System Reset - Beta-1

Exactly twenty years ago, on the 24th of December 2004, Alex - Noctis IV's creator - made a post on AnywhereBB to allow modders to release modded versions of his game. Today, I'm delighted to release Beta-1 of System Reset.

My own journey with Noctis IV's source code started about twenty one years ago. I was 13 or 14 years old, and after a few years of making games in C64Basic on the Commodore 64, and working with ClickTeam's products (The Games Factory and Multimedia Fusion), I wanted to learn a real programming language, like C or C++. But I wasn't sure whre to start, so I downloaded the source code of Noctis IV, and started hacking away at it. It didn't take me long to produce this;

Hactis was born, and in the early days of 2005, Noctis IV CE emerged as the merger between Fixactis and Hactis. We developed and updated Noctis IV CE for several years, even ported it over to Windows XP. But my lack of experience, together with a rather ill-defined software development lifecycle that necessitated e-mailing patches and applying them manually, meant bugs crept in and stability suffered. Noctis IV CE fixed many bugs, but also caused many. So in 2008 I started Noctis IV Plus, an initiative to take only the best features and bugfixes from Noctis IV CE. I even ended up patching some arguably funny timing display bugs prior to the transition from EPOC 6011 to EPOC 6012.

And yet, I couldn't look past some of the glaring issues of both Noctis IV CE and Noctis IV Plus. The fact that they were both inherently using 16-bit assembly and limited to running on systems that supported 16-bit mode meant that Noctis IV's universe had an expiry date. I couldn't accept that, and tried porting things over to JavaScript, with only partial success. The original codebase has a bunch of bugs that need to be replicated exactly as-is, otherwise the universe generation algorithms wouldn't match up. Limitations in ECMAScript that were added as a result of SPECTRE unfortunately meant that I had to abandon this porting effort.

Then, from 2018 to 2020, Dyllan made some excellent progress with Noctis IV LR, a fresh porting project which ported the original codebase up to modern C++. When Godot 4.0 got released in March 2023, and I wanted to learn its C++ integration (GDExtension) to be able to work on some other completely unrelated project, I figured Dyllan's refreshed code would make for a good experimentation playground, and mere hours later I had what would become the first commit of System Reset. I never intended to develop System Reset, but somehow, I ended up developing it. And, honestly, I'm not surprised that I'm back at it again. Noctis IV has always fascinated me, and I suppose it'll keep fascinating me for the next two decades up ahead.

Enjoy, and Merry Christmas!
//Joris

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Changes since Alpha-6:

• Fixed issue where Felysian planets would not look exactly like they do in Noctis IV. This has also improved the accuracy of surface generation significantly, and desert biomes should now be mostly equivalent to how they are in Noctis IV (although ruins may me generated incorrectly still).
• Made it significantly easier to select remote and local targets.
• Added ability to select local target by keyboard entry.
• Added functionality for selecting remote target by parsis coordinates.
• Interstellar and interplanetary navigation now mimics Noctis IV accurately.
• Fixed issue where planet rings were not displayed when approaching a planet.
• Added landing cupola.
• Planet gravity is now set correctly.
• Planet gravity is now displayed correctly in HUD.
• Fixed issue where modules wouldn't work on Linux due to filename casing mismatch.
• Lithium fuel and remaining dyams are now displayed on the FCD screen. These counters also go down, though nothing / undefined behaviour happens when you run out.
• Stardrifters now correctly align to planet equators.
• Fixed issue where the Stardrifter would pitch/roll at an odd angle when approaching a planet from either pole.
• 'not implemented yet' is now shown for FCD features that aren't implemented yet.
• 'local selected planet' marker is now hidden when in orbit and when disabling the HUD
• added water texture (placeholder!)
• added protection against going out-of-bounds on planets