No videos of Gordon J. Key's "Black Angel" on YT?

I’ve never played Black Angel, and I’ve never seen it in action, but given that it was a fairly major release BITD from a famous programmer, I’m a bit surprised I can’t find a single video of it on YouTube or anywhere else. Not even on Jon Abbott’s JASPP channel which has many much more minor and obscure games featured on it. Can anyone say why there are apparently no videos of this game on YT? Now, I did once (c. 1996) have a brief and awkward telephone conversation with someone very closely connected with this game (I was scrounging around for a fast polygon plotter at the time!), and this individual told me that the release of the game in question (or news of its imminent release) had caused a wee ruction with a certain fellow at Frontier Developments, so I wonder if that’s got something to do with it?

Anyway, perhaps if Jon Abbott sees this post, and he has a copy of Black Angel, and if he’s allowed to upload a video of himself playing it for a good few minutes, we can fill an unfortunate void in the world of Acorn gaming videos?

from a famous programmer

He even has a wiki page. And it would seem that being a genius programmer was merely a sideline as his main interest is antiques.
Which is just so RISC OS, isn’t it? ;)

I’m a bit surprised I can’t find a single video of it on YouTube

Well, I pretty quickly hit YouTube’s shonky search algorithm that wants to promote endless videos about a recent-ish board game called Black Angel, along with numerous movies of the same name.

at Frontier Developments

Same initials, different words? ;)

I’m sure I’ve seen mention of the game on Jon’s website at one point. I played it a lot on my now famous A3010. I don’t think I have the disc but it may well be in the drive or maybe !DeskEdit is, whichever probably with RTC battery juice melting it into prosperity lol

Well, I pretty quickly hit YouTube’s shonky search algorithm

Bing seems to be better at finding YouTube videos than YouTube is.

There’s a thread on StarDot about my attempts to record a video of Black Angel.

@ Rick: As someone who is currently making a 3D game hugely aided by the niceties and convenience of 64-bit floating point maths, C, Wikipedia and, yes… ChatGPT, it gives me quite an appreciation of just how bloody clever and skilful Gordon is/was. Probably up there with the David Brabens and Peter Irvins of this world in terms of talent. Mind you, I feel the same about Andrew Hutchings considering he was only 18-or-so when he created ‘Chocks Away!’ (and I bet his program didn’t touch floating point anything; he likely did it the hard-but-fast way).

@ Jon: That’s an interesting thread which I now realise I must have once read at some point. Still, I hold out hope that either you or someone else with a copy of ‘Black Angel’ will kindly make a video of the game in action!

hugely aided by the niceties and convenience of 64-bit floating point maths

Yeah… There’s a reason I wrote my little examination of raycasting in BASIC.

That reason is the ABC compiler (plus, more RISC OS people are liable to understand BASIC than C… ☺).
You see, the inbuilt FP routines in regular BASIC are so damn good (albeit slightly less accurate) that compiling to FPA code produces much the same frame rate as plain BASIC. I imagine the DDE compiler will be only slightly faster.
However, switch to build VFP code instead and it flies.

It’s long past the time when the DDE should have embraced VFP and left anything to do with FPA as an option for older machines/older software. Literally, the Iyonix was the last machine without. Everything else has, and yet we’re stuck trapping “invalid instructions” to emulate an ancient FP chip, which means every single float and double (including those hidden ones where the calculation is worked out to higher accuracy) will hurt the program and be slower for it.

I hold out hope that either you or someone else with a copy of ‘Black Angel’ will kindly make a video of the game in action

I tried yesterday morning…that’s two hours of my life lost and nothing to show for it. A video of nothing for 40 mins is not good gameplay, so I ditched it.

There’s also two game bugs I need to look at, which I’ve probably noted in the other thread. Firstly other ships do not account for your velocity, so when you go to light speed, they’re still flying around you as if you’re not moving. Secondly, the radar ship pips can go outside of the radar display – which starts to look quite messy after a while.

Yeah that’s fair enough, Jon. You gave it a good crack. It sounds like the game was released before it was properly play-tested. A rushed release in time for Christmas, perhaps?

Incidentally, there are no screenshots at all from the game on Google Images or Bing Images either, or at least none that I could find. The game really has disappeared into obscurity.