Maelstrom (1992 video game)

Maelstrom (English for strong vortex, see German maelstrom, or even a highly confused or agitated state of mind, emotional life, spiritual, etc. ) is now a free computer game for Mac OS by the classic Asteroids model. It was written by Andrew Welch, the founder of the software company Ambrosia Software. Mark W. Lewis created the title graphics, the rest of the graphic design and animation worried Ian Gilman. It is designed with THINK C 5:04 and comprises 18,000 lines of code in C, where 9,000 lines of assembler code are embedded that implement the main part of the game.

Game content

Maelstrom is an enhanced clone of the slot game Asteroids. The player controls a small spaceship that it can rotate in the two dimensions of the screen surface and accelerate forward. In order to slow the ship must be turned first; Flow resistance, there is no different than the model. When you leave the screen, the ship appeared on the respective opposite side again ( cyclic boundary conditions). On the playing surface move randomly asteroids, UFOs, powerups or other items that are subject to the same laws as the ship and in some cases can be collected, but usually must be shot. The successful clearing of all asteroids finished one so-called attack wave (Wave). The game goal is always to achieve the highest possible points matter.

History

It was released after four months of intensive development work in November 1992, even before the establishment of Ambrosia Software, followed by three years bug fixes and other improvements have been restocked. It was published as an unrestricted shareware for the then current Macintosh IIsi. The game was in the Mac scene quickly became famous and won a number of awards. It led to his success establishing the company Ambrosia Software and justified its glorious history. Maelstrom is currently made ​​use of the multimedia capabilities of the Mac platform from fully and had paved the way for further developments of the platform in the field of entertainment software. The game was ported in 1995 by Sam Lantinga to Linux and enhanced with features such as a multi-player mode in network operation. The rights to the source code has been sent to Sam and this version ( " Maelstrom 3.0" ) under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) released, but still has the rights to the game content reserved and so this may only be used privately. In 2001 it was also a native Mac OS X version; as ports for Windows, Linux and BeOS.

2010, the original game content were under a free license - Creative Commons license Attribution 3.0. Thus, the entire game is now available as free software.