The Making of Starflight

Updated March 7, 2003

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Starflight Development:

Starflight was a huge game development effort for its time, taking 3 1/2 years to complete and more than 18 man-years of work.

Rod McConnell of Binary Systems has generously agreed to allow the publication of Starflight design documents. The documents published below are just a small fraction of the working documents we used to make the game.

Starflight source code is still being recovered from floppy disks and printouts but you can see what there is so far here: www.sonic.net/~sage/sf/src.

The comments on this website are meant to put this material in context as best I remember it. Many people contributed to the final product and I would like to give credit to each one. If you have anything you would like to share on the history of Starflight I would appreciate hearing from you.

-- Tim Lee
contact email: sage@sonic.net

Binary Systems Document Log -- DocumentLog.pdf (492KB)

This is the main index for Starflight design documents. Most of the documents we used are listed here. The working title for Starflight during development was "Starquest".
[62] Playfield Specification -- 62_PlayfieldSpec.pdf (132KB)

The scope of the playing field in Starflight.
[85] 3D Planet Specification -- 85_3DPlanetSpec.pdf (944KB)

Specification and design of the 3D planet.
[211] Calling Modules -- 211_CallingModules.pdf (124KB)

A design for how to call Forth subroutines in overlays saved on disk.
[220] Phrase Compiler Modifications -- 220_PhraseCompilerMods.pdf (88KB)

Some changes Bob made to the phrase compiler in the Conversation Module.
Display System 12-3-84 -- DisplaySystem03Dec84.pdf (480KB)

A description of how the world was to be displayed with coordinate systems used.
Conversation Module Description -- ConversationModule.pdf (475KB)

This document describes the top-level design of the Conversation Module. You'll see references to Ambient Designs which was the original name for Binary Systems.

The Conversation Module supported player interaction with intelligent characters that are encountered in the course of the game.

This module rests on a foundation provided by Paul Reiche who developed the basic plan for character conversations in his game "Murder on the Zindernouf". Paul very generously donated a couple of weeks of his own time and many great ideas during the development of Starflight. The concept of a "player posture" is due to Paul.

Greg Johnson designed the story line, wrote communication rules and the dialog. Tim Lee helped with the technical design and organization.

The prototype programming for the phrase compiler for the Communications subsystem was done by Rich Duggan.

Alec Kercso re-architected the prototype and considerably extended it into the final implementation used in the game.
IBM-PC Resource Utilization -- IBM-PCResourceUtilization.pdf (563KB)

How the memory and disk storage is used in Starflight on the IBM-PC.
Object Handling System -- ObjectHandlingSystem.pdf (1.2MB)

How game objects are organized in Starflight.
Object Records -- ObjectRecords.pdf (2.1MB)

Data record formats for game objects in Starflight. Some of these records were changed in the final version.