Stardreamer

a space trading, combat and exploration game for the Atari Lynx
by
Karri, Teddy & Marika Kaksonen, Thomas Harte, Chad S Ballew and Rick La Fleur
      Time flies by... Stardreamer has been transferred to the new www.cc65.org compiler. It is now much faster, has tons of more memory to play with, and is getting more content on a daily basis.
      The focus has also changed a little. It will has a lot of small hidden goodies in addition to a classic gameplay.
      I don't have any good downloads right now. There are too many developer shortcuts that give away the game. I will hide them before I put the next download on the net.
      Merry Xmas 2004, karri.
    The latest news on the 4th of December,2002

    Thomas Harte has given his Navigator-code to Stardreamer -- yess!!!

    This means that we have a real 16 to 24 bit 3d environment to fly in! No more of those flat bitmaps to float around or crazy flightpaths.

    I have rewritten the flight engine completely and here is a first taster of how it looks and feels.

    Here you see how the enemy comes in from a rotated angle while the lasers are on. There is not enough material on the craft yet. Just some dots. But just wait! There will be really cool textures coming up once I get the gameplay done.

    The version you can download here does not work on a real Lynx yet. There is some problems with IRQ's. But you can run it on Handy.

    Old stuff... The console and crafts will be rewritten. The planets and items stay as they are now.
    A trader is heading for the jump gate. Time to do some pirating by myself as nobody is watching...
    Got it! Now its just to collect the goods floating around before someone gets here.
    Seems to be bananas floating around...
    Time to make a hyperjump somewhere else before I get a bad reputation here...
    Friendly trader approaching from the molten lava-planet Ritaurow.
    Before landing the captain turns on full-screen mode to get a better look at this unfriendly planet. The question remains... Why would anyone waste his time doing a trade on Ritaurow?
    A quick tap on the Encyclopedia Galactica reveals some vital statistics of the planet:  Wow! Must be at least a tech level 10 planet...
The Stardreamer is an open game with a storyline and an objective. You can be a honest trader, a space explorer or a space pirate. Just remember to check the news every now and then. The galaxy is changing and a new era is about to begin...

Captain's Bookshelf
Spaceflight for Dummies.
Contains
  -Flight Controls
  -Navigation and trade
  -Combat in space (the very short version)

Download the latest beta-version

The latest version here is just the new flight engine. It does not includes things like docking to planets, trading etc. as those have been tested already.
Stardreamer 2000

Bulletin Board for the mostly harmless team starts here...

Some graphics

Rick LaFleur has made some classic screens:

Ideas about gameplay

Thomas Harte in alt.games.lynx wrote:
> The screen size is 160 by 102. The scanner has to be much smaller
> on the Lynx than on the original Elite. The scanner has to be
> drawn as a bitmap. The rest of the game could use sprites.

I imagined a severely cut down bottom section. The scanner reduced to a transparent corner segment, maybe bottom right, gun temp top right and a compression of all the energy bars top left. Additionally, the full thing could be brought up with option 2, and the bottom left of the screen could flash up warnings such as 'warning : altitude low / cabin temp high / fore shield low / etc'.

Continuing my thoughts, I reckoned maybe button B for firing, and holding A and then using up/down to adjust speed. While A is pressed, left/right could operate as look left/look right, where you can tap left or right twice to end up looking backwards. Other information screens (local starchart, local pricings, and so on) could be flipped through on option 1.

Ideas about implementation

Thomas Harte hastily wrote this in order to prompt discussion.

Some code

Some very old sources can be found on the Stardreamer page.