challenging, though again, probably doing by using pre-scaled sprites in memory rather than 3D plotting.

If it makes you feel any better, the commercial Spectrum version of Zarch/Virus only scrolls in whole-tile increments. And I don't think it even has filled graphics.

There was a commercial version for the Speccy? [opens another browser for Google...]

EDIT: just seen it on Wikipedia - so it didn't exactly break any technical barriers in terms of visuals then... phew, at least I was trying to do something worthwhile!

There was a Spectrum version? Why are people going around saying it wouldn't be possible on the BBC?

Paras' idea I think was that the planet is loaded from disc on entering the atmosphere say. Then assuming, a planet landscape is possible on 8 bits as it seems it is, couldn't there be an algorithm "seed" per planet to add variation to a hard-coded landscape?

Jason Tribbeck wrote one:

http://www.stairwaytohell.com/lostandfound/indexb.html

I wasn't thinking at all about how the landscape would be defined actually - but yes, a 'seed, generate, correct' algorithm would make most sense as is used within Elite, I believe (i.e. generate something, then apply a set of rules to remove stupidities from it).

On the subject of nice landscapes, however, the speccy version - see Wikipedia - sucks IMHO. I'm sure it was a good effort, but I'm one for technical achievement and doing it in wireframe doesn't push the beeb boundaries. For me, Elite defined the Beeb wireless boundary. And for solids, I'd say the Sentinel. So to me, unless it's filled 3D like the April fool mockup, it's not faithful to Zarch/Virus/Lander - hence my having a bash.

I'd love to see Braben and Tribbeck's efforts though - shame they seem to be lost.

'Cheating at the maths' for visually correct effect is to my mind the smarter way to push a machine like the Beeb to get speed. Indeed, my university project involved meeting with Jez San of Argonaut to work with them and get rigid body dynamics (i.e. how solid objects interact with one another based on physics) to work in a complex 3D games environment, when Pentium Pro was the top-of-the-range CPU.

The maths is difficult to solve quickly, so you have to find ways to approximate things to get the right visuals. Really tricky - especially when on top of all this fudging, you then have to get other logic to behave correctly (e.g. detecting collisions, blowing things up, or creating shadows)

At least people on the Spectrum actually set about it doing something for their platform. Hopefully Retrosoftware can encourage the same achievements..Doom, Virus, Elite B

If you don't mind a faked transition from space flying to planet flying, with a multiload, then it definitely sounds possible — though I guess it'd just be a lot like gluing Mercenary on to the side. Maybe you could keep the element that the space vehicles in Elite can't cope with being too close to planets, but add transporters that fly between space stations and planets? If you want to visit a planet then you pay to ride on a transporter and then on the planet I guess you either proceed on foot or rent a vehicle? You know, in a fantasy other land where you have time to put lots of work into it.

Re: Virus for the BBC, I'd be willing to bet that the Spectrum sticks with tile-by-tile scrolling to get out of doing perspective divides; no doubt all the little poles on which the landscape is supported are treated as being perpendicular to the front vector and have their 1/z pre-stored. The Spectrum is capable of some surprisingly good 3d (see, e.g., Hard Drivin', Carrier Command, Starstrike 2 or I, Of the Mask) but I guess its 1bpp mode means that plotting graphics is often cheaper than calculating them.

Hence my theory that if you're going to do some cheating, you might as well be smart about it and do it to get better visuals rather than trying to do things by the book, but then having to make compromises that IMHO ruin the effect... e.g. if you can't do part-tile scrolling, or it's not filled, you've lost the 'wow' factor because others have used 3D to better effect... effective approximation is as much of an art as accurate solving; ask any financial engineer!