BLACK VECTOR

The machine and the horizon

The gunship comes in low over a tropical coast, close enough that the surf breaks under the cockpit glass. A ridge climbs out of the haze ahead. Behind it, on a bare plateau, a radar dish turns. Two specks rise from the valley floor and grow wings: Wasps, the Directorate's fast laser drones. The target brackets close around them, the cannon starts to thump, and somewhere below a flak turret wakes up and fills the sky with shrapnel. You pull up hard, roll over the ridge and drop into the next valley before it can find you again.

That is the first minute of BLACK VECTOR, and it earns the cover in that minute.

Four worlds, one pilot

The year is 2187. The Directorate holds the frontier colonies with machines instead of soldiers, and the Free Systems Alliance will not risk open war to take them back. It hires deniable help instead. Rourke Vance is that help: smuggler, gunrunner, mercenary pilot and occasional pirate, working for the Alliance because the Alliance pays. The intro text sets the terms in three lines: No medals. No reinforcements. No rescue.

The campaign is four occupied worlds, in order: tropics, desert, tundra and canyons. Each one is generated fresh on every run, so the coast you strafed last night is not there tonight. The weather moves through as you fly. Downpours roll in over the islands, sandstorms push the ship sideways with crosswind, blizzards close down the tundra and thunderstorms light up the canyons from inside.

In the hangar you choose between two machines. The Swift is fast and lightly armored, with a twin laser and homing missiles. The Hammer is a slow, heavy gunship with a cannon, a laser and a rocket pod. The Swift dances. The Hammer argues.

A grid that fights back

The machines are only half the enemy. Tanks, machine-gun walkers, Wasps and missile-carrying Ravens are what shoot at you, but the installations behind them are what keep them coming, and they are wired together.

Radar stations make every robot on the planet aim better while they stand.
Power plants repair the robots and keep the factories at full speed. They also go up with a very satisfying bang.
Robot factories build new machines for as long as they exist.
Flak turrets punish anyone who thinks flying low is the same as flying safe.

So every world turns into a small strategy problem at full throttle. Blind the radar first and the sky gets kinder. Cut the power and the factories slow down. Leave a factory standing and the fight never ends. Destroy every installation on the planet and whatever is still moving shuts down with it, and the gunship drops onto the next world.

No accelerator required

What makes BLACK VECTOR stand out on drive L: is how it draws all of this. There is no 3D card anywhere in the picture. Every pixel is written into a frame buffer by the program itself, the way the best software renderers of 1995 did it.

The landscapes use the Voxel Space technique associated with Comanche: a height map drawn front to back, one screen column at a time, with distance fog swallowing the far hills. That alone was a showpiece in its day. The trick here is what flies over it. The ships, robots and buildings are flat-shaded polygons, and they share depth with the voxel terrain, so a Raven that drops behind a hill really does disappear behind it, and a factory half sunk in a valley shows only its roof. Most games of the period picked one method or the other. This one runs both at once and makes them agree.

The music is composed live while you fly, dark synth-rock and ambient that shifts with the number of enemies around. Nothing is played back from a recording.

FIELD TEST. Open Settings and switch the render resolution to 320×240. The pixels go chunky and the hills turn into steps, the look the build itself calls the most authentic. Then try 800×600, which, by its own label, needs a fast machine. Fly the same valley at both. The game is the same; the decade is not.

Version 0.5

BLACK VECTOR is filed as a prototype, and its own page calls it an in-engine prototype, v0.5. The changelog traces it from a first playable build through a rename with new logo and cockpit art, mouse steering and a burning-wreck death camera, a period web page skin and, last, the Settings and Pilot Manual dialogs. The four worlds and the campaign that links them are all there. What the next version would have added is not recorded.

The Pilot Manual has the briefing, the target list and the controls: W and S for thrust, A and D to strafe, R and F to climb and descend, the arrows to turn, Space to fire. Read it once, then go and find the horizon.