Indeed OP, indeed. Have some rep.
It's not a game!
- Thread starter Berty Dastard
- Start date
For the OP it is not a game and he puts this forward a non confrontational and even charming way. ED has always been about playing the game / sim the way you wish to. The Galaxy simulation is breathtaking, OP is learning about astronomy and more besides - its really great to hear these positive thoughts and experiences people are having with ED.
Thanks for your kind remarks and rep. I know for some its a game. I have clan mates who have spent 3 months shooting stuff.
Surprised last night to find they are exploring now. But for me it's 'mostly' a sim, but I wil do a bit of bang bang later.
And yes that side of things is constrained. If we had bvr missiles then I guess from the comments of others we might just as well be playing that other game.
But for aviators they still relish the gun kill, when appropriate, and that is the bit that ED is giving us.
Meanwhile I continue to educate myself. Having been to Sagittarius A* I have moved away from that popular magnet about 500 ly.
Within the last hour I have been to about 6 neutron stars, 1 earth like and ...
... a black hole with a weirder lensing (?) effect than I have seen at the few others I have been to. Had to share
Surprised last night to find they are exploring now. But for me it's 'mostly' a sim, but I wil do a bit of bang bang later.
And yes that side of things is constrained. If we had bvr missiles then I guess from the comments of others we might just as well be playing that other game.
But for aviators they still relish the gun kill, when appropriate, and that is the bit that ED is giving us.
Meanwhile I continue to educate myself. Having been to Sagittarius A* I have moved away from that popular magnet about 500 ly.
Within the last hour I have been to about 6 neutron stars, 1 earth like and ...
... a black hole with a weirder lensing (?) effect than I have seen at the few others I have been to. Had to share
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Except when you find that planet that is like 1000k temperature, is composed of completely toxic gas, totally uninhabitable, yet has a population of 100 million. Also, it is not a simulation. Gravity, sound, flight physics, etc... all intentionally out-of-wack for the sake of game play. This is 9 parts game, 1 part simulation.
I agree with you to an extent, that more could have been done with extending the range of fights into the BVR domain, and to make better use of scanners and stealth, but at the end of the day the visual handbook of the game says "lets have up-close and personal WWII aircraft dogfighting, where you can see what's going on with the MKI eyeball, in space".
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If we went down the fully sim route, we'd probably have cockpit-less AI drones conducting operations semi- or completely autonomously. Stealth engagements where whoever got spotted first (heat, EM, optical) gets annihilated in milliseconds. Piloted ships probably wouldn't have glass cockpits (shielded bridges in the interior would make more sense) and we'd be clicking on pixels to target things light-seconds away. Whilst there probably could be quite a good "harpoon-esque" game in this, it wouldn't necessarily be Elite.
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*EDIT* I do agree with the OP that I have actually learnt some things about star formation (T-tauris), partial pressures of oxygen, close orbiting binary planets (thought that they were impossible) through investigating what's in the game. I still think Space Engine is a more impressive achievement though, for a single guy to produce that.
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Elite is a sim-cade. It hangs in the middle between sim and a game but dangerously close to the second one.
Yeah and it does not work well for me - every time I play I cry for real life physics and more realistic spaceships
very much agree ... i have a list of places im also dropping in on from my younger years
of astronomy.
where else can you sit in the photosphere of a star and drink coffee and think eeeee, aint fusion grand.
well, milliways for sure but ....
enjoy your upcoming migration from work into full time ED
of astronomy.
where else can you sit in the photosphere of a star and drink coffee and think eeeee, aint fusion grand.
well, milliways for sure but ....
enjoy your upcoming migration from work into full time ED
YES!
...of Game Dev Story.
Sez who? The game was, arguably, missing a lot of...um...game...at launch. Are you suggesting that they spent all the time implementing the astronomy? 'cos I reckon that's a bunch of hooey. If there was a star-map to copy-paste from, you can BET - real money, like - that it was copy-pasted into the game, with as little 'development' as possible.
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I'd expect nothing less from a cad like you!
Oooh Obstris mentioned Harpoon
I think it's consistent enough throughout to be a deliberate design decision rather than something they just left out because they ran out of time. If the spaceflight and combat was realistic, it would be a completely different game (and possibly not very fun) I'm saying they never had the intention to create such a game.
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Well, I bought into the game on the back of that very sleek video, doing the rounds back in't day, where the pilot freezes his ship and glides into dock undetected. As such, I was disappointed when the flight-modes were changed, but I didn't have an issue with it - the game was in beta and that's the game designer's job - to make the game as fun and accessible to the market segment they want in to.
It's the other bits of the game. ED doesn't shift the goalposts far enough. They've got a lot of publicity on the erroneous belief that there haven't been any space games in 10 years. As such, I believe, they've gotten away with a marketing coup, because this game doesn't contain 10 years worth of advancements. I don't think it will, either - it wasn't ambitious enough from the outset. I see ED as having pre-jumped, on a new, space-game bandwagon, and their aversion to risk dictated this rather simplistic update to a very old formula.
Now, I've been reading some Jodorowsky recently. There's a very strong anti-game, get-out-there-and-do-your-own-thing theme taking place within - surreal twist - a virtual game. I saw a parallel between the protagonist's ideals and the 'blaze-your-own-trail' intention of ED. But they aren't the same, because the rules behind ED are, and will continue to be, set-up to aver players from the very ideal the game professes to endorse.
The OP is spot-on with regards to what this game or "application" if you will, provides to those of us that are into astronomy. Upstairs I have a Zhumell Z12 Dobsonian telescope that I use on and off in the summer on those oh so few clear nights to view many of the objects that I can now traverse to in this virtual world. The best part... no mosquitoes!!!
Oooh Obstris mentioned Harpoon
It's like a personal 'Godwin's law of Analogies'. The longer a thread goes on, the more likely I am to mention Harpoon, DCS, Falcon 4 or StarShatter. See here I am doing it 4 days later!
Edit: Forgot IWar/IWar-2.
If this hasn't been referenced yet, shame. SHAAAAME.
I appreciate your enthusiasm and sentiment, but that's a false dichotomy. It's a game and a simulation. As to its actual educational value, it might be more useful if you could actually search by the star names used in existing star databases. It certainly does help give you a sense of the grand scale of things though, and the beauty that's probably out there.
Speaking about realistic, would we even fly those ships in the future to pick up space rocks or trade cargo by ourselves?
I think that would be done by drones, even the fights (remote controlled)
One of the first rules of game design - reality isn't fun.
Finding the fine line of what players perceive as realistic and keeping that interactivity fun is probably the hardest thing game designers can hope to achieve. In a game like Elite (and it is firstly a game), the designers take a lot of liberties with realism in order to make the game fun. In reality, if humans do manage not to kill themselves off in 1000+ years and reach the stars, I'm pretty certain rocket propulsion will be as primitive to what's actually used as propulsion, as a horse driven buggy is to a F35. But rocket propulsion looks cool, so that's what we have in Elite. Also, I'd be surprised if missile weapons of the far, far future would be limited to 10km and require a HUD lock. But in Elite, it makes engagements more engaging and fun.
I'll take fun over realism every time. However, I am very appreciative of the Milky Way being simulated as best as currently, humanly possible. That kind of realism, imo, is part of the fun of Elite.
+1 for Space Engine. Best space exploration "game" (not really a game yet) there is and as mentioned it's FREE. Liked it so much I made a Space Engine video. Click my sig for the video.