This is pretty fantastic! Love the smooth zooming/turning mechanics - I suppose most of the in-game visuals are rasterized vectors?

If I had a feature request, it'd be relative WASD controls (W=thrust, S=reverse, A/D=turn). Good "feel" otherwise.

This looks really neat. I’ll give it a shot.

- Alex

looks nice indeed! thanks for sharing!!!

Looks great! New DOS software is always welcome and perfect for the coming weekend, thank you

VileR wrote on 2022-09-01, 11:48:

This is pretty fantastic! Love the smooth zooming/turning mechanics - I suppose most of the in-game visuals are rasterized vectors?

Thanks 😀 Yes, the projectiles, enemies and explosion shards are all rasterized lines. Even the enemy "circles" are built out of a bunch of lines. The output framebuffer of the game is mapped to a 7 (red) x 9 (green) x 4 (blue) color cube at load time to fit into the 256-color palette without any tricky palette allocation (simplicity beats purity here, the downside is that the main menu text has a green-ish tint, which isn't supposed to be there). The rotating sprites (planet thing in the main menu, ship in-game) are handled specially in the renderer that hasn't been optimized and uses a lot of floating point but is "performant enough" for the small area of the screen that it renders into.

VileR wrote on 2022-09-01, 11:48:

If I had a feature request, it'd be relative WASD controls (W=thrust, S=reverse, A/D=turn). Good "feel" otherwise.

I haven't thought about this, and it wouldn't work currently with mouse controls (as the ship is always turned towards the mouse cursor currently), but it might be an option to fall back to in case the mouse driver isn't loaded, and those tank controls might work well, but then the content might have to be re-paced, as you can't turn as precisely and quickly with left/right turn keys than you can with a mouse (I supposed?). Alternatively, "W" for thrust (towards mouse cursor), and "S" for reverse (away from mouse cursor) might actually work, but it reduces the amount of control the player has, which might affect "feel".

In any case, a feature request I can remember if there ever is going to be another version of this 😀

You know it's good if it's by the author of Loonies and Dzzee.

This is outstanding, what a great way to spend a Saturday afternoon! (inside playing an awesome game when it is 105 degrees outside, with muggy 55% humidity!). The rasterization give a very unique feel to the game, and makes it oh so fun.

If you want to see the game played on a CRT monitor...

LGR played the game on a recent YouTube video, direct link with timestamp here:

https://youtu.be/cZ_CEJMOPQw?t=1032 (at the 17:12 mark)

Would it be possible to run this on a sub-Pentium processor, if it could be configured to run in a low-detail mode?

MaverickUK wrote on 2022-09-13, 12:49:

Would it be possible to run this on a sub-Pentium processor, if it could be configured to run in a low-detail mode?

I haven't done performance measurements, so I'm not sure what the current bottleneck is (rasterization or some other part). The game is written in a small VM/interpreter I've written (which could be the bottleneck), and the vector math relies on fast floating point, but maybe a 486 DX2 is good enough. It could of course be ported to be fully in C and to use integer math only, but I won't have the time to spend on it, unfortunately.

You'd have to test it, I don't have pre-Pentium hardware here at the moment -- K6-2 (or 3? I never remember...) is the "oldest" CPU I have here, and it works fine there.

Do report back if you test it. If it's just a little bit too slow, turning off the background stars or turning the ship into line vectors could be enough, and that might be something I'd be willing to do if there's an audience for it.

(Shameless plug: If you haven't played "Loonies 8192" yet, see the Loonies 8192 thread, which has builds available in the thread that should work all the way down to a 286 or even a 8086 -- so I have "covered" the pre-Pentium era in that other game project previously, "You Be At Orbit" is most likely for Pentium or newer, but might work on 486-class CPUs as well).

New version "v2", which speeds up loading and fixes Sound Blaster-related issues.

CHANGELOG
---------

v2 (2022-09-28)

- Faster loading (custom VM now has a bytecode representation)
- Smaller executable (not linking in debugger and scripting parser)
- New Sound Blaster DMA code (based on code by Steven H Don, @shdon)
- Fixed sample rate of data files (intro.wav was 44.1 kHz)

Download link: https://thp.itch.io/orbit