Oolite Bulletins

Hi

Well, I hate to sound like the old grumpy and conservative man whom is sitting on a bench in the park wondering what has happened to the youth of today.

But after I have had more than a few looks at the spaceships Frontier Development makes for the new Elite: Dangerous I have a hard time accepting that the game is the fourth instalment of Elite.

If I look at a screenshot of the Anaconda then I simply cannot relate it to be Elite-like

http://www.frontier.co.uk/docs/images/e ... CardHD.jpg

to me the ship might as well belong to an entirely different game.

However, if I look at the image of the Cobra MKIII approaching the docking gate on this image:

http://www.eliteforever.co.uk/images/ELITE9.jpg

then I would recognise it as being from the new Elite with roots that goes back to the old Elite !

I think it all comes down to the shapes of the ships for me - ie. the spaceships in Elite all have very distinctive sharp edged and simple shapes and that is something I really like, as a comparison I can mention the spaceship from EVE which I don't really like.

Do anyone of you feel similar to what I'm feeling or am I just being "old, conservative and grumpy" ?

Hi Neo
The thing is Frontier aim to have the player being able to walk around the inside of the ship and because of that, the internal modelling will effect how the ship looks externally. I do understand what you mean though. For me I always liked the sharp angular lines of the Sidewinder, but in the new game, it's been bulked out a little and looks a bit like a pin cushion now. There will also be new ships to consider too. Basically then there is going to have to be trade offs bearing in mind the actual functionality of the ship models in the game. Still, I am glad the Cobra still looks very much like a Cobra.

Geraldine wrote:

Frontier aim to have the player being able to walk around the inside of the ship...

Sad, that... as is some of their ship design. But that's what the kids want these days.

As Geraldine says, Elite: Dangerous has to deal with the task of reconciling interior and exterior spaces, scaling, etc. But I agree, in principle. One of the great charms about the original ship design was that their form followed their function: they were all designed to be convex, to simplify the process of hidden-line removal when drawing them on-screen. While this was a purely technical issue, it did give a sense that there was some sort of "spaceshipness" which these craft all adhere to - like there is a sort of "boatness" which all water-craft adhere to, so that there is some commonality of design from a canoe to an aircraft carrier.

I worry that, although the ships in E:D (or "Happy Man with Combover", for short ) do have similar design sets for Federation ships, Empire ships, etc., they don't seem to have any overall essential "spaceshipness". But I may change my mind on that when I see them in action. The Empire's big Gravity Doughnut on their large ships is a nice touch, although I can't help thinking it might have made more sense if it rotated around the long axis of the ship. As it is, their capital ships do tend to look a little bit like novelty bottle-openers ...

Neo wrote:

But after I have had more than a few looks at the spaceships Frontier Development makes for the new Elite: Dangerous I have a hard time accepting that the game is the fourth instalment of Elite.

Like I already elaborated in other places, I still have a hard time accepting that Frontier Elite 2 is the second instalment of Elite.

Thus I have no problem recognizing Elite: Dangerous as the third instalment of the Frontier-series, while equally recognizing Oolite as the only other instalment to Elite that ever existed.

Geraldine wrote:

Hi Neo
The thing is Frontier aim to have the player being able to walk around the inside of the ship and because of that, the internal modelling will effect how the ship looks externally.

I don't have much knowledge when it comes to 3D modelling, so I don't really understand how the external shape of a ship will influence the how it looks internally ?

Geraldine wrote:

I do understand what you mean though. For me I always liked the sharp angular lines of the Sidewinder, but in the new game, it's been bulked out a little and looks a bit like a pin cushion now.

I can only agree with you - it is also a mystery to me why they rounded those sharp edges off

Commander McLane wrote:

Thus I have no problem recognizing Elite: Dangerous as the third instalment of the Frontier-series, while equally recognizing Oolite as the only other instalment to Elite that ever existed.

I'll agree; to me Oolite is Elite, because when I play the game I get the exact same feeling in moods as I did when plying it as a teen - an example: when I played Oolite for the very first time and approached the spacestation I just new what I had to do in order to dock, there wasn't any need for reading through a manual or anything it was just like another day at the office and I think it is worth to mention that I haven't, prior to my first docking in Oolite, done this in over 20 years.

Disembodied wrote:

....The Empire's big Gravity Doughnut on their large ships is a nice touch, although I can't help thinking it might have made more sense if it rotated around the long axis of the ship...

It's a cool looking ship but I worry about how you're supposed to get out of the lift in the non spinning part and into the spinning part, won't the floor just be whizzing past you really quickly and you have to somehow jump onto the wall, a bit like trying to jump onto a roundabout in a playground, eg, like these school kids demonstrate http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OwqR7Hb4jY - note: video has a bit of rolling around on the floor in agony and swearing

Personally I think the Gravity Doughnut ship looks kinda stupid and it doesn't fall into my self-established category of Elite ships *getting old, conservative and grumpy all over again*

Neo wrote:

it is also a mystery to me why they rounded those sharp edges off

I agree with this as well. The excuse that the changes have to do with internal space does not really pan out when you consider the fact that they could just have made the hull bigger and there would have been no need to round off the edges.

Wolfwood wrote:

The excuse that the changes have to do with internal space does not really pan out when you consider the fact that they could just have made the hull bigger and there would have been no need to round off the edges.

Frontier wanted to maintain the external scale of the ships, yet at the same time have useful cargo room inside. They could have course reduced the cargo space a bit to maintain those classic angular lines of the original ship set. For the larger ships this would be less of an issue, but for those smaller ships (especially the Sidewinder starter ship), some compromise had to be reached.

Geraldine wrote:

Wolfwood wrote:

The excuse that the changes have to do with internal space does not really pan out when you consider the fact that they could just have made the hull bigger and there would have been no need to round off the edges.

Frontier wanted to maintain the external scale of the ships, yet at the same time have useful cargo room inside. They could have course reduced the cargo space a bit to maintain those classic angular lines of the original ship set. For the larger ships this would be less of an issue, but for those smaller ships (especially the Sidewinder starter ship), some compromise had to be reached.

Well, if that is the reason for making the Sidewinder with rounded edges then I must say that I find it to be a rather lame excuse !

If they knew they would have the problem then I don't understand why didn't upscale the external models of the ships to avoid this problem.

In my opinion: a spaceship with rounded edges is not Elite-style - ie. consider steampunk, manga or anime they all have styles with follow guidelines for how they should look

The Elite universe has been with us for so long that it is entitled to have its own style.

Interesting conversation.

I'm not too bothered about edges being rounded off, I always assumed they were a bit rounded in 'reality' and that the wire-frame graphics were rendering them only roughly. (For me the defining example is the Cobra on the original Elite box. That's what it, the Python and Vipers 'really' looked like - the interlocking triangles were the best representation of them that the scanner could manage.)



The shape of the ships was determined by the limitations of wire-frame hidden line removal in an 8-bit world, so I think it's time to move beyond that!

Absolutely sharp edges on ships doesn't seem very realistic to me and would, arguably, be impractical for ships that need to fuel scoop or land on planets where some measure of aerodynamics becomes important. Sharp edges would be a liability, a blunt profile is much more appropriate.

As for the internal space. Yes, it's a consideration. The Cobra isn't too bad as is, but some of the ships would have vast quantities of wasted space in their original designs. I think Frontier are looking hard at how you would get those canisters of cargo aboard, where the living spaces would be and how the cockpits would work (including how you move between these zones), where the engines and other tech need to fitin the chassis. This was never a consideration in the earlier games.

I think they're treading a difficult course between realism and homage. We all know how trying to reconcile scale and distance is a complete minefield.

I agree the Imperial capital ships presents a world of engineering challenges too, with the 'doughnut'.

Cheers,

Drew.

I had no box-cover to go by, but I always imagined those wire-framed ships to be angular - like this:

^^^ That is cool! How long did it take you to build Cody?

<howls> If only! No, that beautiful model is Raytheon's work (some great stuff on his website), and I believe it sits in a certain office in Cambridge.