40 years since Elite became the most fun you could have with 22 kilobytes In 1984 the launch of a computer game was reported on British national news. The purported reason? A news editor apparently walked in after lunch and found all the staff were playing it. BBC Micro Model B A BBC Micro Model B running Elite. Pic: Richard Speed That game was the legendary space combat and trading sim Elite. …
someone I know1 might have spent a night supporting a couple of guys who removed the profit protection from a copy of PC Elite... still got the floppy disk somewhere, I guess, but no machine on which to read it!
ISTR Elite was pretty well protected and adjusting the main program code2 so that the profit protection wasn't called was interesting to say the least - lots of sneaky tricks used to confound folk such as us but very elegant none the less. We got there in the end (many mugs of coffee later).
1 Yeah right....
2 machine code and a live (as opposed to static) debugger - fun times had by all.
I played Elite at the time but it was just not my kind of kind.. Intergalactic trading is not for everyone. I remember thinking how amazing it was though, it gave a sense of 3 dimensions and space all rolled into one.
Games like this still allowed for a fair bit of player imagination which I still consider to be a good thing.. Games now are so detailed and well scripted that it is almost too much...
The Google-provided analytics.js that is downloaded with this story (along with pretty much every webpage we all visit...) is 52kB, so over twice as big as Elite. I know which of those two products I think has brought more value to the world.
(yes I know my browser probably caches analytics.js and doesn't redownload it on every page I browse to, but that's not the point)
Some of them yes I agree. Shoot some bloke in a spacesuit with ship mounted heavy weapons and he's immune? Buy a spacesuit for 150K, more expensive than some of the basic ships!
I found with the other sequels that they just weren't as much fun and I didn't get the same I'm flying my own spaceship feel. Even though you had realistic planets you could land on and much better graphics.
On the other hand, refueling from stars watching the corona and waiting for the fuel tank to fill up.
Asteroid mining - find it relaxing watching the drones collecting minerals, and where you find a rock with fissures and can blow it apart...
I backed out and took the refund when they dropped standalone single-player mode and insisted it all had to be massive multiplayer online or nothing. I know, very much not down with da yoof and all that, but I'm quite happy to play video games only sporadically and take my own sweet time to progress (one day I may even finish Riven, no hurry).
I was quite annoyed about that change (as an original BBC Elite player I was looking forwards to the new sparkly bits and pretty pictures) but at least they did refund us.
Oh man. They did not remove solo play - that's the only mode I've been playing for 10 years, except for the occasional closed group operations with my two sons.
The universe around you progresses in real time, market prices and alliances and such, but there is absolutely no contact to any other person if you play in solo play mode.
I didn't play Elite at the time of its release as I didn't have a compatible computer. Many years later I discovered Oolite which is a modern take on Elite. Over the years it has been expanded and refined. It even includes the facility for people to define missions - tasks which have to be completed in usually very specific ways. I still play it occasionally. Have a look: https://oolite.space/
I admit it.... I played all those years ago
And its such a simple and elegant solution to "How do I generate and store 8 galaxies in 22K?" *(lets face it unless you're into embedded systems, you dont have to worry about such constraints ever again)
And it spawned a whole bunch of us who traded, flew and shot our way across those 8 galaxies and always had fond memories of open world games where we could do as we wished rather than follow the straight plot line of the game or try for the highest score(this week)... how many people go straight to the main quest of fallout/elder scrolls open world type games?
And the memory lived on when the kickstarter for elite dangerous came around (mostly because no big publisher would put up the money to create it)
And apart from certain stumbles along the way, its worked pretty well for the past 10 years.
So heres a link for all you past elite players, and all the current ones
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99FMBNn1jZU
*Solution: Random number generator that uses a seed value to start the sequence.... same seed, same sequence.... store the seed and the algorithm no need for 22K of data to be stored
OUAT, and on the BBC B, I wrote myself a sort of text-only open-ended map-based adventure game where you could wander about in various sorts of terrain and have various sorts of encounter (i.e fighting monsters, and maybe finding food..?); I used a combination of fixed-seed RNG with weird-argument trig functions to make reproducible terrain with contiguous patches of swap/hills/etc/. It worked, and I suppose I would now have to call it "procedurally generated", but can't help feeling that that phrasing makes it sound much more well thought-out than it was...
| Random number generator that uses a seed value to start the sequence
The interview didn't say as much but I presumed the RNG had to be seeded otherwise every game would be different.
Do this a lot in my current day job. Need apparently random behaviour so that other participants can't predict what we are doing, but at same time need it to be deterministic so that we can write repeatable test cases. In production seed off the hardware. In test mode it seeds off of a part of the test script.
Loving this series of articles BTW.
I've seen somewhere, may even have a copy of a spreadsheet with the galaxy algorithm. Type a value in the box, and it will generate all the data.
I wonder how large that spreadsheet is, have feeling its a bit more than 22KB!
Also read that they had to scrap a whole galaxy because it had a planet called "Arse" in it
"*Solution: Random number generator that uses a seed value to start the sequence.... same seed, same sequence"
Yes, a common "trick" back in the 8-bit days when you could call the BASIC ROM routine to get a repeatable string of "random" numbers. I used it many times myself. But Elite took that trick to whole new level, orders of magnitude higher than I dreamed possible!
This is worth watching. It looks long, but time flies and respect grows with each minute. It has good detail on memory use and procedural genration and lots of other good stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lC4YLMLar5I
My favourite factoid: for the 3D effects they used the dot product of a shape's surface normal and the ship's trajectory to work out if that surface was in view or had to be "hidden".
> they used the dot product of a shape's surface normal and the ship's trajectory to work out if that surface was in view or had to be "hidden".
Still how it's done today. Well, maybe not in hardware but if you're doing 3D stuff in software (which, coincidentally, has been what I've been doing all morning). And yes, I still love that what appears to be an almost infinitely complex problem disappears in few multiplications. Maths FTW.
I so loved my Electron (bought cheaply as sales had dropped off) with its assortment of add-ons I accumulated..
Teaching myself to code in the 6502 assembler. I have no idea how I did what I did, almost half a century almost ago. 'Cept that it involved a lot of not going to sleep when I should have.
I played the Electron version until I was Elite with 1,000,006.4CR and got the certificate. I was always miffed it was in B/W with no Thargoids, so the first thing I bought my University grant cheque was a BBC Master 128 so I could play in not 4+2 colours but 8+4 colours, and became Elite on that too. I also got the version for the Archimedes A310 when that came out a few years later, but never had the time to become Elite for the 3rd time.
I had an Acorn Electron back in the day, and bought Elite, but never really progressed very far with it. My problem was that I was rubbish at docking with the space station, and when you crash into the space station, that’s it – game over. If the docking procedure had a been a bit more, shall we say, ‘forgiving’, I might have got more into the game.
Fast forward a few years, and I had an Acorn Archimedes, on which I spent a lot of time playing Black Angel. This game was very much inspired by Elite, but used the Arc’s extra power to render stunning, colourful 3D graphics. The game-play was a bit different from Elite in that it focused more on puzzle-solving rather than trading, and in my case at least, that allowed me to progress quite far into the game. So I have to admit I enjoyed that game more than Elite.
On a side note, I find it ironic, and rather nice, that I’m spending more time (and having more fun) with my Acorn-related stuff now (in my fifties), than I did ‘first time round’ in my youth. That’s due, in no small part, to some frankly brilliant emulator software - written by people who are several orders of magnitude cleverer than myself!
> I still dread the thought
I learned (by trial and error) to execute something that I internalized as a Galactic Standard Approach: Orient your ship with the planet on the port bow, and the space station on the starboard, and proceed to the nav buoy. Using that fantastic 3-D radar plotter, get stopped exactly between the buoy and the station, then pitch+roll to be facing the station. This puts you on the docking vector - all you have to do then is manage your speed and roll rate to dock successfully (while dodging random ships undocking, of course). Good times.
I found out my morals got out of the window pretty quickly, when I realized how many kills I needed to be 'elite'. I began to shoot at space stations when I left them, after I had destroyed 10 police ships I jumped out of the system.
But then, I got named an "Archangel" after completing a mission, so it's all good.
You can write quite a bit of code in 22KB of assembly language.
I've been pondering this quite a bit since I saw KolibriOS, an operating system fully written in assembly language which includes TCP/IP networking, USB support and a graphical desktop, which is just 1.44 MEGABYTES in size.
Yes , but the point is that these days you mostly don't have to be concerned about whether your app will fit into the available memory/storage. Back in the day, the estimates you had to get signed off before starting included memory and processor budgets for every process, plus you had to show the tasks would complete within their time constraints (num_instructions * tick < time-limit). This gets very expensive but you do it because it's painful if you finish the s/w and discover at that point that - it won't fit into the required system, or barely runs.
(The actual need to do all this expensive guessing went away when computers grew faster than software, but it took a long time after this for the requirement to do it to be removed from the QA processes)
The QuickDraw graphics engine took up about 22K of the 64K ROM in the original Macintosh.
How did Bill Atkinson get it that small?
* Hand-optimized assembler
* Integer-only coordinates
* Bitmap-only fonts for text
* No matrix operations. Not even any rotation functions.
* No anti-aliasing, indeed no colour; strictly bilevel pixels.
* No Bézier curves. Though it did have circles and arcs and rounded-corner rectangles.
The compromises made to make it Multiplayer detract considerably from the remake. I was also very much against the ship handling that they settled on. Pitch-and-Roll in space (while yes, is classic Elite) is daft; practically mandating the use of auto-aim or turrets. Freespace 2 set the bar for low relative velocity space dogfighting, and the bar it remains to this day.
Iwar/Iwar 2 gets an honourable mention for proving that newtonian space combat can be a lot of fun, but that isn't a title with mass market appeal as it's a lot more challenging to operate well.
I ran a sizeable campaign group on social media in support of the kickstarter campaign though were very disappointed with the published game.
I maybe put 20 hours into Dangerous, most of that on long-range exploration. Miniscule hours compared to long I spent in the original, Elite II or First Encounters.
The original Elite story was written by Robert Holdstock. Who went on to become one of the best British SF/Fantasy writers of his time. The Mythago Wood series has to be essential reading as an example of how to merge the two genres.
I played Elite on the BBC, Spectrum and Amstrad CPC 618. Got to Elite on all three platforms.
I refused to play the Commodore 64 version because of the stupid Tribbles and because, well, as a Spectrum owner I was obligated to hate the Commode :)
You only bought tribbles one time. Spoiler for new players follows:
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Tribbles have a lower temperature tolerance than you do. Fly dangerously close to a star, keeping ship temperature below lethal for you, but high enough to kill the tribbles, which decline slowly but inexorably. When disinfected, never buy any again!
Well, obviously, the existing tradition of main-frame text games and text graphics, which in turn were inspired by both sci-fi stories and by the early use of computers for targeting and for linear programming -- the activity that gave us the word "programming". Pretend and Make-believe have always been at the heart of "games" and "play". When "real" computers were used for simulating economies and for wargaming, "simulating economies and wargaming" were what grown-up kids wanted too.
The new generation did the same thing much better and at much lower cost, introducing the ideas to a new audience.
BBC B player, tape version, here. 4 or 5 mins to load IIRC. Never made it to Elite, only Deadly, despite hundreds of hours of playing time. I tried Oolite when it came out but my muscle memory put my fingers into the Elite configuration so I struggled to play it. I also have a (slightly) more recent Elite on floppy disk (which I copied to the hard drive aeons ago) but it must have been created for another computer as it's in 8-bit colour, seems to be missing some ships (e.g. I don't recall seeing a Fer De Lance) and it's just not as good in other ways as the BBC wire-frame.
Interesting! Didn't know that, TIL.
Then again, I remember reading someone describing in detail how the police pulled up alongside them, brought them to a halt, boarded their ship, searched the hold and let them go, all apparently in the original Elite. And only the other day on Stardot someone was talking about the generation ships that definitely appeared in their version of the BBC Micro game. I love reading Elite folklore, it's such a good example of how we all used our imagination to fill in the blanks back in the day. :-)
it's such a good example of how we all used our imagination to fill in the blanks back in the day.
A few years back a couple of us were talking about how with Elite Dangerous, the graphics had finally caught up with how it looked inside our imaginations when we were playing the original.
I loved Elite. What an awesome game. I still play its modern cousin, Oolite - which is a fantastic piece of work. I even enjoyed playing just the trading element of it on Vax terminals at work when I should, ahem, have been working. I have a real (working) Beeb too, complete with Elite disk (genuine, licensed) - but the bits on it are too precious to waste on anything but the most special of special occasions.
But Elite Dangerous? Screw that shit. I bought it, I was just getting into it, then they removed support for non Windows versions. Seriously guys? WTF? And the only advice they had was “Why don’t you just boot Windows to play it”. Er, because I don’t want to do anything enough to be bothered to install and run Windows.
So no. Elite is great. But on the basis of Elite Dangerous you’re better off just playing a modern ripoff of the game than Elite itself.
All that article, all these comments, and nobody has mentioned teletext Elite?
I remember spending quite a bit of time as a ~14-year-old, peeling off the copy protection just for the fun of it. If I recall correctly, the code was self-modifying, sort of decrypting itself iteratively. At some point, the code in RAM showed a text like 'Does your mother know you're doing this?', which was entirely appropriate :-)
Ah yes, I remember that message. We sent them a postcard as I recall saying "yes she does!".
I think I had more fun hacking the copy protection than playing the game to be honest - certainly more useful in later life (no opportunities to be a starship captain ever came my way!)
Ah yes, I remember that message and the great copy protection! We sent them a postcard as I recall saying "yes she does!".
I think I had more fun hacking the copy protection than playing the game to be honest - certainly more useful in later life (no opportunities to be a starship captain ever came my way!)
I backed Elite Dangerous Kickstarter and joined the Alpha.
It was mind blowing. The expansive galaxy of literally billions of stars and the old dream of actually docking at a Coriolis station, fuel scooping massive stars and hearing your hull creak and strain from gravity... Epic hyperspace jumping, sometimes ending up far too close to a binary star system and bricking yourself to get out of there before your ship melts... Oh and actual generation ships!
As someone mentioned above... It finally caught up with our imaginations...
All this with copious nods to the original game:
Systems such as: Lave, Diso, Leesti, Tionisla, Orerve, Zaonce, Reorte...
And Iconic Ships still retained much of their original geometry: Cobra Mk III, Anaconda, Python and the classic Fer De Lance...
But then my Oculus Rift arrived... any my mind was blown again. To this day, Elite Dangerous is my favourite VR experience bar none. Visual and Sound design still holds up a decade later.
Honestly not sure why people are shitting on Elite Dangerous. It's possibly one of the most loving remakes of an 80s classic ever made. Also it really does need a HOTAS and pedals to do its flight model justice.
Chiefly, because the compromises to make multiplayer work are a bag of spanners. If you want some details:
The BS that is the FSD interdiction minigame, and the very blatant and artificial line & lagfest that is swapping between the two play modes of FSD & conventional power.
The fact that supposedly safe and secure systems are the ones that attract the most player character pirates. Anarchic systems are usually the safest.
The RNG associated with the engineering model; quests to "go to location X to collect 10 items" inspired blatantly by the very worst World of Warcraft mechanics.
The ill thought out buggy driving mini game, and, worse, the toilet that is Odyssey that didn't learn from the mistakes Eve Online made in trying to put character models into a spaceship game.
Enforced multiplayer and ditching of the single player modes (which were part of the original kickstarter pitch).
And, last but not least, the dreadful handling of anything bigger than a Viper. The only viable weapons on anything big are gimbals or turrets. I don't care how good you are, no player character in a Viper or an Eagle can defeat a mid-sized freighter operated by a Player assuming half-competently selected loadout. This means it is not a dogfighting game, unlike the original Elite which most assuredly was. (And a Cobra could beat an Anaconda by maneuver in the original).
The best version of Elite ever made is the one for the Archimedes.
I had a lot more fun playing X2 and X3 than Elite Dangerous - both of which appeared considerably earlier.
I'm with you on this GraXXor, I loved Elite Dangerous.
The scale was mind boggling.
I went on both Distance Worlds expeditions and travelling with all the other commanders across the galaxy to beagle point has been one of the gaming highlights in my life.
In 2017 I went to FX17 in London to listen to some talks by the devs on how they designed and coded the game.
The astrophysicist who worked with the devs on creating the stellar forge have a brilliant talk on how the universe was generated in game.
There were certainly some disappointing decisions in the game, and some clunky multiplayer issues - trying to get hundreds of commanders in the same instance for a mass launch was always a lottery.
I eventually finished with about 1500 hours on ED.
Has been one of my favourite games.
Dear Register;
When you are using computers to transcribe audio, you must read the generated text just once to check the results. Then you don’t ship glaring errors like “duplicated mass routines” or bizarre repeated stuttering sentences that humans often utter.
Just read it once. Just once. It’s the cheapest QA you can effect.
Certainly not the best version but my first - monochrome graphics, only one galaxy, no military lasers and reduced number of ships. Docking was fiendishly difficult compared to all other versions I played (C64, Amstrad CPC 464 - non metro version so had the random crash bug - had to send it back to get the patched version (two weeks, imagine waiting two weeks for a patch) , PC - Dos version in 4 colour CGA filled graphics then played Elite Plus in glorious MCGA) - so after mastering on the electron I could dock easily on any other version. Spent a long time hunting thargoids in witch space on the Amstrad CPC version (mining lasers were the best weapons for this - needed to hit a key combination whilst hyperspacing to force your ship into witchspace)
Put a fair amount of time in Frontiers - loved my Merlin and got all the way up into an Imperial Trader (though preferred flying the courier) and aslo played a bit of Encounters (pretty much a Frontiers enhancement).
Haven't play ED in ages - lost a bit of interest when engineers were introduced - might drop back into it at some point if I have time.
I went into programming partly because of this game, so a big inspiration for me. I even made my "own" version of Elite last year, a retro space game called Liberation (a mash up between Elite and Blake's 7). Space sim design pretty much peaked with the original Elite... every step towards realism took us further from perfection!
Luckily I'd already finished my PhD and was on to a lazy postdoc when I got this game. Elite + Colossal Cave defined my 3 years in Cardiff. I remember being totally freaked the first time I got an 'incoming message' in Elite, a request to do some quest or other. Tried Frontier and Elite Dangerous but just never got into them.
I started out as a quite timid, lawful trader. Then one day I accidentally shot down a police ship, thinking it was a pirate coming after me. Next thing I was surrounded by cops and much to my surprise I found that with my military laser and good 3d manoeuvring skills I was able to shoot down the whole lot of them without taking a hit. After that I became a pirate, intercepting traders, selling their crews as slaves, selling their cargos and trading narcotics to anarchy planets. That didn't stop the navy recruiting me for some missions though :-| A few years ago I read the biography of William Dampier and felt an immediate affinity.
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