Arena Football, from V-Reel

V-Reel will develop and market Arena Football exclusively for Jaguar. This represents the first license of the Arena Football League for home video game systems.  (From Atari press release, March 7, 1994, Volume 3 – Issue 4 ATARI EXPLORER ONLINE 7 March 1994).

Development Update – SCES 1994

While still shots of Arena Football make for great pictures, the self running demo was not that impressive, it was just running too slow. The intro screens were very nicely animated… all being completely rendered. The game screen itself reminded me of a cross between Cyberball and Madden 3DO. I’m sure they can improve the speed for the final version, in which case Arena looks to be one of the top football games out there. The demo showed digitized characters with rendered uniforms for a surreal football feeling. While the animation was nice on the intro screens, it just wasn’t there on the actual game screen. While I didn’t spend a lot of time observing Arena, it was apparent that this game still has a way to go in development. (AEO’s 1994 Summer Consumer Electronics Show Report, by Tal Funke-Bilu, GEnie, SCES 1994 Edition ATARI EXPLORER ONLINE 29 July 1994).

Assassin, The 

OMC Games Division announced that they will begin production of “The Assassin”, which was previously to be released on the Atari 8-bit, for the Atari Jaguar CD game console. With the upgrade in hardware, “The Assassin” will allow for more spectacular effects and a higher level of graphical and audio intensity.

With James Garvin moving to Japan, unforeseen problems arose in the development of the Atari 8-bit version. “I was having some major difficulties getting the antiquated RF system of the Atari 8-bit to work with Japanese coaxial connections as well as technical problems that resulted during my travels from the U.S. Needless to say, I had to make some difficult decisions,” stated James Garvin, owner of OMC Games Division. Though, the change in platforms has not extinguished efforts to bring to life an Atari 8-bit version. “There will be an Atari 8-bit version, but it will most likely have to wait until I get back to the States.”

“The Assassin” is the prequel to “Orb Of Bengazi” which is based on the upcoming futuristic cyberpunk world of “Blood City”, a role playing system to also be released 3rd Quarter 1999. This action/RPG features Chicago detective, Michael Steele, as he searches for the murderers of his brother, but what he finds is a tangled web of intrigue and death which takes him all over the world. For those looking forward to “Orb Of Bengazi”, this game should not be missed.

“The Assassin” will be released under the Hellified Games label of OMC, with the project headed by James Garvin, and music composed by up-and-coming musician, Arthur Lauritsen. OMC Publishing is also planning to release a soundtrack sometime around the release of the game. More news and screenshots will become available over the next couple of months.

OMC Games Division is a sole proprietorship based in Austin, Texas and publisher of HieroGraphix Game Journal. Other game titles under development include “Age Of Darkness” and “Orb Of Bengazi”.

1998 OMC Games Div. (http://www.omcgames.com/) (From OMC Press release, “OMC Games Division to Release ‘The Assassin’ for the Atari Jaguar 64-Bit Game Console”, October 21, 1998, reprinted in Area 64: The Jagzone, Heath Anderson).

Demo Available

Demo 1.0 is available now for download from OMC’s Assassin Page. (From Archives 1999, Area 64: The Jagzone, Heath Anderson).

Music Available

The music for Assassin is now up at the OMC website, it’s a RealPlayer file. Check it out, it’s pretty cool 🙂 (From Archives 1999, Area 64: The Jagzone, Heath Anderson).

Automaniacs

This title may be developed as a sequel to the Jaguar driving game Club Drive with improved graphics and gameplay. Virtual Dimensions 3D is the company involved. (News, Automaniacs, AAP, 1999).

Batman Forever

Batman Forever, based on the much-anticipated Warner Bros. movie scheduled for release this summer, pits the caped crusader and his sidekick Robin against Gotham City villains Two-Face and the Riddler. The Atari Jaguar Batman Forever game will incorporate the movie’s characters and feature the films newly-designed costumes and high-tech equipment

Market research demonstrates that over 90% of the U.S. population is familiar with the Batman character, so there will be wide appeal for the game. Batman Forever is scheduled for delivery to stores late in the 3rd quarter. (Atari & Jaguar-related Press Releases, Jag Snags Big Titles for 1995, Jan. 6, 1995, Volume 4, Issue 1 ATARI EXPLORER ONLINE 16 January 1995).

BattleSphere (Star Battle), from 4Play

[A]  talented new design group called 4Play, today announced their first title which will fully exploit Jaguar’s 64-bit capabilities. 600 years in the future, several spacefaring races are battling for domination of the galaxy. To avoid unnecessary loss of life and destruction, it is agreed that the best warriors and military minds will be sent to a small uninhabited quadrant of the galaxy to settle the score. Some of the races have endured years of torment and oppression and with the galaxy at stake, nothing short of eradication of the enemy is acceptable. Star Battle is a first person perspective game designed to put fun back into gaming. Star Battle’s multi-player action allows head to head challengers over modem or network. The Jaguar makes this possible with 64-bit power and outstanding connectability.

Tom Harker, president of 4Play commented, “Our custom game tools afford no compromises. With advanced features like a warp polygon engine, gouraud shading, texture mapping, networking and modem support, Star Battle will be setting new standards in excellence for a long time to come”.

Look for Star Battle to be released on cartridge in the 4th quarter. (Atari Press Release, Star Battle(TM) announced for Atari Jaguar 4Play among Atari Jaguar developers Gaming will never be the same!, Consumer Electronics Show,  June 23, 1994, Volume 3 – Issue 10 ATARI EXPLORER ONLINE 2 July 1994).

Demo – SCES 1994

Another one of Tom Harker’s companies, 4-Play, showed its first title in the form of Star Battle. Programmer Scott LeGrand called it a multi-player space game, geared towards the multi-player aspects rather than individual play (although an individual option will be included in the game). The self running demo allowed you to see all of the different types of ships available to you, rotating on various axis. The game itself was described (again by Scott) as a Street Fighter II in space where you can (in one mode of play) pick any ship and your opponent and fight it out in space, utilizing the different advantages to the 20 or more ships included. Tom stated that they are trying for as much connectivity as possible. Modeming was guaranteed, and networking should support at least 16 Jags together, with 4-Play shooting for the max, 32. Again, this was just a demo showing the different polygon ships you could choose. All were nicely shaded (gourad) with bright, vivid colors. (The actual 3D models were created using InShape on an Atari Falcon030.) (AEO’s 1994 Summer Consumer Electronics Show Report, by Tal Funke-Bilu, GEnie, SCES 1994 Edition ATARI EXPLORER ONLINE 29 July 1994).

Notes – October 1994

We’re pleased to have a posting from our good friends at 4Play, regarding their upcoming game BattleSphere (previously known as Star Battle). This ambitious project should be just the thing to satisfy your space-simulator cravings. Scott LeGrand of the programming team provided this list to get you a little more familiar with what they’re doing:

Top Ten BattleSphere Facts

10. It’s guaranteed to support networks and modems. That’s been our crusade from the beginning.

9. There are only 4 people working on this game. 4Play, get it?

8. All ships have been rendered by Thunderbird using InShape on the Falcon 030. We’d use 3D Studio, but it’s just too damned EXPENSIVE and InShape has a really great object builder for 1/15 the price.

7. All music has been composed by Stephanie Wukovitz using Protracker 2.0 and some nameless 8-16 voice tracker on the PC.

6. We do support texture mapping and hope to have at least one texture-mapped ship in the demo.

5. I wrote all the graphics and game code.

4. Doug Engel wrote the networking and sound code and does the artwork. Actually, he wrote a text blitting routine as well so I lied about #5. Sue me…

3. Tom Harker of ICD, Black Cat, and 4Play has been responsible for the CatBox and getting us all the software and hardware we need.

2. Battle Sphere pales next to “One” on the 32X!!!!! JAGUAR

SUX! Oops, wrong personality…

1. GreyWorld really exists.

[Editor: “Greyworld” being Scott’s name for the 32X “pack-in”.]

Finally, Atari has nothing to do with the concept or execution of this title. It is not a port, it is MY IDEA crossed with Doug’s artwork and Stephanie’s musical talents. It’s loosely a cross between Netrek and TIE Fighter, but it’s really like an old mainframe game I wrote in the 80s hooked into a zero-g flight simulator… Therefore, the first nimrod that starts blaming Atari because we haven’t gotten this thing out yet should be soundly sacked. OTOH, we’re a smalltime operation with dayjobs so it takes us a while to get things done… If you flame us, we’re liable to put a caricature of you in the game with the name appropriately mangled, we’re doing the best we can. If this title goes well, we hope to go fulltime somewhere in the future…

The OTHER BattleSphere programmer, Doug Engel (the renowned Thunderbird from GEnie) added these comments: Things are picking up now. Much of the progress which we made since SCES were in ‘engine’ related areas. Scott keeps perfecting our polygon engine all the time, which doesn’t add a whole lot of new features, but the ones we have work faster and better.

A lot of time is being spent converting from 68000 to GPU assembly. We discovered that even simple tasks done by the 68000 acting as a ‘traffic cop’ can bog down when bandwidth gets saturated. We’re converting everything (even the kitchen sink) to GPU RISC. If you noticed that the ‘selector’ screen ran at a much better framerate than the ‘hunt the satellites’ play section, you’ll see what a difference converting to GPU RISC can make in speed. Unfortunately, a last minute bug kept us from finishing that conversion, so the gameplay section was more or less disabled for this show. There’s some cool space debris that gives a great feeling of motion when flying that didn’t quite make it into the demo.

Stephanie is working on more music, and keeps asking for changes to the Music drivers I wrote, and I’m busy working out networking code that will be portable to our future projects, as well as some neat blitter effects (like our intro), I’m doing all the artwork (you like what you see?) and Scott still hasn’t caught up to me with his using all my bitmaps. 🙂

>Suggestion: I saw that you had custom ‘dash boards’ for each ship type. However the ‘radar’ screens were always in the same place.  

In the demo they are in the same _relative_ place… if you look closely, they are not fixed to the screen in specific locations. There are other cockpits with the screens located in vastly different locations, but I didn’t complete the artwork for them yet.  Also: There are NINE possible radar views to choose from, which are user configurable and saveable.

>Would it be possible to ‘customize’ the screen placement more, so that it’s more than just cosmetics? x,y coordinate offsets for drawing/ updating each ship types dash so you(4Play) could create more varied dash layouts for the ships. i.e. one ship type has the screens side by side, one has the screens vertically layed out on the left, or the right, reversed positions etc, so you would have something to “learn” or get used to when flying different ship types. Just an idea.

As you can see by the way that the screens are not exactly in the same spot onscreen and that they are user selectable, we’ve already implemented these great ideas! However, I’m not really keen on ships with unbalanced cockpits (i.e. both radars on one side vertically) they don’t make sense from a design standpoint because in reality a cockpit will be designed to maximize peripheral vision and that would block too much vision. From an artsy-fartsy standpoint, I don’t like the way that looks aesthetically. Scott doesn’t like them because they would mess up the HUD layout that he’s already programmed. 🙂

I like to think that the ‘different’ cockpit layouts are pretty well reflected in the style of the cockpits that each race uses. I tried to make their architecture different from each other, while putting my own identity into the overall ‘look’. We want people to recognize our games on sight. (“That looks like a 4Play game.”). ( Surfing the Jagged Edge,  by Dimitri Mark LaBarge,  Notes from the BattleSphere, Vol. 3, Issue 13 ATARI EXPLORER ONLINE 9 October 1994).

Races & Gameplay

800 years in the future, the 7 dominant races of the galaxy are at war. Stealing a plot idea from an ancient Star Trek episode, they have agreed to confine their hostilities to Sector 51, a spherical sector of space formerly used by the Earth government to secretly test new weapons and starships. Each race has sent its best soldiers and military hardware to participate in a tournament of space battles in this Battle Sphere. The race that wins the tournament will be given control of the galaxy.

The Races

The Oppressors resemble the human race’s concept of demons and it is believed that Earth legends of demons were caused by the arrival of an Oppressor strike force that was somehow destroyed soon after it reached the planet. They once controlled 80% of the known galaxy but have been slowly losing their hold as they encounter one disaster after another. The Oppressors will do anything to regain their former hold on the galaxy.

The Se’Bab were an all-female slave race of the Oppressors until the sudden arrival of the Telchines 50 years ago weakened their hold leading to a brutal rebellion and double blow to the Oppressors which destroyed half of their empire. The Se’Bab were bred for beauty and obedience. This has translated into extreme xenophobia towards all other races and extremely aggressive, almost suicidal battle tactics.

The Se’Bab bare one breast at all times in defiance of male power. The Telchines appeared 50 years ago and are presumed to originate from a neighboring galaxy. Their advanced craft brutally vaporized a section of the Oppressor’s empire which indirectly triggered the rebellion that freed the Se’Bab from their Oppressor masters. 

The Telchines do everything in threes and are obsessed with the 5 Platonic solids. Their ships have threefold symmetry. No one has ever seen a Telchine and lived. They appear to be transforming space around their Empire.

The Slith are lizard-like beings whose ships seem to be alive. They also have the greatest repair capacity of any race. Never leave one of their ships for dead, it isn’t. They are rumored to devour their prisoners after interrogation. Their capitol ships resemble giant writhing snakes and lizards, and can reproduce if sufficient resources are supplied. Their weapons are tailored to achieving the paralysis and capture of other ships for this purpose rather than simply destroying them.

The Smg’Heed are the last surviving descendants of the human race, mostly wiped out by a scourge of retroviruses and accumulated debt from placing their entire GPP into developing absurdly powerful weapons. As a result, their ships are based on modified 20th century technology, have lousy maneuverability, but do incredible damage if they manage to hit anything. Watch out for their self-destruct systems! The other races decided to include them in the tournament mostly on the fear that they’d activate one of their many budget-busting Doomsday Devices had they not done so.

The Ocatanut are a feline race that follow the Slith wherever they go. An uneasy alliance exists between them, but it has been suspended for the sake of the tournament. There is the general belief that there will be some form of power-sharing between them if either race wins the tournament. The Ocatanut focus on stealth and speed to overcome their enemies. Frequently, they will then share their kills with the Slith.

The Thunderbirds are the sworn enemies of the Ocatanut and the Slith. They are hawklike predators who blend speed and firepower in their ships. They are fixated on coup-like behavior and they tend to make a great show of any kill, making sure their victim knows who it was who has beaten them. It is believed that the Se’Bab and the Thunderbirds have been sharing technology.

Gameplay

Battle Sphere is everything we (Doug Engel and Scott Le Grand) have wished for in space battle games, but haven’t seen since the industry seems intent on continually cloning Wing Commander in one form or another. We personally cut our teeth on Star Raiders and consider it to be the best Space Battle game ever done. (TIE Fighter is our favorite Wing Commander clone that fixes the problems with Wing Commander.) Accordingly, Battle Sphere has the play mechanics of Star Raiders with 16 bit colors, and graphics along the lines of TIE Fighter. There are 4 play modes:

1. Arena: 1-8 player Street Fighter II in Space. Players select any ship they desire and head into a variety of arenas where the object is to kill every other player (or every other player on the opposing team) for points which can be utilized to improve the functionality of their ships. The resulting ship can be saved for future use. This is also similar to a space-based version of Sega’s Wing Wars I suppose.

2. Gauntlet: Single player or multiplayer cooperative 3D Missile Command. The players are given 6 starbases to defend against waves of incoming enemy fighters, bombers, capitol ships and strange things until all starbases are destroyed. Periodically, a destroyed starbase will be replaced.

3. Alone Against the Empires: A single or multiplayer cooperative game similar to Star Raiders. The Battle Sphere is broken up into 64 or so spherical sectors. Some of those sectors, close to the center, contain starbases. The outer sectors contain armadas of enemy ships, enemy starbases, and random strange things (all depending on the skill level). Play proceeds as the enemy ships head for the center of the Battle Sphere in order to destroy the starbases. Enemy reinforcements will arrive at the edge of the Battle Sphere as long as there are enemy starbases. Play continues until 1) All friendly starbases have been destroyed (you lose) or 2) All enemy forces have been eliminated (you win).

4. Network: 2-8 player Netrek meets TIE Fighter. Two alien races at a time are placed in the Battle Sphere with a number of starbases and capitol ships. The object of the game is to destroy all of enemy capitol ships and starbases before an adjustable time limit runs out. Failing this, the team that caused the most damage against its enemy wins. This proceeds until all alien races have fought in the Battle Sphere and the winning race is granted control of the galaxy.

Miscellaneous

Current framerate is 25-30 fps although we can get it down to 1 fps if we stack 10 massive starbases on top of one another and get up close and personal, gee we must suck, eh? Anyone who played our demo at the WCES will testify that we’re pretty smooth, even better than TIE Fighter on a 486 at this point. It is important to note that our polygon engine is not running at full capacity yet. We have intentionally left certain optimizations (like reduced detail models) out at this point so that and speed decreases caused by adding A.I. and such can be gained back with these techniques. Besides, we’re probably just really too lazy to do it right, huh?

All of our ships are gouraud shaded, many don’t even look like polygon models. Texture mapping is being used sparingly to provide detail on top of the gouraud shading, a technique we’re calling “Decal-Mapping(tm)”. Look for more and more of it as the game progresses. Anyone who complains because it’s not fully texture-mapped has incredibly bad taste.

See who can count the most homages to other computer games and SF movies and series…. The winner is a total nerd, worse than we are probably….

The one thing we absolutely despise about Wing Commander is the huge cockpits with the cute joystick which leaves an absolutely tiny viewing area. Our cockpit designs are minimal and we are placing most tactical information in HUDs. This way, if one turns off the cockpit view, no important information is lost. At least they finally fixed this in WC3!

Progress Report: All background engines are finished, as is the flight engine, we are currently working on explosions to top Iron Soldier’s.

Projected release is 2Q ’95. The long haul continues. (Battle Sphere Description, 1/13/95, Text Copyright (c) 1994, 1995 4Play. All Rights Reserved, Volume 4, Issue 1 ATARI EXPLORER ONLINE 16 January 1995).

Update – January 1995

A couple of people had commented about the minimalist designs of the cockpits, versus what will eventually be in the Heads-Up Displays (HUDs) of the various ships. Scott LeGrand (Oppressor) explains the design intentions: There will be more info in the cockpits: some idiot lights and indicators in the cockpit proper and a HUD for everything else… In addition, the targeting indicator around the designated target will have a small shield strength bar under it…We are going for maximal viewing area. I H A T E Wing Commander’s cockpits…

Doug Engel (Thunderbird) added:

And the gunsights will be ‘aimable’ by a ‘gunner’ on controller #2! Also commented on were the beautiful new starfields, designed to give that cinematic quality you only get from big budget space epics. If you’re looking at the static TARGAS you’re missing this thing in motion. If you’re recalling what you saw at ToadFest, forget it! Scott re-wrote the starfield renderer and it’s got stars galore. With the framerate increase of pure RISC, it’s really hot. Noted especially were some of the startling background objects, perhaps the best ever seen in this type of game. 

Doug Engel: The ones we have in there currently are hand-painted by yours truly and then reduced in size to their game dimensions and anti-aliased. I think they look hot. Some of the nebulas I am especially proud of because they look just like photos of real galaxies/nebulas. The ringed planet is also cool.

One particularly interesting area of debate came up when a WCES-goer made this unique suggestion:…someone at WCES suggested that we should make our stars ‘twinkle’. The scientific reasons for why stars only twinkle’ inside an atmosphere were quickly pointed out. Yet, that didn’t deter the participants of that discussion, and options were thrown about for a way to accommodate this effect. Everything from a user-configurable keypad combination to turn on a twinkle effect to very thick shields were suggested; in the end, though, it looked as if that option wouldn’t be included. But this discussion led to interesting comments on the finite resources of any gaming system:

Unfortunately, as I described earlier, most of the ‘neato’ effects people are suggesting are simply not possible due to the fact that there’s a finite amount of power in any system. There are also hardware limitations to worry about too. While we’d love to look exactly like Babylon 5, we have to live with what’s physically possible to do.

Rest assured, we will have creative effects for these things. Just don’t go expecting the results to mimic Star Trek or anything. One person I talked to wanted me to make the shields look like the shield effect in the movie Dune, later used by the Borg… where the shield appears as a glass-like barrier. If we could do it, we would… but those effects were generated by sophisticated image rendering programs on powerful computers over the course of hours/days. No way to do that stuff in real-time. Don’t worry.. we WILL have cool effects. Just not the ones_everyone_ wants us to do because they saw it in a movie/etc.

However, Doug Engel pointed out that other highly sophisticated effects such as texture-mapping will indeed be present in the game, although it wasn’t seen much at WCES: Like I said before… some of our objects are completely Texture-Mapped. I just didn’t have time to fly around looking for specific objects at the time. We were prepping for WCES, it was late-late at night, and I needed to put together some screens to hand out at WCES… For what it’s worth, that night while I was doing that, Scott was in L.A. linking in the decal maps for the remaining races. Some ships (the Telchines) in particular came out utterly awesome. Once the squadron insignias are in place, our ships will look insanely cool… far superior to any Texture-Mapped game.

You guys _do_ realize that certain popular arcade car race games use gouraud shading and phong shading to achieve that metallic effect and then have the detail mapped over it… (sound familiar).

To finish this continuing discussion, a reflective note on exactly what makes 4-Play unique and why they hope it will make their games something unique: There’s a _lot_ of aesthetic considerations to bear in mind when writing a game engine. A lot of planning and ‘art’ must go into the design of a game engine. That’s why the programmer must be in touch with the artists and/or must be an artist himself. That’s why Scott and I work so well together. I know art and I know code. I understand what the limitations of the hardware/software and know how to exploit the hardware to make my art look it’s best, and create effects that are original. Scott knows code and has many years experience with 3D engines. We communicate daily, and we are both striving for perfection. We experiment and go back-and-forth with our discoveries and how to exploit them to be original.

Remember… we come from the days when you _had_ to do something nobody else thought of in order to make your game look ‘cool’. Atari 800 games are what we cut our teeth on. (Battlesphere Under Construction, Volume 4, Issue 1 ATARI EXPLORER ONLINE 16 January 1995).

Update – February 1995

So, more on the work-in-progress known as BattleSphere, starting with comments from our friend, Doug Engel: Just keeping you dudes and dudettes (are there any of those here????) posted on the progress of that incredible new Jaguar title known as BattleSphere…Scott finished some cool code for laser firing. You can even link laser fire between multiple guns for a multi barrel super powered shot. You can also fire single shots one gun at a time, for a rapid-fire spread, taking better advantage of the multiple guns to overcome the inherent recharge time these types of weapons have. Scott also worked out some cool exterior viewpoints, which will really look slick.

I designed the display fonts for our HUD, and wrote the code to put those fonts onscreen. I’ve designed several of the exploded ship objects… a long and tedious task, given that we have over 2 dozen ships (and more on the way). I placed Additional Decal-Maps on several of the ships, so that fighter ID numbers will help identify ships of the same race in co-op network mode.

We hope to have collision detection enabled this week, and explosions done the following week.

On from this update, a teasing look at the possibilities that the multi-player version of this game promises:

>How about allowing programmable ‘fire’ buttons like in the Battletech center games?

Sorry. All of our buttons are currently occupied with important piloting and weaponry functions. There’s a slight chance that the co-pilot/gunner will have a different set of fire controls. We shall see.

Scott Le Grand then jumped in with some updates of his own:

Lasers: They’re gonna work intermittently if damaged… Also, no laser overheating. Each ship will have a bar on the HUD indicating the amount of energy available for maneuvers, weapons, and laser fire. This energy is constantly replenished by the ship’s reactor unless it’s damaged. If energy is available, you can fire the lasers single shot as fast as you can hammer on the fire button. If you hold in the fire button, it fires constant stream somewhat slower than if the button is hammered… If you run out of energy, you can’t fire any more until it builds back up… If you link the fire, there’s a slight recharge time for each tube that becomes apparent…

He then added a bit about how damage is being handled, which also indicates a little bit about how different alien “personalities” are being drawn in the game:

Damage Handling: Here’s how I’ve envisioned it. If a system is damaged, our female voice announces the damage and we have some sort of simplified stats in the hud when each system is damaged with a color coded symbol and a bar indicating the degree of damage. Each race has vary varying repair rates, the Slith specifically able to repair their ship from the verge of destruction to full working order in a minute or so. I figure this game might be too action-oriented to take a pause and start configuring repair rates of various systems.

This next post from Scott illustrates the breadth of gameplay that they’re incorporating into BattleSphere:

In Arena mode, action will be fast and furious, and if you’re damaged, you’re probably dead meat. In network mode, unless you have many kills, you will want to be destroyed so you can get back in the action. The nastiest thing you can do to an opponent will be to disable him and then prey on his starbases while he watches helplessly utilizing the various views… But watch out if he’s a Slith…

And to illustrate the process coming full circle, the final configuration on how damage and repairs will be handled by players:

Default: Automatic repair of all systems

Optional: Divert energy to speed up repairs

Expert: Pick an single system on which to concentrate repairs

Systems can either be working, damaged (where they work unreliably) or destroyed whereupon they can only be repaired by docking with a starbase or capitol ship… 

We leave this topic with the process of development continuing, this time with a new query as to a potential game feature:

OK, new topic here… In Gauntlet mode, you will be given a few starbases and then you will have to defend them from wave after wave of incoming ships. Should we have some level boss-like ships now and then?

The way I’m planning on running this is to divide the game into 6 levels. Each level consists of an attack by each enemy race. At the end of 6 levels, the 7th level is a sort of bonus round and this is where I’m thinking of throwing in some weird level boss sort of stuff. After a 7th level, there are 6 more levels of attacks by each race, but they are harder… I figure this is a good time to pass the design for this past you guys. As in Alone Against the Empires, you can play this singly, or cooperatively… (Surfing the Jagged Edge, by Dimitri Mark LaBarge, GEnie: AEO.6 CIS: 71501,3353 AOL: dimitril,  More 4-Playing, Volume 4, Issue 2 ATARI EXPLORER ONLINE 6 February 1995).

Interview – March 1995

While recently in Los Angeles on business, I was able to get together with some of the 4Play programming team. 4Play is made up of Scott LeGrand, Doug Engel, Stephanie Wukovitz, and Tom Harker (of ICD). Scott LeGrand and Stephanie Wukovitz both live and work at UCLA in Westwood. After meeting for dinner, we went back to their apartment and got down to talking about their first Jaguar title, Battlesphere.

AEO: Tell me about the setup for Battlesphere.

SCOTT: One of my favorite games of all time is Star Raiders for the Atari 800. Star Raiders is the reason I bought an Atari 800 and I am pretty sure that it is the reason that Doug bought one as well. I just played it for months and months. There really hasn’t been a good sequel to Star Raiders ever since it came out. There were a few things on the PC like LightSpeed and there is a game called Elite. It’s kind of like Star Raiders but not really. It’s more a role playing game in space. Then on the PC there is a game that we love called Tie Fighter.

But we also like networking games. So, we thought what would we get if we took all of those games and ideas and threw’em together? A multiplayer Tie Fighter-like game. That’s what the basic plot of Battlesphere is. Now unfortunately networking games haven’t really caught on, yet – but I think that they are in the next few years. They are the next wave no matter what anyone in the industry thinks.

SCOTT: The problem is that not a lot of people have access to games like Net-Trek or any other of those types of games out there. They are very popular in their limited audience that they get to. So we decided that we would do a networking game with Tie Fighter graphics sort of follow the plot of Star Raiders. You’re in a ship and have to take out an invading fleet of enemy ships coming for your starbases before they get you.  

One of the problems with writing a networking game is that while networking hasn’t caught on yet, you also have to write a game that one person can play and have a good time. So our solution to that was to have a bunch of different scenarios within the game.

1st, an all out “Arena” type game, like Battlewheels in space. Everyone gets a ship in the beginning. They can fight networked or against computer ships. As they win battles they can take the winnings and upgrade their ship.

2nd, single player or co-op known as “Gauntlet.” It is kind of like Missile Command in Space. You have 4 or more starbases and you have these arcade like waves of ships coming at the starbases. As you complete a level, you move onto the next one. Every couple of levels you will encounter level bosses. However if you do not like level bosses you can bypass them and leave the level immediately. But killing the boss will get you the big points.

3rd, “Alone Against the Empire.” This level is the Star Raiders-like mode. Single player or Co-op networked. The universe is broken up into sectors and in each sector is either a starbase, an enemy armada coming for your starbases, or an enemy starbase. The enemy armadas head for your starbases and destroy them. Once your starbases are destroyed, the game is over and you lose. The enemy starbases can open worm holes to the enemy’s home world and bring in reinforcements, so the idea is that if you don’t kill the enemy starbases, the game will never end. It kind of resembles Star Raiders II when you have to go and destroy the planets.

4th mode is a Campaign Mode.

AEO: How many players will Battlesphere play, maximum?

SCOTT: Eight players, maximum. Any more than that and you are going to tax the hardware too much and bring down the frame rate.

AEO: So, what do you plan the frame rate to be in the final product?

SCOTT: If we can get 20fps with eight people networked, we’ll be very happy. Right now in single player it is usually running at 30fps. If you stick like ten starbases on top of you, you are going to crash the frame rate down. And there are going to be situations like that in the gameplay and there are going to be people on the Net who say, “Oh what a horrible game because the frame rate drops.” But we’ll laugh, all games do this and you can’t get away from it. Graphics engines have finite limits.

AEO: What is the control going to be like?

SCOTT: First thing is that you can play it one player with one controller. But if you don’t have it networked and you have a friend and you want to play against him, one of the best ways to play Star Raiders was to have one person man the joystick while the other mans the keyboard. You could just scream commands at each other and curse each other out when something went wrong. So, what we are going to do is mirror all of the functionality of the keypad on both joypads simultaneously, so you can have a co-pilot manning all the tactical functions while you are piloting the ship around and firing. On top of that, the joypad on the second controller will optionally control a second crosshair. Both players will be able to fire lasers but the second player can fire the lasers in a direction where the ship isn’t pointing so that you can fire at a ship that crosses your field of view without having to turn your ship.

AEO: How long has Battlesphere been in development?

SCOTT: Well, conceptually, it’s been in development since August 1993. That’s when we were still looking for backers for the game. We had a 20 page proposal that we sent to Atari and a bunch of other companies. And nothing really panned out until we got to Tom at ICD. We all got together and made it happen.

AEO: Have you pushed the hardware to its limits?

SCOTT: No. Battlesphere is too committed at this point, but if we were to re-write it from the ground up we could easily up the frame rate higher. Not that there is a problem with the frame rate now. On our future Jaguar games, they will be better than Battlesphere as far as the coding. I know a lot more now than I did a year ago.

AEO: Will there be any easter eggs in the game?

SCOTT: Well, we will probably have an invincibility code of some sort. But we are not going to rely on keypad combinations for them. We want to make people go looking for the easter eggs. We will drop subtle little hints that if a player flies off in a certain direction he might see something interesting. Luckily, we are the producers of our own game so we decide what we want to put in it.

AEO: Any ideas on the type of music?

STEPHANIE: I have some ideas. I come home and play the keyboard for a while. But I’m limited since we are using a cart. I’m forced to use MOD files. Eventually, if we do a CD game, I think I will enjoy that more. If we can sound as good as Tempest 2000, I’ll be happy. Most of the music will be done in the next two weeks between the school breaks, so it won’t be holding the game up.

SCOTT: Some of our effects are taken from a tape we made back when we were thirteen. We would stick firecrackers into things, like R2D2’s leg, and blow it up.

AEO: When do you expect release on Battlesphere?

SCOTT: Well, we announced 2nd Quarter 1995, but we are hoping for the end of June. Remember, we do this after our day jobs.

AEO: Any specific limitations to the cartridge format?

SCOTT: Well, obviously we are stuck with MODs instead of Red Book audio. But we have plenty of room for explosions and textures and F/X. That’s what I consider to be the video game experience. Just try to make a really good interface for the player and give him a real show. We’ll bump the cart up to a 4 Meg cart when we need to. But right now, while we code there isn’t much need for it.

AEO: What form of networking will Battlesphere support through the Catbox?

SCOTT: The Catbox supports CatNet and an RS232 interface. You should will be able to shove any standard Hayes compatible modem onto the Catbox and use the software in the program to call another Jaguar. We wanted to do that because from the beginning, Battlesphere was designed to be networked. Since I have always been a fan of networking, as soon as we got the Jaguar, Tom and Doug, who are very good with hardware, we had them working on an interface. That’s how the Catbox emerged. Along the lines of developing the networking and modem interfaces, Tom decided it would be good to put audio and video options on there to give it some wider appeal. Then we found out the 3DO had headphone jacks and volume control. So, that ended up on the Catbox as well.

AEO: Are you going to support the Voice Modem as well?

SCOTT: Yes. Two player.

AEO: Do you have a Voice Modem for testing?

SCOTT: We don’t have it at this time. But it is perfectly good enough to debug modem code using the Catbox and a Hayes modem. Those will most likely be more wide spread than the Voice Modem finally gets out there. But, I don’t know what the story is with it.

AEO: Do you foresee yourself moving to CD-ROM?

SCOTT: If the Jaguar does well with the CD, than we will. There will be some sort of expansion module into Battlesphere that we will use if we sell enough copies of Battlesphere to make it a success. By using a CD expansion, you can load the ships off of the Cart faster than the CD-ROM and that will cut the access time. Then we will include more music and different missions, like they’ve done with X-Wing and Tie-Fighter.

AEO: How good is [the Battlesphere Polygon engine] it? How many polygons are you getting?

SCOTT: That’s a really bad thing to ask. The way many benchmark a polygon engine is that they put a lot of really tiny objects on the screen, like 10×10 pixel polygons. Then they spin them around and that’s how you get your rendering rate. What I think the way that you measure a polygon engine should be, is that you play a game and see when it slows done. Our game doesn’t slow down much at all, even when the ships are big. That’s more of a measure of a polygon engine to me.

AEO: How would you rate it to the Checkered Flag engine or the Club Drive engine or the Cybermorph/Battlemorph engine?

SCOTT & STEPHANIE: (laugh) [a lot] Cybermorph has a pretty decent engine in it – a lot better than Checkered Flag or Club Drive. I would think that ours is faster than Cybermorph by about a factor of two; but then again, Cybermorph has a land and we don’t. I haven’t seen Battlemorph.

AEO: Will the set up in Battlesphere take advantage of the newly mapped buttons on the keypad?

SCOTT: We set up Battlesphere’s control on the keypad to take advantage of it. The 1,4,7,* will be engine power. That makes sense. The middle column will be for target selection and the last for weapon selection. You can also access the weapon selection through the red buttons, but you most likely will be able to prioritize the strips for your liking. There will also be other options like pressing “C” and a keypad button for communications, they are all logically related to one another. There are a total of about 36 different options on the keypad. Playtesters will get copies of it around the E3 show.

AEO: On GEnie a while back there was a big discussion about pausing the game in network mode. What was the final decision on that?

SCOTT: There is going to be a pause. Team captains will be the one to pause.

AEO: Are you thinking of supporting the Lynx as a smart controller?

SCOTT: If the Lynx had ever taken off – and it is a great system, I own two – I would support it. But I don’t think that there are enough people out there with Lynx’s to support the development of the Lynx cart to run with Battlesphere. It would drive the cost of the package up way too high. I would guess around $100.  (California 4Play, Interview by Mark “Stingray” Santora, Volume 4, Issue 4 ATARI EXPLORER ONLINE March 28, 1995).

E3

Had the pleasure of running into Scott and Stephanie and Someone Else (sorry B-) from 4Play, and ended up giving the game a healthy test drive. The game is currently about two-thirds complete; the graphics engine is there, there are some sounds, two-player networking was showin, and the “blow up the other combatants” scenario is in place. Missing are complete cockpit instruments (only the fore and aft radar were available), different and more advanced weapons, and the other game scenarios 4Play has been planning for months. They plan to have the game finished in another three months, though I would not be surprised (unfortunately) if it took more than that – part-time game development is not an easy task.

On the other hand, what was there looked great. Fast, fluid graphics, smooth scrolling, lovely backgrounds, and a good smattering of detail. The ships are mostly Goraund-shaded polygon models with a fair use of texture-mapped sigils and numbers, and they explode into lovely fragments that drift deliciously. B-) The game reminded me of X-WING and SPACE LORDS, and shows a lot of potential for the final product. It’s clear that 4Play has a high level of quality and detail (hopefully the AEO video will include Scott’s complete description of the Battlesphere alien races, backgrounds, and ships – they have enough fodder for a novella already), and are dedicated to work on the game until they’re completely satisfied. If that’s so, then BATTLESPHERE will be well worth the wait, methinks. ( Surfing the Jagged Edge, by Dimitri Mark LaBarge, The Jungian View, report by Robert Jung,  JAGUAR VR, Special Jag Edition E3 ATARI EXPLORER ONLINE May 20, 1995).

Update – July 1995

Doug “Thunderbird” Engel writes: Word has it that BattleSphere(tm) now has >MUCH< tighter collision detection. Combine that with the really cool menu graphics I am doing, and imagine what a great game this is becoming!!! Despite Scott’s monitor blowing up without warning, and his moving to a new place which required cable TV hookup, he has still managed to add the real collision code (yes, that in the E3 video was just thrown together for the demo). Now Scott’s on semi-fulltime BattleSphere(tm) programming, so you’re gonna see some serious $h!+ And follows briefly with: The Jun-TACH code is now up and running. It works great. Makes things a lot more fun. The user-adjustable volume settings now save to EEPROM and read back really nicely. let’s hear from Scott LeGrand….(Surfing the Jagged Edge, by Dimitri Mark LaBarge, BattleSphere tidbits, Volume 4, Issue 5 ATARI EXPLORER ONLINE July 20, 1995).

Update – August 1995

Greetings BattleSpheroids(tm)! Well, this past month sure has been hectic. We’ve really got our noses to the proverbial grindstone now, in anticipation for our rapidly approaching self- imposed deadline. Things are shaping up nicely, but there’s much stuff still to do. BattleSphere(tm) was the focus of a focus group somewhere near Atari, and lots of feedback came out of the group. Most of their comments or suggestions were to do things we -already- planned to do, but it’s nice to learn that other people are interested in the same things we are. It was a good experience. We also got a lot of feedback from the MiST show, where several of our online friends turned out to give their opinions of the game. Feedback from this outing was really exciting to us. We’re really excited that everyone (except one person) loved the game. The other dude was clueless, most likely. 😉

Play modes really took a turn for the better with the addition of our deluxe 2-player pilot mode. Now 2 players with only one TV handy will still be able to play in cooperative mode against the computer or their networked pals until they get a monitor/TV for everyone to hook their Jaguars and CatBoxes up to.

We’ve got a really spiffy looking credits screen rolling away with some cool graphics effects going along behind them. It looks really cool. No boring screens for us! There’s a similar but different screen that scrolls the battleSphere(tm) story to those who wish to run it as an in-store demo or someone who doesn’t want to read the manual. Both these screens will be linked into the current version of the game very soon. (Concurrent development sucks, sometimes).

Scott controls the ‘current’ version, and adds the stuff I write to his code, periodically updating my code to match his. My revision is a few weeks behind the latest, but since we write modular code it doesn’t matter….

Stephanie cranked out a really swell sounding song (our “Flying in Space” tune), and it’s got a nice beat and a decent pace. I like it. Supposedly it’s not even done yet. I just happen to have a copy because it turned up a bug in my music player which I quickly vanquished. I got a copy so I could test the new player. Like I said… it sounds great.

In other news, we now have a ‘secret’ ability added to the game which is sort of the BattleSphere(tm) equivalent to a ‘Special Move’. There’s only the one move, but it’s REALLY cool. It gives a whole new dimension to the gameplay. You guys are gonna dig this one, ’cause it’s really a lot more than just a ‘move’. It’s a whole new way to combat, with new graphics and sounds. It simply RULES!

Scott happened upon a new type of weapon quite by accident. (Actually, it’s from an old Star Trek episode but he ‘discovered’ a way to do it by accident.) This brings up a new question for our loyal followers: Should new weapons be ‘earned’, or ‘acquired’, or (something else). We know a lot of people wanted to be able to ‘buy’ new weapons as they progress, but we’re thinking of a scheme more like this… each race has a specific ‘super- weapon'(as well as some of the random aliens that wander through the BattleSphere(tm) from time to time). Periodically, when a ship gets destroyed, an intact weapon system will be ejected from the explosion and will drift through space until some lucky pilot collects it for his ship. The systems will probably show up on radar as a special color or something, so you can spot them easily. Collecting new weapons and discovering what they do seems really fun in a super-bomberman sort of way.

The other possibility is having pilots earn the weapons based on the number of kills they get or something, but that’s no fun to the newcomer without a good ship. We’ve gotta decide quick the best way to acquire new weapons.

In regards to a query about targeting specific areas of ships to damage certain types of systems, T-Bird said….

This potentially applies only to bases and capital ships. We discovered early on that the enemy fighters are hard enough to hit_at all_ and to code it so that specific areas affect specific systems would be a total waste of time since NOBODY would be able to pick a system and hit it (intentionally). Capital ships are likely to -require- you to take out specific systems, in order to take them out. For example, you want to take out the shield generators first, then take out the engines to keep the ship from fleeing, then you can work on the fuel stores to polish it off. That sort of thing. If you can’t knock the shields out, you’ll never be able to damage the engines. To add a bit of skill to the task.

Finally, as this issue of AEO was going to press, there was another set of updates. (The game is either getting close, or 4Play is just getting better folks!) First, from Scott:

Today, I was videotaping Battle Sphere and I found all sorts of rendering bugs…. I recommend this practice to anyone doing game development. It’s the programming equivalent of someone pulling your pants down in public. T-Bird does this all the time (videotaping that is, you perverts)… Anyway, wow, I felt stupid. But they’re all gone now and single frame advancing confirmed that this things stays in the 25-30 fps just about all the time. Sure, flood the screen with ships, debris, explosions, and shots and we’re down to 15 or so, but man does this thing haul…. Heh heh, no one’s gonna figure out the little magic trick it took to make that one happen…And the best sign is I am not bored with playing it yet. In the early days, I used to go play Doom, Iron Soldier, or T2K after I burned out on programming. Lately, I’m dogfighting in the Battle Sphere… Life is good… Now if only I can make the deadline. Our next major obstacle is activating the networking… That’s going to be very interesting…Expect a public showing in the near future somewhere in LA…

Then Thunderbird has the last word….

Latest cut of BattleSphere(tm) is running just fine. Framerate is indeed up, thanks to the special hardware ‘hack’ devised by Scott and Myself. Nobody has though of this little ditty before… it’s too COOL! For what it’s worth, this little trick would have easily made DOOM a 320×240 game at 20-30FPS all the time…This game is running so smooth now. Things are shaping up nice. Scott’s working on putting in the ‘damage’ that you see as ships get beat up. He also said something about working on the ‘drive flares’ that Chazz was asking for that I said we were going to add and that the ships were custom designed to accept them. There’s some nice feedback when you hit someone or take a hit yourself, so people who saw the MiST version can rest easy now. The version we showed then looks like CRAP compared to how smooth and consistent THIS version is.

Loads of things still left to do. I just worked out the code to handle the specific timing of CatNet, so once the packet handler is running, it will go off to Scott for incorporation into the game. (Surfing the Jagged Edge, by Dimitri Mark LaBarge, 4-Playing,  Volume 4, Issue 6 ATARI EXPLORER ONLINE August 21, 1995).

Update – September 1995

…in the 25-30 fps just about all the time. Sure, flood the screen with ships, debris, explosions, and shots and we’re down to 15 or so, but man does this thing haul… Heh heh, no one’s gonna figure out the little magic trick it took to make that one happen…Reminds me of the olden days of 800 programming where there were things you could make the hardware do that the designers never dreamed of. This is so cool. Despite this being our 1st Jag title, it’s probably going to be one of the first “3rd Generation” titles, where the hardware finally gets really exploited. And to think… we’ve discovered ways to make the next title we do even BETTER along the way!

Now if only I can make the deadline. Our next major obstacle is activating the networking… That’s going to be very interesting…I continue to plug away at it…

T-Bird continues with another update:

Latest cut of BattleSphere(tm) is running just fine. Framerate is indeed up, thanks to the special hardware ‘hack’ devised by Scott and Myself. Nobody has thought of this little ditty before… it’s too COOL! For what it’s worth, this little trick would have easily made DOOM a 320×240 game at 20-30FPS all the time…This game is running so smooth now. Things are shaping up nice.

Scott’s working on putting in the ‘damage’ that you see as ships get beat up. He also said something about working on the ‘drive flares’ that Chazz was asking for that I said we were going to add and that the ships were custom designed to accept them.

There’s some nice feedback when you hit someone or take a hit yourself, so people who saw the MiST version can rest easy now. The version we showed then looks like CRAP compared to how smooth and consistent THIS version is. I feel sorry for anyone thinking of writing a Jag Space-Battle type game now. We absolutely KILL X-Wing and TIE Fighter as far as the battle scenes work. Loads of things still left to do. I just worked out the code to handle the specific timing of CatNet, so once the packet handler is running, it will go off to Scott for incorporation into the game.

He then responds to a question from AEO’s Mark Santora as to the sound capabilities of the game: Let’s talk about SOUND for a second. I know Steph is doin some “AWESOME” music and you have some nice effects, but what else is there? Are the engines just normal sounding? Is there a difference between the races?

Admittedly, we haven’t given as much attention to the sound effects as we have the other parts of the game… this is mostly due to time constraints and some hardware problems (and those damnable 1/8″ jacks on the F030’s being the royal nuisance I always predicted they’d be.) We do have a couple of really killer samples which I have done, but we are far from finished with that part of the game.

More on the vagaries of coding this game for a network:

How is the modem play coming? I assure you, that you and scott would make AT&T very happy beta testing BS against each other :’)

That’s part of the almighty Network Code, which is progressing incrementally toward completion, but since I’m trying to do it “right”, I have to test each little thing as I incorporate it, which means writing all sorts of 1-off test routines and status debug printouts, etc.

T-Bird then answers a question regarding the concept of incorporating some sort of “power up”: My opinion regarding power-ups: please do not make us “buy” them. I have never been a fan of this sort of scheme.

I never have liked it either .. I just wanted to ask what everyone felt, and I think it would be quite boring trying to code up a “weapon-mart” screen too. I’m partial to the ‘tractor beam’ idea, or at least some sort of way to pick them from space. 

Which reminds me. As for control, will the sensitivity of the controls be user-adjustable? I can deal with it if not, it’s not that big a deal… but it would be nice to be able to play with the control until it felt “comfortable”. Of course, this might vary a lot with the type of ship you’re flying, so this might not even be a sensible option.

I think we have the control “just right”. However, with all the different ship’s characteristics it might seem like, say, the Annihilator seeming to have poor control after you just flew a mission in a Devastator. That’s because that’s how it’s supposed to work. How would Super Burn-Out be if all the bikes could be adjusted to have the same characteristics? It’s the same sort of thing. Some ships are at a disadvantage because they control differently than others (but might have super-powerful weapons or super shields to balance it out).

Scott joins in the discussion with a question about how to incorporate drained weapons into the game:

OK guys, I’m knee-deep in coding and I have a couple questions…We now have multiple weapons active, some polygon-based, some bitmap-based. Here’s the problem. When one depletes the supply of a weapon, should I: 1) leave the pilot firing nothing until he switches weapons or 2) Automatically change the weapon to another one, in this case I think a default weapon…

Here’s another question: When one switches weapon types, should I cycle through all possible weapons, or only those for which ammunition is available? BTW all videogames should animate their bitmap weapons. It makes a huge difference in the look… One of Doug’s weapons really reminds me of the V’GER bolts from STTNG…

As this is written, the verdict of the online audience was almost unanimous that when a weapon is drained, it should automatically switch to another device. Scott announced that he would incorporate this approach into the game. A little more detail on this:

OK, it’s partially settled. I’m going to put in automatic weapon switching, but here’s the rub. Missiles, plasma bolts, and stasis bolts are qualitatively different weapons. Missiles are homing weapons, plasma bolts are glorified lasers, and stasis bolts are used to paralyze rather than damage a ship. So what I think I need to implement is most of them switching to plasma bolts then the plasma bolts switching to lasers. We’re not going to do the Wing Commander thing and have 8 variants of the same weapon, each with their own bitmap. As far as forcing some ships to switch manually, forget it, that’s bad game design IMO, you don’t make things that get in the way of players. This drives me ABSOLUTELY NUTS in the SNES game Vortex. Especially when you have to cycle through them to get to working weapons. ( Jaguar Tackboard, Confirmed information about Atari’s Jaguar, Compiled from online and official sources,  The BattleSphere Saga, Cont’d…, Volume 4, Issue 7 ATARI EXPLORER ONLINE September 15, 1995).

Update – October, 1995

Thunderbird: Hello BattleSpheroids! Welcome to our latest BattleSphere(tm) Update! The latest and greatest version of BattleSphere(tm) contains a whole slew of new code, which makes the game seem more and more complete. We’re making steady progress towards completion. The good news is that in spite of being exposed to BattleSphere(tm) for hours on end every day of our lives for as long as we can remember, we STILL enjoy playing the game, and programming it still gives us pleasure!

The improvements range from minor to major, and off the top of my head some of them are:

1) Ship to ship collision handler. If 2 ships collide, they now suffer damage and deflect their courses accordingly. (Provided you have some shields, if not…. blammo!). The resulting effect is very ‘Star Wars’ like. We’re pretty pleased wit the results. 2) There’s a really cool new HUD indicator, which shows you the direction and heading of the targeted ship. It’s an extension of what you find on a HUD in a fighter jet these days. It looks really slick. 3) Our main menu code is progressing nicely. I need to generate some more artwork for the menus, but the code to generate the futuristic looking text and pointer are done. The whole thing will get wrapped up in a generic ‘menu driver’, so that the menus can be easily changed as we decide how to lay out the structure of the menus. This beats having to decide how to lay out all the menus right now and hard-coding them. The menu driver itself is being worked on in the background… 4) Our multi-player networking driver is now running within the game itself. At this point, the network only supports flying around each other (weapons are not networked yet). By the time anyone reads this, weapons probably WILL be done (damn, we’re smooth!). Now that the low-level communications drivers are becoming stable, the higher level code can be debugged. The struggle continues, but the networking is making good progress.

Just a note for the curious. Yes, we _did_ indeed have full networking done for E3. The reason we are doing it ‘again’ is simple. The networking we did for E3 was only 2-players. 2-Player networking is incredibly trivial to write. As a matter of fact, we did indeed write that networking code in about 2 days (the 2 days preceding E3). It wasn’t perfect, but it did work well. It worked so well, in fact, that I am at a loss to determine why we don’t have many networked Jaguar games out already. 2-player networking should be in all the 2-player games. In our opinion, there’s no excuse for not having at least 2-player networks in titles where it’s appropriate. If we weren’t so busy finishing BattleSphere(tm), it would be kinda fun to help other developers get their own games networked.

Who knows, Atari’s been making a lot of the right moves recently (they have much improved sound-code, etc.) so perhaps they’ve got someone hard at work writing a custom generic network driver! That would be the thing to do.

Anyhow, we probably could have made the E3 code into a bug-free 2-player network driver in a couple of days more work on it, but we set out in the beginning to have more than 2 players… so here we are, rewriting the driver!

More and more games for the arcade, and PC’s and home consoles have networking built-in. The Jaguar is in a unique position because it is the only console on the market with available network hardware for over 2 players (I am told that Sony and Sega’s cables only support 2-players). At 4Play, we fully intend to support 2+ player networks, because we feel that networked games are the future of gaming. We’re going to exploit that capability to the fullest. Scott’s network load management code actually distributes gameplay functions across the networked Jaguars, actually _reducing_ the computational load on any single console. The game logic actually executes _faster_ on the network because the loading is divided among the multiple consoles!

Anyone who doubts that the Jaguar’s architecture allows “Parallel Processing” (Some unfortunate souls on Usenet…), hasn’t seen BattleSphere(tm) networking. Of course we can’t forget that our custom polygon/network/sound/AI engines _already_ perform load management amongst the 5 Jaguar processors… think about that for a minute… 3 networked Jags playing BattleSphere(tm) amounts to a fifteen processor parallel processing computer!!! However, I can understand why the Jaguar hasn’t seen 3+ player networking in games, because it is an order of magnitude more difficult than a simple 2-player network. No longer do you “know” which player the data is coming from until you process the packets, etc. No longer can you just ‘ping-pong’ messages. A whole complex scheme of ‘who talks and when’ has to be created. Ours is working reasonably well right now, which is the last major ‘engine’ we need for completing the game.

5) Modem code (for RS-232 modems) is an offshoot of the multi-player network code. When that’s finished, it should only take a day or so to make it ‘Modem Friendly’. The most work in doing so involves setting up the screens for dialing the number and configuring the modem. 

Before anyone asks, it looks unlikely that we will be able to add support for the voice-data-communicator. There were none available at Atari when we asked for them last month, and we’re running out of time/ROM to work on it. Actually, that reminds me… we also weren’t able to get a 6-button controller (“none available”) at that time.

We know what the keys map to, so we can try and support it. Just don’t blame anyone if the controls aren’t as ‘perfect’ as they could be. Since the controllers are in short supply, we can’t really test the scheme and fine-tune it. Maybe we’ll make the 6-button an ‘easter egg’, so we won’t get bashed by the magazines if the setup doesn’t work right. Atari must be really busy with their projects, and can’t allocate the resources to the third parties, so we can’t get any controllers, etc… they are a small company doing the work of a giant, so it’s understandable.

6) We now have visible damage on the ships. If you damage the hull of a ship, a sparking explosions blows out of the hull, leaving scar on the surface. What’s unusual is that we made the scars these animated sparking things with electricity zapping around inside them. It makes the damage easier to see at a distance. The effect is subtle, but that’s just the kind of thing that ‘makes’ a game. Subtle ‘eye-candy’, and nice ‘touches’. It’s the sort of thing that makes Rayman so great too. I hope more games have this sort of stuff in them.

7) Framerate is still very high. We run constantly over 20FPS, usually between 30-60fps, depending on the amount of action onscreen. Our little Blitter Trick(tm) has insured that even with lots of explosions going off at once, the framerate is really high. We’re quite proud of this little ‘hack’ we came up with. It really works!!! Not that we were anything but screaming fast before… the load management going on between the processors by our custom engines is no slouch. It’s also ‘generic’ enough that we’ll re-use most of it for our next Jag title. 

We’ve always believed in keeping the framerate as high as possible. Low framerates can ruin an otherwise good game. Our networking scheme is actually _further_ complicated by the way which we have decoupled the network traffic from the framerate, and distributed the control to all of the Jaguars on the net. Any of you who have played other networked games and seen the framerate drop to the rate of the slowest player’s screen will know what we’re talking about.

We’re putting everything we can think of into this game, because we want it to be one of those titles that everyone admires as ‘finally using the hardware’… sort of like the days of the 2600 where the programmers were squeaking every ounce of performance out of the console and coming out with stuff that seemed impossible. We think that if we show off the ‘real’ capabilities of the Jaguar, that more people will stop being so critical of the Jag, and will buy one and enjoy our game on it. We think our game is that ‘killer app’, for the Jaguar. Remember, we’re a very tiny company, with limited time and resources, so we really appreciate the patience our customers have shown with us getting this thing finished. We can’t promise you an exact delivery date, but we can promise it will be worth it. 😉

8) Steph and Scott just outfitted their Falcon030’s with all of the audio adaptors required to get some really nice voice/instrument samples. Steph is doing an incredible job with our music. We have several songs, each with a different personality. Her work will only improve now that she’s got access to the Falcon (the best audio computer ever made!). I have a few items to sample with mine for certain sound effects, but I’m too busy coding to do it. In a few days I will have more time. ( Surfing the Jagged Edge, by Dimitri Mark LaBarge, In the Sphere, 10/02/1995, Volume 4, Issue 8 ATARI EXPLORER ONLINE October 10, 1995).

Update – March, 1996

That’s right! With tonight’s code modifications, you too will experience the amazing technological innovation of 4-times the Nonvolatile Memory Capacity of any Jaguar Game Cartridge ever produced!!! We felt that limiting our high-score tables to only a handful of names was one of the few legitimate complaints with the -awesome- Defender 2000, so we embarked on an effort to quadruple the storage capacity of the NV memory. The effort has succeeded. Now we have the ability to store complete high-score tables _and_ detailed ship statistics. Another record-shattering advancement from 4Play! ( BattleSphere Updates, by Doug “Thunderbird” Engel, public postings to Usenet by Doug Engel, BattleSphere Update, 3/23/96, Volume 1, Issue 1a JAGUAR EXPLORER ONLINE March 27, 1997). 

Update – April, 1996

Greetings Sports Fans! Welcome to the latest installment of BattleSphere(tm) Update(r). Once again, we are slaving around-the-clock in our efforts to create the greatest console game ever designed on any system known to mankind.

Since the last update, the following breakthroughs have been accomplished: 1) A super-nasty and annoying bug in the targeting system was exterminated. Changing targets with the selection keys no longer glitches on occasion. It’s working fine now.

2) A bug in the sound manager was squashed, so now the sound locations in the universe are accurately calculated, so their relative volumes are now properly computed. This had caused some annoying miscues in the sounds.

3) Speaking of sounds, the new samples which we added recently have been described as, “Sounds like a world war”. Great. That’s what we wanted! Our sound is officially chock full of “64-bitty” goodness!

4) All of the versions of all of the Starbase objects have been created. A major task has been completed. There are bases for each different race. Each base has a unique shape and style, making them all race-specific.

5) The Starbase code has been completed, which includes the ability to target, shoot, damage, and eventually destroy a Starbase. The HUD icon for a base was added, so they can be spotted on the HUD and targeted. It looks great.

6) The universe was expanded (Scott playing God again) because the large bases would not grow small enough in the distance before wrapping around the universe.

7) We were not 100% happy with the way the Starbase destruction sequence appeared once it was first completed. We felt that a Starbase should have a distinctive looking termination effect. Inspired by the effects from the recent space-battle on Babylon 5 (which blows away any and all current versions of Star Trek), we came up with a last-minute revamp of the Starbase destruction. Now, a Starbase that dies does so in a much more spectacular fashion. It’s last-minute inspiration like this which makes game development so enjoyable, and makes BattleSphere(tm)’s development process superior to the rigidly defined processes of other developers.

8) The “Gauntlet” play-mode is being honed to perfection. It’s a lot of fun and has an “arcade” feel to it. The enemy AI is really wickedly evil, and few players will get very far against the ever improving enemy pilots. Protecting a group of Starbases in a sector has never been this much fun before… 

9) Expect a preview from none other than Travis “El Travvy” Guy, from Atari Explorer Online within a few days. Travis is going to be playing a recent beta test version of this game.

10) BattleSphere(tm) R00LZ! ( BattleSphere Updates, by Doug “Thunderbird” Engel, public postings to Usenet by Doug Engel, BattleSphere Mini-Update 4/17/96, Volume 1, Issue 1a JAGUAR EXPLORER ONLINE March 27, 1997) .

Update – September, 1996

The three latest additions to our masterpiece are as follows:

1) The “Warp Effect” is incorporated. This is a cool wavy wormhole that appears in the spot where a ship exits from hyperspace. If you see one of these things you can pepper it with gunfire and the ship will materialize right in your hail of fire! Boom!!! It works!!! And it looks really cool!!! I have to make a sound effect for it though…

2) “Free-For-All” play mode has been added. This mode pits you up against 15 other ships in an all-out battle to reach a selectable number of points. You will re-generate after getting killed after a 5 second delay, with a 1 kill penalty. The first player to reach the goal is the victor! This is something like “DeathMatch” in Doom, except that we have the additional features: a) When killed you re-generate with your targeting computer locked on the ship that killed you, so you can get “REVENGE(tm)” on him! b) Your targeting computer displays a bar-graph indicator under each ship target indicator indicating their score. A ship with a large indicator has more kills than one with a short one. This way you can concentrate fire on the guy that’s winning, and cut his score back! Free-For-All mode is complete, except for the pre-game setup screen which allows the number of kills to be specified and the ship classes allowed in each game. Free-For-All works in both 1-player and Networked modes and it’s a real blast to play!!! With 16 ships in constant battle and an infinite supply of lives, things get pretty hairy! ( BattleSphere Updates, by Doug “Thunderbird” Engel, public postings to Usenet by Doug Engel, BattleSphere Update, 9/9/96, Volume 1, Issue 1a JAGUAR EXPLORER ONLINE March 27, 1997). 

Update – December, 1996

Hey there BattleSpherePhanatics(tm)! The wait is drawing to a close. Gauntlet Play Mode is now in play testing, and I must say that it RULES!!! Never before have I met such a challenging shooter game in my life! (Well… maybe Tempest 2000). But it’s great!!!

The levels start off pretty easy for me (I’m an expert) but the enemy gets smarter and stronger as you go. Some levels require a great deal of strategy as you’re outnumbered and outgunned. Careful planning of when and where to use your special weapons is crucial. The level bosses are particularly fun and challenging, and really make the time fly by. Finding the weakness in these guys is going to be a real challenge! It took me 90 minutes to get through one particular level and I know the Achilles heel already (heh heh heh) you guys are gonna love this. Watch out now that the enemy AI is programmed to use special weapons on you. Some of you complained a while back that some of our special weapons were not particularly useful, right? Well, you’ll be singing a different tune when you discover how “INeffective” they are when the enemy is using them on you (don’t cry to me).

At any rate… if you finish all 100 levels of Gauntlet, you will indeed be a supreme BattleSphere champion. In other news, our nifty new introduction which tells the story of the game is completed, which really spiffs up our Attract Mode. There’s even some cool easter-eggs in that sucker. There’s a couple of other things new too, but I can’t tell anyone about them 😉 Let’s just say we have another “first” for Jaguar games! ( BattleSphere Updates, by Doug “Thunderbird” Engel, public postings to Usenet by Doug Engel, BattleSphere Update, 12/28/96, Volume 1, Issue 1a JAGUAR EXPLORER ONLINE March 27, 1997). 

Update – February, 1997

More amazing superhuman effort has brought about dramatic changes to the world of BattleSphere(tm). As we approach the end of available ROM space, more and more additional features are being added and play is being tweaked to perfection. The actual changes made include but are not limited to: 1) The graphical extravaganza introduction has been completed. The number-crunching graphics are indeed impressive. The nasty bug in the hardware which caused this mode to occasionally lock up was circumvented.

2) The mega-awesome new “Mystery” levels have been added to Gauntlet (I hate the term “Boss”). Several unusual new entities have been added to make things a little more interesting for the player trying to complete all 100 levels! Animated 3D ships RULE!!!

3) Gauntlet Networking is nearly finished. This allows 2 consoles to be connected to play a cooperative version of Gauntlet… it may be the only way some of you get to see the nifty later levels (heh heh heh).

4) Cockpit radars have been aesthetically improved for a more high-tech look.

5) Another incredibly realistic explosion has been added.

6) Several all-new sound effects have been added.

7) Steph is pleased to announce that all non-in-game music has been increased to 8 or 10 track stereo sound, thanks to an all-new music player expertly coded by TBird. (Limited bandwidth forces in-game tunes to remain 4-track).

8) A nasty hardware bug killing BattleSphere(tm) mode was eliminated. It didn’t show up until testing.

9) BattleSphere(tm) Play mode is finished. This mode is a show-stopping, strategy-invoking, white-knuckle blast! Conquering the bases of the enemy team is challenging and fun… and the more players you bring to the BattleSphere, the more fun it gets. Forget about mindless “Deathmatching” (Which you can play too in “Free-For-All” mode)… BattleSphere(tm) mode’s vastly more elegant play mechanics create a networked play environment that’s light-years ahead of the simplistic kill-or-be-killed doldrums everyone’s so weary of. The object of the mode is to capture the enemy team’s bases using special energy weapons… but you need to accumulate kills to be able to upgrade your ship to be able to carry these weapons. Once you upgrade your ship, you can dock with your bases and load up on special weapons. But watch out! If you get destroyed, you have to start over again. Once you have sufficient weapons to conquer a base, and you get through the enemy fighters defending it, you can lay into it and take it over. Once the base is yours, you can go after the next. Be careful though because the enemy may not want you taking over their base and may take their own base down with a last-ditch bombing run, if it looks like you’re about to conquer it!

Of course the number of bases, number of players, and method of victory (conquest or destruction of enemy bases) is completely configurable… for hours and hours of networked play fun. By itself this play-mode is an entire game. Remember… this mode is for 2-8 consoles only (no 1-player version).

10) Coding is progressing on the final play-mode (Alone Against the Empires), which is the Star-Raiders-ish mode. An all-new galactic map is being designed as well as the enemy AI required to seek and destroy bases in multiple warp sectors. This mode will be super cool. 

With the multiple play-modes available and the variety of them, it’s a lot like getting 4 or 5 different high-quality games all for the price of one! Imagine getting a game and 4 of its sequels all at one time! ( BattleSphere Updates, by Doug “Thunderbird” Engel, public postings to Usenet by Doug Engel, BattleSphere(tm) (Awesome) Update(R) 02/03/97, Volume 1, Issue 1a JAGUAR EXPLORER ONLINE March 27, 1997) .

Update – March, 1997

Anyone who is interested in having their very own customized and personalized “Collector’s Edition” of BattleSphere(tm), please go to our web-site and leave us Feedback mentioning your interest in this sort of item. Also, please mention how many we should limit the number of them too, and how much you would pay for one:

You have to realize that these would have to be “hand made” and individually encrypted, etc. It will be labor intensive, so the fewer of them we make the easier it will be, but they will probably cost more for us to make. If we’re going to do this, we need feedback to judge how many of them we can make.

We are CONSIDERING doing this sometime after we finish the current game and we see how sales are.

At the very least, we’d have the owner’s name displayed on the title screen or a special dedication screen. We’d probably have a serial number on there too to authenticate the rareness, and we’d sign the cart or something. (BattleSphere Updates, by Doug “Thunderbird” Engel, public postings to Usenet by Doug Engel, BattleSphere(tm) Collector’s Edition 03/02/97, Volume 1, Issue 1a JAGUAR EXPLORER ONLINE March 27, 1997) .

Almost Finished

Well gamers, the wait is almost over! That’s right, with a full force programming blitz over the past few months, Battlesphere is a hell of a lot closer to getting finished. Let me tell you, the gang at 4Play have managed to really pump up the action. But more on that later. At this writing, there are about 7 more concepts to be put into the game. Also, work on the Gauntlet mode is complete.

Gameplay

As I said above, the Gauntlet mode is pretty much done, aside from some minor tweaking. That said, most of this report is going to focus on that. Gauntlet mode starts off with a simple yet effective screen asking for which level you wish to start on, what type of ship, and difficulty level. There are 99 levels in this portion of the game. They start off pretty easily, sending a ship or two into your sector and they go after your starbases. But as you get higher up in the levels, you start running into Squadrons. That’s right, out of one “jumpgate” area, three or more ships will appear. They each have their own vortex, but you get the point. The best way to describe what this looks like is from a movie(a movie reference from me?). Remember at the end of Return of the Jedi all the squadrons of Tie Fighters heading for the Millenium Falcon? That’s what you will see, minus the Death Star. Hey, these guys don’t want to get sued!

Now, a quick fighting tip for Battlesphere: Whatever you do, Don’t Fly Straight At An Enemy Squadron! This is a good tactic for anywhere in the game, but when you are facing the squadrons, they will kick your ass in a real serious way.

Speaking of enemies, they have taken another step towards consistently flogging you. They now use their special weapons, i.e. missiles. A nice little sound accompanies each missile as it moves towards your ship, sort of like sonar. The missiles can be shot down, you just have to find them first. For all you science fiction fans out there, also look for nods towards the past in Gauntlet mode. One level is inhabited by beings from a planet in our solar system. Nak! Nak! Nak! If you don’t get it now, you might once you play it – level 48.

Speaking of the radar, the gang has added a bit of depth to it by layering in a few things. I can’t really describe it, but it looks nice and gives you a bit more eye candy. It looks polished.

Also in Gauntlet, you get the Boss Ships. Put your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye. They are extremely difficult and make you wish for those squadrons of Capitol Ships.

Graphics

The graphics are still sharp and look better than half the crap that is 100% texture mapped. Sure, texture mapping is nice, but usually I find that it bores me and interferes with the gameplay. Let’s face it, a nice looking game with bad gameplay is TFX2000. And a bad looking game with bad gameplay is Battlecruiser 3000.

 Sound Effects

Well, we’ve got the new sound effect for the incoming missiles, but nothing that I’ve noticed aside from that. Of course, Scott will pull me aside later and give me a whuppin’ for that comment.

Networking

It appears that the eight-player networking in Gauntlet is finally solid. No new bugs have creeped up, at least none that Scott has told me about. Link up with your friends, and get rocked!

Music

Stephanie has been diligently working on new/different tunes for the game. The ones she has shared with me, and what’s in the game, are most excellent. Take the energy of the Tempest 2000 music, give it more of a John Williams tone, and put it in Battlesphere. Now you know what to expect. Steph has a few MODs of the tunes on her web page, check them out.

Alone Against the Empires

It has finally started. Here comes what unofficially can be called, Star Raiders 2000. This is the game loyal computer users have been waiting for since the original hit in 1982. Really folks, this is the game to beat. Scott’s got some time to finish this one, hopefully I will have more to tell you about it once I get a Flashrom of it.

 Secrets

I can’t tell you the easter eggs, but I’m trying to keep track over here and my last count put the number of easter eggs around 15. I’m sure there are more. This doesn’t count the hidden race which everyone knows about. These are the funky things. Things you don’t expect. That’s why they’re so much fun. (BattleSphere Playtester’s Update, by Mark “Stingray” Santora,  The January/February 1997 Report, Volume 1, Issue 1a JAGUAR EXPLORER ONLINE March 27, 1997) .

Update – April, 1997

Greetings BattleSphere People. It’s time for another report to fill you all in on the important details regarding BattleSphere. As you can see, many little improvements have been made to the game as we continue to near completion. Over the course of the project, we’ve all refined our skills a great deal, and Steph and I have the opportunity to replace some of our earlier work with improved examples, while Scott continues to pound out the last play mode.

Many of you really enjoyed our little “teaser” movie, and noticed the new cockpit art. The new art replaces some of the older art which I wasn’t totally happy with. Steph has done the same thing with the music. I hear she’s really happy with the new sound/music drivers I’ve written, in spite of the fact that they’re harder to use than the old ones. Along with their other duties, Scott and Steph have had to find the time to move to a new apartment, and do all of the fun and time consuming chores that are associated with this (more on this later).

In addition to that, Scott’s managed to add the Demo Mode to the “Attract Mode” of the game, where the game will play a random round of combat by itself, in between showing the high-scores and the title art. He’s also worked out the proper sequence for doing a software reset using the joypad (not as trivial as it sounds).

I’ve just about finished designing the code for the Galactic Map for “Alone Against the Empires” play mode. The map contains 58 sectors, which can contain bases, fighters, bombers, superships, capital ships, or unknown objects. The map allows the player to monitor the status of any ship (The icons grow dimmer as the hull integrity of a ship is weakened), as well as the type of ship. The map also allows the player to set his warp destination sector and issue attack orders to friendly ships in any sector.

The AI required for this play mode is also a non-trivial task, and as we started implementing the details, Scott and I came up with some new ideas which might take a little longer than we originally anticipated, but we think will really give our game an original touch. A number of big-budget “copycat” games are hitting the streets now, and we intend to stay one step ahead of them. (BattleSphere News, by Doug “Thunderbird” Engel and Scott “Oppressor” Le Grand, BattleSphere Updates, Public postings to Usenet by Doug Engel, 4/18/1997, Volume 1, Issue 2 JAGUAR EXPLORER ONLINE July 1, 1997).

Update – May, 1997

 Just within the past few days we’ve managed to get the initialization code for “Alone Against the Empires” Play Mode up and running. This is a major milestone which we are happy to have passed. We’re now working on the sector-to-sector warp initialization, so that everything gets placed in the proper spot when entering a sector of the map. The Galactic Map code is complete, but I am going to add some indicators to show the hull integrity and shield strength to the map display, since the cockpit indicators are not visible when the map screen is called up.  (BattleSphere News, by Doug “Thunderbird” Engel and Scott “Oppressor” Le Grand, BattleSphere Updates, Public postings to Usenet by Doug Engel, 5/1/1997, Volume 1, Issue 2 JAGUAR EXPLORER ONLINE July 1, 1997).

Update – June 1997

Alone Against The Empires Play Mode is shaping up nicely. The code for displaying the Galactic Map could be considered “finished”, save for a few additional features which we thought of after playtesting it. As you can see, the map presents the player with an enormous amount of detail. Fans of Star Raiders will notice the influences of that game on our thinking. We’ve taken some very diverging paths with our play mode over the venerable old Star Raiders but we think our elaboration on that theme is what that game’s designers would have done, had they had the kind of hardware which can support it.

The Artificial Intelligence required to handle this play mode has proven to be a little more complicated than we originally thought, mostly due to the fact that we’ve been adding features to the mode as we went along, and realized other things should be taken into account (like remembering damage points for every ship on the map!). But the invading AI is shaping up well, and it’s incredible to sit back and watch your wingmen take on the invading fleets while you view the battle from a remote location using the Galactic Map. (BattleSphere News, by Doug “Thunderbird” Engel and Scott “Oppressor” Le Grand, BattleSphere Updates, Public postings to Usenet by Doug Engel, 6/28/1997, Volume 1, Issue 2 JAGUAR EXPLORER ONLINE July 1, 1997).

Update – March, 1998

Update Last night, we may have more or less put together our first candidate for a final BattleSphere build. Thanks to Doug’s tireless efforts, 100% of Steph’s intro will be music to the ears of any lucky BattleSphere buyer. Tonight, this edition goes out to our playtesters while Doug figures out how to make sure Steph’s intro music syncs properly on PAL jaguars. Barring the discovery of a whole new species of bug, I think we’re done… Quick not: I personally think the Hasbro deal is for real, but this has no effect on Jaguar BattleSphere one way or the other as far as I can see. Sure, it’d be great if there were some way we could get the Star Raiders license out of them or have them license BattleSphere, but don’t count on it. The industry SUCKS right now, they won’t even fund a M.U.L.E. sequel. In that environment, what kind of chances do we stand? (CyberChatter, Random topics about the Jaguar, Compiled from online public discussion areas, BattleSphere Chatter, Jaguar Interactive II, 3/13/98, Subject Battlesphere, Posted by Scott Le Grand, Volume 2, Issue 3 JAGUAR EXPLORER ONLINE October 18, 1998).

BattleSphere

BattleSphere is done after 1745 days of work…7/18/98 – Code complete, WOO HOO! 7/17/98 – Wow, six months since I updated this thing. Time flies. Meanwhile, BattleSphere has been bugfree for the past 13 days. This means that we think it’s finished (though there are always those worries that we missed something, making them into “features”). We are on one last quest for flaws before we declare it done. Stay tuned for the exciting resolution (or non-resolution) late on July 18th, 1998. And don’t forget that when the adventure of BattleSphere development reaches its end, a whole new adventure in getting it produced begins. Nevertheless, any doubters will be able to play the sucker networked at World of Atari from August 21st-23rd though my presence there was in doubt until just today as I am busy on the 20th and 21st. It’s show time…(CyberChatter, Random topics about the Jaguar, Compiled from online public discussion areas, BattleSphere News, by Scott Le Grand and Mark Santora, BattleSphere Countdown, from Scott Le Grand’s Official BattleSphere Countdown page, Volume 2, Issue 3 JAGUAR EXPLORER ONLINE October 18, 1998).

BattleSphere Dilemma

The most anticipated Jaguar game ever, BattleSphere , has hit yet another rough spot on its road to release. When JTS owned Atari they had a contract with 4-Play to encrypt BattleSphere. Hasbro recently acquired Atari from JTS, along with it the encryption key. Now Hasbro will not recognize that contract. Several people from JI 2have started an e-mail campaign. Mike Stulir, the host BACK IN TIME Webcast, has secured an interview with a Hasbro rep for his webcast.Lets hope that all this get resolved soon. More on this story as it develops. (Battlesphere Dilema, 1999 Archives, Area 64: The Jaguar Zone, Heath Anderson, 1999).

Trouble with Battle Sphere?

It appears there is snag in the release of the eagerly awaited Jaguar title Battlesphere. Battlesphere was developed by 4Play and is awaiting permission from Hasbro for encryption. Apparently permission had been given for encryption before by someone in Hasbro who did not have the authority to do so. It is unclear if Hasbro will give permission in the near future or ever. Check out the Battlesphere FAQ for more details.  This could be a major blow to the future of Atari Jaguar games. Check back for updates. (Trouble with Battlesphere?, News, AAP, 1999).

I’m Not Laughing

There may be a deal in the works for the sale of Jaguar publishing and encryption ownership from Hasbro to A-One publishing. See Atari 64: The Jag Zone. (An April Fools Day Joke: On Related Battlesphere News, News, AAP, April, 1999).

Bad News

Tom Dusenberry CEO of Hasbro recently commented on the encryption of Battlesphere game (For those who don’t know, Battlesphere is completed and owned by 4Play, but Hasbro owns the key for encryption for any games made for the Jaguar system). Tom Dusenberry said, “I suggest that we inform Jaguar fans to move on and start playing on a new system. We are very pleased and proud to own the great Atari franchise and library of action games…I am not aware of any pending Jaguar licensing deal and probably will not support it…I will not do Battlesphere because we own it and we will not let a game go without our approval and I do not want to waste the time and resources on a obsolete system.” From the Jaguar Interactive message board at Atari Gaming Headquarters. (Bad News for Battle Sphere, News, AAP, 1999).

Encryption will be Defeated

The clock is ticking!

4Play is proud to announce that it will only be a matter of weeks until we will have utterly defeated the encryption code for BattleSphere. We are using a proprietary method which will allow us to encrypt the binary without using any hardware bypassing techniques.

After carefully considering the options, a software scheme seemed like the right thing to do. While hardware bypassing is currently an alternative, it adds significant cost to the manufacturing. Hardware bypass would require an entirely new circuit board be designed and fabricated. All existing circuit board stockpiles are relegated worthless by hardware bypass techniques. Since the market is small for Jaguar games and we don’t have the economy of scale to offset production costs, designing new boards adds a large cost to the price of a cartridge. However, we are working very carefully to reduce these unnecessary costs while delivering the polished, professional product the Jaguar Community deserves. Price has been a primary concern to many of you, so we determined that a little more work to insure a reasonable price is worth the effort. Hence, we invented this ingenious method for software encryption.

Our clever software scheme employs a “brute force” method of cracking encryption by utilizing a bank of 8 specially modified Jaguar consoles with a custom patched version of the standard Boot ROM and a few modifications to the BattleSphere executable itself, which runs in a hardware hacked EPROM cartridge. The exact details of our technology will be revealed in the future, as we do not wish to give an advantage to our competition in the cartridge manufacturing market. Suffice it to say that this bank of Jaguars is constantly booting a self-modifying binary and checking if the Jaguar Boot ROM has failed or passed the software encryption. Once the binary boots, the encryption is successful! Our calculations indicate that it should take a maximum of 125 days for this process to try ALL the possible encryption combinations, but the odds are evenly distributed around 1/2 that amount of time.

Keep your fingers crossed! (Battlesphere Update: 9/13/1999, originally posted at http://home.sprynet.com/~thunderbird/, reprinted in Area 64: The Jaguar Zone, Heath Anderson, 1999).

Battlewheels, from Beyond Games

Buckle up for 64 bits of metal-mashing arcade action. 2021 AD. Humankind has turned to an increasingly dangerous spectator sports for its entertainment. Welcome to Battlewheels! Drive solo or team up with as many as eight of your buddies for a futuristic demolition derby to the death. Custom equip your suicide vehicle from the ground up with machine guns, missiles, flame-throwers… and compete for “kills,” cash and glory against a vicious band of road warriors – through treacherous deserts and ghost cities of a bygone era. Yeeehaw! (Upcoming Games, AEO Vol 3, Issue 1, January 22, 1994).  

Scheduled Release Date

Beyond Games’ Battlewheels is also scheduled for early next year. But as with all good howevers, the sunny side: Battlewheels is not going to be any cheap port, but a fully rethought, JagNetwork and modem compatible game to serve all cheap desires of demolition. Right now, Beyond Games is deciding between a number of approaches to take with the game, trying to find out which will best use the Jag’s fantastic capabilities to the max. (Other Game News, Vol. 3, Issue 12 ATARI EXPLORER ONLINE 9 October 1994).

BiosFear, from All Systems Go (ASG)

ASG developed their own polygonal rendering software on the PC and are currently porting it to the Jaguar. This custom software helps the user create virtual polygon worlds. When asked about the terms used, ASG used a simple comparison to explain the complexity of BiosFear. To sum it up, Cybermorph, StarFox, Virtua Racing, Virtua Fighter… all crap compared to BiosFear. They kept pretty quiet about the main details of the game, but made sure that they would keep AEO updated as time progressed. (64 Bits-Jaguar News, By: Tal Funke-Filu, GEnie: Exploere.5, Issue 9 ATARI EXPLORER ONLINE 6 June 1994).

Black Ice\White Noise (Chaos Agenda), from Atari/Readysoft

We are also working on Chaos Agenda, the game where you play a government operative that must walk the fine line between loyalty and doing the right thing. (Saturday Night Real Time Conference, 29 October 1994, Host – Walter S. Wilson, Guest Speaker – Bill Rehbock, Vol. 3, Issue 13 ATARI EXPLORER ONLINE 9 October 1994).

Estimated Release Date

I’m a sucker for cyberpunk, I guess. This adventure takes place 40 years in the future on city streets where everything has a price, even your reputation. The two words associated with this game should be, “Merry Christmas.” Out around then. (From the Editors, Atari Explorer Online: Jaguar Voyagers, Travis Guy, Once Here, What then?, Volume 4, Issue 4 ATARI EXPLORER ONLINE March 28, 1995).

Indepth Game Description – Atari Fun ‘N Games Media Day

The game takes place in a very large virtual world, I believe about 40 or 50 game miles. Everything is nicely texture mapped and has a very realistic look to it. The game engine is in 3D, but the player is visible on the screen, the effect looks very nice. The player walks around the city, and is capable of entering some of the buildings. Along the way the player encounters various people, each represented through a FMV conversation. The player can choose attitudes to hold during the conversation, similar to Return to Zork. Many different types of guns are available at the weapons shops scattered around the city for the player’s use. The game has a very Cyberpunk feel to it, and that’s just the impression it wants to make. The player can choose how to live his or her life in the game, if the player takes on good missions he won’t have a wonderful “reputation”, if the player chooses assassination type missions, many civilians won’t want to deal with him or her. The whole game will have an imbedded plot that will be uncovered as the player takes the various missions. This looks to be a very, very hot release. (Fun ‘n Games (Media Day) at Atari, by Adam Urbano, Jaguar CD Games, Volume 4, Issue 5 ATARI EXPLORER ONLINE July 20, 1995).

Another Game Description – Atari Fun ‘N Games Media Day

No Respite. No Rails. No Rules. In Black ICE\White Noise players take the role of a street-level cyberpunk in the urban blightscape of New San Francisco, walking a barbed wire tightrope between the cysta line informational world of C-Space and the grimy reality of The Street and The Meat. Gameplay features include point-of-view C-Space hacking, full-motion video encounters, and digitized video sprites of gangs, crazies, cops, Corps… and corpses. Play a good guy who fights the good fight…or a bad girl who left her heart in San Francisco a long time ago. Ooops–your mission went bad and you just blew away a cop. Now here come allllll his friends. Make a note: Better do some creative hacking on that lengthy police record of yours, after you get out of this alive. If you get out of this alive…(Fun ‘n Games (Media Day) at Atari, by Adam Urbano, Jaguar CD Games, Volume 4, Issue 5 ATARI EXPLORER ONLINE July 20, 1995).

And Another – CBS Toy Test

It seems that the newest hobby for Jag programmers is to completely rethink the 3D engine, and this game is no exception to the rule. This new 3D engine written specifically for the game operates at 30 fps at a resolution of 320×200 – on the fly with no prerendering – and is capable of full motion in all directions (which should answer some questions as to whether the Jag is capable of such a thing); it is especially good, reports Pradip, at depth cuing. The game itself operates in a window of 224/180, with the rest of the screen being taken up by control panel operations. Black ICE/White Noise will make good use of Jag peripherals such as the generic NVRAM save carts [Ed: Memory Track carts.] that are on the way, as well as the six-button controller. (Which will be especially good for the fighting sequences in the game.) The team for the game consists of 3 programmers and 3 full time artists (as well as contract artists), who each put in 50 hour weeks. Still, Pradip says that it’s not much more difficult to produce a CD than a cart; the only real differences are the sheer volume of data, plus the lack of Jaguar onboard memory.

As for the game itself, it’s a cyberpunk adventure set in future San Francisco (which should be interesting to compare to LucasArts’ upcoming Calia 2095, which is also a first person adventure in the same setting). It will be a non-linear game, which though it features one main plot, will also be threaded with various subplots along the way which will lead you on different directions along that main plot. One of the most unique (and RPG-like) aspects of the game is that you will be able to interact with characters, and gain reputation in this way that will affect how you move along the main story. Some people have asked about comparisons to the game Virtuoso, based on some early screen shots of BI, but Pradip couldn’t comment as he hasn’t seen the earlier game.  ( Jaguar Tackboard, Confirmed information about Atari’s Jaguar, Compiled from online and official sources, Jaguar at the CBS Toy Test, by Frans Keylard, A Refreshing New Game With ICE, by Pradip, Volume 4, Issue 7 ATARI EXPLORER ONLINE September 15, 1995).

Brett Hull Hockey  

This action-packed simulation features input from and the digitized skating of the NHL’s most popular All-Star player, Brett Hull. Several modes of play are offered including exhibition game, 11 game short season, 42 game half season and an 84 game full season offered by no other hockey simulation game. (Jaguar Tackboard, Items collected by: Travis Guy, , From Accolade’s press release, Volume 2, Issue 20 ATARI EXPLORER ONLINE 23 November 1993).

Brett Hull Hockey on CD

Brett Hull Hockey will be on CD-ROM and have full NHL/NHLPA endorsement. They said it would very easily be POSSIBLE to include digitized faces from every NHL player in the game. (Tal Funke-Filu, Reports from Atari Shareholders’ meeting, AEO News Bulletin #4, Saturday, June 18, 1994).

Early Information

Brett Hull Hockey features super-realistic, digitized graphics and a real-time 3-D hockey rink. Available on CD, Brett Hull Hockey will provide the most realistic hockey video game simulation ever. Look for Brett Hull Hockey to arrive in stores by the end of June.  (Atari Press Releases, Sports titles coming from Atari, Jan. 6, 1995, Volume 4, Issue 1 ATARI EXPLORER ONLINE 16 January 1995).

Early Version Game Description

An early version of the CD-ROM game, but on EEPROMs instead. Seems promising already – individual NHL teams, logos, player names, and stats were available, with a smooth-scrolling rink, scaled sprites, and digitized graphics. Most interesting feature is the ability to change the “camera view” of the game. Press Pause, then press 1-9 on the keypad to change the view from overhead to wide-angle pull-back to everything in-between. I’m not a hockey fan, but I was impressed with the early effort. Only -slightly- less impressive than the upcoming hockey game being shown for the Saturn across the aisle. ( Surfing the Jagged Edge, by Dimitri Mark LaBarge, The Jungian View, report by Robert Jung, Special Jag Edition E3 ATARI EXPLORER ONLINE May 20, 1995).

Game Description – Atari Fun ‘N Games Media Day

The game is actually listed for the CD player, so I’m not sure what the situation on that is. Graphically, the game is similar to the Saturn hockey game, with a very nicely drawn arena. The rendered players move around the ice and the camera pulls back or zooms in to get a better view of the action. November is the month when this should show up. (Fun ‘n Games (Media Day) at Atari, by Adam Urbano, Cart Games, Volume 4, Issue 5 ATARI EXPLORER ONLINE July 20, 1995).

This 3D game offers the player  two different perspectives and features a camera which zooms in and out and moves in all directions to keep up with the fast paced action. The power, colors, and speed of the Jaguar and texture mapping will give the gamer a true 3D experience. (Fun ‘n Games (Media Day) at Atari, by Adam Urbano, Jaguar CD Games, Volume 4, Issue 5 ATARI EXPLORER ONLINE July 20, 1995).

Game Description – CBS Toy Test

I have always enjoyed ice hockey games, so it’s especially fun to see a nice and well detailed one coming for the Jaguar. The rink looks great, as are the characters and the rest of the graphics. This title was already a lot of fun to play, and the graphics do the Jaguar no shame, but did remind me of NHL Hockey on the SNES – however, that was a great game! The multiple camera zooms were cool, and added to the game without distracting. Another title on my wish list. ( Jaguar Tackboard, Confirmed information about Atari’s Jaguar, Compiled from online and official sources, Jaguar at the CBS Toy Test, by Frans Keylard, Volume 4, Issue 7 ATARI EXPLORER ONLINE September 15, 1995).