title: "Elite"
author: TomF
group: N/A


A little thing I threw together at Pilgrimage 2004. And it got third place in the "random" category, which was nice. I meant to do a cool DirectX demo, except I brought my ancient laptop which doesn't have any 3D graphics. But Radman introduced me to text-mode craziness, and the laptop does IBMSCII just fine. So I coded some 3D stuff anyway.

British kids of the 8-bit era may recognise some of the models. It's a tradition - on every platform I code for, the Viper gets ported first, because I can type the coordinates from memory. Can't fight tradition. (I used to be able to type Cobra MkIII coords from memory - I must be getting old).

This version is almost exactly the one I entered, except (a) it's got a memory-corruption bug fixed, and (b) it's properly independent of CPU power (previously it was unplayable on fast modern machines!).

It's not really a "demo" - there's no story or anything. Just fly around and practice docking or something.

Mouse left/right, up/down, LMB to speed up, RMB to slow down, MMB to stop. ESC to exit. Alt+Enter for fullscreen (though then you lose the mouse on Win98/ME, because their console stuff is busted - Win2k/XP is fine).

Thanks to Sol for the nice text library and Bell and Braben for the inspiration.

Greets to Legalize for the party, Radman for the text-mode intro, Northern Dragons for whiskey, the DDR crew for amazing footwork and skimpy tops, and all at Pilgrimage for a good time.


TomF.



