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The graphics of Oolite may be hard to stand after Elite:Dangerous, but have a look at it - preferably with a lot of plug-ins: the universe comes alive, it is *interesting* to follow some NPCs and figure out what they're up to.

It is a bloody shame that Frontier Developments did not have a closer look at that game before starting Elite IV...

The graphics of Oolite may be hard to stand after Elite:Dangerous, but have a look at it - preferably with a lot of plug-ins: the universe comes alive, it is *interesting* to follow some NPCs and figure out what they're up to.

It is a bloody shame that Frontier Developments did not have a closer look at that game before starting Elite IV...

is Oolite. Good old Elite but brought into the 21st Century - free and open source and modable. Awesome!

To be fair Elite wasn't much of a game either, but it was still an awesome way to spend your time.

No Elite was a lot of game. http://www.oolite.org/ current remake.

OOlite (based on Elite, in turn "inspired" by Star Raiders) is probably the nearest thing you'll find on Linux: http://www.oolite.org/

Oolite is a free open-source cross-platform space trading and combat game inspired by Elite. It is infinitely mod-able and is written in objective-C.
The OXPs (expansion packs) use javascript and open-step plists and graphics can be produced with Gimp etc.
There is also a big community behind it so there's plenty of support available.
The game is great fun, and it is easy to make expansions - your kids will be able to produce good results quickly.

Try Oolite. A free, cross-platform space game based on the classic Elite. Dead easy to get into and a great community behind it.

Any fun that might be had by the player is secondary to the game designers purpose.

Not necessarily, that's why I play Oolite: the devs do it for the fun (their own fun and the fun of the players).

Captcha: "feudal" - Slashdot will really become a strong AI one day :)

For those of us who aren't familiar with the original Elite (and can't check it out on Kickstarter because we're lazy or at work) what kind of game is it exactly?

Have a look at oolite.org for an updated, open-source version of the original. Works for Mac, Linux and Windoze.

You can play the FOSS version right now OOLITE
Have fun, it is an awesome game.

Beg to differ on that. http://www.oolite.org/ is an open, modernized version of Elite, and has lots of 'old geezers' practically creaming their pants when they discover and play it for the fist time.
Just look at their bulletin boards for all the kudos being strewn around to the developers.

Check out Oolite. Much of the stuff on your list is already there.

No comments on oolite yet?

http://www.oolite.org/

Its a popular genre... we could post different links to remakes for hours, probably.

One of the authors of the original Elite (on the BBC Micro) released the source years ago. Sadly, it's pretty much incomprehensible. I used to program on that platform, but endless pages of uncommented assembly language with multiple instructions per line are actually harder to read than a well formatted disassembly.

Oolite is the 21st century's free elite, it has many expansion packs and an active community.

Ubuntu users: do not install Oolite from Synaptic/Software Center - that's an old version. Download the tar archive.

One of the authors of the original Elite (on the BBC Micro) released the source years ago. Sadly, it's pretty much incomprehensible. I used to program on that platform, but endless pages of uncommented assembly language with multiple instructions per line are actually harder to read than a well formatted disassembly.

Oolite is the 21st century's free elite, it has many expansion packs and an active community.

Ubuntu users: do not install Oolite from Synaptic/Software Center - that's an old version. Download the tar archive.

I loved the idea of Elite but the implementation (particularly the later ones) was always a bit off for me. The crew based thing would be quite a bit of fun. Have a game that is part space shooty, part RTT or TBT crew management.

I want a remake of Psi 5 Trading Company. That's a great game which I still play now and again - for those that don't know it, you're the Captain of a freight-carring star ship and you command your crew. You can do nothing directly, all actions occur because you've instructed your crew to carry them out.

I'm a massive Elite (original, never got into Frontier) fan too - have a look at Oolite for a modern remake.

Cheers,
Ian

In case there are Elite fans out there who haven't heard of it; check out Oolite http://www.oolite.org/. It's an open source version that is nicely done. Available on Linux, MacOS & Windows.

Many open-source projects need more than just programmers. If you have an artistic bent, whether it's musical or with actual artwork, look around and see if there are any open-source games that require input.

In my case, I contributed (as 'Pangloss') to an open-source remake and update of 'Elite' (the first open-ended 3D space trading and combat game) called Oolite. Once you learn a few things about the game, you start posting hints and tips for other people on the forum and before you know it you're getting involved in multi-participant submissions and developing planets like you're Slartibartfast...

It's a ha-ha-but serious, but several SF authors have speculated about a future where cetaceans are carried on space combat ships because of their instinctive understanding of such zero-G tactics. It took me months of real-time game play to try to get these tactics efficient ; and the whales have developed very similar tactics too. I think that's cool.

In fact, I think that's so cool that I'm going to pass the link (and this comment) to an evolutionary science blogger I subscribe to.

In other news, the energetics of rorqual whales have been under study for a time, with several results being published in the last year or so. Imagine how you'd feel if you fed by running forward at full speed, opening your mouth, and having around your body weight of water slammed into your lower jaw. Sounds like fun? Next time I'm in company with a whale skeleton (hopefully cleaned!), I'm going to be looking at that mandible joint with a new appreciation for what they actually do. Verily, blind chance and disinterested elimination of the comparatively inefficient from the population can perform wonders of pseudo-design!

Your package manager of choice will probably install OOlite version 1.65 (which is several years old). You'll want version 1.75 - even if 1.75 is in "beta", but the beta is more stable than the "stable" release. Also check out the OOlite expansion packs.

Elite is alive and well, re-born as Oolite. Cross platform, open source and very free, with an enthusiastic community of players and modders.

Offtopic, but the link in your signature no longer works. The new URL is http://www.oolite.org/

Here it is: Oolite, you're welcome.

Oolite is a great game, with many add-ons.

Off topic, but the aegidian.org link in your sig seems to be down. http://www.oolite.org/ appears to be the current webpage (fellow fan of oolite here).

a version of Elite and an emulator to run it on.

Jumping in before Alioth and his hardware Spectrum ethernet add-on get there - play Oolite (not the little calcareous stones, but the multigalactic tradeing/ fighting space game) more-or-less natively on your platform of choice.

Docking computers are for pussies. Real men dock by hand. Now excuse me while I go searching for a version of Elite and an emulator to run it on.

Elite is alive and well, and has evolved into what it should always have been. It's open-source and cross platform (Apple, Linux and that other thing). And the Blue Danube is still there.

My favorite game works just fine on Ubuntu.

If only someone would port Oolite to iOS. There was a rumor that Elite would be available in the C64 emulator for iPhone/iPad but it's not there yet.

Fortunately, for those of us who are a few years younger, there's Oolite.

Note quite Elite 4, but a pretty good fan-made successor is Oolite. The test versions include support for shaders, bringing more modern looking ships to the game.

Oolite is the most obvious one. It faithfully recreates the Elite gameplay, but updates the graphics (slightly) and provides a simple way for others to expand the game. It is basically what you would end up with if you tried to write Elite (rather than 'some space trading/combat game') today.

Vega Strike has broadly the same gameplay mechanics as Elite, but is much richer; lots of different things to trade, different things available at different stations, different factions to join or fight, and so on. It also has massively improved graphics (detailed textures, gratuitous use of shaders) without that detracting from the game actually being fun.

Transcendence is a bit different. It's a 2D top-down game, but it has a lot of the things that made Elite fun. It's somewhere between XPilot, Elite, and Nethack. (It's Windows-only, but runs very well in WINE.)

Hehe, I was playing oolite http://oolite.org/gallery only the other week :-)

• The Ur-Quan Masters, if you missed Star Control 2 before it was open sourced.
• Globulation 2 is still a bit pre-release, but the game is playable and has a lot of potential.
• Oolite is a faithful recreation of Elite, but with massively updated graphics. It's certainly not a modern game, but it's a wonderful nostalgia trip if you played the original.
• OpenTTD is an open source clone of Transport Tycoon Deluxe, which fixes a lot of the irritating misfeatures in the original while remaining totally addictive.

There are quite a lot of fun games in the list, but these are the ones I've played and remember enjoying.

I really wanted to play Eve but couldn't get the client to work (this was a while ago). Instead I got a good hit of nostalgia playing oolite, a copy of the old 8-bit Elite. I haven't tried out the crazy amount of expansion packs. If anybody knows anything similar or better please post below!

Phillip.

Freeciv (Free and open version of Civilization) : http://freeciv.wikia.com/
OpenTyrian (Free and open version of Tyrian) : http://code.google.com/p/opentyrian/
The Ur-Quan Masters (Star Control 2) : http://sc2.sourceforge.net/
Oolite (loosely based on Elite) : http://www.oolite.org/
Command and Conquer 1 : http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/commandconquer/download_6178099.html?tag=other-user-related-content;4

Oolite - Elite clone. Aaaaa... the memories :)

The good games keep you coming back. Whereas in the 8-bit days games were cheap you could keep buying new ones, I was shopping yesterday and all the new PS3 releases were 60-70e (about $100). Probably ok value for money considering all the work that has gone into them but no longer in the realm where you can play for a couple of days and then forget about it. The retro games fill a good niche for a bit of variety in between the more 'serious' purchases. My favourite 8-bit game was Elite, and I recently discovered Oolite which was some very fun retro-gaming for me.

Phillip.

• Battle for Wesnoth, a turn-based strategy game with some great single-player campaigns.
• Vega Strike, the game Elite would have been if it had been made for today's hardware (honourable mention to Oolite, which faithfully recreates Elite but with updated graphics).
• Nexuiz, a superb FPS with completely new artwork, levels, and game design based on an incredibly heavily modified version of the Quake 1 engine.
• FreeCol (and, of course, the classic FreeCiv), open source clones of the old Colonisation and Civilisation games, with large numbers of updates (and distressingly good single player AI).
• Blob Wars: Metal Blob Solid, a complex platform game, full of gratuitous blob violence[1]. A sequel, this time in full 3D, was released last month.

With complex and polished open source games in almost every genre being available, it's quite surprising how much people spend on commercial games from companies that treat them like criminals. Wikipedia has a good list - I've not played more than a small fraction of them.

[1] This doesn't quite count as open source. The game is all GPL'd, but a number of images were things the author 'found on the Internet' and are used without a valid license. It was removed from the OpenBSD ports system last week because of this, as the author refuses to address the problem.