Elite / Frontier Some news on Elite 4 (and the Outsider)

[bananascope]

Dont remember it beening that slow on the Amiga?.
Only about a couple of minutes for the terror attacks as I recall.

it was when assulting an alien base that whittled the day away
my friend had an amiga with a hard drive on which it just zip by

 

[DrBaggy]

The real issue isn't the capabilities of the consoles (the 360 and PS3 exceed that of your average PC, although top end PC's do have the advantage), it's about coming up with working control mechanisms. Just replicating keyboard and mouse on a controller doesn't work, so more novel control schemes need to be used such as voice or motion based systems. While they may not be their yet, they will be given time.

Michael

Is there any insurmountable technical reason why mice could not be made to use with consoles? I agree the console controllers don't work well for strategy games. Though personally I'm sorry to see that joysticks don't seem to be used so much (Freelancer started this didn't it?) as a mouse doesn't seem so good for flight/driving sims either.

 

[Stefan Mars]

Is there any insurmountable technical reason why mice could not be made to use with consoles?

No technical reason whatsoever. However, in order to publish a game on a console you are required to support its native gamepad in addition to whatever other controller you might support. In addition there tend to be certain controllers that are not allowed at all.

In general control mechanisms are actually quite expensive to develope for a game, because they tend to be continously tested, tweaked and outright replaced - so the question for the publisher and developer comes down to if it is cost effective to have more than one control-mechanism.

 

[DrBaggy]

No technical reason whatsoever. However, in order to publish a game on a console you are required to support its native gamepad in addition to whatever other controller you might support. In addition there tend to be certain controllers that are not allowed at all.

In general control mechanisms are actually quite expensive to develope for a game, because they tend to be continously tested, tweaked and outright replaced - so the question for the publisher and developer comes down to if it is cost effective to have more than one control-mechanism.

Thanks smars. It feels that if consoles supported mice, they could be used for a wider variety of games (eg strategy) and them even I might be forced to get one! I realise that for developers it's not just technical restraints, but money/copyright and all sorts of other factors that come inti play.

 

[bassmike200]

I'm more than a bit worried about the console release.
Usually, for a PC user, a game being developed on the consoles spells 'dumbing down' - partially due to controller limitations, partially due to console market consisting largely of dreaded 'casuals'.

I'd prefer non-sucky E4.

I love Frontier and spent many years happily building up a small scale fortune and minor reputation for killing people, not to mention advancing through the ranks of the Imperial navy, however I find most Xbox360 games are a bit overly deep, requiring often too much time to master their intricacies and insufficient leniency for rank amateurs (I consider myself pretty poor at Frontier in spite of my years at the mouse (on the Amiga 500!)) so for me an Xbox360 version would be quite handy (my PC is a music machine and this laptop is a web machine, TBH I can't afford a game machine right now!).

That's my tuppence worth for now!

 

[turwhitt]

It feels that if consoles supported mice, they could be used for a wider variety of games .

I used to play C&C on my old PS1 using a mouse. The technology was there 10years ago, so i doubt it's any different now. Are you sure mice aren't usable already on modern consoles?