Tuesday, December 03, 2019

Advent Day 3 ! Cobra Stormtrooper Butterscotch

Day 3 !

Been a busy day today, with an away trip for a meeting away from where I normally work and then back to do shopping on the way home before settling in now to watch a few more episodes of the Mars series.

Oh - never go shopping while hungry. I now have donuts. And lots more stuff.

What's behind the doors today ?
A stormtrooper and a Butterscotch marshmallow. Lush again. The butterscotch taste kicks in a second or so after that first bite. Good times.

Oh and don't worry about the stormtrooper aiming at it like he thinks it needs shooting ... they never hit.

In the background is another theme I'll be running for as long as it lasts, that's Femshep from the Mass Effect games. She's a space marine who runs headlong into a quest to save the galaxy from mysterious unstoppable machine intelligences who come back every few 10,000 years to eradicate all life from the galaxy that has progressed past a certain technology level. Mass Effect gave us a wonderful series of games and I must play it again.

Oh and Femshep, best shep. One reason I tend to play female characters in games is because I like the voice acting more and Jennifer Hale (who voices Femshep) is one of the very best voice actors.

What's the Elite theme for today ? It's the iconic Cobra Mk3, star of the original game going back to 1984. I may have attempted a real drawing with a pen on paper. Check this out :
Couldn't resist adding the mini dwagon.

Anyway, how does it compare to the original ?
There we go. The ships to bottom left and in the centre are Cobras, the little ones are Sidewinders, centre right is a Python and I think the bottom right is a Fer-de-Lance.

The original game, released in 1984, was a complete marvel. It fit into the 32kbytes of memory that the BBC B microcomputer contained and pushed the limits of what was possible with those machines by presenting a fully 3d environment with wireframe 3d graphics.

Computers and graphics have come a long way since then though :
That's the Cobra Mk3 Keelas Wings, approaching an engineers base for a landing and a souping up of the hyperdrive.

It's good too that the new game went back to some of the gameplay systems of the original game. The two games in the middle (Frontier Elite 2 and Frontier 2) went for a fully Newtonian physics model which ... didn't really work for gameplay. Instead of close, exciting dogfighting, combat was either at slow speeds at stations or an exercise in high speed jousting which just wasn't fun. But in going back to a ... funsized? flight model that's a bit like how Star Wars treats physics, the space flying is a lot more engaging and fun.

Good times indeed.

When kicking off this month's worth of postings, I'd intended to only do maybe 4 drawings but ... I think I'll try for more. You only get better at something if you practice and I'm not really at the Getting Better stage of practice, I'm more at the Learning The Tools level of practice.

The pictures by the end won't be masterpieces but ... hopefully people will like them !

Cya tomorrow.

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