the original creator of Elite made a new version of the game, called Elite: Dangerous. It's the same essential game, but online and with modern, realistic graphics:
The really cool thing about it is that it's set in a 1:1 scale model of the Milky Way. Most known stars are in there, approximating to a large extent their true astronomical properties. Whatever isn't known is procedurally generated in a way that's motivated by real science. They even put in the TRAPPIST exoplanets, which you can go visit.
If you liked any of the old Elites or are a space nerd, you really ought to consider playing it.
How does he cope with the acidic community? They seem to be crying out for new features and can be very critical, particularly over the "slow" development of Elite and buggy/patched releases. Many of those on the forums demand various features without an understanding of the work involved (typical for software, after all!).
Personally I find Elite Dangerous to be tremendous fun, and extremely good value for money considering how little I paid for it and how many hours of gameplay I got out of it. Having played the original, I am looking forward to the updates!
One of the reviews of the company (glassdoor?) mentions the mess of the codebase, and I can imagine that contributes to the slow releases, but I guess that's true of any legacy giant codebase; having worked somewhere where the code was 20+ years old and a few key architects were the only ones who knew/understood how anything worked, they became the bottleneck to development whilst the rest of the team were under constant pressure to produce output whilst being devoid of understanding of the code. With the "gatekeepers of knowledge" being the only ones that could help the rest of the team, they were too busy to educate others as they were producing 80% of the output to keep the business operating; I wondered from an outside perspective if this was what happens at Frontier a bit?
> Elite on the Beeb was the game that started me coding
Same for me! Not that I could read the code, but my desire to try to cheat in the game led me to learning BASIC and then a career in software engineering.
One pf the original creators. Braben was only one of the two developers, Ian Bell was the other one. There is a version of the trading portion of the game available in pure C on Ian's web site[1].
"Every little step forward, I felt like I was unpicking a bit more of the story of two young developers creating a modern-day masterpiece; if you squint carefully, you can almost sense where the whole starts to become greater than the sum of the parts. Elite is the coding equivalent of 'A Day in the Life', a mash-up between the Acorn world's very own Lennon and McCartney, with results that are just as seminal in their field. They say you should never meet your heroes, but grokking their source code... well, that's another matter altogether."
Also Frontier Elite II runs great in DOSBox and is my favourite in the series. I believe it was the last big commercial game to be written entirely in assembler and fit on a single floppy disk.
I put every version I could find there, it starts as a specialised emulator to run frontier based on the ST version, then it became a 68000 to i386 asm/C and then added in OpenGL rendering.
It has some beautiful moments, but for the most part the gameplay is uninspired and repetitive. 80% of your time is spent staring at a wormhole animation or floating dust in super-cruise.
Best description I heard is "miles wide but inches deep".
The flight model is great, you get detected by your heat signature which depends on the power your ship is using. You can turn off subsystems (like shields) to reduce your heat signature so you can't be targeted, or dump all the heat into a piece of metal that you eject from your ship and shows up on enemy radar. Mining is great too, but overall there's no overarching progression target. In good game design progression should open up new experiences, here (after you collect enough money, which can be done in a few hours) every part of the game is accessible, and none of them lead to anything worthwhile. You just keep doing the same things with more expensive equipment.
If you don't mind 2D graphics and no multiplayer, I would recommend playing Starsector. It has pretty much the same basic gameplay loop as Elite, but it features more complex combat + ship mechanics, a more dynamic world and it allows you to setup your own colonies on newly discovered planets.
Also you don't need a powerful machine to play the game, it's runs flawlessly on my laptop in 1080p (Fedora + Intel HD520).
there is some truth in this. but people play and enjoy American Truck Simulator. Elite sometimes seems like Galaxy Truck Simulator. many similarities, including having to play a parking minigame before delivering your cargo.
They made it in-house. The engine is called COBRA. Their other games (Planet Coaster, Jurassic Park) use it too. The engine has gone through several generations now and started in 1988 (by name at least).
Frontier is probably my favourite game studio right now. RCT3, Zoo Tycoon 1 and Thrillville on the ps2 where probably my favourite games as a kid and they absolutely smashed it out of the park with their Planet series getting everything that made the originals good right while making it so much more advanced.
Simcity 2013 and Zoo Tycoon 2013 were such disappointments so I'm glad there is a trend along with cities skylines to revive classics in a way that doesn't stomp on what made the originals great.
After they abandoned my platform after supporting it and promising to always support it, and after they failed to support Linux, I decided not to pay for any of the newer versions and stop playing the game. Don’t get me wrong, it looks great and is decently fun, but it feels incredibly limited to even Frontier.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoUJVRCbTxI
The really cool thing about it is that it's set in a 1:1 scale model of the Milky Way. Most known stars are in there, approximating to a large extent their true astronomical properties. Whatever isn't known is procedurally generated in a way that's motivated by real science. They even put in the TRAPPIST exoplanets, which you can go visit.
If you liked any of the old Elites or are a space nerd, you really ought to consider playing it.