Elite Turns 25 159
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."
Elite spiritual successor- Infinity: QFE (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [youtube.com]
Site: http://www.infinity-universe.com/Infinity/ [infinity-universe.com]
Can't wait for this to come out... Frontier First Encouters with a DirectX engine just isn't cutting it anymore....
The BBC Micro version was first and best (Score:4, Interesting)
I remember getting Elite on my BBC Model B back in '84 on cassette. It took quite a while to load but was well worth it. When I upgraded my machine with Opus DDOS and an 800K double sided, double density 5 1/4" floppy drive I was able to get the floppy version which loaded my more quickly. You really needed the analogue controller too. I stuck an old Scalextric controller on top of mine to give me a full hand grip and I could fly rings around other ships.
I tried other versions like the C=64 and PC versions but they really didn't work as well as the version for the BBC despite the fact that there was little use of colour (only the dash) but the mode 4 high resolution monochrome graphics were much crisper and animation was faster on the BBC than other platforms. The BBC Micro was a real gem for quality games. The versions of arcade games like PacMan, Defender, Scramble and so on were in many ways better than their arcade equivalent. The BBC had some really nice hardware acceleration features such as hardware scrolling (both vertical and horizontal) and a very configurable video ULA which is how they were able to do the mode switching part way down the screen in Elite where it switched from mode 4 (320x256 1 bit colour) to mode 5 (160x256 2 bit colour).
It was a real slog to get to "Elite" but worth the journey. Very few games today are anything like as enjoyable despite the improvements in technology. I guess GTAIII was the first time since Elite I had anything like the same feeling of freedom and the thrill of just being bad.
There was a bug in the Spectrum version (Score:4, Interesting)
If you launched, then spun round and re-entered the dock hitting hyperspace at the same time, you appeared, docked, at your destination.
Saved all that tedious trading until you could buy lots of weapons etc.
the Modern version oolite rocks! (Score:3, Interesting)
I found oolite a year or two ago and was amazed at how much fun this game still is!
Re:I learned about some history today. (Score:4, Interesting)
Well according to David Braben hardly anything said online about Elite 4 is true... argh... damn cock tease
"Braben did, however, allay fears that Elite 4 may never see the light of day by confirming it is in development.
âoeThere is absolutely tons of stuff about Elite online,â he said. âoeHardly any of it's true! Some of it is, but I'm not going to say which. We are working on it and it's very exciting.â"
http://www.videogamer.com/news/hardly_any_elite_4_online_info_is_true_says_braben.html [videogamer.com]
My C=64 (Score:4, Interesting)
If there is one thing I miss about my old C64, it's Elite. I lost many, many hours on that game. How they built such a large universe on such a small platform I'll never figure out. Thanks guys!
Thargoids. (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, yeah, they were. You just had to have played long enough.
It took me a long time (Apple ][ version) before I encountered them by chance. Still wasn't sure it was real the next morning. Then a couple of weeks later, the Galactic Navy found me. Had some papers they wanted delivered.
And then "Thargoids. Why'd it have to be Thargoids?"
It wasn't a story arc by modern standards -- but after countless hours of play that stood on their own as just plain fun -- to have something like that pop out of nowhere, and to have the rarest "random encounter" spawn chase me more than halfway across the galaxy... was something I remember to this day.
It wasn't until DOOM came out that I had dreams about a video game.
Happy 25th, Elite. I still have that Apple ][, and I'm digging out that disk this weekend.
Re:Some would call X3 the successor... (Score:3, Interesting)
Ehhhh... I think with the statement "warp into a system" he has already decided he wants to add in some non-Newtonian physics... (though it would have been nice if he noticed that ;)
In practice, he wants what everyone wants with the holy grail of space sims - seamless transitions between extraplanatary, solar system, and terrestrial environments. Ideally with seamless transitions between "inside the ship" and "outside the ship", whether it's on a space station, planet, or just ejected into the void. Honestly, if they want to simulate "travelling really fast", all the better (especially if they make it look like "the jump to light speed"!) As long as you have total control over your 1st (or evern 3rd) person character throughout the various transitions it's going to be a pretty amazing experience...
Great Elite article (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [guardian.co.uk]. 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!""
Re:Some would call X3 the successor... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
BS. There's a reason MS Flight Simulator succeeded though it was rather boring to most people. There's a reason IL-2 Sturmovik is still making money. Realistic sims sell, just to a much smaller niche market. Boring for you and other 12 yr olds? Probably. Most of them can't even get a plane off the ground in IL2.
http://www.fasterlight.com/exoflight/ [fasterlight.com]
Exoflight is a sim based on realistic newtonian physics. Kinda fun. No combat. Space Combat by the X-Plane guys is fun too but the "combat" part is lame due to the lame weapons. Both of these are free.
The ultimate space combat sim to me would be a game set in the cold war era in LEO, to and from the moon and maybe mars. Basically Apollo and Gemini capsules with belt fed .50 cals w/ compensating thrusters. Soyuz capsules with 23mm cannon. Cobbled together crappy tin can space stations (also armed).
Shields, laser weapons and particle cannons are what ruin the fun in space games for me. Slugthrowers and missiles with limited propulsion/maneuvering fuel would make it insanely fun, especially if you accurately model venting atmosphere from bullet holes effecting the stability and maneuvering of the craft. This is how spacecraft to spacecraft combat would take place today, just with better targeting systems. A .50 in space would have MUCH greater effective range than a similar weapon in the atmosphere. You just can't afford to send lots of missiles up on each spacecraft.
I think a space combat sim with realistic physics set in 1974 instead of 2269 would be more fun. Hell, there's even an AGC emulator now that could probably be shoehorned in and scripted to make it easier for non-astronauts to use.
They do not actually want what they believe they want.
Who are you to tell me what I want? I want true realism without pipe dream lasers with unlimited ammo, particle cannons or warp drives (time acceleration to make it playable is cool though).
I've played sims with realistic newtonian physics and I deal with them very well. It takes getting used to but is actually more immersive. You want that tired old Wing Commander shit, you go ahead and buy it. It got boring well over a decade ago.
So thanks but no thanks, I'll take highly unrealistic, fun games.
To each his own, but your opinion is not shared with others and it's awful arrogant of you to think you can tell people they don't want something they want.
A highly realistic space game can be a blast if done right. Stuff set in the far future doesn't interest me all that much anyway.
Re:If you liked Elite... (Score:3, Interesting)
I went and downloaded it.
First it tried to install into c:\oolite, completely disrespecting the past fifteen years of application development for Windows. I have no idea where it's going to save files, but I'm willing to bet it's not nowhere near my profile folder.
After it got installed, it opened a readme file that said how to edit .GNUstepDefaults (what?) and somewhere near the end of the file - which I can't find anymore - it said that exiting the game is done through Shift+Escape (huh?), plus a whole bunch of stuff I forgot.
When first running the game, it asked me if I wanted to load the previous commander, despite never running the game before.
Then I somehow got into the game and started pressing various keys, starting with Escape, Enter and Space, which got me nowhere. Then I pressed F1 (as I decided to go one by one) and suddenly I was in space. Randomly pressing all other keys also managed to get me nowhere.
I admitted defeat and went to read the reference sheet. Again, that got me nowhere, despite somehow going to a different solar system, until I googled for "oolite tutorial", which helped me find out that I should press the "j" key in order to get to the planet a lot faster. Sadly, that didn't work, and I have no idea why... So it got me nowhere for the third time.
It might be a good Elite clone and full of goodness, but it's anything but intuitive and playable. I see there are all kinds of expansion packs available; all that time spent and nobody ever thought of adding such a simple thing as a god damn menu when the Escape key is pressed, or incorporating a small tutorial, or at least making the F1 key display *help* instead of throwing you out into space at the start of the game?!
Bye, uninstalled. I'll check out Vega Strike next week.