New version of Star Fighter 3000

I have released a new patch for Star Fighter 3000¹, a 1994 game where you fly a one-person fighter spacecraft around a mainly flat-shaded polygonal world shooting things, blowing them up, and collecting floating bonus coins.

The highlights in this release are the addition of an invulnerability cheat, improved collision-avoidance A.I. for non-player spacecraft, and bug fixes for the VGA monitor upscaler mode added in the previous release. I also eliminated several illegal reads from zero page addresses, which may help compatibility.

Changes in this version:

• Added an invulnerability cheat (a climbing plant).
• Replaced the algorithm used by the A.I. to avoid collisions between spacecraft and ground objects. In particular, spacecraft no longer turn towards obstacles.
• Attacking spacecraft no longer fire at their target and now have unlimited ability to roll when avoiding collisions with ground objects.
• Enabled some historic code to reduce the jitter of roll control by A.I.
• Made it configurable whether or not the camera view is reset to the player’s spacecraft whenever it is hit by incoming fire.
• Reduced memory usage by 12 bytes per spacecraft.
• A message is now broadcast to claim ownership of the input focus from other desktop applications.
• Fixed bug introduced in version 3.00 where enemy spacecraft launched from hangars or big ships did not swerve to avoid head-on collisions with the player.
• Eliminated occasional overflow in calculations for deflection shooting.
• Fixed longstanding bug concerning friendly spacecraft that can’t find an enemy to attack when the spacecraft they are following joins the player’s formation and there is no room to join too.
• If the player fires upon a friendly spacecraft that has been configured to ignore attacks then it no longer mutinies and leaves the player’s formation without actually attacking the player.
• Fixed longstanding bug where a big ship could attack a bonus coin for up to ten frames if it appeared at the same time that an enemy spacecraft was destroyed.
• Fixed loads from illegal addresses 2, 12 and 68.
• Fixed bugs introduced in version 3.15 where keyboard navigation of the in-game menus and key activation of map control icons didn’t work when upscaling to 480 lines.
• Fixed bug introduced in version 3.15 where garbage was displayed instead of the title screen in full-screen mode except when upscaling to 480 lines.
• Fixed an incompatibility with RISC OS 6 which prevented mouse clicks on the ‘PLAY GAME’ button being debounced properly.