What

I’ve written two broadly similar games called Lightbikes. They’re both pretty old now, so this is a piece of history.

Here you can find details and canonical downloads for them. You might even be able to get them to work, but as I say they’re pretty old and you’ll have trouble running them on a modern PC.

Litebikes

Litebikes (stylised at LITEBIKE for MS-DOS filenames) was a fun multiplayer game I wrote for up to 8 players on one network in around 1997. Based on the often-copied scene from Tron, it’s success was in it’s simplicity and the fact the entire game was a 40kb EXE file to make for easy sharing. It was only written as a showcase for an additive-colour renderer which made for nice-looking transparent bike trails.

Lightbikes v2.0

LBv2.0 was a rewrite in OpenGL, first released around 2000. It achieved minor success, appearing on the PCGamer cover-disc at some point and getting a brief write-up in EDGE magazine.

One notable feature was the networking code. I used two strategies:

• Sent frequently was the bike position and the latest tail piece - to enable best possible prescision for all players
• Sent slightly less frequently, a compressed memory-diff of the other trail pieces. Each client stored a record of what it thought the other clients knew, and sent the latest update to the other clients. This also used a TCP-style retry mechanism implemented over IPX, keeping track of which packets had been received and which needed to be re-sent.

The final copy that was downloadable is here, but honestly I doubt it’s runnable on a modern PC.

• reproduced here are the write-ups in EDGE and PC-Gamer, from Nov and Dec 2001 respectively.