Lander with more tiles and huge landscapes
One of the great joys of analysing a codebase like Lander is when you reach the point when you think you might be able to hack the game. I've had great fun hacking Elite and adding features to Revs, and I'm glad to report that Lander is no exception.
It's not as if the gauntlet hadn't already been thrown down. If you take a look at the article that David Braben wrote in the November 1987 issue of The Micro User (and which I've dissected in the deep dive In David Braben's own words), then you'll see there's this tantalising picture in there, complete with a jaunty editorial tilt:
This is Zarch, but with a big landscape. It looks great! It also seems to include the blue channel in the colour of the landscape tiles, so perhaps this is where the mysterious sixth instruction in GetLandscapeTileColour came into play (the AND R2, R4, #&10)? It's very intriguing, and this is what David Braben had to say about it at the time:
With the display technique chosen, the frame rate dictated the approximate number of tiles which could be used and also the amount of scenery. The display looks much better if these are greatly increased - as the picture on this page shows - but sadly this reduces the frame rate to only one or two frames per second - a succession of stills.
This has all passed into Zarch folklore, but astonishingly, it is now reality. Jon Abbott, the mastermind behind the amazing JASPP Archimedes Software Preservation Project, has done some genuinely awe-inspiring work on optimising and enhancing Zarch, and the results are even more impressive than the above screenshot. If you want to go down a rabbit hole - and trust me, you do! - then I highly recommend this long but rewarding thread on Stardot, as well as Jon's incredible video on YouTube of Zarch running with an extended landscape. It is quite amazing.
So when I was analysing Lander, peeling back all the layers to reveal David Braben's wonderful code, I kept the magazine image and the optimised Zarch in mind. Could Lander possibly support a larger landscape too? The answer, excitingly, is yes, and I've called the result BigLander.
Find out how to download and play BigLander, or dive into the technical information to discover exactly how I managed to extend the landscape in Lander from the original version's 12 by 10 tiles to a whopping 121 by 121 tiles.