Lot's of FFE d3d development

matthewfarmery · Post by **matthewfarmery** » Mon Dec 07, 2009 6:33 pm

in a way I understand the explanation, but you are hurtling at a huge speed one way, it would have been better if the speed was capped, but anyway, when you encounter pirates, it did slow you down, a lot faster, otherwise you wouldn't be able to turn, as the ship would still be travelling in one direction, so jousting wouldn't even be possible,

as for the twat, yeah I did say original release, and that was the version I had, so not sure what version he was talking about, a few people did also mention that the original released was buggy, after which, the twat didn't post again

I did borrow a friends copy again on the amiga, which was a bit better and a lot less buggy, pity that FFE wasn't available for it mind, I may check out this new version after a while, never played it,

Sendraks · Post by **Sendraks** » Mon Dec 07, 2009 6:39 pm

Makara wrote:
I've seen a lot of criticism of the space fights along these lines and have to think that people never quite got their heads around the technique for Frontier's flight model. The basic outline of combat was:....

Yup, that was pretty much always the way I did combat, but until the relative speeds of the ships matched there was always jousting. Past that point, it never really got to the dog fighting phase as you get in Oolite, just the two ships sliding around in front of each other until one was destroyed. However, even employing this technique there was still the distressing tendancy of other vessels to just smack into you. The other problem was that the larger beam weapons were enough to 1 shot ships which had less than 10levels of shielding (irrc). If you got unlucky in Frontier you were just dead, ofc in the earlier versions of Oolite, missiles would have much the same effect on a ship with no ECM.

Makara wrote:
The main downside was that the game really couldn't be played without a joystick.

On my trusty Amiga and given the standards of joysticks of the day, I found a mouse to be preferable.

Makara wrote:
Ship Choice
Well, the light fighters were admittedly rubbish as a player ship - they could only pack a size 1 drive (so always took the same time to hyperspace) and couldn't fit an interesting amount of equipment. But from the Eagle II upwards things were okay. The game was definitely biased towards the small trader (Asp, Constrictor, Cobra III) with the glorious Imperial Courier let down by its lack of a fuel scoop fitment.

I found the smaller ships (even from the Eagle MKII upwards) to be awfully restricted in what they could fit. Too restricted to be "interesting" or "fun." Likewise the larger ships could be kitted out to be invulnerable, which likewise made them not much fun either. In the middle ground you had ships like the Python, Imp Courier and Imp Trader, which you could strike a decent balance between speed, combat viability, range and survivability so as to make the game fun. I remember doing a "grand tour" of inhabited space and constructed my own galactic map which showed how far out from 0,0 humanity had got. That was a great deal of fun.

Essentially, while having a consistent system, it lacked the flair which oolite has. Oolite allows for small, tough combat craft to exist, which can pick a lumbering trader apart. In Frontier, small combat craft were just small.

Makara wrote:
Okay - the autopilot could be rubbish quite often while being pretty much essential. Its main problem was that it always aimed to arrive at the target at zero velocity (depending on frame of reference). Using it to intercept fast moving objects produced horrible results. If you were willing to think about how the ship was accelerating and use manual flight accordingly. There was a definite trade off where you could either save playing time (using autopilot) or game time (manual flight) - going full acceleration half the way then flipping the ship over for maximum deceleration (same as in Iain M Banks' The Algebraist ).

The problem with manual control for me was that it quickly became quite tedious. I could do it and often did to save valuable time on missions (another big advantage over the auto-pilot), but the experience itself wasn't hugely enjoyable for me.

Makara wrote:
The time acceleration is really a matter of personal preference. I find the mystical jump drive in Elite rather irritating - it is necessary for the gameplay but throws the physics textbook completely out the window even by the cavalier standards of SF. Time acceleration produces the same gameplay result while feeling more "realistic" - given that the human body could survive accelerations that would leave internal organs thinly laminated to the ribcage . Unfortunately there were huge "steps" in the calculations under heavy time acceleration that produced... odd... results.

As I'm playing a game and can quite happily fantasise about "inertial dampners" and what not, the jump drive holds no problems for me. Indeed, I was rather miffed it wasn't in Frontier as time acceleration seemed quite mundane by comparison. Thats a horses for courses thing though, personal preference will out on the virtue of either gameplay mechanic.

Makara wrote:
On balance Frontier was a lot better than quite a few posters on this board would have you believe. There was still massive scope for improvement even given the technology at the time (making small items of equipment less greedy for hull capacity springs immediately to mind) and if it were to lift all the goodies from Oolite would be - to my mind - a truly awesome game.

I still think Frontier is a truly remarkable game in many respects and if I hadn't enjoyed playing it, I wouldn't have put the hours in to grow so familiar with its many flaws. Admitedly I didn't get the best of it on my Amiga (which struggled with the game, but it is remarkable the fit the damn thing onto a single floppy for that machine's use), whereas the experience on a P.C was smoother and more satisfying. Cruising into the atmosphere of Mars near Olympus Mons was always very impressive.

Doesn't excuse the fact that space was blue though.

matthewfarmery · Post by **matthewfarmery** » Mon Dec 07, 2009 7:10 pm

yeah I noticed that too, that space was blue, very bad form was that

Makara · Post by **Makara** » Mon Dec 07, 2009 7:28 pm

Sendraks wrote:
Doesn't excuse the fact that space was blue though.

Possibly just a really pessimistic view of the universe's longevity? Everything is red-shifted now as it expands, so by Frontier's time it was all blue-shifted as the big crunch approaches

Zieman · Post by **Zieman** » Tue Dec 08, 2009 8:50 am

matthewfarmery wrote:
but anyway, when you encounter pirates, it did slow you down, a lot faster, otherwise you wouldn't be able to turn, as the ship would still be travelling in one direction, so jousting wouldn't even be possible,

Not like this.

You see: when the player ship flies at high speed, let's say 9000 km/sec to one direction, the pirates don't "slow you down", they just match your velocity (relative to dominating mass, i.e the system's sun or some planet etc., if you're near enough).

You and the attacker form a 'system' that has a high velocity when perceived from outside it, i.e anywhere else in that solar system, but relative to the attacker (inside your mutual 'system') you start stationary.

Usually the AI tries to do several fly-bys, which means basically pointin the ship's nose towards you and firing main thrusters - if you do nothing or (worse still) use the autopilot or have engines on ('set speed' visible = the computer uses thrusters to try to achieve the 'set speed' towards where you ship's nose is pointing, relative to dominating mass) which results in jousting.

Post by **Disembodied** » Tue Dec 08, 2009 2:02 pm

Makara wrote:
The basic outline of combat was:

1 - Drop into normal time while autopiloting to destination when vessels detected
2 - Switch from Autopilot to Manual flight (having set an insanely high target speed on system entry) to acquire a target. This way you would always be under full forward acceleration during this phase - easy to work out what your ship was about to do.
3 - Turn the engines off (I think this is what a lot of people omitted) and use the forward/reverse thrusters to control your speed. No hurtling into huge ships for you.
4 - Repeat steps 2 & 3 until all enemies thwarted. Target switching was easy enough by flicking back to Manual control while acquiring a different one.

My experience of Frontier combat was:

1: switch on autopilot, and set it for the enemy ship.
2: wait for enemy to get within 10km, and start holding down the "fire" button
3: wait until the range is about 2km (it's easy to spot, because that's when the enemy ship would start to fire – assuming it hadn't blown up yet, and that it actually had a laser, of course) and turn off the autopilot.
4: veer slightly to the side, wait for the enemy to shoot on past you and
5: repeat.

If you had a big ship, of course, you could omit steps 2, 3, 4 and 5.

It's not like Frontier's physics were actually "realistic": wormholes aside, the levels of thrust and acceleration you can get in the game are pure nonsense without invoking just as much magic as you'd need in Elite. All it did, as far as I was concerned, was add a little extra element of irritation and annoyance, whilst killing off what is, after all, the heart and soul of the game – the dogfighting.

Wolfwood · Post by **Wolfwood** » Tue Dec 08, 2009 2:12 pm

Zieman wrote:
You see: when the player ship flies at high speed, let's say 9000 km/sec to one direction, the pirates don't "slow you down", they just match your velocity (relative to dominating mass, i.e the system's sun or some planet etc., if you're near enough).

You and the attacker form a 'system' that has a high velocity when perceived from outside it, i.e anywhere else in that solar system, but relative to the attacker (inside your mutual 'system') you start stationary.

Usually the AI tries to do several fly-bys, which means basically pointin the ship's nose towards you and firing main thrusters - if you do nothing or (worse still) use the autopilot or have engines on ('set speed' visible = the computer uses thrusters to try to achieve the 'set speed' towards where you ship's nose is pointing, relative to dominating mass) which results in jousting.

Yup, that's what I meant when I said that playing FFE effectively required 3D thinking skills. One had to consider all sorts of speeds when trying to catch up with a planet that hurtles at great speeds around the local star (and all the while the sun itself is hurtling around the centre of the galaxy (not that you had to worry about that in FFE since your speeds were always shown as relative to the bodies in a said star system)).

Ebi · Post by **Ebi** » Tue Dec 08, 2009 6:29 pm

The russian FFE MOD has nice graphics. You should watch some youtube videos. I could not detect any errors. FFE's navigation system is outstanding. I miss that in Oolite. If you find the physics too hard but like the planetary systems you may want to try Ad Astra (currently my favourite). This game is poetry:)

I've noticed that when you always try to fly away with an angle of 90 degree you and the AI will fly along a circle. That gives you a chance to get behind them.

I would like to see a game with Einsteinian physics. You could accelerate up to speed of light and due to time dilatation you can reach every point. Would be quite challenging for the developers since during those flights the universe evolves. Multiplayer would also be funny. Meet your friend at a specific point in space and time. Think 4D!

Frame · Post by **Frame** » Tue Dec 08, 2009 7:28 pm

FFE D3D sadly have some annoyance bugs too

1 I cannot reconfigure my standard 102 keyboard to work with this.., some keys work, other do not.

2 Still the feel of being lost when looking at the very non descriptive icons(this could have been improved with text hovering)

especially our current youth would be lost to tell what that icon of the classic phone is

.. now if it looked like a cell, they would know.

3 message text garbles up your icons.. you have to scroll the text away to see the icon only to find the text auto scrolls back to obscure your view, in order to tell you, that you forgot to pull up the landing gear...(Annoying boring task that should be automated anyway). pictures below document that resizing window do not help... Way room for improvement

4 mouse sensitivity.. adjustment ability from inside the game...

of course there is still

The brain-dead by birth the slingshot combat, I put on the docking music blue Danube while doing this.. because it fits..

.

Auto flight and docks makes me feel so not in control of my ship... more like a passenger controlling a USV. (Unmanned Controlled Vehicle/

on the + side...

Engine Lightning, and Specular lightning has been added..
nice sun and starry background..

Mp3 ability, however replace the mp3 is the only way to get your ingame music that you want..

time for some pics

nice sun

picture above
hmm kind a disappointing, nicely tiled triangles.. I'm sure this was better. in original FFE. In this also: The buildings sometimes sit on patches of green ground, while however the rest of the planet looks like this. LOD(level of detail) could be better regarding the buildings..

Beautiful, I love the sky, and nice sun, very nice attempt of making the sun light streak across the triangles...

Engine effect good, sun good, starry background good.. keyboard Control in the gutter... impractical mouse sensitivity adjustment ability

Models: what you can expect...

as you can see on all shots.. The HUD has way room for improvement..

On the bad side too, I cannot switch/minimize the window as it will crash in falining to create the D3D memory device.. (on dx 10 vista)

so I have to play in a window, where i can lose focus and survive...

I'm sure to play it now and then.. but never as much as Oolite...

Cheers Frame..

Edit:

it is quite impossible to stay alive, i'm attacked every where i go, as a newbee in a saker III with a 1 mw pulse laser and jitty controls, even the shittiest ship is a killer for me.. as I in 10 attemps, got 1 hit. on a Viper Mark II, and mind I have a clean record

Edit 2,.,

Its Klax 2 times, and BOOM... you got 1 second response time before you are blown up..

I begin to understand why this game failed....

Edit 3

I give up, its klax 2 times, and boom, and I even try to evade the main lanes if there is any... but are attacked by swarms of pirates.

..

Frame · Post by **Frame** » Sun Dec 13, 2009 9:00 pm

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. you might aswell just have done

Code: Select all

this.shipActivatedTimeAccelrator= function()
{
player.ship.explode()
}

Other than that, the game is ridden with pit falls.. anything remotely convenient is punished with some sort of penalty.

The fuel system is designed to be such, that you have to refuel.. between in-system stops, since when you have a hyperdrive you have to refuel now and then, even when you do not use the hyperdrive, and the bigger ship, the more often you have to refuel...

It was really discouraging, So I guess I'm not going to be playing this ever again as it has so many things going against it, and Oolite is much better...

Wolfwood · Post by **Wolfwood** » Mon Dec 14, 2009 10:37 am

If it works like the original, it is the MAX acceleration that is your problem. Simply use the second to highest acceleration instead

Frame · Post by **Frame** » Sun Dec 27, 2009 12:37 am

Wolfwood wrote:
If it works like the original, it is the MAX acceleration that is your problem. Simply use the second to highest acceleration instead

this is rumour control

max acceleration is not the culprit

its plain bad programming, this happens at any time acceleration. 1 arrow 2 arrows 3 or 4 or 5 arrows of time acceleration.

im sorry but this is a bug appearently never addressed...

Wolfwood · Post by **Wolfwood** » Sun Dec 27, 2009 6:59 am

I was a pretty active FFE player back in the day and that sort of thing only happened to me at max acceleration. However, with today's faster computers, 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).

Post by **Kaks** » Sun Dec 27, 2009 9:03 am

Wolfwood wrote:
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!

FSOneblin · Post by **FSOneblin** » Sun Dec 27, 2009 10:39 pm

OneoftheLost wrote:
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