Oolite Bulletins

I have to agree. Every game thats been tagged as "The Next Elite" has always lost the point of Elite. Elite was simple! Easy to understand and easy to play. End of story. Every game since seems to revel in making the experience as complicated and convoluted as possible.
I remember rushing out to get X2 thinking this is it, Elite for the 21st Century. Wow what a disappointment. Far too complex and crap FMV/cutscenes to try and shoehorn in some type of back story urgh.
That's what prompted me to start developement of Deepspace. Oolite is awesome though and if I had the technical knowhow to do an OXP to transform it into Deepspace I would (I may still try if Deepspace fails).
EVE online is another I looked at and then hated. Whats with the thousands of icons. The third person style ship control? again. Its the Everquest of space trading/combat. Required far too much investment of time if you ask me
Its not to say those games are rubbish. They're not. But its not Elite, not as I loved it. I suspect Elite IV maybe too complex too if Frontier was anything to go by, but we can always hope. Having said that I did gleen some enjoyment from Frontier. Pity the combat was ruined by the physic

FMV and cutscenes - that's the other thing. I don't want to play as Kayron Jarvis or Julian Brennan or Edison Trent or whoever - I want to be dropped into the universe with a modest ship and a fistful of credits and make my way from there. (I know you can opt out of the storyline in some games, but not all).

Unfortunately I feel that Elite IV will take a lot of what's been done in the X games onboard, and in trying to accomplish something technically outstanding the spirit of the original - which is what made us all fans when it comes down to it - will be lost among the noise.

You hit it on the head there Sabreman. Elite IV I reckon will be too much like the rest of the wannabe's out there. They'll see them as there competition rather than focussing on their own well established ideas and mechanics.
All I ever wanted from Frontier was the same combat and flight mechanics but with a bigger universe and more choice (ie the bulletin boards etc). Unfortunately they went and introduced 'real' physics and ruined half the game because of it

All they need to do with Elite IV is:
1. Roll back to the Elite (Oolite) combat and flight systems = very playable.
2. Keep the Frontier Universe and backstories, the Federation, the Empire, the Independants Add even more inhabited worlds maybe.
3. Expand the trading a little, keep the buying and selling ships and flying down onto planets etc. The Bulletin Boards and missions.
4. Update the graphics to the standard of say EVE online. Beautiful ship designs - truely lovely.

...and erm job done I think. Chuck in a bit of Ship customization and the jobs a good 'un It's good to dream

DeepSpace wrote:

lots of good stuff

Don't forget in amongst the ship customisation, the ability to see what other ships are equipped with (aerials for ECMs, missiles on racks, laser mountings, etc.)

Captain Hesperus

Right on Commander!
Yeah that sort of made it into Frontier didn't it? But absolutely. Ships modelled with specific hard points for weapons and upgrades so you can see how well armoured your opponent is.
Another nice touch would be a sort of Sniper scope, to zoom in on distant ships and see what they're packing before heading full tilt into battle.

ha ha we should all get our heads together and make Elite IV! or should that be Oolite II! ha ha.

DeepSpace wrote:

Another nice touch would be a sort of Sniper scope, to zoom in on distant ships and see what they're packing before heading full tilt into battle.

In my case it would probably be head for hills ("Torus for the nebula?")....

There's nothing wrong with living a lifetime in abject cowardice, the freeze-dried corpses of heroes are everywhere.

Captain Hesperus
P.S. I am so into sniper scopes

Deepspace,

the word on the street is that Elite IV flight controls will be 'half a step back'. Not sure what that means but it wont be newtonian, but wont be elite either..will be an amalgamation.

Also, it WILL be more complicated...Braben talked about your character literally walking through a starport with hundreds of people walking past and then one person who eyes are looking directly at you..you turn, the person brings a gun out, everyone runs and a laser fight starts...that was the kind of detail he wanted, which was why he made roller coaster tycoon with the expressions on the ppls faces...every game has been made to develop some technology to make elite iv what he wanted it to be.



On the first note, I actually love the realistic physics. makes it feel more real, and less star wars to me. real, complete solar systems I can check out and following the rules of newton make it a better experience for me.

i want to see more emergent behavior in these space games. simple rules that have the capability to interact in complex ways, basically.

for example, you aren't scripting quests or events, but writing a set of underlying behaviors for how the automata act and most importantly, interact.

a very simple example of what i'm talking about could be seen with police and pirates. in one setup, you could manually script police to hunt down pirates. in another setup, you could give each unit a sort of prime directive. police always attack anyone who attacks someone without provocation. pirates always steal. police will hunt pilots as mandated by their behavior, but without specific instructions to hunt units of a certain type.

hardwar and space rangers 2 are the only single-player space games i can think of that had a lot of emergence going on (especially the latter) although the x2 allowed for some emergent gameplay styles (unfortunately the npcs don't seem to use them back).

as for complexity, it's not that complexity is a problem. it's how it's presented. x2 came up again and truthfully x2's not that complex. the data and information feedback's just really poor. once you get beyond that, the underlying tactic you use in elite is basically the same, although more focused on specific goods instead of a broad gross per capita income number.

in general though anything less complex/obfuscated than battlecruiser should generally be workable

have any of you played sundog? that was a really solid interface. i imagine that if elite IV happens, braben would go for something like that.

I see what you're saying. I have no problem with NPC's in Space Stations etc. Thats fine by me. Its the over complication of trading systems and money management and resource management in alot of these games. True the feedback, the way its presented is important. But once you have to order wingmen around and manage energy levels of your fore and aft shields and decide how much energy can be spared for weapons, thats when its really looses it for me.
If Elite IV is stepping back from full Newtonian physics thats only a good thing from my perpective. Its a neat idea and in most cases it works fine, but for combat it completely doesn't work, its horrible.
Plus if you want a game to appeal to as many people as possible then it has to be simple to understand otherwise you'll only grab a small niche market.

There are first ingame screenshots from the wolf359 game. It looks impressive to me


http://www.wolf-359.de/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=42

But once you have to order wingmen around and manage energy levels of your fore and aft shields and decide how much energy can be spared for weapons, thats when its really looses it for me.

i don't think x2 did that. in fact the flight seemed scaled back a bit to focus on the economic and trading aspects. also i think they rebalanced the resource management to be a bit more straightforward in some patches. or rather, improved the AI of your staff so it was most just reduced to buying some freighters and sticking them in a buy queue.

actually that does bring up another problem i see in some games of this type. i don't really think that a space trader type games like elite should focus too much on being realistic space sims. i don't really have a problem with trying to do an 'everything' sort of game at all. it's not even a problem if certain parts get reduced in favor of other focus areas, like how privateerhad a toned back economy and space... phyiscs... realisticness in favor of customization, exploring, and story. what is a problem is when one area, no matter how well done, gets in the way of the other areas.

i guess what i'm saying is that if yuo have a space trader and flying the ship is nigh-impossible or just takes hours upon hours to get anywhere (Battlecruiser's crew micromanagement, or really awkward newtonian flight) -- that's when you get problems.

although truthfully the physics in FE2/FFE always felt very off to me.

Looks nice actually. Is Wolf 359 game a standalone or an Oolite OXP?
Hey but if we're pimping games here's mine...

..Miangele. You're right of course. I just like stuff to be simple. My brain isn't very clever so I prefer stuff to be easy to understand ha ha ha. Deepspace will probably be a shadow of what Oolite currently is. But on the plus side it'll look nice, but thats about it LOL

Both look cool! One suggestion, mabey reduce the Cockpit bars and stuff. Although it looks really nice it may obscure the playing area a bit. As both designers have said, still a way to go before a playable version. Got to say although I love Oolite and played it obsessively, having made Elite and done all the missions, I've been really just doing mods for the last year (which is almost as much fun ) Look forward to getting my teeth into a new Elite type game as a player again!

I've got to say I enjoy modding stuff. Once I learn how to do it properly. Deepspace won't be mod-able Too much coding required for that. Once complete (Deepspace) I'd love to go back to Oolite and start modding something in that though We'll see.