Need help figuring this out: really old Genesis game

[Drauk]

Interesting, does that mean that StarCon 2 was basically a blatant ripoff ?

[AladainAF]

Star Control 2 was absolutely a rip-off of starflight, though it did a lot of things better since, well, it was much newer.

However, in starflight, you could spend a single day on a planet, where as in SC2, you land, spend 5 minutes and pick up 10 mineral nodes, and leave. Some of the good planets in Starflight, such as ones with >60% mineral density, would have over 10,000 mineral nodes on the whole planet.

What always kept me in awe about the game, even today, is that they crammed a massive world (basically 800 planets full of minerals, lifeforms, and storylines), alien encounters, home-planet, interstellar travel, nebulas, plot, character development, and a lot of items on 2 360k floppies.

Edit: Important source code for starflight was released awhile ago by one of the original programmers. Its in forth though, so its fucking weird to read it. (Its not the whole thing though, but its a lot to know whats going on if you knew forth.

http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare...79/SFFiles.zip

[Gryeyes]

Anyone ever play starflight 2?

[Drauk]

Originally Posted by AladainAF

What always kept me in awe about the game, even today, is that they crammed a massive world (basically 800 planets full of minerals, lifeforms, and storylines), alien encounters, home-planet, interstellar travel, nebulas, plot, character development, and a lot of items on 2 360k floppies.

I bet they used controlled random generator for that. Basically instead of storing all the data about planet, you just store several seeds for RNG per planet.

[Millie]

Originally Posted by Drauk

I bet they used controlled random generator for that. Basically instead of storing all the data about planet, you just store several seeds for RNG per planet.

Per some Wiki research, I think this is the case. They didn't store an entire galaxy of pre-made planets on a handful of floppies; they stored the code for random planet and resource generation on a handful of floppies. Still very impressive, and in some ways even more impressive. Certainly more clever.

This is a bit of a tangent, but often I find myself thinking that modern-day game developers could really use a few lessons from the past. Learn to do more with fewer resources. Don't make every game some massive, 5-gig behemoth of code, files, etc. It seems that, every year, games get bigger and bigger. I realize most of this has to do with increasing amounts of video, audio, and graphics resources -- so perhaps it can't be helped. But I also get the feeling that not every game needs that much video. I'd gladly take Civ 4 without the cool intro movies. I'd be happy with GalCiv2 with fewer cutscenes. Not every game needs to be a "movie."

The game industry is presently obsessed with becoming the new Hollywood, and with making "movies" out of their games (literally and figuratively), so this trend is probably not going away any time soon. But it gets annoying every now and then. Games aren't movies. Games are a unique medium that should be celebrated in its own right and not squeezed into the ill-fitting shoes of a different medium altogether.