Elite / Frontier Elite II Frontier rendering engine details?

pipper

P
For its time, Elite II featured pretty impressive graphics on the Amiga. Lots of polygons, quite detailed ships and environments.
Even more impressive, it scaled quite nicely the faster your accelerator board was.

Are there more details available on how it achieved the feat? Was the rendering done purely on the CPU? Was the blitter used?
How did it manage to get the curved surfaces done?

I'd like to know everything about it - ideally from the man himself :)
Is there any chance to get David respond here and give some insight on how his marvel worked?


Thanks in advance,

Mathias
 

madbilly

M
I agree this would be interesting. I don't know how much David programmed himself and how much was done by others - you could look in the credits for the game and see if any other people you could ask.

Also there are probably some details in Amiga Format etc from the time it was released.
 

Hedyn Brand

Hedyn Brand
The MC68000 series CPUs were supposed to be great for pure vector calculation, I think. As long as you were sticking to flat-shaded (non-textured) graphics like that an Amiga or Atari ST would have no trouble keeping up, and those platforms had plenty of vector-based games with fairly large, simmy worlds. The Starglider and Midwinter series come to mind - lots of flight sims and similar too. If a plane's name started with an "F-" the Amiga probably had a game for it :)

Textured 3D would have been much harder because of the planar layout of graphics memory on the Amiga - bitmaps for the first bit of colour information all at once, then all the second bits in the next plane etc. Madness if you were doing all the manipulation required in texture mapping, handy for a responsive GUI on the weak graphics chips of the time (or whatever their excuse was). The optimised layout of modern computer graphics have all the colour information for each pixel in sequence before the next pixel, which is much saner, especially when considering 16/24 bits per colour formats and opacity.

Elite II wasn't really any better graphically than other vector-based games on the Amiga at the time; I think it was the vastness of the universe that really impressed people. It was perhaps a bit more colourful, but even the Imperial Courier was a fairly static model.

I think everything BUT the graphics was impressive about Frontier:Elite II - there was planetary landing at release :)
 
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