Origins and Development
The origins of Tau Ceti and its game engine came from Cooke attempting to work out how the spheres in the game Gyron, released by Firebird Software for the ZX Spectrum in 1985, had been created:
| “ | ...for a long while it had puzzled me how on earth they did the spheres. It obviously couldn't be a sprite because they didn't have enough memory to have that many sprites.
I finally twigged that they must have used a table of line widths, and I thought about it a bit, then realised I could split it three quarters and a quarter, and then it would look like a shadow. I just went away and played with that for quite a long while and got it so that I had the sun in the sky and the shadow in the right place. And it sort of came from that, really. |
” |
Having created the basics of a game engine, Cooke had to decide on a scenario for his new game:
| “ | It was all made up as I went along. I know a bit about astronomy, so I looked around for a likely location - because the way the routine works meant it couldn't be in space; you couldn't have the sun above because the line-draw routine wouldn't work, it would have to be on the surface of a planet.
And I thought 'Right, it can't be Earth because it looks a bit barren for Earth, it's got to be another planet.' So I looked round for nearby stars that might be inhabited and Tau Ceti had a nice-sounding name. |
” |
Cooke was also inspired when writing Tau Ceti by the works of the science-fiction writer Larry Niven and the space-simulator Elite.
Read more about this topic: Tau Ceti (video Game)
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