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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
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