Elite video game reboot hits funding target

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20897768

by SeanDav • 14 years ago

65 43 14 years ago

bbc.co.uk

Geez, it's been almost a decade since the last good space sim, Freelancer.

I wonder why no one has made a mainstream space sim game since (X3 is a notable exception, though the learning curve is quite steep). Between this and Star Citizen, there seems to be legions of space nerds like myself, ready to throw money at even the possibility of a good game.

outworlder3• 14 years ago

There you go: 'legions of space nerds' is probably still a fraction of the total market - and the studios are not aiming for that.

That should not prevent smaller operations from succeeding. The 'space' theme is still used (see SPAZ, FTL even if they are indies).

I think that the 'simulation' genre is not as popular as before, flight simulators (combat or otherwise) have become rarer.

talmand4• 14 years ago

Actually this is a common problem caused by the large publishers. They don't seem to do much market research other than every once in a while they throw a bunch of small budget stuff out there and whatever genre sells decently gets spammed to hell and back. The other genres are essentially ignored until the selling genre is played out. Then we get the small projects again to repeat the process.

It's an old argument: publishers say "we won't make that game because it won't sell" and the market says "we can't buy that game because you won't make it".

But it's understandable, most of these companies have to show quarterly profits so they are adverse to risk. Creating a game that will cost millions of dollars and years to make for a genre that has stagnated, for whatever reason, is a huge risk.

The small developers are the key to filling this niche. Things like the recent indie resurgence and Kickstarter have made this more evident. The problem is often the large publishers buy these small developers and then proceed to destroy what made them special.

A few space sims, so to speak since SPAZ and FTL aren't quite the same, are out now and there are a few with big names attached in development by independents. If these have decent returns, on small developer terms at least, then I expect the large publishers to follow along spamming the genre.

But only if they can figure out how to get them to be fun on consoles. Which is another side of the problem of stagnating genres but that's a different discussion.

randallsquared• 14 years ago

Aren't they all playing MMOs like Eve or Vendetta? Maybe that soaked up the demand.

SeanDav2• 14 years ago

Eve is a great game but you cannot play effectively solo - you have to join Mega Corp X to be effective and really who needs a boss telling them what to do while playing a game...

jheriko• 14 years ago

How do we know they haven't already been trying to make this game for the last 10 years... ;)

DanBC• 14 years ago

What about Kerbal Space Program?

(http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLD603D8234AE51EF0)

ucee054• 14 years ago

Have you tried Parkan 2 or The Precursors ?

Have you tried Vendetta Online ?

macavity23• 14 years ago

The sound effects in the video clip attached to that article make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up!

The level of coding chops in the original game is hard to comprehend by modern standards. It had a (wireframe) 3d engine, eight galaxies each with hundreds of worlds, a dozen or so ship types and lots of different equipment and engines - and an awesome surprise endgame where after scores of hours trading and battling pirates, suddenly out of nowhere (with no warning in the early game or manual) the galactic navy appeared and sent you on a series of missions.

The RAM footprint of this game? 22KB. KILOBYTES. All written in machine code: that's even lower-level than assembler! Something to think about next time you're tempted to brag about your coding l33tness :-)

I'm enormously glad that this game has hit its target, and very, very excited that David B will have the opportunity to make the game he wants without a publisher exerting pressure on him (which was what ruined Elite II).

This game and Obsidian's Project Eternity (also on KS) are being eagerly watched by many people. If they succeed, this will be a massive turning point in the games industry, just as the original Elite was.

Direct• 14 years ago

> All written in machine code: that's even lower-level than assembler!

Can you clarify? I don't know much about the history of this game or the BBC Micro. But do you mean to say this was written byte by byte by hand? I'm imagining someone typing each individual byte of an opcode here. If so, that's pretty amazing.

amalcon• 14 years ago

That was normally done with a hex editor, but yes, that's pretty much how it worked if you didn't have an assembler.

jacquesm3• 14 years ago

It's nonsense, elite was written in assembler. Nobody but masochists were programming directly in hex. The only time I've done it was because there was a quick hack to be done on an apple II and I knew most of the opcodes by heart and how to compute branches. (And the reason for that is that I'd written an assembler). So unless you had no tools you really did not have to program by poking bytes into memory directly. Apropos, BBC basic came with an assembler built in triggered by the [ character.

SeanDav2• 14 years ago

In ye olde days, machine language and assembler/assembly language were often referred to as the same thing although of course they are different. Assembly language is translated to machine language by the assembler. I believe (but may be wrong) that Elite was written in assembly language as one would have to be a masochist to write directly in machine language.

waqf• 14 years ago

The Elite source code can be downloaded at Ian Bell (the other original author)'s site, http://www.iancgbell.clara.net/elite/archive/index.htm. It is indeed written in assembly language (using the BBC BASIC assembler).

jiggy2011• 14 years ago

I remember an interview with Linus Torvalds where he said he wrote directly into machine code in some of his early (pre Linux) programs. Mainly because he couldn't afford an assembler and didn't yet realise the difference.

jacquesm3• 14 years ago

Wireframe is incorrect, it was hidden-line removal, which is a lot more complex than wireframe.

primitur• 14 years ago

Speaking of l33tness, there was recently (2010) a version of Elite finally made for the Oric-1/Atmos family of machines, which never got the game franchise back in the 80's, when they were on the market, and it .. too .. is an act of pure l33tness.

Its Elite, for the Oric-1/Atmos, and its called .. 1337:

http://1337.defence-force.org/

If you're into Elite, give this one a try (It runs perfectly in the Oriculator emulator (http://code.google.com/p/oriculator/), and amazing on the real hardware, should you have one stashed away in the closet somewhere) - and it was made by a very skilled developer who wanted to see the title on the Oric machines, at last. As an avid Oric-1/Atmos fanboix, I can't tell you how amazing it is, finally, to have this title in our collection .. the Oric-1 still LIVES!!!

gadders2• 14 years ago

Where's the Dragon 32 version, that's what I want to know...

gadders2• 14 years ago

They also listed a load of items in the manual that weren't actually in the game. I'm disappointed I never found the massive space transporter thing that was supposed to be in there.

Yuioup• 14 years ago

Here's David Braben talking about the Raspberry Pi at the BBC:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13292450

moneypenny• 14 years ago

stunned

may have to eat socks (See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4748382)

dexter313• 14 years ago

I was always wondering how do you do that in real life?

anigbrowl• 14 years ago

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

jacquesm3• 14 years ago

We had a dog that would do this with some regularity. ER trips for dogs add up.

zandor• 14 years ago

Make sure to check out this great post mortem of Elite from GDC 2011:

http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014628/Classic-Game-Postmortem

guard-of-terra2• 14 years ago

That's interesting, but what about a nice turn-based (or otherwise think-bound) strategy or at least an RPG?

It seems to me that all the modern gaming is about running around with guns. Boring and no food for thoughts. I've switched to Roguelikes, but still mourn for a good strategy.

qznc• 14 years ago

What do you consider a good (old) strategy game?

Imho single-player strategy is usually just a puzzle game.

guard-of-terra2• 14 years ago

Master of Magic. Alpha Centauri. Civilization & Colonization. Master of Orion. In that order.

What makes MoM special? It's PvE. It's so much more replayable than anything else. What makes Alpha Centauri special? There are no things about Alpha Centauri that aren't special.

Also, to the lesser extent, Heroes of Might and Magic series. Hex grid wargames (Battle Isle, Fantasy General, Battle for Wesnoth) are nice too but, having no economy, aren't so interesting.

I don't know what do you mean by puzzle games and why is that a bad thing.

hcarvalhoalves• 14 years ago

I really hope they succeed, but sadly, I'm seeing all the typical signals of games that fail to launch, due to gigantic scope and feature creep. When you focus so much on technology and your answers about the game are all "we plan to support that", that's a bad signal.

You start a game with rock solid game design - throwing procedural generation, multiplayer code, and other cool features together gives you a tech demo, not a game. The smallest changes in game mechanics deeply affect things like networking code. Mix this with a crowdfunded project (where everyone who pledged is a stakeholder and wants a different thing) that's a recipe for disaster.

outworlder3• 14 years ago

Yes, but only if they want to do everything on launch day.

The part about the galaxy changes reminds me a lot of the 'real ecology' from Ultima Online, which had to be scrapped since there's no way ecology can work with players as predators.

chris_j• 14 years ago

I think it's been quite encouraging that, while they are talking about a whole load of features that they'd like to include in the future, they're being pretty clear about the things that they won't support in the first release (landing on planets and so on) and that the pledgers will only influence the game, rather than dictate that any feature must be done a particular way.

The things that I worry about are things that were not a part of previous Elite games like networking, the multiplayer element and, above all else, making the economics and politics work. If other massively multiplayer games are anything to go by, a few large alliances will figure out how to game the rules so as to be able to dominate the game and I bet that the developers will always be playing catch up to that.

Elite video game reboot hits funding target

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