Unofficial Babylon 5 Freeware Space Sim Released

Pluvius writes "The Prequel Campaign to the unofficial freeware Babylon 5 space sim I've Found Her has been released. According to the development team behind the game: 'We've been trying to finish this piece of art for the last 2 years... it's time to play and find out if it was worth the waiting.' You can find a download link (220MB) and an overview FAQ on its site as well, as well as a screenshot or two." This is an interesting unofficial development, following an ill-fated official project along the same lines.

Comments

Neat

[Pluvius]

I decide to check out /. after finishing up a game of NCAA Football 2004, and this is the first thing I see, about two minutes after it's posted. Thanks, simoniker!

Anyway, this sounds like it's a pretty fun game (I've always liked games in the style of Wing Commander and X-Wing). It has low enough system requirements for me to play, but I'd rather wait until I build my new computer in a week or so before I do it. Hopefully I won't forget about it by then.

Rob

Delenn?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you get to have sex with the Minbari princess in this one too?

Oh, and thanks also for editing my submission.

[Pluvius]

The fact that this B5 game is unofficial is pretty important, considering the number of fans of the show here...

Rob (/. does have a lot of B5 fans, doesn't it?)

Descent Freespace 2

[lafiel]

That's what I always thought the ultimate Babylon 5 mod would be based off of. Source code got released a while back and Freespace 2 is bloody amazing. All its weapons seem like they fit B5 perfectly.

Re:Descent Freespace 2

[Drakin]

You mean like say.. This?

Re:Descent Freespace 2

[BlueArchon]

Not necessarily the best engine, as Freespace uses a flight simulator model, and Babylon is one of the few sci-fi series that even attempts to use real physics. So I'd think that that a Babylon sim would be better of based on Independece War 2:Egde of Chaos. It's just another spaceshooter, but with real physics this time.

Re:WARNING!

[Laven]

Are you an anarchist or something? Compare the files with the main mirror.

Re:WARNING!

[Anonymous Coward]

main site md5sum: 631813e9d6460830c0a1a47a85bfffdc
'mirror' md5sum: b898df7c43378481b3ec1296ea84fe3a

Re:-1 No Class

[Pluvius]

I probably wouldn't have said anything at all if it weren't for the odd coincidence that I referred to. That was what was neat about it, not the actual fact that my submission was accepted.

Rob (ur jus jelus ne way)

Re:-1 No Class

[Anonymous Coward]

i am not jealous of your babylon5 fanboy stylee. i prefer having sex.

Wow

[Rethcir]

Downloaded and ran this game... very impressive! Gameplay, graphics presentation and sound work are all proffesional quality and better than many of the computer games i've played lately. Also runs beautifully at 1024 on my geforce 2MX.. i bet that it would look like the show on something more modern. I am still working on the training mission, but if the campaign is long enough, i'd say this is a game i would have been more than willing to pay for! too bad it's too late for them to get the license now. but it is a good thing that JMS is aware of this project (according to the faq) and isn't foxing it. Makes me remember how much I liked B5 back when it was on TNT every day and spent a good summer or two watching the entire thing. Maybe I should go rent some of the DVDs?

Now if someone would do something like this for DS9 to make up for that awful Dominion Wars game, I'd be in geek heaven!

Re:Wow

[der_joachim]

I second that. I downloaded and installed IFH yesterday, and was very impressed. The graphics are good, and run bloody fast on my old, slow GF2 (damn, double-post alert). The sound is good, and at least some of the music is by Chris Franke (which is good too). Although I do not have a joystick, the game is well playable by mouse. It is waaaaay better than some games I actually paid for in recent years...

der Joachim

Impressive Graphics

[TheOnlyCoolTim]

My joystick's in another city, so I won't be playing this for a while, but I did take a look at the graphics, which are great. He even wrote in motion blur which makes things amazing, but unfortunately it takes my framerate to about 5.

Tim

I lament the death of space sims.

[TheOnlyCoolTim]

Independence War, Elite, X-Wing/TIE Fighter, Wing Commander, Freespace...

Great genre of games that hasn't done well these past several years. When I fired this B5 game up for a few minutes I could see the influences from Independence War (Newtonian motion!!!) and Freespace immediately.

Tim

Re:I lament the death of space sims.

[JonathanBoyd]

The influences with regards to the Newtonian mechanics would be from the show itself, rather than from another game.

Re:I lament the death of space sims.

[TheOnlyCoolTim]

The motion still reminded me a lot of I-war. And the lines on the HUD as visual cues for motion are definitely from I-war.

Tim

Re:-1 No Class

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is what you're doing now, of course --

Oh wait, you're trolling on slashdot. Wow, almost had me there for a sec.

homepage

[nempo]

Couldn't they have made the homepage alittle LESS readable ?

Re:homepage

[Anonymous Coward]

Not a dumbass comment, as you're not a native English speaker, but don't write "alittle". Just because there are plenty of morons who think that "alot" is a cromulent word, doesn't mean that it is. "A little" and "a lot". Good. Now show you're better than these yoosayans and don't make that mistake again.

Re:homepage

[Anonymous Coward]

cromulent is a word? I don't see that one alot. Maybe alittle more than I see yoosayans?

Re:homepage

[Zoshnell]

Well to utilize the word cromulent really does embiggen the smallest man.

Re:homepage

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, I would have modded this funny. (the fact that it does not help Karma notwithstanding). However, I have a sense of humor and therefore will never have mod points.

Re:homepage

[Zoshnell]

I think it was modded down because I misspelled embiggin. But how do you misspell a made up word?

Re:homepage

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends on whether the made up word was cromulent or not.

Indie Gaming

[superultra]

Downloaded and ran this game... very impressive!

Which begs the question: why do the big publishers always screw up? I hope - I really hope - that this game will be a kind of milestone in the creation of an independent games scene. Yes, I know, there already is one. The problem with the existing one, at least in terms of its relationship with the larger game industry, is that no one really makes puzzle games anymore. Games like this, however, may very well bring "modding" into the next level and create a sort of farm team of talent for the bigger publishers and devs. Basically, maybe this could be someone's resume, ala Memento for Christopher Nolan or Bottle Rocket for Wes Anderson in film.

Re:Indie Gaming

[superultra]

You should go back to school and learn what 'begs the question' means.

Please, enlighten me.

Re:Indie Gaming

[BizDiz]

"Begging the question" is an argumentative error in which a conclusion is assumed.

Re:Indie Gaming

[blincoln]

Which begs the question: why do the big publishers always screw up?

It doesn't actually "beg the question," but I know what you are trying to say.

Sierra does not seem to be a company that's interested in taking risks:

- A friend of mine was working on a modern update of a classic Sierra game (I can't say which one), that got cancelled because Sierra got cold feet.

- Homeworld2's first incarnation (about 2 years in development) was completely scrapped after the developer ran into some technical issues and Sierra decided to play it safe and had them make a new game that was much more like the original than the one they'd been working on.

Into the Fire (the Babylon Five game) would have been completed after the original series finished airing. B5 was excellent, but it was never a huge commercial success. I imagine that Sierra was concerned that the percentage of PC gamers (already a small fraction of the market compared to console games, for example) who also liked a non-mainstream sci-fi series was too small to justify spending any more money.

They could very well have been wrong. Maybe ItF would have sold millions of copies. I doubt it, though - the PC market is not as kind to unusual games as the console market is.

Most people never saw Crimson Skies on the PC, but when a CS game was made for the Xbox, it sold like hotcakes. Maybe Sierra should have hung onto ItF for a year or two and released it for the Xbox instead.

Re:Indie Gaming

[Anonymous Coward]

It's also possible to correct someone without being an ass.

Of course, you didn't bother correcting him; you just pointed out the error. You also spelled "doesn't" wrong, and you used a comma where you should have used a semicolon, and missed a comma before your conjunction.

Re:WARNING!

[PapaZit]

Even more troubling: the BitTorrent version linked to from the site has an md5sum of 20a8ecd2de7b5cd4f18396e80d215746

Would the real ifhsetup.exe please stand up?

Re:WARNING!

[Laven]

20a8ecd2de7b5cd4f18396e80d215746 ifhsetup.exe
Confirmed... this is the md5sum from the main site, mirror #4 and this mirror. This guy is a liar. And it is very typical for the moderators to believe it and mod it up without even checking.

Re:WARNING!

[leiz]

I downloaded the file using bittorrent, and then checked its edonkey hash against the edonkey link provided on the website and they matched.

Windoze only

[metamatic]

*plonk*

Usefull Error Messages ...

[iDaZe]

Near the end of the shooting training in the Cooke-system when requesting docking clearance the game exits with a 'Aaaaaaaaarrrgggh! Fatal exception in "CTarget::mfCheckTarget()"!' :( Though I must say that the rest of the game is top notch.

Online and printed B5 quotes

[Lord Satri]

Wow. A free B5 game. Too bad it's only for windows.

For B5 fans like me :-) Numerous Great Babylon 5 quotes right here in a pdf. I even published a book, in french however, including these quotes and many more.

"[...] and as a result, we spend too much time trying to be serious, as if that proves that we are more enlightened, better than everyone else. But we can't be free until we learn to laugh about ourselves, once we look in the mirror and see just how foolish we can be, laughter is inevitable and from laughter comes wisdom"
- G'Kar, B5:"Meditations on the Abyss"

Re:Online and printed B5 quotes

[ErroneousBee]

Try vegastrike, I've just started playing the 0.4 vanilla version, and its pretty good (but not too much emphasis on the pretty, the HUD needs work, and one or two of the space backdrops are hard on the eyes).

I think theres some B5 ship models available for it.

Download links?

[UziBeatle]

As of Monday morning I see a blank page at http://ifh.firstones.com/index.shtml and at http://ifh.firstones.com/ and at http://ifh.firstones.com/download.shtml All I could load was the faq page and a screenshot at the screenshot page. Sort of useless website as I see it. Did it ever have more info? Can anyone here submit some working download links? Or maybe that is too risky come to think of it. Maybe better yet can someone from that project come here and tell us what is up with the web site?? Us late comers would love to download that file. Cheers.

Re:Download links?

[moreati]

The file is available on the edonkey filesharing network:

ed2k://|file|ifhsetup.exe|220959945|3D8F3F39269E 8D 15CACBEDACE6B5F361|/

Downloading at the moment.

Alex

Re:Download links?

[Anonymous Coward]

Drat. It looks like the main site has been taken down....Warner Bros. lawyers?

Is there a mirror anywhere?

In A.D. 2254, War Was Beginning

[billstewart]

Boxleitner: What happen?
Ivanova: Somebody set up us the Slashdot!
RedShirtGuy: We get signal
RedShirtGuy: Main Screen Turn On
Boxleitner: It's You!
CowboyNeal: How are you gentleman!
CowboyNeal: All Your Base Are Belong To Us!

... and so it begins