|  Elite +4: Circle Closes | | Posted by Luca on 2023-02-28 |
 Habemus "fixum" maximus! Mark Moxon turns back to the coding scene, and improves the flicker free version of the super classic Elite +4 released some months ago by (almost) fixing the planets' flickering too! The cleanest version of the "game of a lifetime" (cit.) is now here.
Elite +4 Flicker free Π (pron.: Elite +4 Flicker free Pi) is the title of this new and apparently ultimate hack of the famous 3D space trading simulation, where, after the first fix regarding the ships, the planets have been (almost) fixed too. Why we say "almost"? Well, in all the versions, including the BBC original where those patches have been based, planets still flicker a bit when partially off-screen. This is because of the way the ball line buffer works: it's a consequence of the way the circles are stored as sequential arcs, forcing the erase/redraw sequence to involve slightly different segments. So this isn't strictly flicker-free, but it's way better than the default. On C64 and Plus/4, this is even more evident due to the slower processor.
This was the best moment to celebrate the genius of Pigmy, the man who converted the game when he was 15, in less than a week, using only a Datassette and the internal ML Monitor of the machine. That's why Luca took his time to give the original intro a cooler aspect. Overall, with a modernized titlescreen and a stable wireframe 3D, *this* is the Elite +4 version worth to be run on your hardware. |
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