Ed Logg being the person that gave us, Coin op Asteroids and Gauntlet amongst others
I was reading some text from a book by Eastern Front programmer Chris Crawford (called ‘Chris Crawford on Games Design’, I am guessing it’s a follow on from his earlier tome ‘the art of computer games design’)
In Chapter 18 (Ironically enough titled ‘Eastern front’), the first paragraph went like this
‘In August of 1980, I saw a wonderful bit of software (I believe it was written by Ed Logg) for the Atari Home Computer System (HCS) that set up a huge map and smoothly scrolled through it. The map was done with character graphics, but the HCS had the ability to change character sets, so it was not difficult to use graphic character sets to assemble a map or larger image. I realized that this opened up a world of possibilities for wargames. No longer would we need to squeeze the entire map onto a single 320x192 screen; now we could have huge maps. I sat down and wrote a routine that duplicated the functions of the original demo, then designed a custom character set for map use, and finally assembled a map using that custom character set. The result was astounding: a smooth-scrolling map that was four screens wide by four screens high.’
My Question is, is or was Eastern Front based on or built around this scrolling world demo originally coded by Ed Logg, Seeming as though The Scrolling map theme is/was the central plank or core of the eastern front game engine
Additionally, it would seem that the Atari version of 'legionaire' which was coded/programmed after Eastern Front used much of the eastern front game engine (even though the original version of legionaire was only coded for the CBM Pet)
According to the same book as referenced to above, Crawford had some software development contract with Avalon Hill (the famous boardgame company who'd just started getting into computer games publishing) going back to one of his first published games 'tanktics', apparently the game 'legionaire' was also part of this software development contract (according to said book)
If this is so and since the Atari version of Legionaire used some or most of the Eastern Front game engine, wasn't Crawford kind of getting himself into a spot of bother since he'd already had a software contract with Avalon Hill and yet he was using game code from an Atari published game on a competitors product (since eastern front was one of the very few APX products that managed to make it onto Atari's mainstream publishing label, which therefore infers/implies that the game code etc is partly Atari's property)
I was reading some text from a book by Eastern Front programmer Chris Crawford (called ‘Chris Crawford on Games Design’, I am guessing it’s a follow on from his earlier tome ‘the art of computer games design’)
In Chapter 18 (Ironically enough titled ‘Eastern front’), the first paragraph went like this
‘In August of 1980, I saw a wonderful bit of software (I believe it was written by Ed Logg) for the Atari Home Computer System (HCS) that set up a huge map and smoothly scrolled through it. The map was done with character graphics, but the HCS had the ability to change character sets, so it was not difficult to use graphic character sets to assemble a map or larger image. I realized that this opened up a world of possibilities for wargames. No longer would we need to squeeze the entire map onto a single 320x192 screen; now we could have huge maps. I sat down and wrote a routine that duplicated the functions of the original demo, then designed a custom character set for map use, and finally assembled a map using that custom character set. The result was astounding: a smooth-scrolling map that was four screens wide by four screens high.’
My Question is, is or was Eastern Front based on or built around this scrolling world demo originally coded by Ed Logg, Seeming as though The Scrolling map theme is/was the central plank or core of the eastern front game engine
Additionally, it would seem that the Atari version of 'legionaire' which was coded/programmed after Eastern Front used much of the eastern front game engine (even though the original version of legionaire was only coded for the CBM Pet)
According to the same book as referenced to above, Crawford had some software development contract with Avalon Hill (the famous boardgame company who'd just started getting into computer games publishing) going back to one of his first published games 'tanktics', apparently the game 'legionaire' was also part of this software development contract (according to said book)
If this is so and since the Atari version of Legionaire used some or most of the Eastern Front game engine, wasn't Crawford kind of getting himself into a spot of bother since he'd already had a software contract with Avalon Hill and yet he was using game code from an Atari published game on a competitors product (since eastern front was one of the very few APX products that managed to make it onto Atari's mainstream publishing label, which therefore infers/implies that the game code etc is partly Atari's property)