Be Excellent To Each Other

http://www.pcgamer.com/previews/star-ci ... ur-dreams/



Sounds scrummy. A bit like EvE's setup but with BSG physics.

*** splut! ***

I really miss space sims! Why did they ever go out of fashion?

Because the world is mainly populated by dumb people. Hope this turns out awesome.

That looks worth buying a decent PC for!

I've still not played a space sim as good as the X Wing/TIE fighter games. They all seem to end up with three hundred different buttons to control some made up shite that adds nothing to the overall experience. In fact just a modern version of those games would be fine for me.

How do Eve physics differ from BSG physics?

Possibly because of the push to realism? As space sims get realistic, they get boring. And complicated.

EvE clearly takes place in a fluidic universe, for one.

You don't fly the ship in EvE. At least, not how most people think of it.

Physics don't matter to you in EvE, apart from momentum. You tell the ship where to go and it flies itself, as DocG says. You don't really have direct joystick control like in X-Wing.

From Chris Roberts' description, then, this involves getting out and/or walking around space stations and stuff? That's something else EvE sort of forgot, after coming up with what is possibly the most lifelike character generator ever, they then gave you the captain's quarters and... that's it. They pissed everyone off so much with the whole space monocle thing that they had to stop working on the station environment (where you could go and socialize in person with other players) and instead gave us the Tengu so people could bitch about it.

I was addicted to Privateer back in the day... I thought the starter ship (Tarsus) was fine and the other three ships very ugly so I just kept it. The planets were so evocative, especially the rainy Blade Runner New Detroit, it was a shame that they were just a static screen and likewise whenever you approached a planet you just suddenly landed. Frontier (which I played years later) gave you that fantastic sequence when landing on a planet with an unbreathable atmosphere of the big hangar doors opening, and being scooted off through a series of tunnels deep within the base to your ship's parking space. If we were allowed to be in control of all that... wow.

10xC or whatever it's called has got some competition if this is true. I just hope Roberts has gotten over his habit of making computer-melting games. The 'worryingly high poly' comment makes me suspect otherwise.

Privateer 2 was excellent.

Never played it, was it any good? I wasn't sure I liked the style change from the very pragmatic, industrial look of the previous game (and the WC universe in general). Plus it had an FMV plot which was a huge turn off, in much the same way that the stupid plot in the original game got in the way.

I play X3 a fair bit, but that doesn't even have a cockpit as default, you need to mod it to get that!

I think one reason space sims declined is consoles. They generally require a fair number of buttons.

Wing Commander on the Sega CD was very complicated unless you had a six button pad!

I don't think it's the fault of controls so much as the rise of the FPS. I had a ball with Project Sylpheed because it was like going back to those days of TIE Fighter and Wing Commander.

Yes the FMV plot did 'run out' of course, but it was a pretty decent tale as best I can recall, and I kept playing long after I'd 'finished' the game.

Clive Owen too and John Hurt too! The FMV stuff was actually alright.

Never fucking ran in Windows though, so not a game I've ever been able to go back to. Still got the original discs downstairs in my 'computers, consoles and games' archive that I will not throw away ever.

In fact, surely with all the advances in modern technology DOSBox or something could run it? I vaguely recall trying this a few years ago but the mouse sensitivity was totally fucked, after I actually managed to get into the game itself.

Anyone who thinks PC games are troublesome now really should have tussled with config.sys and autoexec.bat and fucking himem and all that shit back in the day

Fucking amen to that. I think that the amount of challenge in the average PC game back then was probably far smaller than the challenge of getting it to run.

I've actually not had a significant problem with installing and running a PC game for years, apart from all the near endless arsing around getting the controls right.

There's a difference between 'run' and 'run as well as possible' though. Modern PC games might have upwards of two dozen settings and sliders to trade performance against different aspects of visuals; frame rate versus anti-aliasing versus texture quality versus HDR... If you care, then arriving at the best setting for your own preferences and your computer is very challenging. Much more so than getting free memory up through autoexec.bat tuning because the surface area of adjustments is so much greater.

You don't say! One minute you have this great background story, the next you are pitched into a HUMONGOUS SPACE BATTLE and suddenly, the plot is done with.

Freelancer was bloody excellent though. Only that part of it let it down, really.

They shouldn't, though. Mercenary and Elite are fine examples of how to do it properly. It should be you, a ship and the 'verse.

Ack!

Oh do come on Doc. Pretty much all PC games configure themselves incredibly well out of the box on auto-detect these days, and they have done for quite some time. (Plus they all recognise and use a 360 pad that's plugged in.)

Yes the determined geek such as myself can fettle and tweak to their heart's content should they wish to, but for 99% of people, 99% of the time, it's just a case of install and play.

Just getting a game to run at all could be a monumental struggle back in the DOS days, are you really saying that buying, installing, and playing a game via Steam is 'very challenging' compared to that?

As markg has already said, I honestly can't remember the last time a PC game gave me any hassle, or at the very least, no more than my 360 does with the console wanting to update itself and then the game wanting to update itself and then the entire fucking dashboard having changed since I last used it so I can't fucking find anything.

Also, in them days there was no internet to consult to help you get it all working.

I have to say though, the idea of acceptable frame rate that the auto detect gives me, and what I consider playable is very different. Pretty much every game I play I have to turn down a lot of the detail to get it to what I consider acceptable. Any sort of slowdown in busy areas really doesn't work for me, the auto detect settings always seem to be set to 90% fine with slowdown every so often. Drives me nuts

Aren't you playing on a weirdy Mac thing, though?

Y'all know about this bad boy, yes?

http://diaspora.hard-light.net

Gosh no, don't tell anyone, but I have a dedicated gaming pc. I just use my iMac as the monitor for it.

Feex

Do keep quiet, people have been burned at the stake here for less.

Ah. "Newtonian physics". That's like Frontier, then, not Wing Commander?

Feeling a bit less excited now...

Am I the only person who played independence war 2? That game was ace, and had almost sensible physics.

Yup, great game!

Gonna try some of the user missions soon.

So, Star Citizen have promised to make up some alien language(s) if they get $50,000,000 in pre-orders.

They are currently on $48m.

Forty-eight. Million.

There's simply no reason for them to actually release this game - the money just keeps pouring in.

I do love the "commercials" for the spaceships, though:

A fair few people on SomethingAwful's forums are selling their imaginary spaceships for a game that doesn't exist yet for significantly higher sums of money than they paid for it, and then buying into the Elite: Dangerous beta.

Make of that what you will

The game industry is a little broken right now?

You'll never catch me paying for games that don't exist yet, anyway.



Ahem.

They have actually started releasing stuff!

Arena Commander mode came online just before christmas, which is described as "Here’s where you’ll get to log your first hours of flight times. With this early release you will be able to get accustomed to your ship’s controls in Free Flight mode, or play the Single-Player version of Arena Commander’s Vanduul Swarm simulator. Multiplayer will follow shortly, as will new game modes."

I've ponied up my £30 for beta access, download copy of the game and access to arena commander and i'm currently downloading the 20gb "patch" to give it a go.

Well... this is going to be a total headfuck The control scheme is much more "real", in that you have thrusters and rotating your ship doesn't immediately change direction. You basically powerslide around, which is actually very nice and controllable, but it's going to take a while to get good at. It's completely different to Elite, which is much more point and shoot on the default settings and it purposely restricts yaw rate so that space flight is more like atmospheric flight and it's all about rolling and pitching. SC is all about pitch and yaw (as wing commander used to be).
The major problem is that it has yaw on the x axis and roll on the twist (z?) axis, and no way to change that as far as I can see at the moment. Swapping between Elite and this is going to be tricky (I know you can turn off flight assist in Elite to get a similar flight style, but it still has a restricted yaw speed, doesn't it?)

It looks great though. Haven't managed to get the Rift working yet, but I haven't really tried that hard.

Just did the dogfighting mission against drones that they released.

Holy shit, that was incredibly good fun! Even with not knowing any of the button mappings and my brain exploding due to the yaw and roll being mixed up, it was still a total blast to fly around and shoot the shit out of the Kilrathi Vanduul fighters. It made the Elite combat seem sterile, and for want of a better word, boring.

The new damage model is sweet.

I wonder if they have fixed the controls yet, I shall investigate the latest build

They're expecting the client to be around 100GB.

I. Um.

I.

Bugger.

Minimum system requirements: Skynet.
Recommended system requirements: two Skynets.

(Stolen fron Penny Arcade.)

Yeah I saw that, and there is an expectation that patches could be 20gb in size each time.
Good job i'm moving to a fibre broadband house!

The new Gamescom live demo is pretty incredible. Don't know how they think they'll manage to get it out this year, but never mind about that. JUST LOOK AT IT! It has the potential to be the most immersive game ever made.



And it's all multiplayer, so it could be a fantastic Beex game as well.

This looks absolutely amazing. But I can't see me going out and buying a gaming PC specifically for it, so it will remain irrelevant.

The game will never be released. The current version available to backers is so bad that people can't even walk through their ship without falling through the floor - to think that they could pull something like this off within the next few months is ludicrous.

//edit: Lookup Major Tom on YouTube, his videos should tell you all you need to know about this glorified crowdfunding scam.

I have been watching this entire escapade from a safe distance with a mixture of pie-eyed wonder and begrudging admiration, it really is a construct of incredible nonsense.

Wouldn't spend any money on it of course, I'd rather drop the cash on something more sensible, like snorting coke out of a high-class hooker's ass-crack. I mean, at least you're actually getting something with the coke+hooker combo, even if it is just hooker poo nose.

100gig?

Why? That's insane

I haven't spent any money on it either, but if it is actually released and turns out to be a good game I will buy it, why wouldn't I?

I have been as bemused as anyone by the way people have been throwing money at it, but the things shown previously have been released, and I played it myself when it was free one week (or something, I forget the details). And yeah, it was too glitchy to be entertaining and it remains to be seen whether it will all be fixed up and running well. People will have the next alpha in their hands soon enough, so we shall see how that turns out.

Not so much feature-creep, more feature-leap, has ruined this project. It sounded so good when the Kickstarter first went up. They have overreached here and most of the features will never be released.

Sorry yes should have qualified the statement to say that I wouldn't spend any money on it in its current state, but if some sort of actual decent game is ever birthed from this multi-hundred million dollar engorged pig of broken dreams and majestic floppy-cock of promise and wild expectation - I'd be quite happy to take a look.