Aurora 4x
Other Games => Other Games => Topic started by: Hawkeye on June 15, 2014, 09:11:23 AM
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Anyone into that?
For those who have no clue what the hell I am talking about :)
It is the new game Chris Roberts (of Wing Commander/Privateer/Freelancer fame) is/has been making for the last 18 months or so as a Crowd funding endeavor.
It´s actually two games in one, a Wing Commander-ish 50+ mission single player (with multiplayer co-op) campaign and a MMO (You play through the campaign, earning some cash (depending on how good you do) and transfer your character over to the persistent universe (if you want, you can also skip the campaign, and start right with the MMO part, but will not have made contact with the people you meet in the campaign and stuff).
Flying is skill based in both the campaign and the PU (i.e. no classes or levels or such stuff, how good you are as a pilot/gunner depends on how good you are with the stick/mouse/controller)
There is not only the flying of space ships (single seater fighter, multi-crew ships you can fly with NPCs or your friends and capital ships with crews into the dozens (the larger ones are only viable for large groups, as they will be persistent, i.e. they stay in-universe, no matter if you are online or not)), but there will also be first-person combat on the ground and in boarding actions (ARMA style has been confirmed) and a NPC driven - player influenced economy (NPCs will outnumber players about 10:1).
Professions are to include:
Pirating
Bounty Hunting
Mercenary
Trading
Mining
Salvaging
Exploring
And probably a couple I have forgotten :)
They have just (a week ago or so) released the Dog Fight Module (now re-named Arena Commander) which is a combat simulation within the game to test your ships/weapon load-outs and test your skills vs. the AI and other players.
Have a look at:
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/
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I think Elite: Dangerous will be much more my cup of tea, and should be released about a year earlier than Star Citizen (which I believe has already missed 2 deadlines?)
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Well, yes and no :)
The DFM (Dog Fighting Module) was initially scheduled to be released in Dec 2013, but that version would have been single-player only using the stock Cry Engine and was intended to spark more interest and bring in more money. After the people threw 30+ millions at Chris, that wasn´t really necessary anymore, so they decided to push that back and release it with the customized Cry Engine back end and not waste time and effort on a build, that had to be discarded later on.
A sensible decision, imo.
As for a second dateline, well, they announced to release the DFM on the 29th of May _if everything goes according to plan_. Of course, people won´t read past "29th of May" and would go apesmeg when they wouldn´t get the DFM on the 29th.
The fun thing is to be able to watch a AAA game being made from the get-go (and I mean _watch_ as in, really see it being made with news/videos/reports on what is going on every few days and stuff) - That´s also a reason for the "missed deadlines." We are told the _internal_ time tables which no-one outside the production team would know a thing about in a publisher made game.
Of course, people are not used to this and tend to go crazy as soon as anything changes.
But yes, Elite Dangerous is supposed to be about a year (at least - I really don´t expect Star Citizen to be released before late 2016) earlier to be finished.
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I'm also really looking forward to Elite Dangerous. I remember playing the original (a lot!) on the BBC Micro. Checking their forums every day :). If I wasn't away from home so much in the next month I would have probably joined the beta by now. I'll probably join in mid-July and that's when I will have to explain to my wife why a joystick is worth £300 (seriously tempted by Thrustmaster Hotas Warthog).
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I got myself a Warthog for Star Citizen and man, I can tell you, you won´t regret it. The feel of this piece of massive steel (well metal anyway, not sure it is steel but it sure has the mass :) ) is incredible.
I had a Thrustmaster FCS stick back in the late 80s and that thing has been with me through about 10 years of MechWarrior and Wing Commander without a hitch (and it could be used to hammer nails into the wall too), so my argument was:
I can either buy a new stick for 50 or 80 bucks every 2 or 3 years or I can buy this extremely solid stick for 300 bucks and never have to buy another one for the rest of my life.
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I'm just holding back from Beta until I come back from the UK in August, then there will be much grovelling to get a new joystick. I've been using OOlite to keep my Elite jonesing to a minimum in the meantime!
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As for a second dateline, well, they announced to release the DFM on the 29th of May _if everything goes according to plan_. Of course, people won´t read past "29th of May" and would go apesmeg when they wouldn´t get the DFM on the 29th.
Not even close.
First it was promised to be released "Early 2014" instead ( quarter 1 so before end of March ).
Then it was postponed to be released at the same time as the announcement demonstration at PAX east ( April 13:th ).
At PAX East they told us that they still needed 1-2 more weeks work to finish it up.
Then they went silent for about a month
After that we were told they "need one more week".
THEN they announced the release on 29:th of May ( which they also failed to deliver on ).
The thing with Chris Roberts and Star citizen is that they promised so much that anyone with the slightest clue about how game development works knows that it will be extremely tough to even do a quarter of it on the lined out time-plan.
So basically he is trying to pull off a self fulfilling prophecy, if people keep throwing more money at these impossible promises he just might be able to scale up the studios and contractors enough to almost finish half of it.
And on the other hand even if they only do deliver 25% of everything they promised it will still be one hell of an amazing game...
IMO they are doing one big thing wrong though, and that is trying hand craft unique 3D model environments for 300-400 landing locations. They should be working at a framework and assets here instead so that players can design most of the stuff with player owned/run shops and houses in the same planetary themes. That would allow them to have 10 times more content in the final game, for 10 times less work.
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IMO they are doing one big thing wrong though, and that is trying hand craft unique 3D model environments for 300-400 landing locations. They should be working at a framework and assets here instead so that players can design most of the stuff with player owned/run shops and houses in the same planetary themes. That would allow them to have 10 times more content in the final game, for 10 times less work.
Or doing what Braben is doing (and did with the original Elite) Procedurally generated universe.
right from the first announcement I thought that they were promising too much with Star Citizen, I wish them lots of luck, and will undoubtedly play, but Elite is where it's at as far as I'm concerned, hell those guys already had a working game when they started their kickstarter.
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I've been Following E : D for a little while now, and it is right on the cusp of exploding. Beta 1.03 is out at time of writing (with 1.04 probably arriving this week some time), and the love it is getting on YouTube and especially Twitch is just amazing. There are several YT vids / Twitch streamers who have bought it, knowing absolutely nothing about it, and they are being blown away, almost without exception.
SC is getting some quite unfair blowback as a result. A lot of people don't realise that Elite has been in dev since 1998, on and off, so it is unsurprising that they have a pretty solid codebase, and are able to rapidly roll new stuff out. A lot of it has been in the can for some time. There is a persistent strain of "why can't it be more like EVE?" from a certain section of the audience, and a lot of pointless ED / SC fanboi-ism, and people not knowing why certain design decisions have been made, like the criticisms of the Elite ship designs, which are direct descendants of the old wireframe models in many cases.
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Thanks TallTroll, you've made my jonesing so much worse, and I'm getting on a damn plane in 23 hours so have to wait til I get home :P
Matt
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I've signed up for the Standard Beta of Elite Dangerous and bought the HOTAS Thrustmaster Warthog :)
Very impressed so far - just wish I had some more free time to play around with it.
Also been playing Divinity: Original Sin with my son when we are both not working at the same time (which is about one evening a week) and that is an excellent game too.
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I got myself a Warthog for Star Citizen and man, I can tell you, you won´t regret it. The feel of this piece of massive steel (well metal anyway, not sure it is steel but it sure has the mass :) ) is incredible.
I had a Thrustmaster FCS stick back in the late 80s and that thing has been with me through about 10 years of MechWarrior and Wing Commander without a hitch (and it could be used to hammer nails into the wall too), so my argument was:
I can either buy a new stick for 50 or 80 bucks every 2 or 3 years or I can buy this extremely solid stick for 300 bucks and never have to buy another one for the rest of my life.
"never have to buy another one for the rest of my life"
"I had a Thrustmaster FCS stick back in the late 80s"
"I got myself a Warthog for Star Citizen"
Er, so what happened to the warthog? I understand getting a second joystick but use of the word was makes me think you did actually wear the FCS out or something.
IMO they are doing one big thing wrong though, and that is trying hand craft unique 3D model environments for 300-400 landing locations. They should be working at a framework and assets here instead so that players can design most of the stuff with player owned/run shops and houses in the same planetary themes. That would allow them to have 10 times more content in the final game, for 10 times less work.
Or doing what Braben is doing (and did with the original Elite) Procedurally generated universe.
I think a combination of those 2 would work better, use procedural generation as a placeholder with varying amounts of predesigned enviroment thrown in where needed, but allow the modding community to contribute, either making frameworks for the porcedural generation or for the predesigned stuff, then allow players to interact with the preexisting enviroment and alter it to their own whim, to an extent.
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>> IMO they are doing one big thing wrong though, and that is trying hand craft unique 3D model environments for 300-400 landing locations.
There's hand-crafting and hand-crafting. If you watch the Gary Whitta / David Braben / Chris Roberts interview, Chris and David mention that they have had some back and forth on procedural generation. A given city only needs certain areas to be hand crafted, as suburbs / commercial districts etc IRL all feel a bit samey... ideal for PG treatment. There's no need to make every dwelling or office block a unique, special snowflake. Similarly, many large scale farms IRL are just huge areas of fields, all growing a very limited number of crops. You could model millions of acres, entirely "realistically" with very simple PG routines.
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"never have to buy another one for the rest of my life"
"I had a Thrustmaster FCS stick back in the late 80s"
"I got myself a Warthog for Star Citizen"
Er, so what happened to the warthog? I understand getting a second joystick but use of the word was makes me think you did actually wear the FCS out or something.
LOL, no, the FCS stick/throttle (and TM pedals) are still very much alive, but they use a game port to connect and my new PCs don´t _have_ a game port anymore.
I could probably work around that, but also had problems with the programming software from TM on new-ish Windows, so I finally decided it was time to "upgrade".
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LOL, no, the FCS stick/throttle (and TM pedals) are still very much alive, but they use a game port to connect and my new PCs don´t _have_ a game port anymore.
I could probably work around that, but also had problems with the programming software from TM on new-ish Windows, so I finally decided it was time to "upgrade".
Yes, exactly same problem here. I also used to have the FCS.
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A gameport to USB adapter costs between 15-20 bucks but you could make one for maybe 6 bucks if you're handy with a soldering iron/could be bothered....
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Cripes, I just had a look at that Thrustmaster joystick - it's a beast! Having said that I think I'm going to have to follow, been trying to play just with keyboard and mouse and have struggled to say the least.
Ending up spending a small fortune on the kickstarter so intend to make the most of the game. (Elite was pretty much my intorduction to gaming on the BBC B and have fond memories of playing this with for such long sessions we ended up overheating the computer).
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A gameport to USB adapter costs between 15-20 bucks but you could make one for maybe 6 bucks if you're handy with a soldering iron/could be bothered....
Yeah, that´s what I implied with the "could probably get around that" part. A bigger problem was the programming software, which was, IIRC, a DOS program, and simply refused to work in the more recent windows versions - and to be honest, the Warthog is a huge step up from the FCS, no matter how good it was.
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Finally got the Elite:Dangerous beta,
First Impression: HOLY COW!
Second Impression: SWEET MOTHER!
Third Impression: WOW!
The game is playable, ships quite flyable with mouse & keyboard, but it's not FUN with mouse and keyboard, I'm looking at a Sytek X-55 HOTAS Rhino, to be different from all you guys buying Warthogs!.
Awesome touch that they've done a Steve and scoured star catalogues to add 150,000 real stars to the game, and even gone the extra mile and added all the known exo-planets.
The feeling of scale is truly stupendous.
It's exceeded my expectations (for the little I've seen so far) and my expectations were really high. I like the one server for all players (just instancing busy zones to make it work, and since you can move between instances, and it biases automatically to placing you in instances with people you've previously interacted with) though theres a reasonable chance that very few places will get overcrowded since theres 400,000 systems in the game (though my understanding is that's limited during Beta to force more player interaction)
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It's exceeded my expectations (for the little I've seen so far) and my expectations were really high. I like the one server for all players (just instancing busy zones to make it work, and since you can move between instances, and it biases automatically to placing you in instances with people you've previously interacted with) though theres a reasonable chance that very few places will get overcrowded since theres 400,000 systems in the game (though my understanding is that's limited during Beta to force more player interaction)
It's 400,000,000,000 systems :)
Currently 50 systems in Beta-1 but that will increase to 500 in Beta-2 from September 30th. I haven't played for a while but I'll be back in the cockpit for Beta-2
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Braben is a amazing. Even to this day I can't help but be awestruck at Elite 2 containing a galaxy 1:1 sized (pretty big Galaxy...), Newtonian physics, even the music it had as well, all that stuff in one floppy disk...
Just amazing really.
It makes me sad that Elite Dangerous won't really have much of the same stuff as Elite 2, mainly because you can't have a fast-forward time button in a multiplayer game and ships travelling at super fast speeds might make the game very difficult to play.
Wish I could afford the beta but glad I kick-started it and looking forward to the release.
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oops, well more than I'll ever see!
changed my joystick order to an X-52 since, however there don't seem to be any in the country, I suspect related to it being the suggested joystick, and the ones the dev team are using, hopefully I should have it next week, in time for Beta 2. I've discovered that I for one can't fight worth a damn with mouse/keyboard, so I'm sticking to safe route trading until I get myself joysticked.
I had very high expectations for this game, and so far they've all been surpassed, I really love the fact that all the stars you can see in the starfield outside your cockpit are the actual stars in the game that you can go to (well not in beta as theyre restricting players to a small sphere to concentrate interaction an loads) I spent about 10 minutes last night just tooling around the front of a station reading the billboards
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Braben is a amazing. Even to this day I can't help but be awestruck at Elite 2 containing a galaxy 1:1 sized (pretty big Galaxy...), Newtonian physics, even the music it had as well, all that stuff in one floppy disk...
Just amazing really.
It makes me sad that Elite Dangerous won't really have much of the same stuff as Elite 2, mainly because you can't have a fast-forward time button in a multiplayer game and ships travelling at super fast speeds might make the game very difficult to play.
Wish I could afford the beta but glad I kick-started it and looking forward to the release.
They work around that with "supercruise" which is basically using your Hyperspace drive in-system, allowing you to travel many times c. The game effect is pretty much the same as the time dilation in Frontier, and First Encounter but with pretty special effects, the systems are still gigantic, and even supercruising around say a quaternary system can take quite awhile!