Elite / Frontier A galaxy far far away....

[scsiborg]

I couldnt feel further detached from the development of Elite 4.
I have read on this website and other reference sites how David B is constantly hounded for a release date. With the greatest amound of respect and admiration, perhaps people would stop asking if they were given a more specific answer. Does anybody have any new and real information about Elite 4??

People like myself are wanting to get exited about his/frontiers work again, it would be something to look forward to, but how far forward?

 

[Steve O B Have]

There is plenty of info here, and there has been direct conformation that E4 is in the early stages of development. There has also been confirmation that various other games in dev by Frontier are doubling as testbeds for E4 ingame technology and AI. I'm happy with that.

Attempting to narrow the game down to a release date is exactly what damaged the last two iterations, besides what happens if that date gets moved forward once or twice - then the general gaming public would have grounds for their other favorite pastime - griping about vaporware - no thanks...

 

[scsiborg]

Hey Steve O

There is plenty of info here, and there has been direct conformation that E4 is in the early stages of development. There has also been confirmation that various other games in dev by Frontier are doubling as testbeds for E4 ingame technology and AI. I'm happy with that.

Attempting to narrow the game down to a release date is exactly what damaged the last two iterations, besides what happens if that date gets moved forward once or twice - then the general gaming public would have grounds for their other favorite pastime - griping about vaporware - no thanks...

In normal terms that was a perfectly resonable response and not one i wholy dissagree with, but.. what i dont understand is are they trying to target a brand new audience? or are they trying to appeal to the old faithful?. How can asking for a release date damage the outcome? no one is saying rush, just when do you expect a release. The old faithful are little fed up - 1993 since elite 2 - to 2006 and counting. Why is is such a difficult question?

David B has said hes sorry for the delay because the game is close to his heart - with is a perfectly good answer for me. But a dev blog would be nice, dont you think? just a token - something, anything

 

[Steve O B Have]

In normal terms that was a perfectly resonable response and not one i wholy dissagree with, but.. what i dont understand is are they trying to target a brand new audience? or are they trying to appeal to the old faithful?. How can asking for a release date damage the outcome? no one is saying rush, just when do you expect a release. The old faithful are little fed up - 1993 since elite 2 - to 2006 and counting. Why is is such a difficult question?

David B has said hes sorry for the delay because the game is close to his heart - with is a perfectly good answer for me. But a dev blog would be nice, dont you think? just a token - something, anything

I also would love a Dev blog, some stuff from the art department perhaps some idea of how the physical interaction is going to occur - but I am sure that there are any number of reasons why Frontier either can't or won't - copywriting not being the least.

I'd suggest that from a business aspect the sensible thing would be to attempt to appeal to a fairly broad demographic, and this may mean that some of the 'old faithful' (myself included) my not entirely like what we see. I'm not sure that I would mark myself down as being a qualified observer on how to directly target a wide demographic, but I'd like to think that I fit somewhere in the middle - i.e. full time professional job, reasonable income and definately not a full time gamer, but I have been known to kill an entire day playing various games - especially back in the frontier days . I can't really get away with that anymore without the better half getting shirty LOL.

It's possible that the question is difficult to answer because they don't really know altho it would be quite odd to not work to some sort of a timeline. So I would suspect that Frontier has some sort of an idea of when they will be finishing aspects of the game but possibly not the whole.

I'm contenting myself with checking out the progress on The Outsider, and am frankly quite impressed with the quality of art and the technology behind it. David has confirmed that they will be using this in part in E4 - and personally I think this bodes well.

 

[Crayfish]

no one is saying rush, just when do you expect a release. The old faithful are little fed up - 1993 since elite 2 - to 2006 and counting. Why is is such a difficult question?

I cannot speak for Frontier, but as a full time software developer and independant games developer I can try to answer this question for you.

To begin with, estimating software development times is hard, a particular module on average might take between one and two weeks to code. You only tend to know which it will be after the first week has gone by. There are many reasons for this and trying to solve this problem and measure programming time is the focus of the discipline of software engineering. An excellent book on the sunbject is "The mythical man-month" by Fred Brooks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month

On a normal 10 module project for example (based on the fairly arbitrary times given above), you'd probably estimate a development time of fifteen weeks. Assuming that all those 1-2 week modules would average out.

In addition to these basics there are other factors which make it even less easy to predict development time. For example, if you have inexperienced staff, they will take *much* longer to produce the same product as experienced developers. If you are developing in a low level language, as almost all games are, the time variance widens again.

Most pertinant for Elite IV is that if you are developing new technologies, it becomes almost impossible to estimate the time taken to develop those modules. New technical solutions to problems such as terrain mapping on a planetary scale, happen in fits and starts. One week you might progress rapidly, the next is spent following a series of dead ends. Its largely unknown territory.

With a project the size of Elite IV, probably hundreds of thousands of lines of code, and many new technologies. The most accurate answer you could be given may be "between two and five years". Giving any indication of release date is a no win option for Frontier. If they are optimistic, they will be slammed when the release date passes, and if they are pessimistic, everybody will be disapponted, perhaps for no reason.

 

[scsiborg]

I cannot speak for Frontier, but as a full time software developer and independant games developer I can try to answer this question for you.

Hi Cray Fish - thanks for your post, Working as an IT manager myself within a busy environment - i can certainly appreciate what you are saying about staff and their abilities.

I am so guilty of forgetting the actual work required to provide what we are all waiting for - perhaps the vast distance between the games have contributed to that. Nothing stoping us haveing a little dev blog though