Somebody should take Battlecruiser 3000AD and mod the shit out of it - if that's even possible - to prove it can be done.
They tried.
They failed. The architecture is too old - and too shit. Like a friend of mine said about
Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing:
No amount of modding will fix a game with problems this huge.
If you're not familiar with
Battlecruiser 3000AD and have never played it, I scarcely know how to describe it to you. Ignore that it looked like the SNES
Wing Commander game - the game was literally
unplayable at launch. Literally every feature that Smart had promised either flat-out wasn't delivered on, or was delivered in a slipshod, essentially threadbare state at best. The game crashed constantly, and the manual was zero help whatsoever with either the interface or game itself. You couldn't even progress past the second mission in the campaign until the 2.0 patch, which came out close to a year later, and even that gave it only
basic functionality.
Impossibly, the engine, which is now about 25 years old, runs like absolute shit even on computers with about thirty thousand times the resources needed to play the game. This is because the game's architecture is so bad at multithreading that the game
actually plays worse on a better machine. The most modern versions of the game were made for a single-core PC.
In 2012.
Battlecruiser 3000AD was one of
those games - the ones where PCs that were
just coming out could barely fucking handle thing under
ideal circumstances, and even then odds are good that something would catastrophically fuck up and then catch fire, like
Wing Commander Privateer 2: The Darkening. It's fared better on re-releases, but only barely. It looks - and plays - like a game that got locked inside this temporal stasis capsule and defies any attempt to play it normally.
You can download any of Smart's games for free from his site, but be forewarned -
Battlecruiser 3000AD is too broken to fix.
In this game lies a tragedy - a testament to a broken dream, and of ambition unfulfilled. It had such an enormous, promise-filled premise that one couldn't help but feel the wonder when it was first proposed, but that turned out to be a textbook
tragic dream. Smart himself mismanaged the project spectacularly.
Smart himself is a brilliant guy, but his ego is what ultimately has led to him becoming one of the longest running jokes on Usenet. During his flame wars, Smart has religiously claimed to possess a doctorate and frequently titles himself as Ph.D. The problem: His thesis is not listed anywhere, and he has not divulged even basic details about his doctorate, such as which college he attended or who was his supervisor, leading the bulk of the internet to assume, perhaps rightly, that it's as phony a claim as
Vade's new headmate.
