Retro, Commander …

[Disembodied]

Erstwhile forum member-turned-author Drew Wagar takes a tour of Elite through the ages, loading up all the previous versions of the game right back to the original. See the original BBC Elite from 1984; Frontier: Elite 2; Frontier: First Encounters; and of course some of the notable fan-made versions, including Oolite.

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/547833763

[Griff]

Thanks for posting about this Disembodied it's always great hearing Drew talk about Elite, those 'First Encounters' games looked a lot better than i remembered at the time, maybe they just run a lot faster emulated on modern computers or something. I hadn't realised that they'd programed lighting bouncing off planets and space stations onto the nearby ships - that's pretty amazing, i think at the time i thought that that was just glitchy graphics

[Commander_X]

Hah, old dinosaurs up, and alive!

Drew, DaddyHoggy, and they also mentioned Selezen, but didn't see his name in the chat.
I guess we can now be sure, if there ever was any doubt, that Drew betrayed Oolite for E:D Quite candid to see him not recalling most "elementary" keys, and the fact that Oolite actually has yaw (by default mapped on "," and "." -- for keyboarders this is a first "must" override).

[Griff]

I'm really enjoying Drew's 'Elite Dangerous' Lore Tour, been following along a day or two later when Drew posts the videos up to his YouTube channel, last weeks episode featured and interview with Selezen (Dave Hughes) and there was some Oolite chat and even an in-game appearance!

[Cholmondely]

I guess we can now be sure, if there ever was any doubt, that Drew betrayed Oolite for E:D Quite candid to see him not recalling most "elementary" keys, and the fact that Oolite actually has yaw (by default mapped on "," and "." -- for keyboarders this is a first "must" override).

Having watched quite a number of his videos, the only keyboard commands which Mr Wagar really seems to have internalised are those for the original Elite. Not the various Frontiers. Not Oolite. And especially not Elite Dangerous with its 140-page instruction-packed player's manual.

Which is fair enough, I would have thought! His real love is obviously the Lore.

(It is probably not worth the effort, but if 'vanilla Oolite' had a simple switch to enable the original Elite key commands, then Drew would have had no problems with it (apart from abject yawlessness - if that really counts as a problem for him!). And neither would the handful of others coming to it from a pure Elite background.)


Just as a meaningless corollary, I tried Elite in DOSBox on the dreaded Macintosh, and the key commands were transmogrified from the original game - e.g. pitch & roll to the arrow keys. It's not obvious what has been moved where. Ho-hum!

[ffutures]

Video doesn't appear to be on line any more.

[Griff]

Drew hosted an Elite Lore tour in Elite dangerous the other week, in memory for Michael Brookes who very sadly passed away recently, he was one of the original Frontier development team who worked on getting Elite Dangerous released

A recording of the stream is here, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLn0zoTQNHo it's beautifully done, lots of Elite 8-bit references, and the last few minutes with the jump to witchspace is genuinely moving