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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."
Until Elite 4 comes out (ahem, cough) Infinity: Quest for Earth looks to be its spiritual successor (yes there's seamless space travel to planetside, as showcased in the trailer)
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fp8WOCuR_pQ
Site: http://www.infinity-universe.com/Infinity/
Can't wait for this to come out... Frontier First Encouters with a DirectX engine just isn't cutting it anymore....
Here's to the crazy ones
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
Here's to the crazy ones
FTA:
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.
That was actually emulated in the game. If you accelerated to Pluto from Earth at 1g, it would take (approximately) a realistic amount of time to reach it.
What made it bearable were two concessions: You could alter the flow of time in the game, when nothing interesting was happening, so hours would tick by like seconds... and ships could accelerate at (ahem) hundreds of g's. So it had some outlandish elements, but the mechanics were thoroughly Newtonian.
It was beautiful. You could thrust toward Saturn, then cut your engines, point any direction, and just slingshot around... start accelerating again when you're headed at the sun, to approach the Earth. I would buy a modern equivalent, even if it wasn't a game at all, just a space flight sim. With the same infinite number of procedurally generated solar systems.
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
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.
...you may like Oolite, an Elite tribute. It has the goodness that ArcElite has too - it is not player centric, you can encounter epic battles (I've seen three or four distinct groups of ships battling it out, with the Police mixed in there too). The game is open source (GPL) and expandable with expansion packs (so now you can have Generation Ships and Space Dredgers, as well as scenes from the Dark Wheel like the Tionisla Orbital Graveyard). It's available for OSX, Linux and Windows (it was originally developed for OSX).
http://oolite.aegidian.org/
Latest version is 1.73, and there is a wiki for the game at http://wiki.alioth.net/
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Francis Spufford's book The Backroom Boys has a chapter about the creation of Elite, and a fair chunk of it is on The Guardian's website. One of my favourite bits is, after they came up with the procedural method for creating the universe, how they picked the seed:
"Braben and Bell called the starting number for a galaxy "a seed" and, in truth, creating the game this way was more like gardening than deliberately constructing something. You had to plant the seed and see what grew. It was another sense in which they were ceding direct control over the game in favour of working indirectly on the player's experience. But they did want to start the player off in a reasonably friendly bit of space, where the pickings were good and they wouldn't get instantly clobbered. Since there was no way to edit a galaxy, you just had to try galaxy after galaxy, seed after seed, until something suitable grew. "I remember thinking it was very wasteful," Braben says. "You'd type in a number, a birthday or something, and see what galaxy that came out with. 'No, I don't like that. No, I don't like that. That cluster looks horrible'." They also decided they had better check the 256 system names in the galaxy where the player would be plunked down, in case any of the four-letter words were actually four-letter words. "One of the first galaxies we tried had a system called Arse. We couldn't use the whole galaxy. We just threw it away!""
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.