Oolite 2: scales, Frontier and flames

[DaddyHoggy]

just wanna add my 2c to the scale debate - realistic environments only enhance playablitiy imho, if it detracts then something's wrong..

I'm new to Oolite but showing it off to a mate the other day, trying to drum up interest and had to go thru explaining why the scale's broken and that if he wanted realism Frontier was the only option...

But Frontier was more fun because of the realistic scale, not less. More engaging, immersive, evocative and all that..

It's not a case of tiny stations orbiting huge planets but HUGE stations orbiting realsitically-sized planets, surely?

Oolite already has time acceleration built it... so that's no problem. And of course it would be perfectly complemented by realistic velocities too... The game already borrows from Frontier here and there, why shouldn't it follow the same logical evolution?

To be perfectly honest, as much as i'm enjoying Oolite, if FE3D was in a comparably finished state i'd be playing that instead... all the best things about Elite's gameplay are carried over and developed in Frontier... for all the reasons Elite's a great game, Frontier is better, and realism is the key... the thing that made Elite such a gamechanger in the first place...

The realism vs fun argument was always a false dichotomy. I mean how far would you take it - is 2D more 'fun' than 3D? If 3D ain't fun it's cos the gameplay ain't there, and the same applies to scale. Give me realistic sizes and speeds, long range scanners, time acceleration, maybe a simple autopilot.. and something to do or see.. and to me that's fun. If Elite changed everything, Frontier raised the bar.

Besides, at the moment to travel any distance in Oolite i'm constantly switching between hyperspeed, afterburners and accelerated time anyway. If anything, consistent size, speed and time scaling would be less of a grind than these current compromises to classic gameplay. I mean hyperspeed? What the hell is that anyway? And the whole 'mass locked' thing, really.. it was necessary in the original game but missing from FE2 for a reason...

Anyway, that's the excuse i made to my mate - it's a 'retro' concession to 8-bit nostalgia. And where Elite concedes realism, Frontier positively features it... it was a better game precisely because it was more of a sim.... just as Elite was amongst its competitors back in the day. This was self-evidently Braben's ethos all along.. Elite was unprecedentedly realistic, Frontier just moreso.. and that's what made 'em so addictive.

/rant

I played Elite on C64 (to Elite) and on the Amiga (also to Elite). I played Frontier on the Amiga and on the PC and it was dull, dull, dull, dull. Seriously, if you think Frontier was better than Elite than you're definitely playing the wrong game when it comes to Oolite, and as others have suggested, Pioneer is the game for you.

Elite was never conceived to be a simulation - it was conceived to be a game where you didn't have 3 "lives" and a game was designed to last for ten minutes - that was the only mould B&B were trying to break. Space is enormous, to encounter any other ship other than docking the situations would have to be contrived (made player-centric again) or be so rare as to be utterly pointless.

I'm intrigued by how you would make a realistically scaled Oolite not the dullest game ever created - how many thousands of ships you'd have to populate the system with to have any chance of meeting one...

I suppose you'd want Newtonian Physics too, so you spend your entire flight altering your flight vector in the vague hope of getting back on the tale of the one ship you've encountered recently to have a fight with it?

[Disembodied]

just wanna add my 2c to the scale debate - realistic environments only enhance playablitiy imho, if it detracts then something's wrong..

That all depends on how much, and what sort of, realism you're injecting. Newtonian physics = more real, but less fun, for example, in my opinion anyway.

But Frontier was more fun because of the realistic scale, not less. More engaging, immersive, evocative and all that..

I agree in principle about the sense of scale: that was one area where Frontier was better than Elite. Although I'm still not certain that the scale was realistic: it was just less unrealistic than Elite. Reality is often inconveniently awkward with regard to making a good game ...

It's not a case of tiny stations orbiting huge planets but HUGE stations orbiting realsitically-sized planets, surely?

That's fine for the stations. How about other ships? Do we make the ships huge, too, so people can see them and we can have fun dogfighting with them? Because – to me – that's the fun part: the dogfighting. The jinky zip-and-twist, close-quarters duelling. Horribly, horribly unrealistic, but loads and loads of fun.

The realism vs fun argument was always a false dichotomy. I mean how far would you take it - is 2D more 'fun' than 3D? If 3D ain't fun it's cos the gameplay ain't there, and the same applies to scale. Give me realistic sizes and speeds, long range scanners, time acceleration, maybe a simple autopilot.. and something to do or see.. and to me that's fun. If Elite changed everything, Frontier raised the bar.

Realism vs. fun is anything but a false dichotomy. After all, the reason we play games is because – personally speaking, anyway – reality isn't a wild and crazy thrill-filled ride of joy ... Games are games and reality is reality. I play the one to get away from the other. Making chess "more real" wouldn't necessarily make it a better game. You can make a realistic medieval battle simulator, of course, but it's unlikely ever to be as popular – as fun, in fact – as chess. You could really screw chess up, though, if you said something like: "Well, it would be more realistic for the King to be mounted: therefore, he should be able to move like a Knight. And he should be able to hide inside Castles." An obviously OTT example, but games are also complex structures, with a great many interdependencies: pull on one bit and all sorts of other things might start shifting out of whack.

Games are abstractions. Obviously, some games contain more of a simulation element than others. Some people want pure simulation, and are happy to "play" at flying a passenger airliner for six hours in real time from London to New York, nearly all of it on autopilot. That's not Oolite. Oolite, like Elite before it, is about dogfighting in space, with some trading thrown in to stitch it all together. And, frankly, as such it kicks the rump of anything else out there. (Speaking of 2D v 3D, by the way: the 2D, top down Escape Velocity space-trading games gave me much, much more fun than Frontier ever did.)

Starting with the epic disappointment that was Frontier, I have seen loads of space games come trotting along, like Terminus and the various X games, which have promised me thrills and delivered me either tedium, or control systems so complicated they would give a stenographic octopus conniptions, or both. Why have so many people spent so much time recreating Elite? Because Elite rocked. Nothing else, for pure gaming pleasure, came close. Frontier had the sense of scale (sort of), and the chance of exploration (except there was nothing to find), but there wasn't any game in there. God knows I looked for one, but – nope, it wasn't there. Too much realism (although without ever becoming, y'know, realistic), and not enough fun.

Honestly, I think it's the realism that kills these attempts to be "the next Elite". Loads of really clever people, who remember having so much fun with Elite, want to make a game like Elite but with the sense of scale and all the physics and everything ... and none of them do. Their games are strangled by too much realism. (In the X games, for example, I'm surprised I don't have to fill out a tax return.)

Games are art forms. Like any art form, the secret is not what you put in but what you leave out. Kudos, I say, to Giles and the other devs, for keeping – even enhancing – the fun, and not tying themselves up in the tedious snares of a spurious attempt to be "realistic".

Edit: ninja'd, to a large degree, by DH – and him wounded, too ...

[DaddyHoggy]

But you put it much better than I!

[Commander McLane]

@ Vibrator: what strikes me as odd in your argument that realism makes for a better game is that you're explicitly relying on time acceleration. With that you break your whole argument. Time acceleration is utterly, utterly unrealistic; it doesn't exist in reality and it never will. (Also in Oolite time acceleration is a debugging feature. It will not be part of the next stable release.)

A space game with a realistic scale, but without time acceleration is not going to be fun. I wouldn't play it, and I doubt that you would.

Elite/Oolite never needed time acceleration to be the most thoroughly enjoyable games.

[CommonSenseOTB]

I must be blunt. Frontier ruined it for me. Then I found oolite searching for elite(freeware?) and THE game has been redeemed with interest!

[Vibrator]

cheers all, no time to respond to every point but breifly - time acceleration (as in slowed perception) is easier to swallow than 'hyperspeed' getting 'mass locked', or maybe that's just me...

Realism: with respect to where it really counts; where it adds rather than detracting. Realistic scale is more fun cos it's more aesthetically pleasing - mini planets don't exactly help suspension of disbelief. And whether ships are 'huge' as well isn't the point- rather it's the visual impression of realistic relative scales. The ISS is pretty huge but it's a tiny spec from the surface of the moon and breathtaking up close with the Earth in the background. Realistic scale generates a sense of presence and immersion that's eroded by unrealistic scale, period. GTA still doesn't have realistic scale so for all the detail still feels like toytown. Driver does have realistic scale, so despite the comparative lack of detail provides more of a cinematic experience. And maybe Fe2 wasn't at 1:1 scale i don't know but it was ruddy big!


..and to all those who thought FE2 boring..!!? It's exactly the same gameplay, trading & fighting, just with a better range of playable ships and better environment detail.. The kinds of arguments you guys are making against it seem to be in the same vein as all those publishers who turned down the original.. I preferred FE2 for all the same reasons i enjoyed Elite, no contradictions.. but no point pressing it further, i love Oolite, been playing it every day for the last fortnight and on exactly the same buzz i get from all the Elite versions... it's a brilliant recreation in it's own right.. just adding grist for the mill...

[m4r35n357]

.and to all those who thought FE2 boring..!!? It's exactly the same gameplay, trading & fighting, just with a better range of playable ships and better environment detail.. The kinds of arguments you guys are making against it seem to be in the same vein as all those publishers who turned down the original.. I preferred FE2 for all the same reasons i enjoyed Elite, no contradictions.. but no point pressing it further, i love Oolite, been playing it every day for the last fortnight and on exactly the same buzz i get from all the Elite versions... it's a brilliant recreation in it's own right.. just adding grist for the mill...

I feel you missed an opportunity to comment on Pioneer, I think you need to rule it out as an option, otherwise, it is an option

[DaddyHoggy]

cheers all, no time to respond to every point but breifly - time acceleration (as in slowed perception) is easier to swallow than 'hyperspeed' getting 'mass locked', or maybe that's just me...

Realism: with respect to where it really counts; where it adds rather than detracting. Realistic scale is more fun cos it's more aesthetically pleasing - mini planets don't exactly help suspension of disbelief. And whether ships are 'huge' as well isn't the point- rather it's the visual impression of realistic relative scales. The ISS is pretty huge but it's a tiny spec from the surface of the moon and breathtaking up close with the Earth in the background. Realistic scale generates a sense of presence and immersion that's eroded by unrealistic scale, period. GTA still doesn't have realistic scale so for all the detail still feels like toytown. Driver does have realistic scale, so despite the comparative lack of detail provides more of a cinematic experience. And maybe Fe2 wasn't at 1:1 scale i don't know but it was ruddy big!


..and to all those who thought FE2 boring..!!? It's exactly the same gameplay, trading & fighting, just with a better range of playable ships and better environment detail.. The kinds of arguments you guys are making against it seem to be in the same vein as all those publishers who turned down the original.. I preferred FE2 for all the same reasons i enjoyed Elite, no contradictions.. but no point pressing it further, i love Oolite, been playing it every day for the last fortnight and on exactly the same buzz i get from all the Elite versions... it's a brilliant recreation in it's own right.. just adding grist for the mill...

FE2 and Elite don't have exactly the same gameplay for the very reasons you've given yourself. In FE2 your ship accelerated at X g for hours and hours and hours ( or minutes if you went to 10,000x normal time) - then there'd be a blip on the screen as a pirate went whizzing past, you'd lock on to it and then for hours and hours and hours (or minutes if you wound the time acceleration back up to many 1,000x normal time) chasing it down, which in fact meant letting the auto-pilot make the adjustments for you. If you were really lucky you'd get two or three shots off before you over flew each other and you could begin the process again. If you were unlucky you'd run out of fuel during this process...

In the end I bought shields and turrets and either rammed my enemies to death or used the moving turrets while paused "cheat".

Huge scales means huge speeds and huge speeds means minimal interactions because to get anywhere you have to be going really fast and so does everything and everyone else.

I still own a working Amiga and Frontier and when we had this debate last year I dug them both out just to confirm that it was as bad as I remember and it was...

[Zieman]

@ Vibrator: what strikes me as odd in your argument that realism makes for a better game is that you're explicitly relying on time acceleration. With that you break your whole argument. Time acceleration is utterly, utterly unrealistic; it doesn't exist in reality and it never will.

In FE2 (or was it FFE, or both?) the feature isn't called time acceleration, it is "Stardreamer Time Control", which should be entirely possible even with near-future Earth technology. The way I see it, the apparatus doesn't accelerate time, it slows one's perception of time (and maybe metabolism too) to ease the tedium of space flight.

[Killer Wolf]

Space is enormous, to encounter any other ship other than docking the situations would have to be contrived (made player-centric again) or be so rare as to be utterly pointless.

I'm intrigued by how you would make a realistically scaled Oolite not the dullest game ever created - how many thousands of ships you'd have to populate the system with to have any chance of meeting one...

i don't think this is a totally valid argument. Sure space is big, but realistically, why would you be heading out there? Of course you'll encounter more in docking(/trading) situations - everyone in the game is trading to make money, therefore flying set routes/directions to the trade points, or waiting to pirate them, and therefore lying in wait in those space lanes.
the above argument smacks to me of saying you've got a great driving simulation but if you leave the roads you're not going to encounter many cars in the middle of big fields.

[Commander McLane]

Space is enormous, to encounter any other ship other than docking the situations would have to be contrived (made player-centric again) or be so rare as to be utterly pointless.

I'm intrigued by how you would make a realistically scaled Oolite not the dullest game ever created - how many thousands of ships you'd have to populate the system with to have any chance of meeting one...

i don't think this is a totally valid argument. Sure space is big, but realistically, why would you be heading out there? Of course you'll encounter more in docking(/trading) situations - everyone in the game is trading to make money, therefore flying set routes/directions to the trade points, or waiting to pirate them, and therefore lying in wait in those space lanes.

We are (at least I am) only talking about the space lanes. My reasoning is this: your visual indicator that you are really traveling from the witchpoint to the station is that the planet gradually becomes bigger in your view screen. For me that's an essential part of the game, and I don't want to miss it. Now, if the planet is made bigger by a large margin (100 times), you equally have to place the witchpoint 100 times farther out, if you still want a growing-planet-as-I-get-closer effect. Therefore, if you don't want to add 100 times more ships to the space lane (which is currently above the capability of Oolite's engine), you'll be 100 times less likely to meet anyone in the space lane. You'll have the same amount of encounters with pirates, other traders, asteroid fields, etc., but stretched on a journey that takes 100 times longer than currently. The same action you now get in 3 minutes would be watered down to 5 full hours of game play. Thus most of these 5 hours would be filled with absolutely nothing.

[Disembodied]

cheers all, no time to respond to every point but breifly - time acceleration (as in slowed perception) is easier to swallow than 'hyperspeed' getting 'mass locked', or maybe that's just me...

They're both as unrealistic as the other, really, in that they both involve fiddling with the physics (but then, so does FTL travel). The "masslock" game mechanic is a brilliant little device, though, as it forces the player to interact with other ships – and this, after all, is the point of the game.

As for the sense of scale ... personally, I agree, to an extent. I'd really love to play a game with a properly massive sense of scale. Frontier did approach that, sort of, and the physical reality of the planets and moons as places you could land on was fantastic.

..and to all those who thought FE2 boring..!!? It's exactly the same gameplay, trading & fighting, just with a better range of playable ships and better environment detail..

Yes, in Frontier you trade and you fight, but you don't dogfight. Like DH says above, it was just screaming back and forth on autopilot, holding down the trigger for a bit and screaming back and forth some more until one of you died, usually of boredom or old age. Dogfighting is the heart and soul of Elite/Oolite, and Frontier – obsessed with the idea of having "realistic" Newtonian(ish) physics in this one bit of the game for some reason – threw it away.

The question remains: what would the Frontier universe have been like if Braben had just kept Elite's ship flight mechanics and combat? I'm guessing it would have been vastly better, if only because it couldn't really have been much worse ... but would it have been as good a game as Elite was, or Oolite is? That's really hard to say.

Expanding the scale out to even something like Frontier's shrunken version of a solar system means vastly reducing the chances for ship-to-ship interaction, especially as there would be multiple destinations in most systems. Off the top of my head, I'd guess you'd have to chuck out some more realism and say, OK, the Torus drive is how we skim at FTL speeds across the vast distances between planets, within a solar system. But it's not universal: it only works along a web of, um, gravometric flux that connects up any significant chunks of mass (planets, moons, large asteroids etc.). In other words, there are roads, lanes, spaceways, some broad, some narrow: each system has a geography – one which changes over time as planets orbit the sun, but still, a geography. We have the awesome sense of scale, and we can look around and say "cool!", but 99.99% is unused and we can focus on having fun in the remaining 0.01% where all the action is.

That's a huge change, though. I'd love to see it – I'd love to see if it would work – but I think it would be more of an Oolite II thing than an Oolite 2.0.

[DaddyHoggy]

Space is enormous, to encounter any other ship other than docking the situations would have to be contrived (made player-centric again) or be so rare as to be utterly pointless.

I'm intrigued by how you would make a realistically scaled Oolite not the dullest game ever created - how many thousands of ships you'd have to populate the system with to have any chance of meeting one...

i don't think this is a totally valid argument. Sure space is big, but realistically, why would you be heading out there? Of course you'll encounter more in docking(/trading) situations - everyone in the game is trading to make money, therefore flying set routes/directions to the trade points, or waiting to pirate them, and therefore lying in wait in those space lanes.
the above argument smacks to me of saying you've got a great driving simulation but if you leave the roads you're not going to encounter many cars in the middle of big fields.

No, I'm just saying, if we scale things up, then we need to scale up the number of ships. If the distance between witchspace beacon and planet is increased 1000-fold then the number of ships would need to be increased 1000-fold to have the same effective number of encounters. If you argue that we just use the time multiplier to increase the time between encounters so we don't need to increase the number of ships then what's the point? If most of that newly scaled space is to be missed out because you're permanently on fast-forward then what the point of it? It clearly doesn't need to be there. So, I'll try again - without scaling up massively (the same proportion as distance) the number of ships to be encountered, the only place we're likely to meet other ships, is at the WS beacon or coming in to dock - the rest will be mostly (empty) space - filled with ships running on fast-forward to miss all of this increased/realistic scale out.

[Vibrator]

.and to all those who thought FE2 boring..!!? It's exactly the same gameplay, trading & fighting, just with a better range of playable ships and better environment detail.. The kinds of arguments you guys are making against it seem to be in the same vein as all those publishers who turned down the original.. I preferred FE2 for all the same reasons i enjoyed Elite, no contradictions.. but no point pressing it further, i love Oolite, been playing it every day for the last fortnight and on exactly the same buzz i get from all the Elite versions... it's a brilliant recreation in it's own right.. just adding grist for the mill...

I feel you missed an opportunity to comment on Pioneer, I think you need to rule it out as an option, otherwise, it is an option

Just downloaded the latest Alpha and find it is suprisingly playable, thanks for the heads up. Oolite's got me back on the classic tip for now so i'll prolly stick with it a while, but Pioneer is looking impressive. My comments really were aimed at broadening the classic Elite experience rather than another remake of FE, kit and caboodle.. Something like a classic Elite frontend with a more FE2 backend, or something. Dunno. I do think the scaling in the original Elite is as much a concession to hardware limitations as playability, and that FE2 is faithful to the vision of Elite in a way the original 68k version couldn't be, that being cheifly a space sim, with stuff to do. Oolite's modability is a great development on the theme - adding more spacey stuff, and things to do... yet a departure from the original.. with hardware no longer an issue realistic scale would seem a similar kind of logical progression.

But again, this is in no way a criticism against Oolite - just an opinion for this thread topic, inspired by previous comments..

[DaddyHoggy]

There's no proof I've seen in any interview with Bell or Braben that they conceived Elite to be a "Space Sim" - if this is your starting point then I'm not surprised that you find the original concept of Elite to be limiting, you're looking for a Space Simulation where there isn't one.

Pioneer therefore sounds right up your street.

Or you could try and find something stunningly unplayable - with physics up the wazzoo - and then you'll see that Simulation != Game != fun.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Combat