Elite Turns 25

satellite17 writes "The BBC notes that the classic space combat / trading sim Elite is 25 years old today. Elite was one of the first 3D games produced for a home computer and also one of the first open-ended games. Odd as it sounds now, this meant that even though it was popular with friends of the creators, David Braben and Ian Bell, they initially struggled to find a publisher. 'They just didn't get it; they wanted a high score and they wanted players to have three lives,' Braben said. It is also credited with influencing quite a few modern classics."

Comments

Investing in new ideas feared back then

[Techman83]

It was something that I thought was a bit more recent phenomenon. But it seems that once a market becomes "established" that it becomes tougher to get people to invest in an idea that isn't safe. And it just goes to show what a significant impact that this game had on the industry and what a shame it would have been if they had given up.

Re:Some would call X3 the successor...

[flydpnkrtn]

X3 doesn't have seamless planetside travel, does it? I think the last review I read said it didn't... although technically that means I'm looking for a "Frontier: Elite II" or "Frontier First Encounters" successor... the original Elite had no planetside stuff

Until the day I can warp into a system, take my ship that's in space 10,000 AU from the nearest planet, point it at that blue looking planet over yonder (all the while dealing with Newtonian physics), and fly down to the surface (without cutscenes or whatever), then fly around some mountains, notice a weird looking tribe staring at me, then fly back out to space I won't consider a game Elite's successor.

Yea I'm a little bit religious about a damn good realistic game set in space

hardware requirements

[Errtu76]

FTA:

"We crafted every single byte and would work for hours just to free up three or four bytes so we could put in a new feature or ability.

"That level of concentration on things have been lost today when you have things that are many megabytes or even gigabytes in size," he added.

I wish more developers would do this with today's games. Then perhaps i wouldn't have to upgrade my computer so often when i wanted to play a new game. I know the article only mentioned memory usage, but i'm sure this goes for cpu / video power as well.

Re:hardware requirements

[Xest]

Yes, and then you also wouldn't see games released for about 10 years too.

The kind of memory and CPU cycles you can free up by these kinds of optimizations, compared to the amount of memory and cycles available just makes it not even worth it. The amount of time required to do this level of optimisation on games of the size and complexity we have today would add many years to development time.

This coupled with the fact that compilers nowadays do a better job on the fly than most developers can anyway means it's really a pipe dream to have all your games completely and thoroughly hand optimised from start to finish, and amusingly you'd likely only see a couple of fps benefit, and maybe a few mb of memory savings. It's just not justifiable.

From a commercial standpoint it would be suicidal too, everyone else would be developing as normal, and by the time you'd finally released your perfectly hand optimised game, the optimisations would be irrelevant as your game would be 5 - 10 years old and everyone would've bought far more powerful PCs anyway.

If upgrading your PC is a problem, and you're not bothered about the above side effect of having games behind the times that hand optimisation of a complete game would cause, why not just buy last gen games rather than trying to play all the latest and greatest?

The fact is, those skills have been lost for a reason- they're just not important in modern game development where the pressure is on to produce ever more code and content than before and where that level of optimisation offers so little benefit when taken with the fact most game/renedering libraries (DirectX, OpenGL), and most compilers ensure this optimisation is done for you already where it matters. I certainly think we're at risk of losing low level programmers, and that's not a good thing, but this is certainly not an area where their loss matters- I'm more concerned about the loss of people who can do low level stuff to support reverse engineering of DRM, proprietary protocols and that sort of thing.

This is not to say games don't need optimisation at all, of course they do, there is still plenty of scope for that, but to hand craft each byte of content and machine code? Not worth it.

Re:Some would call X3 the successor...

[Dr_Barnowl]

Indeed... and Newtonian manoeuvring just doesn't work too well in the human brain.

Movies depicting space travel with Newtonian manoeuvring are regarded as artsy. Movies with "etheric rudder" (to borrow the Star Wars term) have exciting space battles.

Battlestar Galactica (the original) used etheric rudder. The re-imaging was Newtonian, but got away with it by making things about strategy rather than tactics (and people rather than ships), and obscuring combat in a haze of gunsmoke and camera shake.

Games are the same way. Playing I-War is hard. Playing the X-Wing series isn't easy, but the curve is less steep, because it's like air combat, but the vector of gravity has been removed, simplifying the flight model.

I was certainly impressed by the Newtonian mechanics in the Frontier series, but I enjoyed the combat in Elite a lot more.

Space combat with laser weapons in a world of Newtonian mechanics just isn't interesting, because it consists of

• Close to optimal range (this being close enough to be in weapons range but far away enough that your opponent can't accelerate laterally out of your weapon reticle)
• Fire

Victory is entirely determined by who has the most power behind their shields and lasers. You spend the majority of your time in the early stages of Frontier avoiding combat because you'll be whiffed out of existence like a water balloon hitting the sun. Then when you have enough cash to beef up your ship, you are effectively untouchable.

Short-range particle bolt weapons and etheric rudder may not be realistic, but they are a lot more fun.

Re:Elite 2 and 3

[Haeleth]

The problem with the sequels was that they went all out for realism, whereas the original went all out for fun.

So in the original, to fly to another system you undock, hyperspace, and apply your jump drive a few times. If you meet opposition, you engage in an exciting dogfight with usually several enemies.

In Frontier, to fly to another system you undock, fly outside hyperspace range, hyperspace, and then spend the next twenty minutes slowly accelerating and decelerating across an entire solar system. If you meet opposition, it takes the form of a single enemy. You remain relatively stationary while it flies slowly round you in circles, only coming into range for a few seconds every three or four minutes.

Realistic? Sure. Immersive? Yes, actually, for a few days. But the original was gripping for months, while the sequels got boring very quickly, and that was entirely down to the fact that realistic is not fun.

Re:Some would call X3 the successor...

[Sycraft-fu]

This is why the "realistic" space sim zealots will never be happy. If a company ever actually gave them the game they wanted, one that was truly realistic as per our current understanding of physics and such, it'd be way too boring to actually play. They do not actually want what they believe they want. Goes double since realistically, a pilot would have almost nothing to do with combat. A computer would be doing all the controlling, the pilot would simply press a button to let it know that it was weapons free.

We already see this with air craft today. When a pilot goes on a bombing run, they don't fly the plane, it flys itself. Its route has been programmed in to the on board navigation computer. The plane lets them know when they are near the target, and when to signal for bomb release. When they do signal, it doesn't actually drop the bombs, just lets the computer know that it is allowed to drop the bombs when it calculates the time to be right. The bombs then guide themselves according to their navigation computers, as the plane moves on.

This sort of thing would apply to space combat to an even larger degree. A computer would be handling all the complex aspects of moving the ship and aiming the weapons, a human would only specify targets and destinations and such.

So thanks but no thanks, I'll take highly unrealistic, fun games.

history changes, human nature doesn't

[Tom]

'They just didn't get it; they wanted a high score and they wanted players to have three lives,'

Funny how that drives games development until this day. It's not 3 lives, but in the MMO market, for example, few dare to deviate from the "Level 60 cap, classes, crafting and grinding" concept. And those that do are almost always the minor players.