Tau Ceti (computer game)
Encyclopedia
Tau Ceti is a science fiction themed computer game first published in 1985 by CRL
for the ZX Spectrum
and later converted to several other platforms. It was designed and programmed by Pete Cooke
. It was groundbreaking at the time for its extensive use of 3D graphics, shadow effects and its large gameworld set on a small planet, Tau Ceti III, orbiting the titular star
. The planet also has a realistic day and night cycle (much shorter than our own).
An enhanced version (known as Tau Ceti - The Special Edition) was released for the 128K Spectrum and Amstrad CPC
in 1987 featuring extra graphics and a large amount of accessible library data about the gameworld and the game.
A sequel, Academy, was released in 1986.
Having created the basics of a game engine, Cooke had to decide on a scenario for his new game:
Cooke was also inspired when writing Tau Ceti by the works of the science-fiction writer Larry Niven
and the space-simulator Elite.
) has been uncontactable since a meteor
smashed into the planet. A mission sent to Tau Ceti III in 2164 landed on the planet but broadcast a mayday message followed by silence. Experts decided that the planet's robots were running amok as a result of the meteorite impact. The only chance, it was decided, of successfully stopping the defence systems without destroying the cities already there is to send a single pilot in an armoured Gal-Corp skimmer to the planet's surface with the task of shutting-down the central reactor in Tau Ceti III's capital, Centralis.
When it was released, Tau Ceti was an ambitious piece of software and its scale can still seem impressive. The planet Tau Ceti III consists of several cities which themselves consist of clusters of buildings with their defensive laser towers and patrolling robot Hunter ships. The player's skimmer can dock with some of these buildings and find parts needed to help shut-down the central reactor as well as refuel and find vital information. The cities themselves can be travelled to by means of a "jump pad" which makes the long trips between them much quicker.
Interestingly, if you did take the long trip between cities, a bug in the Amstrad CPC version meant you stayed in the same city when next using a jump pad. This can be used as an advantageous way of returning quickly to the center of the map, without traveling back through every city. This also allowed the player to jump to non-existent cities off the map.
The gameworld is displayed in a 3D view from the skimmer
. As well as displaying these 3D graphics, Cooke's game engine renders them with simple shadows in order to simulate the day and night cycle of Tau Ceti III. These days are much shorter than Earth's consisting of one spin of the planet per hour with sixteen "spins" to a Centaurian day.
The cities of Tau Ceti III are extremely hostile places as they are full of robot defences. These consist of laser towers, Fortresses (which are essentially better-armoured Towers), Hunter ships (of which there are three types: Mark I, Mark II and Mark III), and slowly-moving mines. To defend itself against these, the skimmer is armed with lasers, missiles, and AMMs (to destroy missiles fired by robot Hunters). The skimmer also has a shield although its power is limited and if the shield is badly depleted or exhausted, the skimmer will take damage and some of its systems will fail. They can be repaired at any supply centre.
Any static defences (e.g. buildings) which are destroyed are permanently destroyed. Any mobile defences (Hunters, droids, etc) are renewed when the player leaves a city; so cities are never fully cleared. Cities vary greatly in their defences; a few cities are almost undefended (just minefields), a few cities are very very intensely defended (e.g. Centralis, where the main reactor is).
The skimmer is also fitted with a scanner in order to detect buildings or Hunters not in its forward view or at a distance, and a compass to aid navigation. To cope with Tau Ceti III's frequent hours of darkness, the skimmer has an infra-red display mode and also carries a limited number of short-lived flares.
Although Tau Ceti is primarily an action game, it has some text-input sections when the skimmer docks or lands on the planet's surface. When this happens, the player can communicate with the skimmer using simple commands such as "HELP", "STATUS" or "SCORE" to get access to game information. If docked with a building, "LOOK" will display a picture of the inside of the building and "EQUIP" will allow access to anything useful in that building.
As with some other Cooke games, the game also has an inbuilt note-taking system (accessed via the command "PAD") to take notes without using pen and paper.
.
, a Spectrum gaming magazine, summed Tau Ceti up in 1985 as "an excellent game, combining several elements with stunning graphics" and gave it an overall rating of 94%. Another Spectrum magazine, Sinclair User
, gave it a 5 star rating and declared "It's hard to imagine a better space game, unless one's talking about Elite, with its intergalactic scope and strategic depth. Viewed as a shoot 'em up with a purpose to the carnage, Tau Ceti has to be one of the all-time greats."
Commodore User
magazine provoked controversy later in their tips page for the Commodore 64
version of the game, in which they announced that the final two reactor parts necessary to win the game could never be made to fit, thus meaning that it was not possible to complete the game successfully.
CRL Group PLC
CRL Group plc is a defunct British video game development and publishing company. Originally CRL stood for "Computer Rentals Ltd.". It was based in King's Yard, London and run by Clem Chambers....
for the ZX Spectrum
ZX Spectrum
The ZX Spectrum is an 8-bit personal home computer released in the United Kingdom in 1982 by Sinclair Research Ltd...
and later converted to several other platforms. It was designed and programmed by Pete Cooke
Pete Cooke
Pete Cooke is a famous British computer games programmer, best known for his work published in the 1980s for the 8-bit home computers, especially the ZX Spectrum....
. It was groundbreaking at the time for its extensive use of 3D graphics, shadow effects and its large gameworld set on a small planet, Tau Ceti III, orbiting the titular star
Tau Ceti
Tau Ceti is a star in the constellation Cetus that is spectrally similar to the Sun, although it has only about 78% of the Sun's mass. At a distance of just under 12 light-years from the Solar System, it is a relatively close star. Tau Ceti is metal-deficient and so is thought to be less likely to...
. The planet also has a realistic day and night cycle (much shorter than our own).
An enhanced version (known as Tau Ceti - The Special Edition) was released for the 128K Spectrum and Amstrad CPC
Amstrad CPC
The Amstrad CPC is a series of 8-bit home computers produced by Amstrad between 1984 and 1990. It was designed to compete in the mid-1980s home computer market dominated by the Commodore 64 and the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, where it successfully established itself primarily in the United Kingdom,...
in 1987 featuring extra graphics and a large amount of accessible library data about the gameworld and the game.
A sequel, Academy, was released in 1986.
Origins and development
The origins of Tau Ceti and its game engine came from Cooke attempting to work out how the spheres in the game Gyron, released by Firebird Software for the ZX Spectrum in 1985, had been created:Having created the basics of a game engine, Cooke had to decide on a scenario for his new game:
Cooke was also inspired when writing Tau Ceti by the works of the science-fiction writer Larry Niven
Larry Niven
Laurence van Cott Niven / ˈlæri ˈnɪvən/ is an American science fiction author. His best-known work is Ringworld , which received Hugo, Locus, Ditmar, and Nebula awards. His work is primarily hard science fiction, using big science concepts and theoretical physics...
and the space-simulator Elite.
Plot
Humanity has spread out and colonised nearby star systems but a plague in 2150 led to the colonies being abandoned and left to their automated robotic maintenance systems. While several of these colonies have been successfully re-inhabited, the colony on the planet Tau Ceti III (orbiting the star Tau CetiTau Ceti
Tau Ceti is a star in the constellation Cetus that is spectrally similar to the Sun, although it has only about 78% of the Sun's mass. At a distance of just under 12 light-years from the Solar System, it is a relatively close star. Tau Ceti is metal-deficient and so is thought to be less likely to...
) has been uncontactable since a meteor
METEOR
METEOR is a metric for the evaluation of machine translation output. The metric is based on the harmonic mean of unigram precision and recall, with recall weighted higher than precision...
smashed into the planet. A mission sent to Tau Ceti III in 2164 landed on the planet but broadcast a mayday message followed by silence. Experts decided that the planet's robots were running amok as a result of the meteorite impact. The only chance, it was decided, of successfully stopping the defence systems without destroying the cities already there is to send a single pilot in an armoured Gal-Corp skimmer to the planet's surface with the task of shutting-down the central reactor in Tau Ceti III's capital, Centralis.
Gameplay
Interestingly, if you did take the long trip between cities, a bug in the Amstrad CPC version meant you stayed in the same city when next using a jump pad. This can be used as an advantageous way of returning quickly to the center of the map, without traveling back through every city. This also allowed the player to jump to non-existent cities off the map.
The gameworld is displayed in a 3D view from the skimmer
First person (video games)
In video games, first person refers to a graphical perspective rendered from the viewpoint of the player character. In many cases, this may be the viewpoint from the cockpit of a vehicle. Many different genres have made use of first-person perspectives, ranging from adventure games to flight...
. As well as displaying these 3D graphics, Cooke's game engine renders them with simple shadows in order to simulate the day and night cycle of Tau Ceti III. These days are much shorter than Earth's consisting of one spin of the planet per hour with sixteen "spins" to a Centaurian day.
The cities of Tau Ceti III are extremely hostile places as they are full of robot defences. These consist of laser towers, Fortresses (which are essentially better-armoured Towers), Hunter ships (of which there are three types: Mark I, Mark II and Mark III), and slowly-moving mines. To defend itself against these, the skimmer is armed with lasers, missiles, and AMMs (to destroy missiles fired by robot Hunters). The skimmer also has a shield although its power is limited and if the shield is badly depleted or exhausted, the skimmer will take damage and some of its systems will fail. They can be repaired at any supply centre.
Any static defences (e.g. buildings) which are destroyed are permanently destroyed. Any mobile defences (Hunters, droids, etc) are renewed when the player leaves a city; so cities are never fully cleared. Cities vary greatly in their defences; a few cities are almost undefended (just minefields), a few cities are very very intensely defended (e.g. Centralis, where the main reactor is).
The skimmer is also fitted with a scanner in order to detect buildings or Hunters not in its forward view or at a distance, and a compass to aid navigation. To cope with Tau Ceti III's frequent hours of darkness, the skimmer has an infra-red display mode and also carries a limited number of short-lived flares.
Although Tau Ceti is primarily an action game, it has some text-input sections when the skimmer docks or lands on the planet's surface. When this happens, the player can communicate with the skimmer using simple commands such as "HELP", "STATUS" or "SCORE" to get access to game information. If docked with a building, "LOOK" will display a picture of the inside of the building and "EQUIP" will allow access to anything useful in that building.
As with some other Cooke games, the game also has an inbuilt note-taking system (accessed via the command "PAD") to take notes without using pen and paper.
Reactor rods
In order to shut down the central reactor, the main objective of the game, the player must first locate the forty pieces of the reactor cooling rods and assemble them into twenty complete rods which can then be inserted into the reactor to shut it down. The assembly of the rods is achieved by using the command "RODS" which displays a screen showing found rod-pieces which can then be assembled in a manner similar to a simple jigsaw puzzleJigsaw puzzle
A jigsaw puzzle is a tiling puzzle that requires the assembly of numerous small, often oddly shaped, interlocking and tessellating pieces.Each piece usually has a small part of a picture on it; when complete, a jigsaw puzzle produces a complete picture...
.
Critical response
Response from the gaming media was very positive. CRASHCRASH (magazine)
Crash was a magazine dedicated to the ZX Spectrum home computer. It was published from 1984 to 1991 by Newsfield Publications Ltd until their liquidation, and then until 1992 by Europress.-Development:...
, a Spectrum gaming magazine, summed Tau Ceti up in 1985 as "an excellent game, combining several elements with stunning graphics" and gave it an overall rating of 94%. Another Spectrum magazine, Sinclair User
Sinclair User
Sinclair User, often abbreviated SU, was a magazine dedicated to the Sinclair Research range of home computers, most specifically the ZX Spectrum...
, gave it a 5 star rating and declared "It's hard to imagine a better space game, unless one's talking about Elite, with its intergalactic scope and strategic depth. Viewed as a shoot 'em up with a purpose to the carnage, Tau Ceti has to be one of the all-time greats."
Commodore User
Commodore User
Commodore User, known to the readers as the abbreviated CU, was one of the oldest British Commodore magazines. A publishing history spanning over 15 years, mixing content with technical and games features...
magazine provoked controversy later in their tips page for the Commodore 64
Commodore 64
The Commodore 64 is an 8-bit home computer introduced by Commodore International in January 1982.Volume production started in the spring of 1982, with machines being released on to the market in August at a price of US$595...
version of the game, in which they announced that the final two reactor parts necessary to win the game could never be made to fit, thus meaning that it was not possible to complete the game successfully.