Frontier Elite 2, speed comparison

[PMC]

Yes I have.  I've tried Frontier on an A500, vanilla A1200, A1200 with Apollo 1240/25Mhz and Apollo 1240/40Mhz.

The increase in frame rate is quite substantial in each case.  Obviously the 40Mhz '040 was the smoothest, but you will notice a significant increase in frame rate by increasing processing power.  There are options in Frontier to alter the detail level to suit faster CPUs.  

[PMC]

StevenJGore wrote:
There is definitely a speed increase between running Frontier on an A1200 and an A500. Similarly, there will be a speed increase between running Frontier on an unexpanded A1200 and an A1200 with, for example, a Blizzard 1230IV accelerator card. It's still not perfectly smooth, however, IMHO I don't think the Frontier code is particularly optimised!

Steve.

AFAIK Frontier was written entirely in assembler and was one of the last games coded in this fashion.  It was coded for 68000 specific machines (eg Atari ST & Amiga) and both versions are pretty similar visually, but I don't think there's any optimisation specifically for higher end CPUs. Of course, the frame rate is faster but I don't think there's any specific code to take advantage of the extra features '030/40/60 processors - or indeed MMU / FPU modules.

If the source code is eventually released, some enterprising coder might like to create 040/060/PPC versions of the game engine and perhaps an RTG version?  It would make an interesting comparison with Amiga native chipset versions.

[PMC]

Whitesnake wrote:
While we are on the topic of Elite what happened to that company that was porting Elite 3: First Encounters to the Amiga.

Pass on that.

I heard some discussion that David Braben was going to release the Frontier / FFE source code to the community, which would make an interesting project.  I'd love to see a prettied up version of Frontier that supports RTG being ported to 68k / PPC.  

[PMC]

blobrana wrote:
Hum,
last time i heard was that David Braben  was working on version 4...
But the other games have been released as open source from what i gather...see! (dead links) and HERE! (better)...

i much prefer the amiga version, but here's  a ADF  for WinUae

(and one of my saved games for you to peruse)
 :-o

Elite 4 is almost as long coming as OS4!  There are magazine previews of Elite 4 going back to 2000 and there hasn't been any news in quite some time.  Maybe David Braben's resting on his laurels?

The old versions of Elite have been released as shareware, but I don't think DB has released the source code.