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What is Space Jihad?
Space Jihad is a multiplayer space combat game. Players chase each other
about in small space fighters equipped with guns and missiles and do their
best not to blow up their own ship (except when they want to, of course).
Why is it called Space Jihad?
Just to be politically incorrect. Credits for this wonderful name goes to
Karl Smith
(Footnote 1).
Actually, the offical name is "Star Force", but it's
better known as Space Jihad to me and my friends. Space Jihad is
certainly more descriptive of the game anyway.
What platform does it run on?
A bunch of ancient Amiga B2000s. Each Amiga is equipped with:
- A GVP G-Force '040 accelerator;
- a GVP video card running at 352x288 with 256 colours;
- an extra serial card;
- 4 Megabytes of RAM;
- a couple of 880K floppy disk drives; and
- a two ton dongle. This dongle is equipped with:
- Two 3-phase AC flux vector motors and drives
-
A gimble arrangement that looks like a kitchen whizz
but big enough to hold one human occupant.
-
A large (1 metre wide) LCD back-projected display
300 pixels across.
-
A not-quite-yet working phone system (the engineer
mutters something about the four crystals not yet
vibrating in unison).
-
A red-glowing panic button.
-
Three 10 inch Multifunction displays, displaying
much of the craft's instrumentation.
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About forty switches and buttons. Nearly all of them
are illuminated.
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An analogue throttle and joystick.
-
Lots of interface hardware, much of which gets plugged
into the amiga joystick ports, along with the analogue
controls and the rotational encoder connections.
So it's a simulator thingy. How realistic is it?
It depends on what bit of the simulation you're talking about:
- Battle experience
Not even closely approximating reality - The marketing
department has deemed that physical injury and death may
be detrimental to customer satisfaction.
During the game, you cannot physically harm anyone,
though you can muss up their hair a bit with a few missiles.
- Game flight physics
Very realistic, given a spacecraft capable of acceleration
several g's in most directions. Each ship's motion is
the sum of all its thrusters (12 or 16 in number). The
size, placement, direction and rate-of-change of the
various thrusters give each ship a unique feel. The third-order
motion gives all the ships a much more natural feel than
the spaceships on most conventional computer games.
- Instruments
Sort of realistic. Apart from the magic radar that can see
in all directions and has unlimited range. Once upon a time
people were happy to spin off into space and never contact
another lifeform during the game. These days, customers are
a little more sophisticated and want to be able to find some
action. The complete lack of weapon 'safeties' is a tad unrealistic,
but this game it all about shooting people and giving them
Bad Hair days, not docking with space stations and listening
to The Beautiful Blue Danube.
- Simulator motion physics
Not very realistic at all. The simulators roll on two axes
and no translational movement is possible. But some people
really like being spun upside down a lot.
Are all those buttons real or just painted on?
Yes, they're all real. All the forty-odd buttons and switches do things
in the game, except for the 'engine' switch and the switch that activates
the fan that blows cool air on your left leg. The buttons do things like:
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Designate a particular enemy ship you wish to examine whether with
the aid of remote scannering instruments or with high explosives.
-
Control whether your ship flies in the direction it's pointing
in or skates around like an Asteroids ship instead.
-
Accelerate up/down or left/right, or apply the brakes.
-
Operate the Multifunction displays, shields, cloaking, radar
and other stuff.
-
Signal to the operator that you've had enough and really
would like the room to stop spinning now.
Does it realistically model aerodynamics?
Perfectly! There is no air in deep space!
Is it any fun to play?
Sort of. It's a bit lacking in scenery and places to hide. Need more CPU
grunt! Given its basic limitations, the game's been well tuned for gameplay,
(through years of refinement). Some of the Experienced Players
(Footnote 2)
seem to delight in finding some perverse new trick that gives them the
edge in combat. One of these tricks involves setting a homing missile to
target one ship and launching the missile at a different ship at close
range.
(Footnote 3)
Where can I play it?
In a huge half-buried baked bean tin, in Pilgrim Place, behind Hoyts 8
at Moorhouse Avenue, in Central Christchurch, New Zealand.
Contact your travel agent today!
How much does it cost to play?
Buckloads. Actually, it depends on what kind of simulator motion
you want to pay for. The cheapest is 'none' at roughly $5 - you just
play the game sitting in the cockpits with the motors off and the door
open. Then there's 'partial' and 'full motion'. To qualify for
any kind of motion, you have to go for the 15 minute basic training
session.
Is it safe?
Mostly.
What if I want to get out?
Push the big red panic button. Hopefully, an alarm will sound, your
simulator will come to rest the right way up and a friendly operator
will open the door for you. Never undo the harness until instructed.
Once you feel you're not in any immediate physical danger, you can pull
the panic button back out and continue the game. Don't worry about
losing your ship in the game - it's indestructible while the panic
button is in
(Footnote 4).
This game looks bloody complicated. Do you have a manual for it?
Yes. It's around here somewhere, on the Web.
Is that spaceship over there 'me'?
No. If you are especially observant, you will notice:
-
You're sitting in a small room with a joystick, a lever that
goes back and forth and lots of modern aircraft style instruments
plastered over the dashboard. Some kind of crosshair is fixed
to the middle of the screen.
-
When you wiggle the joystick, all the stars move left/right
or up/down.
-
When you pull the trigger, big sparkly bullet-things rush from
the sides of the screen and race to the middle, getting smaller
and smaller and smaller before finally disappearing.
-
Strange machines covered in glowing bits often turn towards you
and emit brightly coloured sparkly things that get bigger and
bigger. Lots of loud bangs echo around the small room.
Hence no spaceship you can see is 'you'.
You are sitting in a spaceship, looking out.
What happens if I push all those pretty buttons?
Heavenly music will burst forth, angels will sing your name and
you will quickly transported to a new plane of existence.
Go ahead. Push them all. You know you want to.
Sometimes, one of the other ships start growing larger. It keeps
growing faster and faster. Just when I can see nothing but some
part of the ship I'm blinded and deafened by light and noise.
Soon the screen goes blank, a message appears and I see stars again.
What happened?
You crashed.
I can't seem to hit any of the other ships, even though they are
perfectly lined up with the sights? What's wrong?
The bullets you fire are quite slow, so you have to aim ahead of the
target to land bullets on it properly. How much ahead you should aim
depends on how fast the target is moving up/down/sideways and how
far away it is. If you like, you can enable the Predicting Gunsight
by pushing the green 'HUD MODE' button on the dashboard. That'll
show you what to aim for.
What does "Relax, you're a bagel?" mean?
There is someone out there called "Bagel", targetting you with his
Mind Control Laser. Resistance is futile. You are a bagel.
Why is it that, after the cheerful and helpful operator straps me
into a simulator, he goes away and says "Bignose!"?
Oh, That's my fault. It's not the operator calling you 'bignose'
at all. That's the sound that comes from a simulator when the operator
puts it into 'debug mode'
(Footnote 5)
to adjust some deep and mysterious simulator parameters.
The sound has been changed now, to something less likely to cause
operator injury.
A message informs me that I can get a really fast ship with big
guns, tons of nukes and fluffy dice if I type 'XYZZY'. How do I
type 'XYZZY'?
Ignore it. It's a geek joke, rather like the one that says you
don't have to be an Einstein to play this game
(Footnote 6).
I finally manage to shoot down someone and a message tells me I 'fragged'
the other player. A second later my ship gets destroyed and
another message says we both fragged each other. Didn't I just
waste that other player?
You did. It still doesn't mean that the burning lump of twisted metal that
was once a spaceship hurts any less when you crash into it. Because motion
is relative in space, the scoring system cannot determine the difference
between you crashing into a bit of debris and someone else cleverly throwing
the debris of a ship (that was wrecked anyway) in your direction. The scoring
system simply knows that your ship was destroyed by a fast-moving bit of
metal owned by the other player, hence that player is awarded a frag.
To avoid 'mutual frags', strive to keep your ship from colliding with other
ships or their burning wrecks. Those green lateral thrust keys are damn
handy for sidestepping burning wrecks.
The inter-simulator phone system doesn't work! Why is this?
It's a hardware problem. The engineer mutters something about the four
crystals not yet vibrating in unison. I told him he's supposed to wave
the dead chickens anticlockwise in the southern hemisphere and
that the sacrifical gerbils have to be virgins, but he won't listen.
Why is the 'Bambi' a complete pig of a ship to fly?
I copied the Bambi's shape from an earlier programmer. My boss liked
the shape of it, the ship being all streamlined and all that. I thought
it looked like a cross between one of the Battlestar Galactica's Vipers
and a Fiat Bambina, so I called it 'Bambi'.
I designed the other two ships (primiarily around the way I could
place the thrusters) and went on to develop the thruster physics
model
(Footnote 7).
Then came Bambi. Where does one start on a ship like Bambi? There's
almost no room on the ship to put the roll, pitch and yaw thrusters, let
alone the lateral thrusters.
Most of the surface area of the ship is behind the centre of mass,
and the main engines are too close together for yaw to work quickly.
Slightly over half of the the pitch control is done by the thrusters
on the top and bottom of the nose. A few bullets in the nose or a
minor ding can seriously impair the Bambi's flying ability. Still, it's
the best that can be done for a ship designed to look like an aircraft.
If you want to see a really good fighter spaceship design, have a
look at a Star Fury from Babylon 5. It's an X-shaped ship with
engines on each tip. Note how each engine has thruster ports pointing in
various directions. This is so the ship can slide in any direction and turn
very quickly on any axis.
Notice the opening sequence where a Star Fury strafes a
target, passes it and turns around to continue blasting at it without
changing its original course. This is easy to do in Space Jihad:
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Fly towards a target. Shoot it as you approach.
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Steer just enough to avoid hitting the target. Now hit the
ACC/VEL button.
-
Readjust your aim and continue hitting the target. As the
target flies by, keep pointing at it and keep firing. You're
still flying on the original course.
-
When the target is getting too far away (assuming you haven't
destroyed it already), hit the ACC/VEL button
again and your ship will start flying in the direction its
pointing the same way it normally does.
If you're really good, you can fly round in circles about a target
and shoot it at the same time. Just don't try it in a Bambi, 'cos it's
a pig.
The messages from the damage report machine don't make sense!
That's because the damage report machine is one of the first things
to get damaged.
Why is it that I die most often when I ram another ship?
It's probably because you're using the front of your ship (which is
weak and brittle) to ram the side of another ship (which usually is very
tough). Try picking a really tough ship like the Eletric Reaper and
turn it so it's side on to the target when ramming. If you have a Tyron
and find that your rotary cannon thing is out of ammo, you will find that
the gun itself makes an excellent battering ram, even against incoming
missiles in their terminal homing stage.
Are there any cheat codes?
There was one. It was available in 'debug mode' and increased the
speed of your bullets to several kilometers per second. The kinetic energy
of these bullets was so high that just one or two rounds could destroy
any ship (well, the rounds with significant mass could). On the latest
version of the game I installed, I changed the cheat to make your bullets
move a few feet per second instead. I think there may be another
cheat to get back high speed bullets, but I don't remember it off the
top of my head and I'd have to read the source code or dissasemble the
game code.
How about writing a aircraft flight simulator?
That's the current project for Flight Developments Ltd. It should be out
by 'Feburary'. I just don't know which Feburary.
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