Lot's of FFE d3d development

[FSOneblin]

Probably gonna read through the manual until I get back from this trip, but I am one of the few who never played any of the Elite games before Oolite.

Welcome, brother, to the "Oolite first" club.

FSOneblin

[ADCK]

Was playing the d3d version earlier today, no keyboard remapping killed it for me.

The original FFE game was great and awful, great in it's scope, but awful in it being released before it was ready and frontier dev never bothering to fix it.

Plus Braben went a bit overboard with the "realism" and seemed to forget it's a game, and that games are supposed to be fun.

[JeffBTX]

I second ADCK's sentiment...

Its kind of hard to describe if you haven't been there...

You LIKE and you HATE FFE (JJFFE helps a little bit though).

I have a legacy DOS 6.22 machine in the corner of the room, its better than struggling with DOSBox... I would rather install and play Frontier (Elite II) on it than FFE (Elite III).

I have to say that I was CLOSELY EYEING GLFFE, FFE D3D and such, before I installed Oolite. Now I'm HOOKED on Oolite.

[Greyman]

[...] I have to say that I was CLOSELY EYEING GLFFE, FFE D3D and such, before I installed Oolite. Now I'm HOOKED on Oolite.

Good choice, man!

[Frame]

the retroengineers (the fan developers) should really be able to improve that sort of stuff quite easily (relatively speaking, since they no longer have to be that economic with processor load).

You know, this is the sort of stuff that kills kittens, as another_commander would say!

FFE is a very complex program, most of it programmed at a very low level. It does take a lot of time to get familiar with such a beast, and a lot of bugs are incredibly difficult to track down. Do you seriously think that the original Frontier development team, the ones who built the game from nothing - by definition the ones most familiar with the way it works - would have left that bug in place for the years it took to get FFE to the market if it was that easy to track down & correct?
Of course, the guys who decompiled the game, and managed to update it for newer computers are doing a fantastic job, and they might well manage to bugfix that problem, in the fullness of time.

However, speaking from experience bugfixing & maintaining years-old software (including Oolite, btw), the lack of a bugfix is not for lack of trying.

Once a system reach a certain level of complexity, it gets very difficult to fit it all in one brain: apparently, the effort needed to keep more than 7 separate things in mind at the same time is beyond most humans. Something like FFE contains much more than 7 things interacting with each other!

That complexity is probably going to hamper a bugfix for quite a long time still, unless one of the guys working on FFE gets lucky / finally sees months of effort actually pay off. Since the source for the 'new' FFE is freely available, you're of course more than welcome to have a go at fixing that particular bug yourself, and to prove me totally wrong!

I had a look at the source for gljfee, most of it is in asm :S, the game is unplayable to start with, so I'm puzzled that anyone upgraded this beast to start with..

To add to it, I tried slowing down my system(running more threads) with what seems like succes... however, when I'm jumped by 4 pirates that spank the living daylights out of me, and I barely survive by sheer luck killing those falcons or what they where, and hull damage at 90% I consider myself lucky, and masterfull in my Viper mk II, that i bought at lave...

then only to be attacked by an imperial courier that I had my 1 MW beam laser trained on for what seems like an eternity, he swoops in, fires his laser and takes out my naval ECM that I got at Zaonce... poops beyond my laser range and pops a missile at me, that i franticly try to take down with my beam laser, and tries to hit with some mines too..

no luck... BOOM dead again, very fast this time even..

I respect the effort people has put into jffe and jffegl and ffe d3d..
but I wonder if its not all just wasted effort, since the game is so complex written in asm(which I with my limited mnemonics* understanding) it seems just tooo complex... in fact I think rewriting it from scratch and taking the data snippets from the asm where it applies would have been a better approach.

**mnemonics is a term for the commands in machine code (assembler langauge used in low level programming)

example

Code: Select all

JUMP_000400:			; Pos = 133e3
		push esi
		push ebx
		call FUNC_000031
		add esp,byte +0x8
		mov [ebp-0x14],eax
		lea eax,[ebp+0xffffff64]
		push eax
		mov eax,[ebp-0x14]
		push eax
		mov eax,[DATA_008558]
		push eax
		call near [DATA_007639]    ; FUNC_001344_StringExpandFFCode
		add esp,byte +0xc
		dec eax
		mov [DATA_008558],eax
		jmp JUMP_000450

This is actually binary data translated to something humans can understand.. I can make educated guesses only from my c64 days...

a map of these machine code sub routines or what should i call them, would have been nice though... since the asm file is 130528 lines strong :S

anyway, not my table ever

Cheers Frame,...

[Zieman]

so I have run the milk systems..

I now have an ASP explorer with 15 shield units or so..
so I entered the Arcturus system.. when the moment i clicked
time accelerator button, while viewing externaly, two ships appeared
out of nowhere, with no hyperspace cloud, right next to me, and completely still relative to me, meaning they where flying on a parallel perfect vector as to me..

Klax warning sounded, in no time my 15 shield units, where depleted.
and my ship exploded..

I mean, it was liturally 2-3 seconds from these ships to appear to my ship exploded, that had an energy booster unit

Gigantic Fail, as in gigantic Bug... which now explains why i couldn't get anywhere before in the gateway system.. since even with an Iron Ass, I'm blown up instantly.

Don't know about FFE D3D, but in the original FFE (& JFFFE ) you could get along with almost any ship, you just needed a lot of patience and of course lots of save/reload action.

And there was a trick with the stardreamer system that worked like Oolites off-spacelane-detour -trick. The trick was easier to implement in original FFE, because JJFFE had one of the time acceleration bugs squashed (the "feature" that allowed you to zoom towards a planet/station at 50 000 km/sec and come to an seemingly instant halt in front of the station with autopilot).
The trick:
- hyperspace
- save game
- select your destination
- engage autopilot
- use first level of time acceleration to get up to a 10-60 km/sec velocity
- disengage autopilot and cut off engines
- manually accelerate towards your current heading
- now, while continually accelerating, engage 3rd or 4th level of time acceleration
- if you want to be 99% safe from pirates, use 3rd level at least up to 1000 km/sec and then 4th level up to 5000+ km/sec
- if ~90% safety is enough for you, go straight to 4rd level and up to 5000+ km/sec before going for full time acceleration

[Micha]

I very much liked Frontier on my Amiga (never really bothered with FFE) - for the galaxy sim aspects. I spent lots of time just hurtling through space admiring the graphics, getting into orbits around objects, etc. Beautiful.

As a game though, it failed IMHO. Mainly due to the already mentioned un-fun combat. I'd love to see a cross between Frontier and Elite which retains the galaxy-sim of Frontier and the dog-fighting Torus-drive fun of Elite. Not sure how the two could be married sensibly though.

A game which sortof managed was "Space PirateRogue" - you had newtonian physics, but capped at fairly low velocities. The ship systems could either be on 'automatic' or 'manual' - similar to the way it was in Frontier, but due to the capped velocity, on 'automatic' it was almost an Elite flight model - you tended to 'skid' slightly at max speed but dog-fighting was definitely possible. One neat trick was that you could use a gravity well to escape pursuers by sling-shotting around it, temporarily raising your max velocity. So again, it was not scientifically accurate, but as it was a GAME, not a SIM, some concessions were made to trade off accuracy for fun - always a win in my book.

[Zireael]

[...] I have to say that I was CLOSELY EYEING GLFFE, FFE D3D and such, before I installed Oolite. Now I'm HOOKED on Oolite.

Good choice, man!

Are these available for download somewhere? I recently heard about them (and the original Frontier) and I'd like to see what they are like.

[sunlover72]

Hmm i played elite literally to death on bbc and C64 but.. it was many years later i tried FFE, i didnt particularly like it i have to admit.

I seem to recall combat felt..clunky, i also (correct me if im mis-remembering!) remember buying a huge ship and filling it full of shield generators so it was completely indistructable.

[Cmd. Cheyd]

Are these available for download somewhere? I recently heard about them (and the original Frontier) and I'd like to see what they are like.

Here, let me google that for you...
GLFFE

FFE D3D

[Zireael]

Thanks. I decided FFE D3D is too big (circa 170 MB) and too buggy, so I'll try original Frontier. See my other topic. (still can't post URLs)

[Cody]

Not my thing, but word reaches us via SSC that AndyJ (responsible for new builds of FFED3D) passed away last summer.

[Griff]

aw man that's awful news, really sad to read, Andy did some amazing work patching and fixing those games