Mark Moxon

Sounds like me! I’m having to disable the Sentinel’s stare just so I can get some decent screenshots… 🤣

Glad you liked it. I’m trying to introduce more graphics where possible - that’s not so easy with trigonometry articles, but it’s a bit easier with things like landscapes. 😀

Next week I’ll be talking about the 3D objects, so there should be scope for some cool graphics then, too…

The tile shapes dive is even more interesting from that perspective - half a byte to encode all those different 3D shapes. Very neat!

Generating the landscape - The Sentinel on the BBC Micro A deep dive into generating the landscape in The Sentinel on the BBC Micro

If you only have time to browse one of these articles, may I recommend the deep dive on generating the landscape, which you can read here:

thesentinel.bbcelite.com/deep_dives/g...

This one came out really well, and the visualisations are a lot of fun…

Index of all deep dive articles - The Sentinel on the BBC Micro Index of all deep dive articles about The Sentinel

Just released: 6 brand new deep dives into The Sentinel on the #BBCMicro and #C64

This is where it gets interesting!

Generating 10,000 3D landscapes; tile data and shapes; enemies and trees; secret codes

thesentinel.bbcelite.com/deep_dives#latest

Batch #4 coming soon

Enjoy!

#retrocomputing

But to answer your question - yes, it’s taking 1024 random points and smoothing/scaling/capping them in an 11-stage process to produce a landscape. It is extremely clever!

It’s not just smoothing, it’s actually two different types of smoothing, plus scaling and capping. There isn’t really enough room in Bluesky messages to explain it, to be honest! But next week’s deep dive will explain all in lots of detail…

Ha, don’t post on social media after enjoying a cheeky beer.

It should say 1024 pseudo-random numbers. But you knew that, right? 😀

GitHub - simonowen/sentland: Python script to generate landscapes matching those in The Sentinel Python script to generate landscapes matching those in The Sentinel - simonowen/sentland

A big thanks to Simon Owen, whose excellent repository I forked and enhanced in order to build this visualisation. It's well worth a visit.

github.com/simonowen/se...

This is pretty cool.

It's a visualisation of the internals of The Sentinel on the #BBCMicro.

This is it generating the game landscape for the first level from 256 pseudo-random numbers.

Next week I'll be releasing a deep dive into exactly how this works.

#retrocomputing #retrogaming #c64 #8bit

Thank you! It's good to get the heavy maths out there so I can move on to the articles with pretty pictures. 😆 The landscape articles in the next batch are shaping up very nicely... they should be ready to release next week.

Index of all deep dive articles - The Sentinel on the BBC Micro Index of all deep dive articles about The Sentinel

I'm (slowly!) releasing 50+ deep dives into The Sentinel, Geoff Crammond's epic #BBCMicro game

Batch #2 is now ready: 7 new articles about maths, geometry, trigonometry… and Revs

thesentinel.bbcelite.com/deep_dives

Batch #3 (landscape) coming soon

Enjoy!

#retrocomputing #retrogaming #c64 #8bit

Index of all deep dive articles - The Sentinel on the BBC Micro Index of all deep dive articles about The Sentinel

I'm releasing over 50 deep dives into The Sentinel, Geoff Crammond's epic #BBCMicro game.

Batch #1 is now ready: 6 new articles about memory maps, program flow and interrupts, all at thesentinel.bbcelite.com/deep_dives

Batch #2 (maths!) coming soon.

Enjoy!

#retrocomputing #retrogaming #c64 #8bit

Thank you! Glad you like it. These old games are really brilliant for this kind of thing - there are no game engines hiding the internals here… 😀

Fair warning, the first two batches are all about program flow and maths, so they're fairly uninspiring, but I've got to get the groundwork done before I can talk about the cool stuff. Batch 3 will be about landscape generation, batch 4 about 3D objects, so they'll be better.

11 batches in total.

Blimey, are you psychic? 😀 I'm planning to release the first batch tomorrow.

I've written 16 out of a total of 50, and will release these in two batches, one tomorrow and the other when I've finished the final subbing. There's a lot to say and progress is slow, but I'm working on it, honest!

Good point. And it is easy to understand, that's for sure. The biggest confusion is when codebases mix sign-magnitude and signed numbers... but who would do that?

Well, apart from Bell and Braben, obviously. 😆

Oof, Elite's sign-magnitude numbers are a bit of an acquired taste - I'm not sure whether I'd perpetuate that particular design decision! Multi-byte signed numbers might be easier to handle if you're after a bigger model space, though both solutions do work, so I guess it's down to personal taste!

Well, that looks pretty great! Nice to see it all working live. 👏

Yeah, it might take a while... but there's a lot to say. 😀

The list of deep dives that I am working on

I've started writing a series of deep dives into Geoff Crammond's epic #BBCMicro game The Sentinel.

Here's the to-do list.

I will post a link here whenever I add a new one to thesentinel.bbcelite.com

It's going to take a while! But it should be worth it...

#retrocomputing #retrogaming #c64 #8bit

The Sentinel in embroidery

You didn't know you needed this in your life, but you do.

Marine Beaufils is a French artist who creates beautiful embroideries of... The Sentinel (amongst others).

It's inspired and quite beautiful. Enjoy!

www.marine.st/en/pages/sen...

#bbcmicro #zxspectrum #c64 #retrogaming #retrocomputing

Glad you like it - that full view is quite something!

Oh yeah, I see what you mean. Interesting, I guess that must be a typo in the MAME comment, because the ARM5 definitely isn’t a thing.

It’s nothing to do with the subject of your blog post, though, so I’ll shut up and go back to reading the good stuff. 🫡

Totally agree.

Great article! You’re one of the few bloggers whose stuff I always read, no regrets.

One thing: “the DECO 156 was apparently a custom encrypted ARM5 CPU”.

I don’t think there’s such a thing as an ARM5? Could it be ARM3, ARM6 or possibly ARM7, given the timeline?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...

Take away the slow panning and the tiny POV and it isn't really the same game. The faster versions are OK, as the strategy of the game is still great, but I do feel they miss out on the magic of the original.

Sometimes faster gameplay and bigger POVs aren’t better - they’re just different, I guess!

It would be a different game, I suspect! The genius of the original is in the claustophobia of the small POV and the feeling of being trapped.

You know those dreams where you're desperate to run away but your feet are stuck to the floor?

That's the original version of The Sentinel.

Atomic Elite Hi guys, I want to share information about my latest conversion project for the Acorn Atom: ........ Atomic Elite. The source files are taking from the

And here’s the thread on Stardot about it. It’s been around for a while now!

stardot.org.uk/forums/viewt...

GitHub - oss003/Elite: An Acorn Electron conversion of Elite for the Acorn Atom An Acorn Electron conversion of Elite for the Acorn Atom - oss003/Elite

It’s already been done! Atomic Elite is a real thing. 😀

I don’t know a lot about the Atom so I’m not sure if it needs an upgraded machine, but it definitely exists.

github.com/oss003/Elite