Be Excellent To Each Other

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20165344

A way to go yet..

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/146 ... s?ref=live

Preferred Frontier. I hope he won't just remake it, as there's Oolite for that. I want Elite 4, goddammit.

Oof. £20 or tier 4 before you get a copy of the game.

Indeed, I think I'll just wait until it is actually released, if ever, and buy it then.

Well I backed it in the end. Utterly gaping gay for Elite, me.

Yeah, I like Elite but £20 is a bit strong for me (and that's just for the first however-many backers, after that it's £30) and I don't want to be throwing cash into the ether this close to Christmas.

A £1.25 million target seems ambitious. Was Elite that big a deal outside the UK?

I'm in.

Wasn't Frontier the best selling game of all time at one point?

EDIT: "It was the best selling game in Europe 1993 according to Gallup", says the official homepage.

There's already EVE, which is a modern-day Elite, played with tens of thousands of other people.....

EVE is shit for Elite afficionados, though. Goddamnit, I want to actually fly the ship, not click to tell it where to go. I also want to be able to manually land on planets, and jump to any system I can get to with a hyperdrive and enough fuel, from anywhere in my current system, instead of having to use bloody jump gates.

Could you land on planets in Elite?

Don't forget Eve's full of the utterest cunts on the Internet, too.

Just stay in high-sec space if you want to avoid the cunts.

Your other option is X3, which is under a tenner on Steam.

No.

Frontier, though.

..and do everything in the most laborious fashion. Eve's main problem for me is that the stuff I want to do is drawn out and boring unless I risk a bumraping in low or nullsec. ?admittedly I could hire someone to haul my ores to Jita but that takes a longer timeframe than my attention span can accomodate. It's my problem, I know, but I cant be the only one who just wants to take their veldspar to market.

As for Elite, the main thing abut it for me is that it's single player. Not sure how this will go down.

He's making it multiplayer according to the bumpf.

Have any of you guys tried X3?

Admittedly I've not played it myself, but a guy at work is a big fan and he's said on more than one occasion that it's basically a modern Elite.

He's put over 100 hours into it according to his Steam profile, and he's not known for playing shit games.

I read GY's comment as that the original Elite was single player and he wasn't sure how the new multiplayer version would go down.

Bingo

Correct, but you could in Frontier and First Encounters, and I would imagine he'd be unlikely to take such a massive step backwards for this version.

It is the best kind of correct, you're right

Yeah. It's really fucking good, and massively mod-able. The scale and scope of it are amazing. It's a good few years old now, and at the time I didn't really have the PC grunt to handle it properly, so I never really sunk as much time into it as I would have liked.

Yeah, I've played it a fair bit, as Craster says there is a big mod scene (or was a few years ago) and you can get entire fleets of Star Wars, and I think Star Trek and BG ships added to the game. Entire new sectors, new races of people, ... . No real planet stuff and no exploring outside of the ship. It is a bit old now and does look it, that said I have only played X3: reunion, not X3:Terran Conflict which a few years newer.

I should really try X3 I guess. I played X2 but it just didn't grab me, and I ended up downloading JFFE so I could play Frontier First Encounters in Windows 7.

Frontier was actually subtitled Elite II.

Good to see you agree!

While the ability is nice, and something that made me prefer Frontier, I found as soon as I found a lucrative route that I was Autopilot/Time compression all the way.

True. I like the extra flexibility though, especially if your hyperdrive failed mid-jump and left you stranded out in the middle of nowhere, but you had the forethought to fit a fuel scoop, so you could fly over to the gas giant in the system, refuel and then jump again.

£175k so far. Screenshots and video incoming, sez Braben.

Thats around 100,000 more than he had this morning when I started this thread.

Be nice to see it happen.

Some of the game projects on Kickstart have 3 or more times the money they need.

£221 now.

Just chucked on £20, seeing as I can put it aside from xmas money... Seems to be the best option, as you get the game plus your name reserved.

I hope it runs on my gaming PC, which was bought in late 2008.

All the £5,000 slots have gone!

That's what I went for too, though I'm sure I'll have to buy a new pc before 2014.

The counterpoint to that is having a large enough ship that you could spare room for it (6t is a lot on many ships). You also had the drive breaking down with almost complete certainly every year unless you serviced it, and the fact that the 'distress signal' function was completely useless so if you ran out of fuel or otherwise became stranded, even in a system with lots of other ships around, there was absolutely nothing you could do about it.

This really harmed my suspension of disbelief, especially in a game otherwise quite meticulous about little details like that.

I also got tired of flying into systems and having to fend off half a dozen pirate attacks, either by pirates who'd collide with you killing themselves in the process, or pirates in tiny airfighters that were almost impossible to hit but also so puny they could do no damage either their weapons or by kamikaze attacks.

I tried X2 and X3, but gave up on both due to the bad translation of the manuals from German to English.

Sometimes I'd realise that different chunks had apparently been translated by different people, and though the manual appeared to be talking about two different devices on your ship (for example) it'd eventually dawn on me that they were the same thing and different translators had come up with different English phrases for it.

I could sort of see the potential, but there are only so many weekends I'm willing to invest in a game before I expect to be able to start to play it.

The AI was really crude. I discovered that when an enemy ship was at a certain distance from you, fairly close up, they would neither try to attack or get away, they simply stayed immobile. This was an easy way to defeat powerful opponents in a relatively weak ship.

Another thing that was broken was that pirates were travelling in groups of 2-3 ships and were supposed to attack you as such. But the accelerated time (which you'd obviously always use to get from A to B) broke this so that you'd only ever face one ship at a time. The only way to get a proper challenge was to check the planetary map for the locations of the pirates that were moving towards you and reduce the accelerated time on purpose when they got near so their group wouldn't be split.

Basically, combat was broken.

EDIT: Oh, and who can forget the police ships that were unable to get out of the Space Stations without blowing themselves up.

Dudes! He got an entire galaxy onto one DSDD floppy!

It was fun to sit outside a station, fire a shot and then watch the fireworks as wave after wave of police ships exploded in the hangar.

When I made a bounty hunter character I made a point of finding a retired police Viper as I thought it was cool to look incognito (and also the joke that like cars, they'd have a "police package").

The Kickstarter page has updated concept art and a video on it now, although I cannae watch as I be at work I be.

I just came over the concept art of the Cobra.

Hhnnngh. Interior model shots... oh gods...

I've been considering having a funny 5 minutes, pledging 500 quid, and getting "Mentski Station".

...After saying this in a certain IRC channel, there's been discussion on having a whip-around for a group pledge of 750 quid to get Planet Hahsdigi in the game.

Respect for getting them to wake up long enough to discuss anything.

The last things anyone needs is to wake up the hahs, it's bad enough slumbering.

As my name suggests I backed this straight off the bat.

Excited by the Dark Souls-esque sounding multiplayer, less so by the abandonment of ASTROPHYSICS.

I've backed even though I don't have a PC... thats how much I want this made.

Also backed!

I've also backed, but only the minimum £20 in order to get the game. I could do with a lottery win really, then I could back the whole thing.

I'd love a new Elite!