Annali da Samarcanda

Alberto Marnetto’s Notebook

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While my next big writeup is cooking, here’s a report about some smaller projects.

SuperSight 2.0

Last week I published a new release of my mod for Stunts. Best I can do is to copy-paste my original announcement, and invite you to the Stunts forum in case you’d like to talk about it.

The new version number does not bring revolutionary improvements, but it wants to represent that the project has reached a certain maturity and stability, and also that the focus will be less on the raw number of polygons and more on other aspects of the playing experience.

Here the new features since v1.6:

• Unlocked the camera zoom.
• Unlocked the camera elevation. Note that if you go to 90° (elevation = 256) the camera will be fixed with having the North on the top of the screen. This is a consequence of how the Stunts graphic engine works, up to you if you consider it a feature or a bug.
• Extended the status infos shown with the F5 keys. Now they also show the camera orientation. Useful to reproduce particular screenshots, compare replays, etc.
• Fixed the bug where the explosion effect would sometimes appear in a wrong position (related discussion).
• Minor tweaks to the rendering algorithm.
• Reduced the exe size to 250 KB, so that you can load more tracks on your floppy disk.

For daring drivers, I also provide a “boosted” variant, SuperSight 2.00X, which pushes the engine to the limit. It is more beautiful to see, but subject to crashes.

• 5 graphic modes with different detail/speed balance.

• FULL: 180 tiles, slowest but most detailed algorithm. A fast 486 or DOSBox with cpu=dynamic are recommended.

• GOOD: 110 tiles, similar to current official release.

• FAST: 80 tiles, should work well with emulators in low-power machines.

• VFAST: 50 tiles, for your dear 286.

• BLIND: 1 tile, the one you’re in. You think you could drive on Default with your eyes closed? Time to prove that!

• The graphic level is autosaved in a file called STUNTS.INI, and auto-loaded at startup (curious people might want to edit that file and set the parameter to 5 to activate the mysterious 6th graphics mode).

You can get both variants in my Stunts project page.

A replay using the 2.00X version: the winning run by Argammon on the track “The Fjords” by Dreadnaut.

Camel Trophy Game

Publishing TTT in detail brought me to revisit the Spectrum world. As I was browsing the game database of Spectrum Computing, my attention was captured by the loading screen of the entry about the Camel Trophy Game1.

The color bleeding could have been handled better, but you must admit the picture is thrilling.

The game was one of the very rare Italian creations in the Eighties. Looking for infos about it I came across a long post-mortem, written by one of the developers. The article shows all the passion that went into the production process.

It was a pity that the game was forgotten and undocumented, to the point that there were just a couple of screenshots and no gameplay video about it. So I invested some hours, learned the controls and played the game a couple of times, documenting my second run in a video showing the full gameplay.

Click for the chapter list

• 0:13 Loading "camel1" (quiz)
• 0:54 Splash screen
• 2:54 Loading camel1 complete
• 3:34 Start of the quiz
• 12:25 Results of the quiz, player name selection (note: Heinz Kallin was the winner of the Camel Trophy ’85)
• 12:49 Loading "camel2" (track selection)
• 13:33 Splash screen
• 15:26 Track selection
• 16:37 Loading "camel3" (the game proper)
• 17:15 Splash screen
• 19:48 Intro menu
• 20:04 Trophy Day 1. Trial: overcoming a bump
• 20:48 Trial: fuel economy run to the base camp
• 20:04 Trophy Day 2. Trial: assembling the car
• 24:18 Trial: jungle exploration
• 25:35 Trial won: run to the base camp
• 29:02 Trial: obstacle avoidance
• 39:03 Trial: fording a river
• 44:20 Trial: assembling a bridge (my best result: 1 piece placed)
• 1:25:26 Trial won (?): jungle exploration
• 1:29:00 Trial: assembling the car (my best result: 3 pieces placed)
• 1:31:13 The end: final evaluation

Unfortunately, I must say, the game was lost to oblivion for good reason. The authors put a lot of effort in rendering the experience of the Camel Trophy in videogame format, but they seemed to disregard the entertainment factor, producing something that is neither a good documentary nor a enjoyable game.

In real life, the Camel Trophy was a competition for Land Rover off-road vehicles. The participants had to travel through hundreds of kilometers of hostile terrain and complete various trials to gain ranking points.

There are 12 scoring situations: jungle penetration, night orienteering, fuel economy run, mud negotiation, sand negotiation, water negotiation, equal-time driving (matching times each way over a prescribed course), basic hill climb, slalom hill climb, high average speed, bridge negotiation and sand ladder practical application.2

The game tries to faithfully reproduce the expedition. It features most of these challenges, each simulated by a corresponding minigame.

Tragically, instead of testing the player’s driving and coordination skills, the game makes wide use of fake difficulty, refusing to reveal what one needs to do. To build a bridge or reassemble the car it is necessary to find by trial and error the exact pixel that triggers an interaction, and the correct path to navigate the jungle can only be discovered by failing repeatedly. As a result, the game is frustrating at first and becomes boring after two-three runs, when all the secret pieces of information have been collected. The experience reminded me of a post by Emily Short about Italian games, even if she was speaking about a different era and genre:

Italian IF often rewards the player for imaginative guesses about what to do next to move the story forward, in contrast with English, where the player is expected to spend more time extracting exposition from environmental hints.

Is this way of “challenging” the user such a common trait of Italian game devs? I really hope not.

In any case, the work that went in this early creation deserves not to go completely lost. I do not recommend watching the video in full, but maybe it might be useful for game historians. You can get some impressions by using the chapter list, or take the quiz featured at the start of the game and see if your knowledge would have allowed you to survive in the real Trophy. You can also follow the thread in the Spectrum Computing forum.

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The ZXDB calls it “Camel Trophy ‘86”, but it seems a mistake since the year appears neither in the gameplay nor on the cassette cover. ↩ 1.

Daniel Charles Ross, “Mud, Sweat and Gears”, Popular Mechanics, September 1984. ↩

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