Exodus - Cancelled 3D exploration game on the Commodore 64 from 1989

Exodus was an ambitious war game, described as a mix of Elite, Civilization and Traveller. Due for release on #Amiga, #AtariST and #Commodore64, developer Paul Clansey allowed GTW to preserve the game in 2016, revealing details on why it was cancelled.
gamesthatwerent.com/gtw64/exo...

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

Fantastic to see this

[@datassetteuser356]

Wow, looks pretty awesome!

[@commocore]

This looks brilliant. I just played Dogfight 2187 (with equally brilliant music by Ben Daglish!) but the sense of a smooth movement in this one is fantastic, down to 1 pixel. One of my ambitions is to learn how to write a 3d polygon renderer like that on Commodore 64. Plotting on a bitmap has it's own challenges, but 3d aspect moves it to completely another level. How come these people were able to create such engines back then?

[@GamesThatWerent]

I'm not sure how they managed it, but some of these developers used up every trick in the book to try and squeeze as much out of the 6502 as possible. Games like Battle Command I believe used look up tables to try and help speed up on calculations.

[@commocore]

@@GamesThatWerent Indeed, well designed lookup tables and intermediate calculations can do magic. Nowadays we can just play with math without even fully understanding how it works, back then you would need to understand it fully, and put a lot of effort to do all the calculations on the actual hardware.