Hey, Oolite has PC and Linux ports at last!! Awesome.

What about this one?

http://oolite.aegidian.org/

While [Infinity] looks impressive [...] in this case that seems to be the entire FOCUS of their development, at least so far. So it boils back down to what I said, a dev has to choose what they do.

Naturally, and I most certainly wasn't knocking anything else for not doing this stuff. I simply wanted to point it out to those who were talking about the very kinds of features he's implementing in such wistful tones...

Yeah I do

They split off into two groups though, and are slinging mud at each other for no real reason other than that they're probably 14 years old and feel the need to prove how 733T their version is over the other group's.

Furthermore, why bother with a remake when you can just download the original, download the dosbox from sourceforge, and play the original?

Creston

You all know about the Privateer Remake project, right?

http://wcuniverse.sourceforge.net/

WHY THE HELL CAN'T WE WALK OUT OF OUR SHIPS AND GO TO THE BAR? Or whatever building we want?

I think it's not so much a question of "Why can't we?"

It's more an issue of "Why would we?"

A dev only has so much time to develop content. While it may be cool for some people ( I can do without it personally) to have every spaceport completely modelled with houses etc, that all has to be developed and created by level designers. The time they spend on that is time they're not spending on creating sectors in space.

It's a tradeoff. The Egosoft team deliberately chooses not to do planetbased stuff, but focus all their intention on making a galactic economy that works, that the player can interface with and make money out of, and have lots of sectors with background etc.

I'm not saying that that's necessarily better, that's a preference for everyone, but it's what a dev chooses to focus on. Unless a space title ever gets a 500 man team to work on it, I think what you're asking for is not going to happen

Creston

Edit : Procedurally-generated 'landable' planets:

...and a procedurally-generated universe in general. Billions of planets, literally.

Take a look at the development journals for "Infinity: The Quest for Earth". It's a long ways off, and it's going to be a MMO first and foremost, but the guy really seems to know what he's doing.

Experimental planet terrain has been a recent focus, and he's using pixel shaders to generate the terrain textures entirely from the video card!

While it looks impressive (and there are several other engines out there that do a "complete" universe together with planets etc), in this case that seems to be the entire FOCUS of their development, at least so far. So it boils back down to what I said, a dev has to choose what they do.

I have no doubt that Egosoft could CHOOSE to make landable planets and generate them on the fly etc, but it would take up a large chunk of development time, and that's time they're not spending on space stations, flyable ships, a galaxy wide economy, factions etc.
Game development, unless you have 50 million bucks to spend on it, is a matter of choices and tradeoffs. One thing generally comes at the cost of another.
Even Valve, completely self funded, fell victim to this with HL2. (completely different genre, but this holds for all game development).



This comment was edited on Oct 14, 09:10.

I would much rather have a smaller universe with great character and detail, than a larger one with generic modules and primitives scattered randomly about the place.

You and me both bud.
And yes, I agree that Privateer was awesome that way. There were space stations, but also the planets themselves were an integral part of the actual universe.

I may fire that up again, out of nostalgia. Btw, for those of you who don't have it (anymore), you can download it from www.the-underdogs.org

Creston

Does anyone know what the difference is between this and the first one? It's really not clear from the product page.

Yeah, they've kept pretty quiet on exactly what's new, mostly so that you can discover it for yourself, I believe.

Iikka had this to say on the Shrapnel Games forum:

It's a sequel, as in it starts right where SAIS left off; at Glory system in 4590. It's the same universe so the races are the same and everything that was in SAIS also exists in Weird Worlds. But there are all kinds of additions and you can choose from three different map sizes (1-3x the size of the map in SAIS) and so forth.

That last point should give you a lot of control over the length of the game. Select the small map for a quick game, and increase it for a longer, more involved experience.

Basically, when compared to SAIS, I think you can expect the same but much much more so, and with a serious update to the presentation. You can also look forward to some excellent mods, I believe. There's a scriptable quest system built into the game for mod-makers to use, and I would expect that the standard game makes ample usse of it as well, so there should be many more connected sequences of events than there were in the first game.

They've spent a lot of time polishing this one. IIRC, the original estimated date for completion was close to a year ago, so it's most definitely not a case of pushing it out the door early. Even at this point they still delayed about a month to make it perfect. I'm anticipating a very professional and bug-free game here. If you liked SAIS I'd be surprised if you didn't love this. If you didn't play SAIS, well you're in for a treat.

I think there will probably be a demo (seeing as how there was for SAIS), but I don't think they've said anything official about that yet.

I want a new Captain Blood.

Good god! I had that game on my Amiga. Wierd game to say the least. Music by John Michael Jarre if I remember rightly.

(my fan site. Check it out)
http://home.earthlink.net/~cgh5541/

mmm... Battlestar Galactica Viper pilot action sim.

Someone make this immediately.

That would be Battlestar Galatica for the X-Box and PS2. Been done.

(my fan site. Check it out)
http://home.earthlink.net/~cgh5541/

have your terran generator create 25,000 planets in the galaxy and the 200 planets that are tied into the storyline get tweaked. sure i'd fly over a unimportant plant and say the portion i'm flying over is showing on this 3x3 grid 2 mountains,a desert,a tundra, 2 volcanos, a lake and 2 swamps and they really don't make any sense geographically but what the hell. the randomly generated space or planet port just needs to have enough facilities i can get enough fuel to reach other planets. maybe the spaceport carries the uber weapon?
omg. am i describing a cattlecruiser 2999 that doesn't suck?
the original elite has a very simple yet effective engine to create planet resources. i believe bell and braben ran thier planets builder for a few hours,tested their opening worlds for each set for a short while and quickly had their game world which i thought was cleverly crafted as i tried working out the best agriculture to industry to luxury to illegal good routes.

Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space
after looking at the screenshots i remember playing the first one and yeah it was Great fun! with tons of different things to do in the game.

Weird Worlds:

I pre-ordered this some months ago, the moment I heard I was able to do so. Strange Adventures in Infinite Space was "staggeringly brilliant", and for a mere handful of dollars sucked away more hours of my life than most full-priced games. The new game looks gorgeous by comparison, and will offer more options, much more Stuff, and much Much more in terms of modding: SAIS was given some simple mod support post-release which produced some really nice efforts, but WW has had this in mind from day one. I can't wait.

Oh, and I didn't interpret the comments as bashing WW/SAIS for not being I-War or TIE Fighter... I just thought it was that a new space game of any kind made people nostalgic for those titles?


I-War 2:

I-War 2 is still an awesome game (and still incredibly beautiful, for that matter), and there's plenty of life left in her yet. Although it's just the first formal release with some known bugs, and is intended as a platform for future releases with bug-fixes and added features, you guys should definitely check out Epic Middle States. See the release announcement here:
http://www.ataricommunity.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=137


Procedurally-generated 'landable' planets:

...and a procedurally-generated universe in general. Billions of planets, literally.

Take a look at the development journals for "Infinity: The Quest for Earth". It's a long ways off, and it's going to be a MMO first and foremost, but the guy really seems to know what he's doing.

Experimental planet terrain has been a recent focus, and he's using pixel shaders to generate the terrain textures entirely from the video card!

http://fl-tw.com/InfinityForums/

but you know I'd be willing to sacrifice graphics quality if it meant we could really go anywhere

Have you looked at Spore, by Will Wright?

Spore, game of the decade.

Here is one to Up you all.

What about the whole process of landing yourself in Frontier? Sure the game was buggy as all hell, but you got to do EVERYTHING! Ships had multiple gun spots, you can add/remove equipment from it.

We are at the point now where a game engine can handle ground, water, air, space all in real time.

WHY THE HELL CAN'T WE WALK OUT OF OUR SHIPS AND GO TO THE BAR? Or whatever building we want?

I want to see a modern SUNDOG if you ask me.
I want to see a modern STARFLIGHT
I would love to see a sequel to SENTINNEL WORLDS

mmm... Battlestar Galactica Viper pilot action sim.

Someone make this immediately.

Personally I still say that the actual fact of just LANDING on a planet, even if just in the way Freelancer did it, adds a crapload of atmosphere to a spacegame. It shows that planets are actually involved, and not just background to a bunch of space factories.

Bingo, Creston. An even better example was Privateer. It was simple, animated landing sequences, but those sequences gave a sense of continuity. Different landing sequences combined with unique (and interesting) music for each planet gave them personalities. It's what made Privateer such a fantastic game. There is a huge gap between a good engine and an engrossing game, and that gap can only be bridged by atmosphere, (if you'll pardon the bad pun).

Developers may balk at spending money on greater music content, background animations, and other seeming "fluff," but that fluff is what makes a good game into a great game. It is precisely at that point that every modern (post-WC:P) space shooter and trader game has fallen flat on its face, as far as I'm concerned. I would much rather have a smaller universe with great character and detail, than a larger one with generic modules and primitives scattered randomly about the place.

I think given the right "engine" we have the horsepower now to do it, even if its not the entire universe..even a system of planets you could venture onto would be cool using a procedural terrain/city generation..but you know I'd be willing to sacrifice graphics quality if it meant we could really go anywhere. Ah well!

Have you looked at Spore, by Will Wright?

He might have what you are looking for.

The Freespace games were pretty damn high quality, too.

Sigh. We'll never see another one of those, either.

Maybe not commercially.
http://dynamic.gamespy.com/~freespace/forums/showthread.php?s=&postid=740120#post740120




Freespace 2: Lost Souls
http://www.sectorgame.com/aldo/

Creston - the goal would then be to create a system for much better random generation... I think something like that needs to be redone with todays technology - it would probably be quite amazing

I think most people would just be annoyed at how the same everything looks. A Split planet wouldn't BE the same as an Argon planet, but they would look that way.

And seriously, that'd be a heck of a lot of work, and for what payoff? So people can roam around planets, without really a whole lot to do...

Would it be cool, yeah, definitely, but I can see how a dev would say "Errrmmm yeah. If you fund me 20 million dollars, I'll get started tomorrow."


therefore the kind of experimental gaming mindset that brought us things like Elite and Xcom and Midwinter and all that doesnt thrive in todays world

Well, you also have to consider that the reason that things like Elite and Xcom were considered so cool is because they were the FIRST to do it. In my opinion X2 >> Elite, and X3 will be >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Elite. It's got a lot of cool new stuff compared to X2, but it's still a "space game".
So if you're going to judge everything on which genre it falls in, I'm guessing nothing is new anymore.

this is what many people mean by "the death of PC gaming" and its not something that is going to happen - it has already happened

No. People bitch about the death of PC Gaming in relation to its small market compared to consoles, not because there's no cool stuff coming out.
Now, as far as innovation goes, I will say that the consoles are doing better than the PC is, but even on the consoles, they're still things that have been done before, only in new and interesting ways. That's not as prevalent on the PC, sadly. It's mostly "yet another RTS" or "Yet another shooter".

I find that I can't really get all that upset about it anymore. Gaming was bound to get Hollywood'ized at some point once it started growing and growing and growing, and the fucking suits came in. As a result, I buy far fewer games than I used to. Maybe ten a year, if that. I used to buy probably 50-70 games a year.

There's still good and great games coming out, you just have to be patient a bit. And in the end, they're still just rehashes of stuff that's come before, albeit done in a new way.
Btw, that's not always a bad thing. Like I said, X3 >>>> Elite, and to give another example, Hostile Waters (Antaeus Rising) >>>>> Carrier Command. (although not being able to move the carrier itself is a damn shame.)

Creston