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Reversed engineered game Starflight (1986)

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Re: Reversed engineered game Starflight (1986)

#11

Post by scandox »

reactordev wrote: post #9
twoodfin wrote: post #2

Hard to convey how effective Starflight’s game design was within the limits of the day. The embedding of the story within what was almost entirely free-form exploration & adventure across a huge galaxy was masterful. You could feel how close the creators were to the edge of what was possible with the save game system: Basically, the disk was a memory image. As you played the game would rewrite itself, so if you got s…

Everyone goes on about Elite, but Elite was just a sandbox… (an amazing sandbox) This was crazy! World gen is hard. Proc world gen is NP hard. Story driven proc world gen with persistence in 1986 was Kaku level brilliance.

I loved Starlight but I'm not sure it was procedural world generation. I mean there was a map of stars printed with the game so they weren't changing. There was a small bit of variation in terms of what one found on planets and so on...the key was it felt like an open world because it was big enough and there was nothing stopping you from doing what you liked and when (except resources).

Re: Reversed engineered game Starflight (1986)

#12

Post by jhbadger »

krige wrote: post #6

...Forth? Wow. I wonder how much code change was necessary between the various systems. It's hard to imagine a Megadrive Forth compiler, but then again, the game was on several other M68k systems so maybe it wasn't as hard...

It is really, really easy to write a Forth interpreter (You can write a simple one in an afternoon). It's often the first software written for an architecture. The structure of Forth means that the hardware-dependent parts are contained in a small number of words (sort of like functions in other languages but not exactly). Forth can be implemented on tiny microcontrollers; a Megadrive would be luxury.

Re: Reversed engineered game Starflight (1986)

#13

Post by sponaugle »

s-macke wrote: post #10

Author here. I’m happy to see one of my projects on Hacker News. This has been a fun one. One evening you just try to disassemble it and wonder where the code is. The following months were a truly satisfying experience, reverse-engineering this diamond. There is still a functioning Forth interpreter implemented in the game. If they hadn’t removed all the word names, it would have been possible to debug at any time an…

A fantastic read, and really interesting to see the use of Forth. I remember Forth having a bit of popularity in the 80s. This was such an amazing game, especially in that you felt like the world was huge with the encouragement to just explore.

The other game this reminds me of is a game for the TI99/4a called Tunnels of Doom. It was a cartridge game that also had a floppy or cassette data load. It had a dynamic dungeon creation so every time you played the game you got a new unique experience. That would be an equally challenging one to reverse engineer due to the oddity of the GROM/GPL architecture in the TI99/4a.

Re: Reversed engineered game Starflight (1986)

#15

Post by jhbadger »

scandox wrote: post #11
reactordev wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone goes on about Elite, but Elite was just a sandbox… (an amazing sandbox) This was crazy! World gen is hard. Proc world gen is NP hard. Story driven proc world gen with persistence in 1986 was Kaku level brilliance.

I loved Starlight but I'm not sure it was procedural world generation. I mean there was a map of stars printed with the game so they weren't changing. There was a small bit of variation in terms of what one found on planets and so on...the key was it felt like an open world because it was big enough and there was nothing stopping you from doing what you liked and when (except resources).

It was procedural at least in the sense that you couldn't store the data for all the planets in memory (or even store it on disk) on the 1980s systems it ran on. So you needed a way to generate the data on the fly.

Re: Reversed engineered game Starflight (1986)

#16

Post by reactordev »

scandox wrote: post #11
reactordev wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone goes on about Elite, but Elite was just a sandbox… (an amazing sandbox) This was crazy! World gen is hard. Proc world gen is NP hard. Story driven proc world gen with persistence in 1986 was Kaku level brilliance.

I loved Starlight but I'm not sure it was procedural world generation. I mean there was a map of stars printed with the game so they weren't changing. There was a small bit of variation in terms of what one found on planets and so on...the key was it felt like an open world because it was big enough and there was nothing stopping you from doing what you liked and when (except resources).

yeah but you're dismissing the fact that this was just a pregen table of data back then. They made a map based on that, sure, but from that table came... everything else and you can't store all that data on floppy.

Similar techniques apply today. Pregen like 100,000 stars. Give them names and locations in the galaxy, treat them as your "locations of interest" with a seed. The rest can just be another cloud of particles with no interest and if the player visits, you can RNG whatever based on the seed. No two systems can share a seed. They can, however, share a branch.

Re: Reversed engineered game Starflight (1986)

#18

Post by flanbiscuit »

> There is no set path, allowing players to switch freely between mining, ship-to-ship combat, and alien diplomacy. The broader plot of the game emerges slowly

This reminds me of Star Control 2, aka The Ur-Quan Masters

> The game influenced the design of numerous other games for decades after its release.

And in SC2 wiki page I see this:

> Once Reiche and Ford conceived Star Control 2, they would draw large inspiration from Starflight.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Control_II

Never played Starflight before but seems right up my alley as SC2 is one of my favorite games

Edit: Just finished reading the rest of the readme. Very cool! I honestly knew nothing about Forth (just that it was a programming language) and now I want to play around with it.

Re: Reversed engineered game Starflight (1986)

#19

Post by s-macke »

s-macke wrote: post #10

Author here. I’m happy to see one of my projects on Hacker News. This has been a fun one. One evening you just try to disassemble it and wonder where the code is. The following months were a truly satisfying experience, reverse-engineering this diamond. There is still a functioning Forth interpreter implemented in the game. If they hadn’t removed all the word names, it would have been possible to debug at any time an…

Some early source code snippets of the game have even survived and can still be found on archive.org [0]. By today’s standards, they’re almost unreadable.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20030906124225/http://www.sonic....

Re: Reversed engineered game Starflight (1986)

#20

Post by somenameforme »

If anybody is interested in just playing this game, the Sega Genesis version of this game is arguably the definitive one. It was released later on and took everything in the PC version and amped it up a step. It's amazing and easy to find emulators + the ROM online. I replayed it fairly recently and it definitely held up very well.

It's open world, clue based, and with some amazing plot. Like the article mentions, the ending twist alone makes it worth suffering through your notepad of a million little hints thrown at you throughout the game. It's also the sort of game you can beat in [literally] 5 minutes if you know everything ahead of time. So I would strongly recommend avoiding walkthroughs/spoilers. The whole game is about piecing together the puzzle of what's happening and it's amazingly immersive.

Generally a game that was way ahead of its time.

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