Elite 4 (Dangerous)

[ollygd]

Did anybody play Frontier: Elite 2 much on their Amiga years back? Well, I wonder if you've heard much about this?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20165344

Kickstarter Page:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1461411552/elite-dangerous

I'm planning on kicking in a few quid on pay-day :-)

[odin]

Looks like Newtonian physics! I.e. like in Elite 2, not the Spitfires-in-space bull**** physics most space "sims" have (Elite 1 as well I think). Not sure about the MMO stuff though, I'll be sitting on the fence for this for a while yet.

[weirdami]

Looks like Newtonian physics! I.e. like in Elite 2, not the Spitfires-in-space bull**** physics most space "sims" have (Elite 1 as well I think). Not sure about the MMO stuff though, I'll be sitting on the fence for this for a while yet.

Newtonian physics. Bullstars physics. It's all relative, if you go fast enough. Potato. Tomato. Home slice.

[gertsy]

Newtonian physics. Bullstars physics. It's all relative, if you go fast enough. Potato. Tomato. Home slice.

Then Sandwiches.

Was pretty keen on Frontier.  Hmm wonder if the kickstart will do better. Its been going for 10 years.

[klx300r]

My pledge is in! Just seeing the original Elite gameplay with modern graphics is cool enough for me

[ollygd]

I used to play this waaay too much when I was younger. They mentioned they were going to do a fourth Elite game and go down the MMORPG route back in 2000. As I rememember, they decided that internet technology wasn't yet mature enough.

During the noughties, they had a few false starts in the which were always disappointing. I kept my interest though as a guy at work had a friend who worked for Frontier. He assured me it was being worked on in the background....and I guess it must have been true!

I do hope they reach their kickstarter target - seem to be doing pretty well though.

[Wilse]

Nice.

I actually got a little bit of nostalgic excitement watching that.

[ollygd]

Looks like they'll need to make about £15 a day on average to hit their target. They may hit that today, they were at £419k when I got up this morning!

[kvasir]

Frontier Elite II was one of my favorites (still fire it up from time to time, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hV_juoQvAbE&feature=share&list=UUKH06xroQsn7EOUHXeb7I0g), though my brother and I were talking about writing a similar type game using fractal math to generate star systems and such, were pretty in-depth about it. Neither of us had the coding skill to make it happen, though. Only mention it because one of the problems we couldn't figure out was how to handle "real" physics in an MMORPG setting. For just one player, hitting "fast-forward" to get the days/weeks required to transit from one planet or star system to the next isn't a problem, but trying to co-ordinate this accross several real-time players would require literally "future knowledge" of every players actions in the game. The best we could come up with was a universal time acceleration, which would compromise "reality" for maneuvering in local space. Gives me a headache just thinking about it.
Anyway, for multi-player support, one would need to scale back the realism a bit.

[ollygd]

Interesting. Looks like it may not end up being a MMORPG after all - possibly for the reasons you have described. That said, DB is holding his cards tight so anything could materialise at this point.

Looks like they smashed their target yesterday by about £3k

Roll on!