Christian Pinders "Elite: The New Kind" is worth a mention. It was released around 2002 I think, and unfortunately relatively quickly withdrawn due to a request from Braben, I believe.
The New Kind was a re-implementation of Elite in C that largely tried to follow the way the original worked, while remaining readable C.
I hacked on my copy for a while to port it to OpenGL, add some particle systems for explosions, and embed ppmforge (I think, it may have been another fractal planet generation tool) to create fractal planet surfaces (just a quick hack to add a texture on a sphere that looked nice from the air, I didn't even begin to think about adding code to land etc.)
Pinders original source shouldn't be impossible to find. It's worth a look.
The sequels were much more extensive and attempted a Milky Way galaxy with realistic 1:1 scale star systems with orbital mechanics and seamless planetary transitions.
The reason Elite TNK was pulled was because someone was selling it without permission.
This review is slightly less impressive if you are aware of the other (official) Elite games, "Frontier: Elite II" and "Frontier: First Encounters".
> It has to be said that the premise of oOlite is based upon the Elite Universe, however oOlite is really a new concept, with so many new features, new ships, weapons, stations, missions etc that it is a unique game in its own right.
No. Oolite is not an expansion of the original Elite and really should be compared to FFE. One might as well compare modern Libreoffice to MS Word 1.0 for DOS (the age difference is about the same). No critism of Oolite, as FFE was extremely buggy and Oolite is a solid foss replacement.
Oolite is much more of a descendant of the original Elite than it is an descendant of FFE. Last I tried Oolite you couldn't land on planets for example. And contrary to Frontier: Elite II and Frontier: First Encounters, Oolite takes place in the "classic" Elite universe. Oolite also uses the "classic" hyperjump's of Elite, rather than the mechanism used in FFE.
Overall, I'd say oOlite is "Elite 2 for those that didn't like the Frontier games". It doesn't try to change Elite conceptually nearly as much as the Frontier games did. When I finally first saw them, the games were not recognizable to me. When I first saw oOlite, my first reaction was "ah, this is Elite, just prettier and with more choices".
Comparing Oolite to FFE makes little sense to me, unless your goal is explicitly to contrast them - they've gone in drastically different directions from the same starting point, and oOlite bears pretty much no resemblance to FFE.
It's lacking a good deal of polish, but it's a good effort. It's more or less a direct clone of Frontier/FE, practically to a fault, though sadly without any of the original ships due to copyright restrictions. Surprised oolite hasn't had similar problems.
There's also a commercial space sim based on it in development called Paragon which might be worth keeping an eye on: http://www.paragongame.com/
Let me make my point clearer - this article gives a lot of credit to Oolite for things that other Elite games did first. Keep in mind, I'm only critiquing the way the article was written, not oolite. Oolite is a fun and well designed game. Also I might commit the same sin as the author, and credit FFE for the introduction of a feature when I should be crediting FE2. Let's run down the list.
> If you sit outside a station, you can watch many ships entering and leaving to their destinations, watch as a fugitive decides to attack a vulnerable trader, and is attacked by the system police, or scoops up its ill gotten gains. ... These things will happen regardless as to whether you are there or not. THAT!.. is one of the major points that differentiates between the two games, which makes oOlite a game of its own.
This was more or less in the original (Acorn) Elite and was absolutely in Frontier.
> oOlite brings new roles and perspectives to fill that seat from the outset, such as transporting clients (should you have a passenger bay fitted) from one system to another, or delivering packages to earn credits
Entirely from Frontier.
> One example as to the massive improvements within oOlite compared to any other Space Trading Game could be the career of a miner. ... after purchasing a fuel Scoop, an item intended to scoop fuel gravitational matter from the Suns, but also found to scoop all items with matter, such as CargoPods (ejected from traders you’ve attacked, or that you’ve come across after someone else’s misfortune), also pieces of Asteroids found in Space, broken up with a mining laser
"Compared to any other" except for the original Elite, which had all of those. And Elite 2 and Elite 3.
> the forthcoming release of Elite: Dangerous (the official sequel to the Original Elite game By David Braben: see a recent E3 2014 trailer on youtube)
Well these extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I was pretty sure "Frontier Elite II" was "the official sequel". Oh, linked the source is just gameplay footage, no voice-over retconning FE2 out of existence.
> Within the vast regions of Space and the thousands of planets, there are many different systems of Government ...
Once again, not original and entirely from Elite.
The next couple of paragraphs are well written, explaining actual original features or giving credit to Elite when appropriate. I would have no complaints if the entire article was written in the same style as the sections about missions, expansions, backgrounds, and towing.
> Elite gave a new realm of “choices” in a game. Then came oOlite, which took hold of the idea of Elite, transforming it into something huge
... But it quickly falls back into a revisionist history.
> It is without doubt, the best Space Trading game freely available, and is, in the opinion of the writer, everything that Elite wished to be, and with the advent of OXPs, everything that the new Elite: Dangerous wants to be but can’t.
Considering that "Elite: Dangerous" is only half done, a bold claim.
Other un-credited things that were in other Elite games first (but were more awkward/lengthy to quote) include the story-driven news feeds, jump tracking, a table of prices, and in-game ads.
Basically, if you edited out 20% of the article it could be about FFE. 30% of the article and it could be about the original Elite. Considering that 100% of the article is about how great oolite is, this does not exactly come across as fair.
You're right that some of the features that have been added probably come from FE2 and FFE. My point is mainly that oOlite in the large is much more like Elite than it is like the later ones, a few features here and there notwithstanding. Especially in the overall feel. Maybe it's changed a lot since last I tried it, but it at least used to be basically a prettier Elite, as I've mentioned.
> These things will happen regardless as to whether you are there or not. THAT!.. is one of the major points that differentiates between the two games, which makes oOlite a game of its own.
>
>This was more or less in the original (Acorn) Elite and was absolutely in Frontier.
For Frontier, maybe relatively extensively. For the original, I'm 99% certain that a system for all intents and purposes does not exist when you're not there, at all, and that the ship traffic is simply a pseudo-random property of things like tech level and government type. So while you're in a solar system, yes, that's there, though only in a very crude fashion in the original (the ships are pseudo-randomly created on each entry to a system). And yes, maintaining state when you leave a system isn't exactly new either.
> ... But it quickly falls back into a revisionist history.
I agree, in fact what I like about oOlite is that unlike the Frontier games, it does not try to "transform it into something huge".
> Considering that "Elite: Dangerous" is only half done, a bold claim.
Agreed, it's clear that Braben at least has never really been satisfied and have wanted to stretch things very far. In my opinion the Frontier games fell flat because he was too ambitious at the time, while oOlite works because it's not trying to be everything that Braben at least wanted, but something small and hackable. And that's awesome, but if Elite: Dangerous is "just" at the level of oOlite, it'll be a massive disappointment, and a massive underdelivery on the concepts they've presented.
Just to be more clear on what I talk about when I'm talking about the Acorn version, here is an excerpt from http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Archimedes_Elite . Of course this version was from 1991, predating both FE2 and oolite and seems justifiable to place it in the same category as the original Elite.
> ArcElite is perhaps most famous for being the first non-player-centric version - meaning that the AI would fight amongst itself and pursue its own interest. The player was no longer the centre of the universe. From the AFE FAQ: "Now you can encounter pirate packs battling it out for dominance of their private patches, traders under attack, Bushmaster mining vessels smashing asteroids into chunks and scooping up the pieces, vipers towing disabled ships back to the station, vipers flying along in formation looking for some lawbreaker to fight. There are even other ships like yourself - Cobras armed to the teeth looking for pirates to fight, to boost their Elite rating."
Compare this to the claims about oolite:
> In Elite, the universe centers around the player, spawning random events in their path to encounter. oOlite is very different, in that when a player is thrown into any system, it is populated with NPCs, with their own individual AIs, so that as you travel through a system, there are pirates plundering, miners recovering minerals from asteroids, and Escort ships traveling through the star system
ArcElite was released 13 years before oolite started development, it deserves some credit.
If the article was framed as "Oolite is a combination of classic Elite mechanics, merged with the best of the features from the sequels, and user-generated plugins to seal the deal" then it would be a good article.
This was initially developed on OS X but has since been ported to Windows and Linux(x86). Does anyone know if the releases for all these platforms are identical in terms of features and release dates, or is one the poor cousin?
So I'm finding references to jjffe and glffe. But their sites seem to be gone. Is there anywhere one could get a modern frontier first encounters to run on OSX or windows?
The New Kind was a re-implementation of Elite in C that largely tried to follow the way the original worked, while remaining readable C.
I hacked on my copy for a while to port it to OpenGL, add some particle systems for explosions, and embed ppmforge (I think, it may have been another fractal planet generation tool) to create fractal planet surfaces (just a quick hack to add a texture on a sphere that looked nice from the air, I didn't even begin to think about adding code to land etc.)
Pinders original source shouldn't be impossible to find. It's worth a look.