What

Lightbikes in various incarnations was a simple Tron game. Multiplayer in every incarnation, always with a focus on simple fast gameplay.

It’s worth mentioning Lightbikes and keeping a canonical source of the download online as there are a few sites offering fake or repackaged copies.

Litebikes

Litebikes was a fun multiplayer game I wrote for up to 8 players on one network. 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.

The one notable feature was what seems like absolutely crazy networking code - each player client had a block of memory for the game state, and each time the client sent a network packet it would create a diff between the previous and current data in memory, compress this, and send it to the server. This was also split over multiple packets in a cludgy approximation of the TCP standard, except entirely over a packeted IPX network. Looking back I’m amazed it worked at all.

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.