Sure the elite radar’s impractical, but then again so is manually piloting a ship with a fixed gun in front. There’s a sort of romanticism in impracticality It can however represent distance more effectively. while the circular radar only immediately represents position, absent color or size cues.
I’m not really complaining – my favorite space sim of all time is freespace 2, which uses the same type of radar – I’m just nostalgic about the funky elite radar. It’s all pretty keen looking either way.
The planet looks allot better. I did notice something, but I’m not sure if a person would notice it once you have collisions in place. If you are to close to the planet, you can see the green lines hovering above the blue curve.
I keep on loosing the space station. If you hold down shift a tad too long, you go into warp and I spent a good 10 minutes, before giving up, searching for the space station again and was unable to find it. Three ideas for solving this, 1. have a cap on the ships speed that is much lower, with a separate key for engaging warp speed/jump/whatever ftl you are planning to have in place. 2. Have a map and a autopilot. 3. Have a much more gradual acceleration (instead of 2 seconds to reach max speed have it be 10 seconds or something)
Other ideas:
Please let us control flight direction via the mouse. Steering with the keyboard is very cumbersome
IIRC only ‘Final Frontier’ had Newtonian physics and it was quite a challenge. The first Elite had the arcade style controls.
For Elite inspirations you could also check out www.oolite.org, an Elite clone, as well as my beloved X (X2,X3) series @ egosoft.com.
Though it is a slippery slope from doing an Elite / Freespace style game to a X2/X3 style sandbox game.
Btw, X3 actually had some nice controls that while not quite Newtonian, did go quite some way where if you turned, depending on mass and speed and such, it took some time for your ship to actually start moving in that direction.
Elite 2 (just “Frontier” here) had Newtonian flight physics, and it made the fights just plain boring. While the relative velocities between you and your targets should have cancelled out, the shooting still somehow managed to feel more like a turret than a fighter.
Elite 1 got you into a rhythm since the enemy movements were generally so predictable. Freespace 2 managed to avoid that by mixing things up and putting you inbetween these gargantuan capital ships tearing into each other with beams that would flash fry you if you flew into one.
[quote]The planet looks allot better. I did notice something, but I’m not sure if a person would notice it once you have collisions in place. If you are to close to the planet, you can see the green lines hovering above the blue curve.
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At the moment continents are just lines hovering above the planet, I’ll get round to creating occlusion geometry for them as well soon.
[quote]1. Please let us control flight direction via the mouse. Steering with the keyboard is very cumbersome
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I did have mouse control but disabled it while I was testing something and forgot to turn it back on.
[quote]2. Collisions.
3. Map and autopilot
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Probably the next two most important things to add.
I think nearly all space-sim games tend to feel like you are in a turret and just descend to an exercise in try to lead your targets. I think I will go for a more turn-based RPG style combat system (similar to Chrono-Trigger) as I tend to find those a lot more fun.
[quote]shooting still somehow managed to feel more like a turret than a fighter
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Lol. There was the other extreme, in Privateer, the best ship with the best armor had a very successful combat method that was hilarious. The quickest, easiest method of killing swarms of ships was ramming them. I never bot a missle in that game, because you are the missile.
[quote]shooting still somehow managed to feel more like a turret than a fighter
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In X2/X3 you could add turrets to ships. And you could get ships from tiny with one laser to huge with multiple turrets spewing out clouds of death.
Piloting your armada into a Xenon controlled space with a Xenon battleship + escorts was absolutely brilliant and looked like it came straight from Lucas’ studios.
I think that if you are going to go with Newtonian physics, using turrets & missiles would be the best path. Your typical ‘single seated fighter’ would be to much to handle and you would probably opt for capital ships /destroyers / frigates and like.
Maybe using some kind of controlable auto-stabilization that would dampen the mass inertia could do the trick. Enabled it should feel more like an FPS style steering and on key press it would be disabled to become a “drift mode” for e.g. an attack. Making this devices tradable items with different attributes (strength of dampening, energy efficiency, time to full dampening etc.) could also add to the gameplay.
It can however represent distance more effectively. while the circular radar only immediately represents position, absent color or size cues.