Recent content on Exile
The previous articles covered how Exile (BBC Micro, 1988) generates its world and draws it . This part is about the thing the game was actually famous for: the physics. Exile’s marketing called it the first game with realistic physics, and for once the marketing undersold the engineering — gravity, momentum, drag, buoyancy, wind, bouncing, all computed for every active object, in 8-bit…
The previous article looked at how Exile (BBC Micro, 1988) generates its 256×256-tile world from about 500 bytes of code. This one is about what you actually see: how the graphics are stored, how another handful of bytes becomes a red rock face here and a green bush there, and how the sprite plotter gets it all onto the screen fast enough to scroll on a 2MHz 6502. very piece of art in the game —…
Exile (Superior Software, 1988) gave the BBC Micro something seemingly impossible: a single coherent world of 256×256 tiles with caverns, shafts, diagonal tunnels, a crashed spaceship, an underground base and all on a machine with 32KB of RAM, most of which was screen memory and game code. Stored naively, the map alone would be 64KB. Twice the machine. The trick is that the map is never stored.…
There is no source code Let’s get the awkward part out of the way: the original source to Exile does not exist in any form I have access to. Whatever Peter Irvin and Jeremy Smith’s development setup produced in 1988 — assembler listings, notes, graph paper — is not something you can download. What you can download is, in some ways, better. At level7.org.uk lives a complete…
Why Exile has been with me for a long time. It was published for the BBC Micro in 1988, written by Peter Irvin and Jeremy Smith, coming towards the end of the BBCs commercial life and when many were, or had, moved on. However it was clear to everyone who played it that it was doing things an 8-bit machine had no business doing: a vast procedurally generated cave system, creatures that seemed to…