Elite Oolite

When I lived in Brunei in the mid-80s, a neighbour had a BBC Micro and I would go over there to play the space trading game Elite. The hidden-line wireframe graphics and massive procedurally-generated universe seemed amazing to me at the time and it was definitely the kind of software I aspired to one day write myself. At the time, I taught myself trigonometry to do 3D graphics but never got to hidden line removal :-)

I was aware of various Elite clones over the years, but the other day I stumbled across Oolite, an open-source Mac OS X version with modern OpenGL graphics. Simply amazing and just as addictive as I remember the original being. It also seems to be highly pluggable, with numerous extensions available to add both to the UI and gameplay.

Syndicated 2008-05-09 23:27:59 (Updated 2008-05-09 23:34:36) from James Tauber