Talk:Knight Lore

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[edit] Isometric

Is this really the first game to use isometric projection? --Mmartins 08:33, 11 August 2005 (UTC)

Definitely not. I know that 3D Ant Attack (name might be misremembered) came some time before Knight Lore. What's more, it was scrolling rather than flip-screen. Anyway, I'm in the process of updating all of the Ultimate game pages, so when I get to this one I'll fix this (obviously feel free to correct it yourself though). Thanks for pointing it out. --Plumbago 08:51, 11 August 2005 (UTC)

You were right about the name. Also, check out Trashman - another one of the firsts with the isometric view. --BACbKA 16:50, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

Trashman was never isometric. You can see from the screenshot that it's almost, but not quite, top-down. There were other isometric games preceding Knight Lore though --82.45.163.18 18:00, 28 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] NPOV

I take issue with this conclusion, pulled off a website and presented as a straight fact by Wikipedia:

"While this routine has been found to be optimised in all of Ultimate's games from Knight Lore onwards, the optimisation is not present in Sabre Wulf. Given Tim Stamper's chronology for Sabre Wulf, one would expect otherwise if it had truly been completed after Knight Lore"

The only fact that's suggested by the variations in the keyboard routine is that the keyboard routine for Sabre Wulf was written before the corresponding keyboard routine for Knight Lore. Since it's obvious that a number of Ultimate's games were being written in parallel at any one time, there's no reason to extrapolate that the entire Sabre Wulf game was written before Knight Lore. I'm not sure how to take the bogus conclusion out without necessarily removing the whole of the (interesting to a saddo like me) factoid. --82.45.163.18 18:00, 28 April 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure that it has been presented as fact (it uses the word "disputed" after all), but you're right in that there are several reasons why the keyboard routine thing is by no means proof of chronology. For a start Tim Stamper never said that they didn't start Sabre Wulf before Knight Lore, just that they completed it afterwards. If that's true then it's not difficult to imagine the coders of a title as revolutionary as Knight Lore dropping the comparatively bland Sabre Wulf temporarily to concentrate on completing Knight Lore. Knight Lore also pushes the hardware to its very limits and frequently seems on the verge of creaking to a standstill, so every code optimisation Chris Stamper could wring out of the Spectrum would be vital. However the same is not true of Sabre Wulf, so if work on it had already begun, there would be no pressing need to go back and implement the same small optimisations - if it ain't broke etc. Obviously there's no proof either way, so unless the Stampers ever change their story we'll have to take their original word for it. And why shouldn't we? Miremare 06:51, 5 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Importance

I don't know if I disagree with the change in importance, but I certainly disagree with the reasoning behind it. Winning awards does not make an article important. Interesting, maybe, but not important. This is not a review site, and importance should be graded on impact and notability rather than popularity and ratings. As far as I know, Colossal Cave Adventure never won any awards, but it was 100x more important to video games than Twilight Princess. I'd rather play Twilight Princess, but that doesn't make it important. Articles shouldn't be rated by how cool the game is. ~ JohnnyMrNinja 22:29, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

Um. Okay? It doesn't matter. It's not of high importance based on any discussion on this talk page or any link on the article. - A Link to the Past (talk) 22:31, 29 July 2007 (UTC)
As far as I can tell I'd agree with that. The fact that it was British 8-bit computer game that was ported to the Japanese Famicom would seem notable (as I don't believe this was ever anything like a common occurrence), but the article doesn't seem to be written in a way so as to point out the notability. Possibly the Isometric aspect is notable too, but again the article does not play that part up. Reading the talk page, it appears that it used to claim Knight Lore was the first isometric game (which could well-qualify it for High), but another game seems to have now taken the title. As it stands I would agree that Low would make sense until the article can be changed to point out a greater importance. I was merely objecting to the specific logic pointed out with the change, not the validity of the change itself. ~ JohnnyMrNinja 22:45, 29 July 2007 (UTC)
Knight Lore is (as far as I know) the first isometric game which allowed the player free movement about the environment; earlier isometric games like Zaxxon were restricted in what the player could do, and things like Ant Attack allowed only "character based" (8 pixel) scrolling. Yes, the article doesn't show this at the moment, but that's why we have separate importances and ratings. To quote from CRASH in 1988, "Knight Lore deserves some recognition for having started off the isometric-arcade-adventure genre proper". I have restored the high importance. --Pak21 07:55, 30 July 2007 (UTC)
I'd second Pak21 - Knight Lore is easily one of the most notable games of its era. Aside from its 3D environment (which 3D Ant Attack had previously pioneered; though in considerably less detail), KL allowed the player a degree of realistic interaction with objects in this environment unknown at the time. This sort of thing we take for granted in games today, but it was almost unheard of in 1984. Furthermore, aside from the awards and prizes it received at the time, the innovation and success of KL is underscored by the wide range of titles that essentially cloned it (e.g. Batman, Spindizzy, Head Over Heels, Fairlight, The Great Escape, etc.). All that said, I also agree that the article could do with being beefed up to support this notability - I'll see what I can do. Anyway, just my two cents. Cheers, --Plumbago 08:15, 30 July 2007 (UTC)
Okay, discussing - there's no rationale to show that Knight Lore's "first" is all THAT notable, and I don't see that it is. The way you talk about it, Knight Lore's isometric style is as big of an advancement as 3D is. - A Link to the Past (talk) 18:30, 3 August 2007 (UTC)
Well, isometric games are without doubt a genre of their own (e.g. moby games or my mame emulator have it as category - or WP for that matter). So if this game is considered to have defined a whole genre of computer games, then I'd say it makes it quite important in an encyclopedic sense (I have no idea what this rating is about though.. so not sure that matters). Also five minutes of google tell me it shouldn't be hard to write a bit about notability of the game, e.g. an IEEE Computer Graphics paper (text leaked into google cache) says "Knight Lore was said to be the second most cloned piece of software after the word-processing program Word Star", and here's another CRASH article about isometric games which e.g. says "Filmation 2. An Ultimate invention, this allows graphics of Knight Lore's quality to be scrolled smoothly over a large playing area.". --Allefant 09:30, 4 August 2007 (UTC)

As well as Allefant's Word Star quote above, there's the following from GamesTM:
What was to come next though, would make the industry sit up and take notice of the small Ashby-de-la-Zouch based firm. The seminal Knight Lore arrived towards the end of 1984 and, thanks to a technique known as Filmation, provided gamers with an interactive isometric world to explore. Nothing like Knight Lore had been seen before on a home machine and it was hailed as revolutionary -- the fact that it was running on a humble Spectrum 48K was even more impressive. A slew of clones (including various efforts from Ultimate) followed.
The words "seminal" and "revolutionary" here pretty much cover it I think. Miremare 16:49, 4 August 2007 (UTC)

Do you have an issue/page number etc for that? It's the sort of quote which would be wonderful to have properly cited in the article. Cheers --Pak21 17:00, 4 August 2007 (UTC)
I've added the reference to the article. Does anyone know the original source of the WordStar quote? I know I've read it before, but that page doesn't seem to say where it's from... Miremare 17:14, 4 August 2007 (UTC)
I can add a reference to the paper above.. the game very certainly was not "the only one to be cloned more often than WordStar" really - but we have a secondary reference saying that it was said to be :) Also this one looks nice: "At the time when the Hemicube method for radiosity and distribution ray tracing were being developed, the pinnacle of graphical achievement in the games scene was some clever visibility determination in the seminal KnightLore" ("Game Graphics During the 8-bit Computer Era - Steven Collins" in SIGGRAPH computer graphics newsletters). --Allefant 17:57, 4 August 2007 (UTC)
Another good quote. Blimey, it's turning out to be even more notable that I thought! Also, while we're here, what do people think of the importance of Sabre Wulf? It was rated Mid before and has not been changed back. Miremare 18:04, 4 August 2007 (UTC)
I'd say Mid is ok. It has a certain place among the most notable ZX games, so Low would be too.. well, low in my eyes - but it also didn't define a new genre like KnightLore. --Allefant 11:24, 10 August 2007 (UTC)