People who liked EVN.. Check out BetaBlocker

[Saint_Proverbius]

BETABLOCKER

It's like EVN.. Only it uses 3D graphics instead of the nice 2D ones EVN used. It's faster and has a bit more action(too much if you ask me), but it does have a lot of cool features. If you're looking for the next EV game, which is likely to never come, then you might want to give this a whirl.

 

[EEVIAC]

Ah crap. When I read "Beta Blocker" I thought it was going to be a Fantastic Voyage/Microsurgeon type game. Anyway, the EVN download was kind of unwieldy for dial-up, this is much more sensible.

 

[Jed]

It's faster and has a bit more action(too much if you ask me), but it does have a lot of cool features.

Everyone one of those screenshots looks like an atomic clusterfuck. Still, this is right up my alley, so I think I might have to give it a shot when I can find some time this weekend. How does it stack up to Flatspace?

 

[fnordcircle]

Interesting.

AND DAMN those graphics look a lot like flatspace, even if it is 3d.

 

[DarkUnderlord]

Downloading now...

 

[Greenskin13]

Wow. This is a lot like EVN....

I think EVN's 2d graphics are a bit more detailed, but there's a great deal of improvements that BB made, such as getting the route planner right away.

 

[Dhruin]

Seems like fun but fairly hard - I got blasted left , right and centre. I couldn't quite get going with Flatspace so EV Nova still seems the best to me. Any others I've missed?

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

Epair, which is in the works.
Trader Missions, also in the works.

BTW, that's also the problem I'm having. I'm getting my ass kicked all over the place in the game and there's not much I can do about it. I tried strengthing my shields and armor, and I'm still a bitch for nearly everything that decides to get pissy. Unlike EVN, when there's a battle, I just see some utterly fast moving shots flying everywhere, my shields and armor disappear, and poof.. Death.

The game really needs some difficulty tweaking in a major way.

 

[Dhruin]

I'll keep an eye on those others and hope that Beta-Blocker fixes the balance but. Thanks for the tips.

 

[Greenskin13]

Mother Mary says to me: "Dude, where's my Church?"

You can reduce the amount of dying you do by avoiding Outcast planets early on until you get a better ship and also planning your warping so that it doesn't cut through the system's center. And efficient afterburners are great for dodging missiles and getting the Hell out of Dodge.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

I've actually started doing so-so in the game. I've found that once you learn where a lot of the planets are, you can take on lots of missions at once and net $30k on one passenger ferrying voyage.

Of course, the big problem is, I tend to have to go through some outcast worlds every so often.

 

[Greenskin13]

England: where bad teeth meet bad food.

Hours of playing the intergalactic taxi have finally paid off. I bought an Exi Wraith and had it 'pimped out' with Accelerator guns and Shotgun missiles plus all the tweaks. Now I do Freelance missions in the border systems, saving up for a captial ship.

I haven't encountered anything remotely like a plot, so I'll assume it hasn't been implemented into the demo yet. Sad....

EDIT: Scratch that. After I became a made man by wasting Outcasts, I was approached by the Sol Police on Earth for a special extraction mission. I think I botched it, though, because I took so long.

 

[mr. lamat]

anyone know how to sell commodities you buy? i haven't figured that out yet.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

I'm not sure. I just soak up as many missions in a general area as possible and trade that way. I was rather hoping that since they're using some of the Freelancer's ideas, they'd also have used something like a trade net as well so I could figure out how to trade better. Even something like HardWar's system where the prices change but you could get the trade prices for surrounding areas would be nice.

 

[mr. lamat]

figured it out... you can only trade listed resources, re: those which always appear at a base/planet, which is kinda shitty.

and here i thought a mining colony would go apeshit over hard drugs.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

That is rather silly. You'd think you could trade anything anywhere, just to free up cargo space if you needed to free it up.

I agree, you'd think mining colonies more than any other type of colony would LOVE drugs. It's a motif in all sci-fi dealing with mining colonies, they love the drugs.

 

[world_creator]

i apologize if the game seemed rather hard, its still in both its testing and development phase so i havent taken off some time to refine the difficulty of the game, all i can recommend at the moment is that you stay out of trouble (the game was much harder in earlier versions). in regards to commodities, i did not tailor each planet's commodities individually and that is why you see every commodity available just about everywhere at random prices. thats because i simply randomized it for the sake of seeing if commodity trading would work. if you have any ideas on changing the commodity system, please go ahead and tell me and ill see if i can change it. i tried not to spend too much time on it. oh, and the "plot" is a pretty stupid "plot" that i wouldnt even count as one, i just added something to test out the plot system i programmed but have yet to use. im currently refining it. again, if there is anything else youd like to see change, please tell me. ive only played evo and freelancer (which i dont remember too well anymore feature wise) and a slight bit of evn. evo was enough to make me try to make another game like it.

 

[mr. lamat]

i dig the game, but want to be able to sell any good anywhere. your system doesn't allow that, or at least on my download.

other than that, it's a kick-ass way to waste an hour

 

[world_creator]

basically so that you can sell goods anywhere but can only purchase them at certain places?

 

[mr. lamat]

at the moment, i can only sell goods at stations/planets that also produce them.

ie. if i take a cargohold full of drugs from an outcast planet, the only place i can sell them is another outcast planet or washington. i tried running them to the new kyoto mining colony, alten and a few other places but they were never listed on the commodity screen.

your asking exactly what i want... certain places should produce certain things... resources from mining world, food on agricultural worlds, luxury goods on cityplanets, drugs on outcast planets... but i should be able to sell them anywhere. try and have it make sense though, like a mining planet should desire and pay through the nose for drugs and food.

 

[world_creator]

sounds logical and like a fine idea to me, thanks.

 

[Greenskin13]

Hey Jon, welcome to the Codex.

Your game is great, by the by. The occasional memory error really takes me out of the game, but if it wasn't for them, I'd probably play this game for hours straight.

I think I fell out of the plot because I spent too long picking up the Sol Police operative from Heldon. Is there any way to jump back in?

Good luck with BetaBlocker.

 

[world_creator]

what version are you guys playing btw?

the memory errors are the result of a game in progress, i have quite a few bugs that i need to crush and im getting there. in that build you guys seem to have, i believe the plot line just resets and you can run back there and do it. i might be wrong though, sorry if i seem a little out of it.

 

[Erichat13]

I haven't played the game a whole lot, but from what I've seen so far, I think it will turn out to be slightly better than EVN when it's finished. I like the graphics better, and also like the how the ships look. I'm playing version 0.9.9 and look forward to the completed version, keep up the good work!

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

0.9.9.0 is what I'm playing.

I think the things that I'd like the most are:

• Nearest Enemy Targetting. In the docs, it says that W has a bias towards hostiles, but that's really not enough. I spend a lot of time getting my butt kicked while just trying to target what's ticked off at me in the current system. Just being able to hit E to get the closest enemy would make that problem go away.
  
• Hailing. Being able to hail ships to get them to stop attacking with a bribe, general chatter, picking up missions, sending distress calls, and so forth.
  
• Character system. Personally, I'm not sure why none of the game like this have implimented this. Imagine having your pilot be nearly as important as your ship similar to how MechWarrior affected BattleTech. You could have a dexterity attribute that builds on your pilotting skill and gunnery skills for example. Charisma could affect a delay in the fighter AI, hailing, and so forth in addition to diplomacy and other skills. Intelligence could drive mechanics skills, power management skills and so forth.
  
• Better trading. In addition to what lamat said, you could have type flags for the various places. A mining colony would want medical supplies, food, equipment, and drugs. Just set a flag for MINING_COLONY and it automatically sets up the demands for that kind of thing to raise the prices there by a certain amount.
  
  Indicators on how good the prices are would be nice, especially for beginners. If you hit up a planet and see URANIUM VOODOO DOLLS for $586Beta, you really have no idea is that's a good buying or selling price. A five level system like; Good Buy, Buy, Stay, Sell, Good Sell would go a long way towards making it more friendly.
  
  You could also do a system like HardWar where you could get info on the prices around that region for the goods you are buying. Say the prices for things within a three system jump range.
  
• More equipment. Something EVN had that I really liked was the auto-refuel system. You land, it automatically refuels your ship and deducts credits accordingly.

That's really my list for now. Some of those would be easy, some would be very difficult.