Oolite Bulletins

Not sure whether this is the correct location for my post. I am also not sure whether someone here already knows about this, but...

I stumbled over a quite new video about Elite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lC4YLMLar5I
And it mentions that the full source code of the game is available on github: https://github.com/kieranhj/elite-beebasm

The video explains nicely some of the stunts Elite had to pull to be working on the BBC Micro. Does some of the game's architecture apply to Oolite?
Would it be worth referencing that somewhere? Again, I am not sure where that location would be.

hiran wrote: ↑Mon Dec 04, 2023 10:56 pm

Not sure whether this is the correct location for my post. I am also not sure whether someone here already knows about this, but...

I stumbled over a quite new video about Elite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lC4YLMLar5I

I just found it myself by chance. And it was definitely worth the watching.

The video explains nicely some of the stunts Elite had to pull to be working on the BBC Micro. Does some of the game's architecture apply to Oolite?
Would it be worth referencing that somewhere? Again, I am not sure where that location would be.

I actually understood the logic of hidden-face (not hidden-edge) elimination because I spent 1984/1985 learning crystallography and plotting structural data (crystal and geological) using a stereographic net. Very clear explanation. All the introduction to assembly ... well, I was doing that when the game was being lauded.
It's a lovely example of doing something that looks convoluted because it's cheaper (computationally) doing it that way and robustly trimming the tree of necessary computations as early as possible, rather than using a conceptually simpler computational model and having to do some really dirty maths later to work out which hidden edges you can avoid drawing.
My CS lecturer - particularly the beardy one who did "Algorithm Design" at the end of second year - would have loved this.

I heard absolutely nothing about it (Elite) as a student because the only undergrads who actually saw the university's computing hardware were 3rd & 4th year Computing Science students. Everyone else saw paper (or after 4 terms, glass) teletype terminals. On which the "persistence of frame rate" lasted for months.