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Starflight ~ let's play (Episode 3)

Makagor

Liturgist
Joined
Jan 27, 2006
Messages
103
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A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...oh wait. Way back in 1986 Electronic Arts published this little gem by Binary Systems. This is a freeform space exploration sim that allows you to go where you want, shmooze with the other denizens of the galaxy, discover the secrets of long dead empires, and get viciously explodinated if you are not careful.

Let us begin:

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If you can't/won't read all that it is your basic mission statement and some information concerning the local region of space. It gives the location where two otherships disappeared, tells where the minerals are in our home system, gives you the location of some ruins in a nearby system, and warns of aliens in another system. We haven't done anything to be evaluated yet, so we'll skip that for now.

Let's go!
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Woops, can't take over the galaxy without some minions and for some odd reason the ship won't fly without a name.

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We'll buy some cargo pods and name the ship...

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The ISS EXTREEEEME! Pretty bad-ass, huh?

Now for an extreme crew...
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Commander Collar Grabber! Humans are pretty good all-arounders and excellent at grabbing the collars of the galaxy.

But he needs a comic relief sidekick.

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We'll take along a bug-furry called Mr. Buggles. Bug-furries are excellent navigators and engineers.

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We spend the rest of our money training navigation because it sucks to get lost and science because...well, SCIENCE! is an extreme skill to have.

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You can have up to six crewmembers, but for now our two bros will both have multiple roles. Does this mean we're playing a roleplaying game?

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Beam me up!

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This is where the copy protection comes along. Fortunately I still have my code-wheel from back in the day.

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5..4..3..2..1..

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Whoosh!

What perils await our intrepid adventurers? Will they discover the secrets of the Ancients? Will collars be grabbed? Tune in for the next episode to find out!
 

lightbane

Arcane
Joined
Dec 27, 2008
Messages
10,156
What? No shields and/or weapon have you? You're not enough extreme, and you know that the galaxy is filled with heretics, mutants, aliens and worse abominations all eager to pounce at you...

Still interested however, continue it.
 

Dionysus

Scholar
Joined
Feb 12, 2009
Messages
345
I loved that game. It's too bad that the dumbed-down spiritual sequel (Star Control 2) gets more love these days. I blame the console kiddies.
 

Makagor

Liturgist
Joined
Jan 27, 2006
Messages
103
Episode 2

Our brave crew have just launched from the starport on the maiden voyage of the ISS EXTREEEEME!

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Here we are, right outside the orbital range of our homeworld, Arth. It has just recently come to light that Arth was colonized by a group called Noah 2, and that this group came from a planet called Earth. The same source of this knowledge is also the source of our new interstellar ship technology. This technology is centered around the mysterious crystalline matter called Endurium, and Endurium is the fuel used by our new ships.

The recently discovered historical writings tell of the Old Empire and a Great Interstellar War. When the Old Empire was on the verge of defeat an organization known as the Institute launched Project Noah, a last ditch colonization effort to preserve the Empire. The final fate of the Empire and the identity of the Empire's enemies has been lost to time. Perhaps these mysteries will be unravelled by intrepid explorers.

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Onward! Our mighty war...er, our wimpy galactic newbies head for interstellar space to have a look around. The little white dot at the top-center of the upper right screen is our ship, near the edge of our solar system.

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We are in interstellar space. Let us check the starmap.

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The cyan rectangle is the position of our ship. The orange cross is our selected destination. This is for information only, there is no smart auto-pilot. The destination crosshair will give you the distance and fuel needed to travel from where you are to the destination.

The Starmap axes are oriented to the galactic plane. The horizontal axis is the outward-coreward axis, with the ascending numbers progressing towards the core of the galaxy. The vertical axis is downspin-upspin axis with the ascending numbers progressing in the direction of galactic rotation (upspin).

Operations gave us a tip about ruins in a nearby K-Class system. For those of you with a poor SCIENCE! skill, K-Class stars are orange in color. The nearest orange star is just upspin and outward from our position. Let's go check it out.

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Operations said the second planet, that's the blue one.

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Collar Grabber grabs the planet by the collar and uses some extreme SCIENCE! on it. Notice how it says TEMPERATURE: NOT CERTAIN. That's because C.G's science skill isn't as extreme as it should be.

Operations gave us a planetary coordinate too. We'll go down and check it out.

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Safe landing, Cap'n!

Prepare to go ashore!

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Alien ambush!

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Pew!Pew!

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What the hell is that thing?

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There are ruins right where they said.
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And a message!

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A bit of useful information - the location of Colony Control. It appears they had an infestation of furries too...kinda like the Codex, eh?

Zoom out the map and we see...
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...another ruin.

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Some Endurium!

After a couple of hours of Endurium collecting, mining, and critter zapping we get lost in a storm.
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And Collar Grabber gets struck by extreme lightning! We'll need to increase Mr. Buggles' navigation skill as soon as we can...if we survive.

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Things looked dire but we were still close to the ship and were able to make our way back.

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Collar Grabber treats himself to some first-aid.

Time to bug out.
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See there where it says ECOSPHERE : 2-4? That means you are more likely to find life or liveable planets in the orbits indicated. In this case planet orbits 2, 3, & 4. But just for extreme giggles let's go visit the innermost planet.

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Oxygen? Check. Water? Check.

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Gravity less than 2.0 G? Check. Temperature within liveable range? Check. No violent weather? Check.
Hey! People can live on this planet. Let's recommend a colony here.

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Hehe, we rocked this rock!

Time to head back home.
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On the way back we stopped at the inner planet of the home system to scrounge up some more minerals to sell.

Back at Starport we check in with Operations.
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Awright! A 35000 m.u. bonus for finding a good colony planet.

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Uh-oh, bad news. For some unknown reason at some inevitable time our star is going to flare and most likely destroy our planet. The corporation wants us to find viable colony worlds to which we can evacuate our people. It's a good thing we got a jump start on finding the easy pickings!

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Hmm, androids 20 sectors coreward of Arth.

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A nexus of continuum fluxes 40 sectors outward and downspin.

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Ruins found on the thrid planet of Arth system.

Time to sell all our phatlewt.
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Collecting bio-data and specimens is a waste of time. We won't be doing any more of that.

Training the crew...
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We added and trained a diplomatic lizard-furry to handle all the talking.

Now to improve our ride...
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We added a couple more cargo pods and the best engine we could buy. We may have to do some extreme running away.

Will our extreme heroes find the source of the solar instability? Will they find the golden fleece? Do androids have collars? Tune in next time to find out!
 

Hory

Erudite
Joined
Oct 1, 2003
Messages
3,002
Dionysus said:
I loved that game. It's too bad that the dumbed-down spiritual sequel (Star Control 2) gets more love these days.
Because instead of a shitload of sterile technical descriptions, SC2 has interesting characters, meaningful encounters, quirky dialogues, puzzle solving, great music, fun combat and so on.
 

Metro

Arcane
Beg Auditor
Joined
Aug 27, 2009
Messages
27,792
Never played the original but I loved Starflight 2 and they're basically the same game. Some fans and possibly the original developers have been working on a sequel for nearly a decade now although I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for it to be released.

http://www.starflight3.org/
 

Black_Willow

Arcane
Joined
Dec 21, 2007
Messages
1,866,230
Location
Borderline
Hory said:
Dionysus said:
I loved that game. It's too bad that the dumbed-down spiritual sequel (Star Control 2) gets more love these days.
Because instead of a shitload of sterile last-gen shit, SC2 has LARPing, twitchy combat, l33t grafix and so on.
fixed
 

Hory

Erudite
Joined
Oct 1, 2003
Messages
3,002
Starflight by Binary Systems? More like Mission Log Generator by NASA. THIS GAME IS ABOUT READING A SHITLOAD OF TECHNICAL TERMS. LOOKS LIKE REALISM FAGGOTRY GOES WAY BACK.
 

Dionysus

Scholar
Joined
Feb 12, 2009
Messages
345
Hory said:
Because instead of a shitload of sterile technical descriptions, SC2 has interesting characters, meaningful encounters, quirky dialogues, puzzle solving, great music, fun combat and so on.
SC2 has dumbed-down twitchy gameplay and fruity aliens for the ADD-afflicted Saturday-morning cartoon set.
 

Wyrmlord

Arcane
Joined
Feb 3, 2008
Messages
28,886
Hory said:
Dionysus said:
I loved that game. It's too bad that the dumbed-down spiritual sequel (Star Control 2) gets more love these days.
Because instead of a shitload of sterile technical descriptions, SC2 has interesting characters, meaningful encounters, quirky dialogues, puzzle solving, great music, fun combat and so on.
You know what is funny?

The space and planetary exploration was the only thing I enjoyed from Star Control 2.

And the space and planetary exploration was the sole focus of Starflight, which I later got my hands on.

This is a testament to where Starflight stands and where Star Control 2 stands.

(Okay, admittedly, the sterile style of Starflight really makes it hard for you to first get into it.)
 

Morkar Left

Guest
Loved that game! Together with SF 2 the best Exploration RPG ever. Keep it up!

Played the remake to starcontrol and didn´t liked the combat. The combat system is nice for a coffeebreak but way to console-heavy for my taste.
 

Metro

Arcane
Beg Auditor
Joined
Aug 27, 2009
Messages
27,792
Hory said:
...READING...

Can't have that. Actually, Starflight was about trading, exploration, and diplomacy (at least to the limited extent you could have in a twenty year old game) and if you didn't ruin it all with a hint book it was fairly challenging to figure things out. Then again you probably think Seven Cities of Gold and Heart of Africa were crap, too.
 

Makagor

Liturgist
Joined
Jan 27, 2006
Messages
103
Episode 3

Episode 3

Welcome back to the adventures of Captain Collar Grabber and his crew of freaks. Last time we upgraded our engines and expanded our cargo space. We head out to land on the third planet of our home system to look for ruins.

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We find some more fuel and other useless artifacts.

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Let's go investigate the report of androids 20 sectors coreward.

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There's a system 20 sectors in, that must be the one.

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First contact!

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"See androids fiiightiiing! and fucking! and sucking! Brad and Janet!"

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Yes it is, but we didn't remove anything from an inventory...

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Why yes we are Group 9. Group 9 from OUTER SPACE!

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We manage to flummox the androids and they scurry away, leaving us to our business.

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The blue one looks promising.

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Uh-oh, it looks like a trap.

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Great, it's the Galactic Inquisition. Why do robots care about the state of our souls? At least we have souls, eh robot-boy? And who the fuck is Layton?

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No need for you guys to hang around...we'll watch your stuff for you. And Code Blue is for pussies, switch to Code Brown!

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Sweet! Let's pump these idiots for information.

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OH GOD ITS HEVAN!

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Mars...

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Ruins location...

After learning lots of useless trivia from the androids we send them on their way and orbit the planet.

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It's a nearly perfect colony world, nice.

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Lots of goodies on the surface too. After filling up all our cargo pods we head back to Starport.


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Some continuum flux coordinates...

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Jackpot! A 50000 m.u. bonus!

We sell all the minerals we found on Heaven and upgrade the ship's systems some more.

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Now we have the best engines and a very nice shield. What, no weapons? Eh, EXTREME DIPLOMACY seems to be working out so far.

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We train a new crew-bug and prepare to head back out to look into this continuum flux business.


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"Roads? Where we're going we don't need roads!"
 

ghostdog

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Dec 31, 2007
Messages
11,079
Suggestions:

1. Ditch the .png file format, convert to jpg for smaller size.
2. Smaller dimensions. 800x500 is too big for this game. Resize to something like 500x375 (4:3 ratio since stretched it looks crap)


Keep it up.
 

Makagor

Liturgist
Joined
Jan 27, 2006
Messages
103
ghostdog said:
Suggestions:

1. Ditch the .png file format, convert to jpg for smaller size.
2. Smaller dimensions. 800x500 is too big for this game. Resize to something like 500x375 (4:3 ratio since stretched it looks crap)


Keep it up.

Thanks for the suggestions. So the .png format is too big? Looking at my picture sizes the .png's are about 150KB. The same images converted to .jpg are coming out about 50KB. Is that small of a difference really noticeable? I didn't notice a long loading time when looking at this thread, but hey, I don't mind making it easier on anyone who wants to see these.

The default screenshot file format coming out of D-Fend and dosbox is the .png. I couldn't find a way to change it. Any tips on mass converting all my screens to .jpg? I'm nearly done with the playthrough and I've got several hundred screenshots and it might be more effort than I can spend to convert them one at a time.

My pictures may look a little stretched but I did not alter the aspect ratio at all. That's just the look of the game and if my memory is to be trusted I think it has always looked a little flattened out. I only made them bigger with Powertoys for Windows XP so they would be easier to read.

Have a look at these:

Unaltered screenshot
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Blown up to 640x400
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Blown up to 800x600
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Custom sized to 500x375
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Here's the same four as JPEG
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Which of those four do you all think are best for this kind of presentation? I'll size them however the majority likes.
 

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