Hey Guys,
I just stumbled across this forum and thought I'd share a little bit of Star Reach/ Space Federation history:
Star Reach as one of the first real time strategy games on the PC market. If I remember correctly the only other RTS games were Dune II, and Herzog Zwei. I hadn't played Dune II, but definitely put some hours into Heroz Zwei.
When I was first pitching the concept and showing the demo the executives at most the game companies I talked with ie.. Broderbund, EA, etc.. had to be convinced as to why it made sense to to allow Real Time in a strategy game.
Also since Star Reach was published by Interplay, Blizzard who was also published by Interplay at the time was looking at pre-release versions of Star Reach while developing Warcraft I.
At the time that we designed Star Reach, CD Rom's were not in popular use so we were constrained to a 3 disk limit ( 3 3.5 inch floppies at 1.44 mb per piece!). Also virtually no one was making LAN based games at this time. Both of these trends changed dramatically 6 months into production, so other RTS games such as Warcraft released with increased content AND LAN support. We wanted to add both of these but would have had to delay the release of the title beyond possible release dates.
We also faced major technical challenges at the time. Since Star Reach was a RTS, we needed to load everything into ram (since pulling data off a 3.5 inch floppy is really slow). So we had to use custom extended memory drivers in order to map everything to ram.
I also overdid it a little bit on sound and music. Early in production we received a prototype of the super cool Gravis Ultrasound card. This card was capable of playing 16 channels of 16-bit sound at the same time with 256K onboard memory. compared to 1 sound channel from the Sound Blaster and no memory. So.. we wrote our own music player and sound driver so that we could utilize all 16 channels, including stereo effects, panning and fading. Its cool that you can play this title on DosBox, but its not quite the same as hearing it on an actual Gravis Ultrasound. Sometime before release I also received a prototype of the Sounblaster 16, which allowed 2 channels of 16-bit sound. So I ended up writing custom drivers for that too. So Star Reach allowed for native mode support of SoundBlaster pro, SB 16, SB, and Gravis. Virtually no game at the time did this, and engineers from both Gravis and Creative labs were referring other developers to us to answer questions.
We also created a sound track using the Amiga Mod format using sampled digital samples.. most games at the time used MIDI synth sounds for music (sounds like a cheap casio keyboard). Its easy to take this stuff for granted now in the days of massive memory and mp3 sound tracks. But it was no joke to try to fit several real sounding songs on 4.2 megs of disk space that loaded up to 2-4 megs of ram maximum along with all of the other graphics etc..
I then added a twist to the Amiga MOD code to allow for sound tracks that changed depending on the level of action in the game.. This didn't become popular in other games for at least 5-6 years.
Creating the arcade input for both joystick and keyboard was also ridiculously difficult. I had to write custom assembly keyboard drivers to be able to detect key press and release. Also many of the keyboard models for PC's had lockout issues.. if you pressed two keys at the same time, one of them wouldn't be detected. This is why they keyboard selection screen includes the ability to press multiple keys at once and see which ones highlight, so that users could choose other keys when they encountered lockout. Joystick support also required direct assembly drivers. Even worse I couldn't find any information about how joysticks worked until i happened to find a Kraft joystick at an electronics store that came with an electrical schematic! this schematic explained which port the joystick talked to.. So I had to write code to keep throwing data at this port and listing to responses while moving the joystick to figure out how it worked. And the responses only made sense because I happened to know how capacitors work.
At least 60% of the code was written in assembly language to enable the targeted FPS Rate of at lest 15, which was a major challenge for this game on the 386 PC's.
Features I wish that we had been able to add in - Campaign mode, Mouse capability, and Network play. Along with much more content. All of these things were primarily limitations of a 3 floppy disk limit, lack of decent network drivers, and numerous technical hurdles to get a game of this scope to play within a 2 megs of RAM on a PC, while inventing the technology to run it and fitting in content and game play in a 12 month production cycle.
It's really great to see some of the feedback on this site. And my regards to the this site for finding and hosting these games.
-David Foote
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