Be Excellent To Each Other

Only ever played the BBC version. Wore the disk out

I think the mistakes of Frontier will be learnt. Fundamentally it was a great game but game development was still very young. He now has his own experiences, a proper dev team + also other games to look at and learn from. Everything I've heard so far says much thought is being given about how it will work and will stay true to Elite while being good to play.

I think it is going to end up as a train wreck. £1.25MM is not a lot at all.Sorry to be the naysayer but
iOS game publishers would consider that small beer. It might appear as a small hobby project but as a game? Better off getting those A3 Elite posters signed.

£1.25 million not a lot for a small, dedicated developer? Bollocks!

They're basically spending it on wages and electricity bills. It's plenty.

The reality is most iOS games are actually developed on the same kind of timescales and budgets your average 8 bit game was. Small teams or even people in their bedrooms and games turned out in 8 to 16 weeks. £1.25 million isn't a figure many or indeed any iOS games would approach.

It's also approx the same kind of money that was asked for Star Citizen. Chris Roberts wrong as well?

Also remember this game isn't coming from scratch. The concept doesn't need to be developed. Key parts are already sorted as they have been working on this as a skunkworks project for years. What is being paid for is for them to spend a year writing the game.

Real world reality check: 1.25 million is fuck all money, even for a smallish company.
Christ, my department burns more than that annually, and there are only eleven of us.

As they said at the outset, this was a test to see if the market was there.

Two words, 'beer' and 'hookers'.

This. And the VC stuff I was party to regarding IT things.

I don't get how more money means a mac version, and then more ships, and more content, and more, and more!
Software development works like that, throw more money at it and you'll get more done in a shorter timescale, it's a proven model that never fails...

That's just how kick starters work.

Malc

David Braben had full creative freedom with Frontier: Elite II. That seemed to work out okay. In fact, it's generally held that it was the publisher's fuckery that caused Frontier First Encounters to be released in such a shocking state.

And Braben also stated it was a way to "force" Elite IV into being their main project as opposed to something they just pissed about with in the background when not busy with other things.

I would presume the Kickstarter is simply a means of procuring some of the funding, with the rest coming from more traditional means of financial investment. Getting this amount of money from Kickstarter is a good way of removing reliance on a publisher for funding - they've said that about it all along.

Considering Frontier are a fully-fledged game developer in the UK nowadays, I can't see them wanting to massively fuck their reputation by not going full-steam ahead with this now the Kickstarter has succeeded.

I can't really remember ever noticing in Elite:Frontiers, but does the game have proper orbital mechanics and general spacey physics? I just remember hitting to GO FORWARD BUTTON, pointing in the right direction and everything seemed to work. I don't remember having to worry about gravity or 'slingshotting' like other people seem to have mentioned. Infact I'm fairly certain you could just 'stop' dead in space?

I you "stopped dead" it would always be with reference to some near greater mass, like the nearest planet. You can see the change in reference as you approach on autopilot, because at one point there will be a sudden "change" in speed. So if the planet is your current reference, then when you have speed 0 you are really following the planet on it's orbit around the sun. Then when you get close enough to a space station, that becomes your reference, and you orbit the planet with it.

It depended on what body you were relative to, you could indeed stop dead in space, but that would be relative to an object (star, planet, space station) and you would use fuel to keep yourself there.

You could slingshot around stars and planets, you could watch sunrise and eclipeses and transits and so on.

Malc

I jammed to "go" button down for ages to see what happened when you broke light speed. Nothing, it turns out

You could slingshot around planets, but there wasn't really any point as your fuel usage for normal zooming around was so low.

Big upsurge now. Ironically it may be nearly enough extra to pay the Oliver Twins to develop their ill conceived egg game.

Hey it's past the Mac version threshold!

Any news of the 8 bit versions?

I'm so fucking happy right now.

I'm so happy to hear that Braben calls it "Lave" and not "Lahve" as certain people have tried to suggest.

"Lave" is in "rhymes with wave" or "Lave as in "sounds like Le havre"?

Rhymes with wave!

Or go the Grim... approach and pronounce it lar-vay.

I've been pronouncing my name correctly all these years! Phew!

Not "Lave" like the French "to wash"? It is good we are clearing these things up.

Mind you, at work today we have been dealing with "What came first, the chicken or the egg?" situation, or, as I prefer to ask "At what point in time did Ovocalyxin-32 arise to play a prominent role int he protein matrix?"

Skills.

Good job that's not an animated jif.

I thought they got renamed to cif?

The egg came first, chickens, by definition, come from eggs, something like a chicken, but not a chicken laid an egg, and the first chicken came out of it.

Malc

Yeah, that's badly punctuated!

A = Thing that laid an egg
B = Egg
C = Chicken

A laid B and C hatched out of

A is not a chicken, C is.

B was there before C, so the egg came first.

Malc

What's the right way to cook an egg, Malc?

1098 Sparrows

I have a different oven now so that method is now outdated.

Malc

Hey that's a thing that (just) predates Beex!

Malc

This is the point, I think- it's been in development hell for years and years and years as the name of Frontier's research stuff. They just need to actually make it, now. Not the same as making something from the ground up.

I reckon it might have something to do with him approaching the big 50. Elite IV - Midlife Crisis.

Reached the 1.5M stretch goal. Number of playable ships has just risen from 15 to 25!

I hope the Lion Transport is still in it. Shitty little loveable thing.

I think I'll wait until it's on sale.

If we have a BEEX team on Elite, can the first motion be that we all go to the founders system that only Kickstarter people can enter thus leaving Mr Chris in deep space muttering that he shouldn't have been so tight a year ago?

Motion 2 - We help Dimrill carry a precious cargo of booze and jazz mags halfway across the galaxy to planet Zardoz.

Securing a certain pledge only happens when you've typed in your card details and address, not when you chose which tier you wanted.

Which is why it said 6 £20 ones left when I clicked on it, 5 left while I was typing everything in, and by the time I got to Submit SORRY THIS PLEDGE LEVEL IS SOLD OUT.

£25 then. Submit it. Back to the main page. Suddenly there's 1 £20 left again.

CUNT.

As pointed out, this project has been running for years in the background and I think this footage gives this fact away. They have something semi functional already running. In fact if you remember the original news report at launch, Braben had a load of screens running behind him of some kind of 3D space game. I did wonder if they had a basic engine running already before they started. I think the subsequent clips have shown they do indeed have some kind of space combat game working on a basic level.

The next year will be refining the engine, creating content and sorting the trading and multiplayer side.

This is going to need more than a one button joystick isn't it? What I mean is, it looks like it could be complicated.

You can be my sidekick, Mr Parrot.

(above) Elite
(below) Elite: Dangerous