About Starglider 2

[ara]

Hi guys,


I always wanted to write technical articles about old computer games I liked. I finally pulled myself together and wrote a few lines about one of my favourite games on the Amiga: Starglider 2. Enjoy:

https://rmsadre.bitbucket.io/sg2/index.html

(sorry, it turned out to be rather technical)

[deimos]

Originally Posted by ara

Hi guys,


I always wanted to write technical articles about old computer games I liked. I finally pulled myself together and wrote a few lines about one of my favourite games on the Amiga: Starglider 2. Enjoy:

https://rmsadre.bitbucket.io/sg2/index.html

(sorry, it turned out to be rather technical)

I think it's quite good.

[Predseda]

My favourite game that I still did not complete.

[rothers]

It's pretty crazy how ahead of its time that was.

[dreadnought]

Great article, I did enjoy "reading" it, even though I could understand only about 10% of it all

You should definitely consider dissecting more games.

[Redster]

Love the game but reading that just made my head pop - in a good way. Keep it up

[Rotareneg]

Neat, thanks for the article!

One technical oddity I remember was that if you fly far enough way, space will wrap around with extra solar systems that you can't really interact with, which I discovered when I realized you can greatly reduce fuel consumption when using the stardrive by reducing the throttle to just above the threshold where it starts to drop back into normal drive.

[BigT]

Great article, thanks for creating this content, please keep up the great work !!

[RichL]

Enjoyed. Thank you.

[gingerbeardman]

Love what you've done so far. Please keep going!

I shared it on Twitter and somebody mentioned the mirror universe, which I had no idea about until now.

https://twitter.com/484millionmiles/...688635393?s=21

[redblade]

Excellent article just having a whinge about:

1. No dark mode
2. No mention of tools used in disassembling the binary

I can tell you really love this game to reverse engineer it, I am interested in what parts you found the most difficult reverse engineering it? I'm guessing it would be more the object system rather then the drawing system?

Did you see any C code in it or was it 100% assembler?

Did you play Starglider 1? What did you think of the changes between the two games?

With the engine do you think it could have been used as an educational tool to model our solar system?

How do you like Starglider 2 compared to F.O.F.T (Federation of Free Traders).

When you were growing up, did you own the origional or did you have a pirate copy?, (I just had a pirate copy on some compilation disk so probably wouldn't enjoy it as I didn't have the manual)

Great read

[spacey]

great job - really interesting!

while i sadly can't contribute any technical details about starglider 2, i was at argonaut in the late 90s.. there was a small team working on tech for starglider 3 - i got to see bits here and there which was very cool, but by the time i left at the end of '99 there didn't seem to be a whole lot of progress on an actual game (i may be wrong on that - i was on other projects).

[ara]

Thanks a lot for your kind words! I forgot to check the forum again after the holidays.

I will add the mirror-universe bug mentioned by Rotareneg (here) and James Kracht (on twitter) in the next update of the article.

@spacey
I hope that one day fragments of starglider 3 will reappear. It probably would have been a great game. It's really fascinating how much gameplay you can pack in a very kbytes of code.

@redblade

I've never played SG1

Concerning the difficulty: yes, the object system is more work to understand than the drawing system because each object has its type-specific way how it uses the fields in the object structure. But I think the most difficult part is the game logic. There are flags set here and there that trigger game events and that you can only understand with a global view on the entire code. Compared to that, the drawing system and object system are much more isolated and can be understood independently.

It's 100% assembler.

Edit: On Firefox, there is a dark mode when you switch to Reader View.

[Adropac2]

I enjoyed Starglider II quite a bit but found the quick save took away any sort of tension. Being able to save just prior to any point just seemed silly and the idea that you didn't have to made no sense being that it was part of the design. Same with Frontier which would have benefited a save at dock only like the original or at least an option at the start of the game to disable them unless docked

Again people say in their defence that you don't have to use them but the reason we're engrossed to begin with these experiences is because of a sense of realism. In real life if you had the option to quick save just before any hairy moment, you can know for sure that's exactly what you'd do and so this aspect just seems silly being you can't actually do that in real life. Useful sure but lazy design

[Tigerskunk]

Starglider 2 was my most anticipated game ever, I think.
Saw a preview in a german games magazine at the time, and it looked so mind blowing.

When I played the final game, I was a bit disappointed about the kind of lame space battles. Rendering the shots as slow moving polygons was taking away a lot of the fun.

Anyway, that flat polygon style was really awesome, and I wish we had new games doing that.

[copse]

Did you ever work on the second article? I was looking forward to more details, especially the mirror universe.

[alexh]

I met the Starglider 2 programmers when I was working at Argonaut in the late 90s. They were a great bunch of people. I was only there 12 months but it felt longer and I had a great time when I was there.