A massive internet liberation movement took place on such an ordinary afternoon.
Perhaps netizens haven't realized this yet.
But wait until ten or twenty years later.
The history books of the internet will surely record this day firmly, making it a most significant and memorable page.
Inside the NEXUS office.
Lin Lixin held a cup of coffee, smiling as he watched the busy crowd.
Especially that kid Connor.
After spending a few days together, he finally managed to shake off the initial feeling of seeing Lin Lixin as some kind of terrifying abyssal beast.
She even occasionally cracked little jokes with Lin Lixin.
Right now, he was monitoring the various data of the email service with great enthusiasm, making adjustments every now and then.
They've already started planning what improvements to make in the next version.
How are you feeling?
"This is so awesome!"
Connor answered without hesitation.
Even without his answer, Lin Lixin could tell that these young men had just experienced the most exhilarating project of their lives.
"Hehe, that's good."
Lin Lixin nodded in satisfaction and walked up to Carmack.
Programming makes a living, or more precisely, programming at Gamenova makes a living.
After several days of development work, Carmack's spirits have noticeably improved.
Adequate sleep, a beloved job, and Lin Lixin by my side all day long—this is the greatest happiness in life.
"And you?"
"I embedded a complete spreadsheet and calculator into the game."
"Ha?"
"Huh? You don't like it?"
"Uh—no, it does need it."
Lin Lixin scratched his head.
Stars! is indeed a typical spreadsheet strategy game.
The complex economic and technological systems require players to invest a lot of time in calculations and table manipulation.
This can be considered a major characteristic of early PBEM games.
Because it's completely asynchronous, each player has a lot of time to think, making this design that increases the game's depth very popular.
"Once the framework is almost complete, we can officially begin work. I've also taken care of the email connection."
Upon hearing this, Connor, who was not far away, almost spat out a mouthful of blood.
That's absolutely right, that's just Mr. Lin's style.
After all that trouble, spending a fortune, and even setting up a free email service with tens or hundreds of thousands of new users every day, all to lay the groundwork for the upcoming PBEM game?
It truly lives up to its name, Gamenova.
Lin Lixin sat down in front of the newly installed development machine for his own use in his office and connected it to Carmack's warehouse.
He has already built a very basic demo.
Although no gameplay elements have been added yet, and the visuals are entirely presented through text, the game is still in its early stages.
But this was originally only used to test those auxiliary functions.
In a sense, Carmack spent those few days building a game engine from scratch with his own hands.
The toolchain is complete and ready to use right out of the box.
It's just a specialized version, only suitable for developing their next game.
"Tsk tsk tsk----"
Lin Lixin nodded in satisfaction, staring at the text-based interface, stroking his chin in thought for a long time.
The original Stars! game was actually quite niche, a game primarily for geeks.
Its heavily text-based interface and poor graphics make it unsuitable for the general Volkswagen.
"It's rare to find such a complete development toolchain, so let's optimize the interface."
Human-computer interaction is a complex subject within video games.
The last time Lin Lixin made significant progress in this area was during the Ace Combat era when he observed Lockheed's cockpit.
Since it's based on web-based development, he can actually try to come up with a lot of creative ideas.
It's not just about optimizing the menu interaction; reducing information density makes it less tiring.
Even the game's graphics themselves have been improved to some extent.
Let me think—
Lin Lixin took out his Motorola MicroTAC and dialed a number.
" Gary, find me an old arcade game—yes, Atari's Battlezone, as soon as possible, I'm on Nexus."
5"
At noon, an urgent package was delivered by Activision staff from the Nova Arcade.
It must be admitted that although Atari made a series of blunders after the 1980s, it was indeed a great company during its time in the 1970s and early 1980s.
Lin Lixin looked at the Battlezone machine in front of him with a complicated expression.
Although Gamenova has always positioned itself as a pioneer of 3D technology, if you really look back, Atari had already created "3D games" as early as the 1980s.
It's still a first-person immersive 3D spatial game.
Unlike other arcade machines on the market, Battlezone's screen is much smaller.
Because its screen is not that of a typical CRT television.
It is a vector display.
Unlike traditional televisions that scan pixels line by line, vector displays directly control an electron beam to draw lines on the screen.
While it may struggle to represent complex graphics, vector displays can outperform any current monitor when it comes to simple geometric shapes.
Even their painstakingly developed TFT LCD technology cannot compare.
This thing is so amazing that even the US military had to commission Atari to make a special training version.
GAMENOVA didn't achieve this until the Ace Combat era.
The Atari game was released in 1980.
Is there any advice on porting this geometric 3D system to a PC?
Lin Lixin looked at Carmack.
While modern monitors still can't reach the level of vector displays, rendering geometric shapes like them is no longer a difficult task.
Upon hearing this, Carmack stepped forward and carefully examined the images on the screen.
A few minutes later, he nodded slightly, went to his seat, took out a pen, and began to write with flowing strokes.
In just a few breaths, a page was filled with formulas.
At first glance, it reveals perspective projection matrices, rotation matrices, and integer-to-floating-point arithmetic.
"As expected of you----"
Others dig into the source code: reverse engineer the program, extract key functions, and attempt to unravel the obfuscation.
GAMENOVA source code analysis: just take a look.
It's just...
Well, anyway, Carmack, who came from a computer graphics background, quickly found his niche and immediately got to work.
Lin Lixin, not wanting to be left behind, began designing the game itself.
Although Stars! is a niche game, so niche that there are hardly any players on the entire Chinese internet who have heard of it, its spiritual successors are all very famous.
Start with a small fleet and one or two planets, develop an empire, befriend other cosmic races, and conquer the galaxy.
At the start of the game, scout ships are sent to scan suitable planets. These planets can be colonized and developed, allowing players to expand their empire and provide resources.
As players encounter other intergalactic Civilization, they can choose from various diplomatic options, such as friendly cooperation, large-scale war, or even launching a direct purification campaign.
Players can customize the ship's hull and design their own modular warships.
That sounds so familiar!
Yes, this is one of the ancestors of classic space-themed strategy games such as Stellaris and Homeworld.
In fact, the underlying framework of space strategy games was established decades ago.
Even looking at recent years, there are classic works like "Elite" from 1984.
However, due to the limitations of the era, many things could not be made well with the hardware available at the time.
One has to admire the amazing creativity of the developers of this era.
Although Lin Lixin didn't really remember Stars!, he had played quite a few other space games.
After all that work, the development process officially began.
Essentially, Lin Lixin and his team didn't even need to reinvent the wheel when it came to this game.
There are already mature solutions for almost every module; he just needs to extract and optimize them before they can be put into use.
For example, in the 1984 game "Elite", there was already a complete algorithm for generating galaxies and planets.
The seed for the entire random algorithm only requires 6 bytes of memory.
6B!
It's not KB, nor MB or GB, but B!
With only 6 bytes of memory, the Elite algorithm can create approximately 282 trillion galaxies.
The later No Man's Sky actually used a similar approach in its early release.
The entire universe was created out of thin air.
In some ways, it does taste quite like pigeon meat.
Repeat the same bit rotation on three 16-bit integers, using the generated new result as input each time, and continue the same operation.
This is the legendary Fibonacci-like idea.
The most amazing thing about this technology is that the universe it generates naturally possesses a sense of continuity.
Within the same region, there can be many similar but different attributes, whether in terms of economic structure or name.
In other words, it's a natural clustering, community, and cultural sphere.
In the entire randomly generated universe, nothing is discrete, nothing is isolated.
No matter how many times Lin Lixin sees this amazing code again, he can't help but marvel at the incredible creativity of the creators of this era.
Mid-March.
Lucasfilm brought together the main cast of Star Wars to create a simple short promotional video.
The content isn't complicated; it's probably just another side story set in some distant star sector, similar to the Command & Conquer series.
Even before the PV finished playing, the audience already knew what was going on.
What else could it be?
Gamenova is making a new game again.
The outcome was not unexpected, but in some ways it far exceeded everyone's expectations.
Star Wars: Stellaris!
[Price: Free to Play]
[Now available on NEXUS browser]
[Visit the homepage or stella. com for details]
Free game!
It's still online gaming!
You don't even need to pay for a floppy disk; you can play simply by visiting the official website.
It's like a pie fell from the sky!
Why do I need to register a Novamail email address just to play a game?