Talk:Asteroids (video game)

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BetacommandBot 07:10, 5 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Recently, the statement that Asteroids was the first game to feature a high score table was removed, indicating that Star Fire came before it. I'd like to see some specifics about the release date of Star Fire and how that compares with Asteroids, since Asteroids has long been known as the first game to feature a high score table. The references in the Star Fire article don't appear to support its claim, at least not concretely. — KieferSkunk (talk) — 19:33, 8 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Kiefer - I wouldn't say that Asteroids is long known as the first. Some sources have simply (incorrectly) reported as such, along side sources that reported Star Fire as being the first. The well known video game community resources KLOV, and MAME's MAWS Database all also state Star Fire as the first. This reference from the Star Fire page is pretty clear on that as is this interview with the designer also looked to in the article. Asteroids was released in November of '79, and its rom copyright date also states this. Star Fire's copyright date is 12/1978 to Exidy (who as the resources talk about was the one who bought the game and released it after shopping it around in '78), with an early '79 release date. Likewise, the Star Fire Operations Manual that comes with the coin-op is dated April, 1979 and supports this. The author of Star Fire, David Rolfe (also involved with Intellivision development) has a web page that I've just contacted him through as well to try and verify the April '79 date. --Marty Goldberg 20:31, 8 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, that sounds convincing enough. I've heard quite a few people familiar with the industry claim that Asteroids was the first to feature a high score table (not just to allow entering initials for the highest score), so it might be worth mentioning in this article something along the lines of: "Contrary to popular belief, Asteroids was not the first game to feature a high score table – the first to do this was Star Fire, released earlier the same year by Exidy." — KieferSkunk (talk) — 20:51, 8 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds good. Where would you see adding that in the article without sounding like its trivia? --Marty Goldberg 20:57, 8 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I remember that there was what appeared to be a fencepost error in one of the asteroid shapes -- one side of the polygon displayed brigher than all the others, presumably because it was traced twice. If would be cool if we could find a reference for that. -- RoySmith (talk) 15:31, 9 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Every asteroid appears to have slight brightness variations of the lines. Kinda interesting that you can also see the same type of variation when the ship is facing perfectly right or left but on none of the other rotations. Also, the first release of Asteroids had some brightness variations on the letter B which was fixed in later versions. Even the saucer and the ship explosion have variations so it's hard to tell if these were on purpose or not.

--73.180.50.41 (talk) 12:16, 25 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I believe the

I remember reading a magazine article years ago that said the collision detection was slightly off. Sure enough, if you try the game in Mame, the asteroids seem to box bounded rather and polygon bounded for collision detection. I am struggling to find a reference for this though. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mojo-chan (talk • contribs) 15:16, 18 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Mame is an approximation of vector hardware on a raster display, not the same. The arcade's hardware collision detection worked on whether beams were drawn over each other. --Marty Goldberg (talk) 19:06, 18 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I see, makes sense to do it in hardware. What about the players shots though, as they are points and would need to be tested to see if they are inside a polygon, something the CPU wouldn't be fast enough to do for every on-screen object. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mojo-chan (talk • contribs) 12:39, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

A point is simply a beam drawing at a specific location, no different than the others. When you draw a line, it simply keeps the beam on and moves it, then shuts it off. When you draw a point, it turns the beam on and off at that single location. To keep a dot or a line, or anything else on the screen for any length of time in a vector monitor, you have to continuously draw it or it will fade away. When a line is drawn over a "dot", or vice versa, you have a collision. --Marty Goldberg (talk) 02:56, 25 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

In that case, collision detection would not work. An asteroid is a polygon made up of lines. A bullet is a single point. If that point is inside the polygon, it does not cross any of the lines of the polygon so would not trigger a collision. The only conclusion I can come to is that collision detection must be more complicated than simple line intersection. It is not difficult (mathematically) to test if a point is inside a polygon, but it would be too computationally intensive for the CPU to do alone. Mojo-chan (talk) 13:47, 25 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

There are no "polygons" in the game, the first game to use those was I Robot which had special polygon based hardware. Each asteroid is made of separately drawn lines. And you are correct on if the point was drawn inside an asteroid it would never detect it until (either) would travel a bit and be hit. But the game never draws like that, the shots always start outside all the shapes. --Marty Goldberg (talk) 16:19, 25 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I'm pretty certain that Asteroids didn't use hardware collision detection of this type. Each asteroid is roughly a circle, and it would make sense to check whether a point or line intersects the boundary of an asteroid's "circle", rather than checking every line that makes up the individual asteroid. The math required to check a point's distance from the center of each circular boundary is very simple and can be done with integers, thus making software collision detection not only feasible, but more likely in this case.

To properly detect a collision in hardware in the manner described above, the display hardware would need to be aware of how fast each point and line is moving, and determine if a shot point will intersect an asteroid/UFO line in the next screen update. Vector displays being what they are, simply detecting if two segments cross or a point is drawn directly on top of (or underneath) a line is very unlikely to be good enough - it would be far too likely for a shot to skip over a line between updates and the collision to be missed completely. — KieferSkunk (talk) — 19:53, 25 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Also, it's worth mentioning that MAME treats vector games as having actual vector displays. The game's virtual hardware has no idea that it's actually outputting to a raster display - all drawing operations are done in the same way that they would be on physical hardware, and the MAME display code handles translating the vector draws to a raster image. So as far as the game is concerned, if there is hardware detection being done by the vector hardware, it's supposed to be simulated accurately. (Whether it is totally accurate or not is another question.) — KieferSkunk (talk) — 19:57, 25 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Looking at the MAME source, there does not appear to be emulation of hardware collision detection. It would not be too difficult to do on the CPU because the asteroids could be box bounded and do not rotate. As KieferSkunk said, it would be hard to do in hardware because aside from anything at a resolution of approximately 1024x768 lines would be very small and at the speed they and bullets move an exact intersection is somewhat unlikely. On the hardware, lines essentially have zero thickness from a mathematical point of view. I think it must be CPU based.Mojo-chan (talk) 13:44, 26 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I'm of the opinion the asteroids are circle-bound, since the displayed shape is roughly circular and thus a square boundary would be visually inaccurate in many cases. Also keep in mind that Asteroids Deluxe is essentially the same game with a few relatively minor changes - the core software is almost exactly the same, and the asteroids DO rotate in that one. To my knowledge, the rotation in that game is purely cosmetic, but has no impact on how collisions are calculated. — KieferSkunk (talk) — 19:18, 26 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I am trying to devise a test. Is there some way to single frame step MAME? Maybe the ROM can be disassembled.Mojo-chan (talk) 16:03, 27 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Guys, the problem is vector hardware *does not use frames*. There is no framerate, and the single 6502 hardware was not powerful enough to do real time collision detection like what you're suggesting. I'm in the process of talking to the designers of Atari's original vector hardware (this was all pre-mathbox, Battlezone had collision detection algorithms built in to the mathbox). I'll post the results here. --Marty Goldberg (talk) 16:12, 27 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks Marty, looking forward to your findings. I would just point out though that the 6502 is certainly powerful enough to do collision detection, assuming it is either bounding box or radius based. Integer maths and lookup tables would make it more than feasible in assembly code. I know because I used to write code for the things :) Mojo-chan (talk) 18:20, 28 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Circle-point collision only needs three adds, two multiplys and a compare. Box-point collision two adds and two compares. 6502's ran at about 4 Mhz IIRC, os this would be easy enough, especially if you did box first and only did the circle if needed - maybe even use an inner bounding box to cull further. Rich Farmbrough, 10:45, 9 May 2010 (UTC).[reply]

Somebody keeps removing this snippet I've tried to put in. I'd like to know why. It's annoying as hell. --Tablizer (talk) 07:33, 3 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

• The vector graphs allowed the display of bright, pin-point missiles, which made them stand out more so than could be done on traditional raster TV screens. This can be achieved in vector displays because the electron gun can be programmed to stop and dwell on a given point on the screen for a relatively long period of time per scan cycle, flooding a given spot on the screen with electrons. Raster TV, on the other hand must follow a pre-set zig-zag pattern with pre-determined timing. The compact brightness of the missiles is difficult to match even on modern screens.

Please see your talk page and the edit summary in the edit history. Your snippet constitutes

WP:OR. You need to add reliable cited material discussing Asteroids "pin-point missles" and why they can "stand out", otherwise its simply personal observation. Same goes for you personal commentary on brightness of the missiles being difficult to match, etc. --Marty Goldberg (talk) 07:36, 3 August 2008 (UTC)[reply

]

Most of the existing information in the article is like that though. Why target *only* this one? Articles about semi-recent technology will tend not to have a lot of published sources. --Tablizer (talk) 06:35, 11 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Also, this particular piece of information isn't really so much applicable to Asteroids as it is to vector display technology in general. The snippet is overly detailed, doesn't contribute much to the overall understanding of the game and its impact on the industry, and likely has parts of it that fail

WP:N. I tried to come up with a suggestion on how to tie this more concisely to the game, but I couldn't think of a way to do it without expounding on the technology in a similar way. Also, Asteroids is definitely not the first device to use a vector screen in this way - oscilloscopes and other vector displays have always been able to do that. It's just a matter of how the display is programmed, and since that sort of behavior is almost part of the definition of "vector display", it doesn't seem particularly noteworthy to me. — KieferSkunk (talk) — 16:22, 11 August 2008 (UTC)[reply

]

Just to add to Kiefer's explanation, the fact that there is already much material that needs to be referenced is exactly why there is not a need for more unreferenced material whose relationship to the subject matter is that it happens to use a vector display. And that's completely incorrect, there's plenty of material out there on vector technology and its in no way, shape, or form "semi-recent". Atari's arcade vector display technology will be 30 years old next year, Cinematronic's is even older, color vector technology is in its late 20's. Then there's vector computer displays which are well in to their 50's. There's tons of manuals, documentation, etc. available, and there were plenty of discussions on vector technology in game, engineering, and other periodicals. Vector monitors are not even in production anymore as far as I know, oscilloscopes have moved to LCD displays as well. We appreciate your attempt to contribute here and elsewhere on Wikipedia over the several years you've been here, and hope you continue to do so. But to save your self from further frustration, I would advise becoming more familiar with Wikipedia's policies on

WP:VERIFY. --Marty Goldberg (talk) 16:40, 11 August 2008 (UTC)[reply

]

[1] should be useful to build out a development section... --MASEM (t) 00:05, 30 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I've dropped in a quick update about John McAllister's new World Record which I watched over the Easter weekend (although I was allowed to sleep occasionally!) I will improve the entry when we have the official ranking from Twin Galaxies. Msemtd (talk) 11:03, 6 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Just throwing this one into the air, but could Beat Hazard[2] be considered to be a clone/follow-up of Asteroids? Stwalkerster [ talk ] 15:31, 24 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Not notable unless there's some press coverage about it being directly inspired by or based on Asteroids. The fact that it simply looks and/or plays like Asteroids is probably not enough for it to be included as a clone or derivative by itself. — KieferSkunk (talk) — 19:14, 24 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

This review is

transcluded from Talk:Asteroids (video game)/GA1

. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: Indrian (talk · contribs) 01:14, 9 January 2014 (UTC) I'll do a thorough review over the next couple of days. Indrian (talk) 01:14, 9 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'm lucky that

• "Triangular-shaped" is redundant; "triangular" is fine.
• "the "big saucer" shoots randomly like cannon fodder." - The term cannon fodder refers to combatants considered expendable, which really has nothing to do with shooting accuracy. This should be changed.
• "Smaller asteroids also score higher points" - This makes it sound like the asteroids are the ones accumulating points. Should read "Smaller asteroids are also worth more points.
• "After reaching a certain score, only the small saucer appears" - What score is that?
• "As the high score increases its angle range narrows" - As written, "its" refers to the small saucer, but I think you mean to refer to the shots from the saucer. This needs to be reworded.
• You mention that the game gets harder and faster each time the player clears the screen. Is there a point where the player reaches a maximum difficulty level and it no longer increases?
• When discussing bugs, you mention in passing that the player can gain extra lives, but the method of doing so is not discussed.
• Similar to the above, you do not mention how many starting lives the player gets for his quarter.

Done!

• "Asteroids was conceived by Lyle Rains and programmed and designed by Ed Logg" - This is only partially true. According to the sources already cited in the article, Rains conceived of the game, and Logg programmed it, but the design was a collaborative effort.
• "the latter whose first work with Atari, Inc. was 1978's Super Breakout" - This is not true and is not actually what the source says. The source says that "Super Breakout was the first game that Logg worked on that went into production." The first game he actually worked on was called Dirt Bike, but it was never released.
• Also, its okay to give a little historical background on Logg, but if you do, it should be its own sentence(s) rather than tacked on to another thought like it is now.
• "engineer Howard Delman contributed to the hardware it used" - You don't need "it used" at the end of that sentence. Also, according to Retro Gamer, Delman also designed the sound for the game.
• "In a meeting with Rains in April 1979, Rains spoke of a multiplayer video game in development for the Atari Cosmos, a tabletop video game console cancelled in 1981 which used holograms to produce 3D images." - This is incorrect and is an error that has crept into several sources due to confusion over similar names. As detailed in the Retro Gamer article and a few other places, Asteroids was based on an arcade game that went by the names Planet Grab and Cosmos at various stages of development. This game was never released. The Cosmos tabletop game was a completely different project. This should be changed and can be cited to the Retro Gamer article already being used.
• "A full-color version known as "Color-QuadraScan" was later developed for games such as Space Duel and Tempest." - This is certainly true, but it is not relevant to the topic of this article.
• "It was given to Delman, who used it as part of Lunar Lander's circuit board" - This is mostly true, but not quite. Delman actually had to finish the design that came out of Cyan. He did not just incorporate a finished technology into an arcade board.
• "The original Asteroids prototype board is part of Delman's personal collection." - Again, this is true, but not relevant to the design of the game.
• "Logg programmed a ship into the monitor" - This is poor grammar. The ship was not programmed into the monitor, it was programmed into the hardware and rendered on the monitor.
• The entire fourth paragraph is problematic, as there is no real flow to the ideas. It should be rewritten in such as way that the different aspects of the design transition into each other better. The info is fine; its just the writing that needs work.
• "The two saucers were formulated different from each other; the "big saucer" shoots randomly like cannon fodder, while the "small saucer" emphasizes firing at the ship." - Not only is the grammar poor (should read formulated to be different from each other, for example), but it largely repeats information already present in the gameplay section.
• "Logg was asked for the time he leaves and when employees play it" - Grammatically, this makes no sense. I think you are going for something like "Logg was often asked when he would be leaving by employees eager to play the prototype."
• "Logg and other Atari engineers observed proceedings and comments were written down in four pages." - "were written" is passive voice. Should be active.
• "Atari went to Sacramento, California for testing" - I know this refers to location testing, which was the common practice of arcade companies setting up a prototype in a local arcade to measure coin drop and gauge the potential success of the product. The layman will not know what this means though, so it needs to be explained.

This section may need more rewrites for organization after these changes are made, but I will wait to see how these changes are implemented before commenting further.

Done!

• "Atari earned an estimated $150 million dollars in sales and a further $500 million in revenue from the game" - This is true to the source, but it is not accurate. The source makes clear that the "further $500 million" represents money earned in the arcades from coin drop. Atari, as the manufacturer of the game, does not collect that money, which goes to the actual operators of the game. Therefore, this needs to be changed.
• "Tod Frye, an [sic] programmer tasked to work on the port, discovered that he could not make a faithful version of the game within the 4 KB limit addressed by the 2600, so he used bank switching" - I am not sure when and where the idea that Tod Frye had anything to do with Asteroids and bank switching first originated, but it is not true. See this interview[3] with the actual programmer of 2600 Asteroids, Brad Stewart, for the real story.

Done!

• There are several places where the citations at the end of a sentence are not in numerical order. These need to be fixed.
• Ref 17: Destructoid is only considered a reliable source in certain situations by the video games wikiproject (see Wikipedia:WikiProject Video games/Sources). It would be best if this ref could be replaced with a higher quality source.
  • I replaced Destructoid with SlideToPlay.com.
    talk) 01:06, 10 January 2014 (UTC)[reply
    ]

• I expanded the captions.
  talk) 01:28, 10 January 2014 (UTC)[reply
  ]

And that's it. I know there is a lot of text up there, but most of it amounts to minor cleanup. With a little hard work, I believe this article will have no trouble achieving GA status. Therefore, I am putting this nomination on hold so the nominator can address my concerns. Indrian (talk) 20:19, 9 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

• That was a quick turnaround: I am impressed. I will have to give a thorough reading of the article again to see how the changes look and catch anything else I missed (I have already noticed one or two things I should have brought up in the initial review, for example), but we are getting close to done here. I may not get the next round of comments up until tomorrow. Thank you for your efforts on the article. Indrian (talk) 01:33, 10 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • You're welcome, Indrian!
    talk) 01:39, 10 January 2014 (UTC)[reply
    ]
    • See this: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Asteroids_%28video_game%29&diff=590010544&oldid=590009388
      talk) 02:25, 10 January 2014 (UTC)[reply
      ]

• "The first game with Logg's involvement, Dirt Bike, remains unreleased, and his first game to be produced was Super Breakout." - As I stated before, there is nothing wrong with including a little background on the designers in the article, but the way it is now is just not working. The info comes out of nowhere and breaks up the flow of the paragraph. This should be improved or removed. You could always try to work it back in before bringing the article to FAC.
  • Improved.
    talk) 23:30, 10 January 2014 (UTC)[reply
    ]
• "Atari's first such game was Lunar Lander" - This info is repeated further in the section, and in my opinion it works better there. I would take this line out.
• "connected to a monitor and containing a size of 4×4 inches, five buttons, 13 sound effects, and additional RAM" - "containing a size of 4×4 inches" makes no sense grammatically, and I am not exactly sure what you are trying to convey, which is why I did not clean it up myself.
• "He had a ship programmed into the hardware and rendered by the monitor, but saw no design document" - Again, this makes no sense, and I was not exactly sure what was going on. I think you are trying to convey that Logg did not work off a design document but instead refined the gameplay by playing around with the ship and adjusting the physics model based on trial and error. Whether that is correct or not, this needs to be changed to make the information clear.
• "Atari went to Sacramento, California for testing, setting up prototypes of the game in local arcades to measure its potential success. A group of old players familiar with Spacewar! struggled to maintain grip on the thrust button and requested a joystick, whereas younger players accustomed to Space Invaders noted they get no break in the game. Logg and other Atari engineers observed proceedings and documented comments in four pages." - So this is actually referring to two different events. Atari did do location testing in Sacramento as the article states, but the observations of veteran players and young players were done during focus group sessions at Atari itself, not during the Sacramento location test.
• So a couple of general observations on the reception section. First, all you have right now is retrospective criticism, that is reviews of the game penned years after the fact. There is nothing wrong with this at all for GA, but if you want to take this article to FAC, it would be best if you could dig up some reviews from the early 1980s. You don't need to find that right away, as I will pass it to GA without that info.

Finally, you mention that Cassidy praises the game for introducing the high score table with initials. This is true to the source since Cassidy does make this claim, but in fact Star Fire from Exidy beat Asteroids to market by a few months, making it the actual first game with such a table.

Added "one of" before "the first".

talk) 22:57, 10 January 2014 (UTC)[reply

]

I believe once the above concerns are addressed this article will be good to go. Indrian (talk) 16:30, 10 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

• Done!
  talk) 23:32, 10 January 2014 (UTC)[reply
  ]
• Did one final round of copy editing to tidy things up a bit more, and I am now satisfied that this article meets the GA criteria. I have therefore promoted it. Well done! Indrian (talk) 20:57, 11 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • Thanks, Indrian!
    talk) 20:58, 11 January 2014 (UTC)[reply
    ]

From what I've read (besides the directional control), there are three buttons: one to SHOOT, one for THRUST, and one for HYPERSPACE... but I am only *guessing* ... can't we do better (be more precise) for such an iconic game??? Hydradix (talk) 06:26, 12 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

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In the article it says "After reaching a score of 40,000, only the small saucer appears." It's possible for the player to reach that score before the saucer spawn timer gets low enough to even be capable of spawning the small saucer. The saucer spawn timer starts out long and gets shorter as the game goes on and will only let small saucers spawn if it gets low enough.

Another issue with that is that the actual score requirement for the small saucer spawning (assuming the spawn timer is low enough) is 30,000, not 40,000. I'm not really a wiki person though so I'm not sure how to fix the sentence myself without overloading the reader with useless information. --73.180.50.41 (talk) 11:16, 25 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Ignore what I said about only small saucers spawning past a certain point regardless of score. Turns out the chance of them spawning over the large ones increases as the game goes on and only reaches about 93.75% before 30,000 points. 73.180.50.41 (talk) 13:56, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I've been away from this article for a number of years, and noticed that all mentions of the "lurking" exploit - something that is very notable, well-covered and was at the time well-cited - have disappeared completely. Can anyone explain why it was removed?

The programming oversight in Asteroids that led to the "lurking" exploit was that the saucers could only aim at the player's ship on screen, but could not aim off-screen or take advantage of the fact that objects "wrap" to the opposite edge of the screen. Players figured out that they could "lurk" at the left and right edges of the screen to avoid being shot by the small saucer (it had a higher chance of missing, and the long travel time meant the player could easily dodge the shot), and thus play for extremely long periods of time shooting just the saucers across the screen boundary. Similarly, on some revisions of the game, a player could "park" their ship in the P1 score/lives section, which rendered the ship invisible and invulnerable, allowing the player to step away from the machine (e.g. for bathroom breaks).

These exploits directly led to changes in the way Atari and other game makers designed and tested their games, and the software industry as a whole has the "lurking" exploit to thank, in part, for some significant design and testing practices that still exist today.

I'm disappointed to see that this coverage has been lost over time. It'll be quite the undertaking to bring it back, but make no mistake: That information is and always was notable about this game in particular. — KieferSkunk (talk) — 20:50, 5 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, I see what happened: It got merged into the "Reception" section. This is not a good location for that, for the same reason that the "split-screen" (kill screen) on Pac-Man shouldn't be in its respective Reception section. It used to be either in Development or in its own section. — KieferSkunk (talk) — 20:57, 5 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• https://archive.org/details/edgeuk117/page/n85

Someone is claiming an "actual record" of 84 million was made in 1982 with no citations, assuming it's not true considering the abbreviations and grammar used. Might be worth looking into? TheRealHFC (talk) 06:44, 6 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maelstrom_(1992_video_game)

shouldn't this be in there somewhere? or do we not include home computer clones?

duncanrmi (talk) 08:23, 9 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]