Star Fighter upgrade in free for all - RISC OS News, Software and Information

Star Fighter upgrade in free for all

Published: 2nd Oct 2005, 17:38:26GMT Source: drobe.co.uk
By Chris Williams

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Free to all those who've paid for it, that is

A free upgrade for all Starfighter 3000 owners has been released by publisher APDL. The update will bring everyone up to the latest version of the 3D space game, and includes support for the StrongARM processor, RISC OS 4 and 32bit RISC OS.

Chris Bazley, the game's currently maintainer, said, "Over the years, a significant number of longstanding bugs have been fixed. This is my main motivation for making the upgrade freely available. Note that you still need to obtain the rest of the game data separately - hopefully by having legitimately purchased a copy at some time."

Originally developed in 1994, the game was born from Fednet Software, who also produced other greats including Stunt Racer 2000 and Chocks Away. Like SR2K, SF3K pits players against each other in a fierce, futuristic, and televised world controlled by the media - not unlike what we have today, really. You can read a review of SF3K here.

Update at 22:56 2/10/2005
Chris Bazley has said that he hasn't considered using the recently released 3D drivers for the Iyonix, although he has heard from the team working on 3D graphics for RISC OS 4. Chris added that he'd rather see that a common advanced graphics API is developed for all RISC OS platforms. He also suggested that the likes of 3D accelerated graphics may be wasted on a venerable game like SF3K.

Links
Starfighter 3000 website

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flypig (+2.5) 2/10/05 8:41PM	This free upgrade is a complete disaster. Nobody should download it. At least, not unless you've got a lot of free time to kill! I've just "wasted" practically the whole weekend playing SF3000 on the Iyonix. It's just such a great game even after over 10 years. The best thing about it is that it's fun to play even for just a few minutes at a time for a break. So thank you Chris & APDL for making this available!
SimonC (+2.5) 3/10/05 12:10PM	Excellent news, and excellent work. So far I've resisted doing more than giving it a quick try out. Is it coincidental that this has happened when the current Drobe poll is what it is?
thesnark 3/10/05 7:50PM	*In reply to No:* but nor was that the sole contributing factor.
chrisrayson 4/10/05 10:23AM	"Not unlike what we have today, really" - indeed: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4307538.stm
AW (+1.0) 4/10/05 7:44PM	What about the Level editor?
thesnark (-1.0) 4/10/05 9:04PM	What about it? Very few people seem to have downloaded it from what I've seen of the web server logs.
thesnark 4/10/05 11:22PM	'Wasted' is perhaps a little harsh. The fact is that the game runs fast enough without hardware acceleration and will presumably do so on all future RISC OS machines. Any change to the style of the graphics would require a considerable amount of extra work that would probably be better directed at a new game written in a higher level language.