Braben's Elite, FEII and FFE.

[Trash]

Elite was the seminal space trader game and basically created an entire genre. It was followed by two amazing sequels that managed to cram an entire milky way complete with Newtonian physics to play around in on a few floppy disks. Not to mention the awesome classical score they had. I'm thinking of starting one of them up again, but do remember what a timesinks these games were. So, what is the best one and what mods, patches or fanpatches should I try?


Elite is basically the game that started it all. Gotta love that logo.

Fronter - Elite II is the sequel which threw in so many awesome stuff on a few disks that I could barely believe it.

Frontier - First Encounters was highly anticipated but turned out to be unfinished and buggy. Am not sure however if it ever got truly patched up and if it reaches the height of excellence of its predecessors.

 

[DraQ]

...











Well, Elite started it all, but got replicated, cloned and fiddled with to hell and back, so the only reasonable alternatives are FE2 and FFE.

FE2 is more finished of the two, I recommend DOS version under DOSBox, but if you want something more flexible and light, you can google GLFrontier (but disable half-assed and buggy OpenGL mode with ctrl+e ).

There is also Pioneer which is to a large extent a community remake of FE2, but it's still in alpha stage.

FFE got raped by premature release. Most of the bugs have been ironed out by either fans or official patches, you just have to use JJFFE or one of its derivatives (like Russian D3DFFE, which is unfinished, but fairly impressive). FFE has benefit of better AI, handcoded missions and lots of background lore in form of journals. It also introduces the element of terrain elevation, but it has no clouds and properties of certain astronomical bodies are fucked up thanks to the game never being properly finished.

In any case, if you want either game to unfold it's full potential, use this tutorial so that you don't end up hapless without all the automatics and capable of only doing freight runs between safe systems.

The tutorial is for JJFFE but apart from Jordanian Controls it works with FE2 too.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Go play EvE Online instead.

 

[DraQ]

Go play EvE Online instead.

EvE cannot into newtonian. Or planetary landings.

Also:
http://www.rpgcodex.net/phpBB/viewtopic.php?p=493595

 

[MetalCraze]

Eve Online is also not a game.

 

[Von Paulus]

Try Evochron Mercenary. Not Elite, but it reminded me a lot of Elite when playing.

 

[Tycn]

Eve Online is also not a game.

It's actually a species of cuttlefish.

 

[asper]

Frontier is the only one I really played. Damn, this reminds me to rip off the cool face pictures and post them as Codex avatars.

Anyway, the games are amazing. I still remember how Frontier blew my mind with having an infinite universe to explore. They ooze style and atmosphere. The Kubrick-inspired classical tracks were awesome years before I discovered Kubrick. The only thing holding these games back is the dated interface (as with most old games).

 

[Trash]

Reinstalled Frontier - Elite II and am having a blast. Hilarious as how quickly the memory of how to play this came back to me. That's what you get for spending way too much time as a teen on a game. :D

Glfrontier was indeed easy to setup and start. It also looked nice and I do have the sneaking suspicion that the programmer added extra stuff like new police conversations. I got booked for having a broken taillight when I landed and had the chance to give the cop the finger. However it seemed most of the audio wasn't ported and there were some strange bugs cropping up. Installed Frontier in Dosbox and it runs like a dream.

Evochron is rather lame. Shows promise and all but the game just lacks atmosphere. Didn't do anything for me.

 

[Fowyr]

I remember visiting every star system in the first galaxy in futile pursuit of legacy ship. Curse them for this red herring, curse them!

 

[Trash]

I also get the sneaking suspicion that there are no mods being made for these games anymore. Glfrontier hasn't been updated since 2006. Pioneer has also been left alone for years. Last update for D3DFFE is from 2008. Too bad.

FE2 is awesome as it is though and FFE works very well with JJFFE. Hell, and we could always hope for Elite 4 to show up one day. Probably on the same day that Grimoire gets released.


EDIT: My bad. Mayority of links given on sites point to old or abandoned versions of mods. Seems that Pioneer at least is still being worked on. Alpha 8 and with a new lead programmer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aVf-8qVdsg

 

[Suchy]

http://www.frontierastro.co.uk/Hires/hiresffe.html

Nerd fucking gasm!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNIbekG4wLw&hd=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7ip5orUlDM

 

[Von Paulus]

Evochron is rather lame. Shows promise and all but the game just lacks atmosphere. Didn't do anything for me.

I agree with you but which Evochron did you play?
In Mercenary he has improved a little or at least is what I feel.

 

[Trash]

Mercenary. Everything about the game shouts that it wants to be a mmo. Even docking just gives you access to a quest dispenser and an item list to browse through. Game has absolutely no atmosphere to speak off. Looks pretty though and the weather effects once you enter an atmosphere are cool. It just lacks...soul I guess.

 

[SCO]

http://www.frontierastro.co.uk/Hires/hiresffe.html

Nerd fucking gasm!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNIbekG4wLw&hd=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7ip5orUlDM

MY BONER! IT LOOKS DOWN ON EARTH. IT IS GOD!

 

[Von Paulus]

It just lacks...soul I guess.

I see your point. It lacks also a true campaign in SP.
But to be honest, I don't how would I feel if I played Elite nowadays. I played it on my C64 back in 1985/86. Probably it wouldn't be so much different.

 

[Suchy]

Shit... did anyone manage to download FFE3D? I can't get it from spacesimcentral for some reason. Goes terribly slow (like 10kb/s) and it always breaks after a few megabytes. Doesn't support download managers either.

 

[jiduthie]

no planetary landings, i'll grant you, but x3 did a very good job of all of this , space sims are few and far between but there has been quality. Egosoft "gets it" to my mind.

 

[commie]

Shit... did anyone manage to download FFE3D? I can't get it from spacesimcentral for some reason. Goes terribly slow (like 10kb/s) and it always breaks after a few megabytes. Doesn't support download managers either.

Register. It will download fine and quickly.

Last update for D3DFFE is from 2008. Too bad.

Hmm. This one at Space Sim central seems to be updated in late 2010.

 

[Morkar Left]

There are still some updates to d3dffe once in a while but only models so far. the owner of Spacesim central packs them together in one download and the latest are usually mentioned there in a thread with a link where you can download them (russian).

 

[Suchy]

Shit... did anyone manage to download FFE3D? I can't get it from spacesimcentral for some reason. Goes terribly slow (like 10kb/s) and it always breaks after a few megabytes. Doesn't support download managers either.

Register. It will download fine and quickly.

Last update for D3DFFE is from 2008. Too bad.

Hmm. This one at Space Sim central seems to be updated in late 2010.

I registered. Still achieving the amazing speed of 12kb/s... maybe at least it won't break this time.
Here's the download link by the way: http://www.spacesimcentral.com/download ... &df_id=255

Edit: of course the download broke up.

 

[Raapys]

That looks awesome. Gonna give it a try, getting great download speed here.

 

[baronjohn]

Yeah, I get 350kb/s here

 

[Suchy]

Care to upload it to a decent file host afterwards? I mean mediafire, rapidshare, hotfile or megaupload.
Thanks

 

[baronjohn]

http://ifile.it/f3lgtco/FFED3D.7z