Elite / Frontier Frontier: First Encounters - or: how I learned to stop worrying and shove the Mouse

[Arioch]

Try as I might, I’ve been unsuccessful in getting FFE to play in the style of Original Elite and my recent play through of FE2 - I thought I’d got it sorted; using some keyboard mapping software and John Jordan’s version of FFE I’d got everything I wanted onto a gamepad, Elite-style control method, tickety-boo.

The problem was actually being able to fight effectively

The gradual movement acceleration and drift from the previous games was gone, replaced with instant start/stop rotation at full whack. Extremely difficult to track targets, especially with the AI being a lot flightier than in FE2.

Back when the final patch (1.06) came out for the game, joystick control still wasn’t working and wasn’t going to be fixed - the reason given being that the game was meant to be played with a mouse. I assume this is why the keyboard controls also don’t work correctly when in an atmosphere (up/down go on diagonals instead). This meant that I’d have to accept using a mouse and the twitchy flight method.

On the plus side this meant that I could actually go back to the original DOS version of the game as I wouldn’t need any of the control enhancements brought by the excellent modded versions - and I’d also be able to play it on my Android tablet using Magic DOSbox, which worked out great with FE2. After a quick ponder on control methods, I’m now using a left JoyCon from a Switch and a Bluetooth mouse:

Source: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bDtjoK6lQao


(Sorry for the poor quality and the snuffling dog who came for a nosey Big thanks to the dev of Magic DOSbox who sorted out a mouse issue quicksharp - without whom I’d not be able to move & fire lasers at the same time )

Now I’m all prepped, time to get reading the in-game newspapers, just like I didn’t do back in 1995

 

[Arioch]

Reading what I thought was reams of flavour text? Yeah, no, 1995 me wanted to blast demons in Doom and shoot down spaceships, I didn’t have time for reading In the short time I played the buggy early release of FFE I only tried to emulate my FE2 game play, and thought that it didn’t really stack up against its predecessor - plus it had an awful frame rate on my 486 dx2 66 So playing now is a bit of a fresh experience even though I’ve read about virtually everything the game has to offer. Perhaps not fresh - well past the sell-by date maybe, but still edible.

Opening up the journals page - they all mention the “Wiccan Ware” race (with various editorial spin, the Imps are very disapproving for example) which just so happens to start on the world I’m on:

Bringing up the System map, I can see it’s only a short hop over to Old Curie from Old Blackelk - around 2000km:

A quick sub-orbital hop saw me just leaving the atmosphere of Hope and having a quick chance to admire the chunky graphics - my sleek Saker MkIII with the star Gateway approaching sunset:

After a manual landing at Old Curie, the BBS gave me the game’s first “mission”:

No probs, mate! Alioth is only 12ly away - easy peasy, lemo...oh, I’ve only got 10ly range. Here’s the game asking the player to figure out route plotting - there’s only one star that’s viable as an intermediate:

Soholia isn’t on a direct line to Alioth, but it’s on the same plane. Slapping some extra hydrogen fuel in the hold, it’s time to get my skates on. Thankfully my jump drives dropped me within a few AUs of my destination so I was able to swiftly approach Wicca’s World (hurray for puns on old BBC programs - Whicker’s World ) and a chance to look at the new atmospheric graphics - the colour banding now has a bit of dithering but we’ve lost all clouds. Still, doesn’t look too bad in my opinion:

Another manual landing saw me getting a successful mission message and the next journal editions had some important news:

...not the bit about a medical emergency where I’ll be able to make some money running supplies - the bit about me! That’s me that is! In the news! Whoop whoop!

With my starting money now doubled, it’s time to grab some medical supplies, slap on the blue flashing lights and ney-nah ney-nah my way back to Soholia.

 

[Zieman]

So it begins.

 

[Arioch]

Ferrying medical supplies into Soholia netted me a tidy profit - bumping my balance up to around 45k

A neighbouring system had the goods and the well-paying BBS demand stayed up for a few weeks, enough to get in a couple of runs. A few pirates decided to try and get in on the action, but I managed to pulse laser them to smithereens - combat is much more difficult than the previous game with the AI seemingly always trying to joust and always firing directly at my ship. The previous game’s tactic of reverse-thrust-at-an-angle doesn’t seem to affect the AI’s aim in FFE - I’ll need to figure something else out. On the plus side combat mode automatically puts you onto Engines Off mode, which was easy to miss in FE2.

After the plague was attenuated it was time to look for profits elsewhere - a BBS post requested help in delivering a priceless artefact, but the distance involved was too great and I sensed I’d have trouble making it in time, also, it sounded proper well dodgy (not been reading spoilers, honest!)

Instead, it was time to head to the Fed - some comfortable milk runs between Sol & Barnards Star would boost the credits and get me on my way to a Cobra Mk3. Stripping down the Saker III to just an autopilot got me some valuable extra cargo space, and before long I had enough money to get a new ship - the Adder would only net me an extra 1t of cargo space but its better jump drives meant the Sol>Barnards trip would be reduced from about 7 days down to just under 4.

At this point I indulged in a bit of extreme terraforming - Earth in the game is rendered as a plain brown desolate world, like something out of Space Battleship Yamato - a bit of hex-editing later, I’ve changed it into a more Earth-like planet. The continents are all wrong, but at least London’s on a green bit

The latest news came out, and it seems I was right about the dodgy sounding removals job:

Behold the Puns!

 

[gunbladelad]

It should be interesting to note that all the newspapers / journals will often report on events happening relatively close to the player as well - and there are a multitude of story missions to get your name in them (such as the Wiccan Ware Race) - The artifact retrieval mission is another, but takes a bit of doing just to make it there in time. Naturally I'll say nothing about the others - but they're usually identifiable by an advert that appears on multiple stations (or is heavily mentioned prior to the event in the journals)

 

[Arioch]

It’s time to say farewell to the Adder and its well positioned rear-view camera:

(The only difference between the game running and this screenshot is that the engine plume sprite jiggles around a bit in the game )
...and hello to my shark’s teeth paintjob Cobra Mk3:

...with just enough money left to fill the hold to capacity, chef’s kiss
There’s even some extra texture on the Cobra in FFE - instead of the plain backside, I’ve now got stripey things and whatnot:

A problem occurred on the very next trade run - docking at Abe Lincoln in Sol highlighted an issue with the manual landing docking “assist” when close to the slot: in the previous game when you were within a few hundred metres of the Station and lined up with the docking slot, it would compensate for Station spin and automatically rotate you into the correct orientation. In FFE once you get close enough you match the Station rotation but you stay at whatever angle you were at until you enter the docking slot, at which point your ship gets rotated around to the correct position.

With the Saker III and Adder, this hadn’t been a problem, those being two small ships. The Cobra on the other hand is much wider...I discovered the problem when my hull quickly shredded to zero and I was greeted with a spinning gravestone. There’s collision detection in the airlock after all!

Because I want to do as much manual flying as possible, this means I need to take a bit more care lining up the docking slot in future. It’s almost like docking in the original game

 

[gunbladelad]

Just remember - Docking is difficult, even for the autopilot, lol. (Of course, time acceleration helps everything)

 

[Arioch]

Just remember - Docking is difficult, even for the autopilot, lol. (Of course, time acceleration helps everything)

Looking at the Cobra cockpit graphic background image above, it’s plain to see a robotic hubbly-bubbly pipe just left-of-centre. The autopilot is obviously hitting the hookah a bit too much

“Look, man, if there's one thing I know, it's how to drive while I'm stoned. You know your perception is completely f***** so you just let your hands work the controls as if you were straight.”

Source: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=emhHUtPJmP8

 

[Arioch]

I’ve managed to solve my docking woes - just two Shield Generators allow my Cobra to dock upside down and only lose 87% shield strength during the airlock “assistance” rotation - so that’s me back to being able to slip into the slot from whatever angle I want

Spoiler

without worrying about my hull.
A few more milk runs got my Cobra outfitted to a standard where I’m happy to try combat - whether it needs tweaking remains to be seen:

One annoying little graphical bug that can be seen on my ship model above, and also visible using the external camera:

...my front-mounted Beam Laser appears to be pointing out from my ‘rse there

 

[Arioch]

I think I’ve inhaled some passive smoke from the RoboBong 2000™ in the Cobra’s cabin - I’ve decided it’d be a great idea to get the original BBS videos working on my Android tablet

My reasoning is thus: if I’m going for a true warts-and-all consuming of FFE, I might as well gobble it all like a pet linglang munching on the Emperor’s bezzie mate (various news sources, May 3250)

Source: https://youtu.be/JlXqrlXtlMA


Awesome pixelated Am-Dram

If anyone is interested on how I got them working:

Spoiler

I was unsuccessful getting the DATA folder (where all the video files are) to work with the freeware version of FFE, so I ended up getting Magic DOSbox to use two folders on my tablet as C: (harddrive) and D: (CD-ROM), copying the original CD contents into the D: folder, going into a DOS environment on the tablet and installing the game to C: then running the sound setup. After that, I got the 1.06 patch, copied that into the C: folder, then installed it from a DOS environment. On completion I deleted all the patch files. I then transferred my savegame into the correct Firstenc folder. End result: fully working cringe!

 

[alexzk]

Oh wow, they're "movie" quality, why E is missing that? >:
We need animated NPCs

 

[Arioch]

Oh wow, they're "movie" quality, why E is missing that? >:
We need animated NPCs

One benefit of seeing these videos over the next few months - by the time Odyssey’s mission givers appear in first-person, they’re going to look like Laurence Olivier’s standard of acting compared to FFE’s script card readers

 

[gunbladelad]

I remember years ago on the old alt.fan.elite BBS boards, there was a fan project to get the FE2 faces to display in FFE - and it was pretty much forgotten until I remembered I still had the files downloaded at the time - and shared them to Space Sim Central.

I never did get the original videos myself, but I might give them a look for JJFFE.

 

[Arioch]

I remember years ago on the old alt.fan.elite BBS boards, there was a fan project to get the FE2 faces to display in FFE - and it was pretty much forgotten until I remembered I still had the files downloaded at the time - and shared them to Space Sim Central.

I never did get the original videos myself, but I might give them a look for JJFFE.

Many thanks for uploading those - I’ve had them working with JJFFE, and I suppose if I wanted to use them with my current DOSbox game I could just drop them into the DATA folder and replace the existing files.

I’m having too much of a laugh with the originals though - literally the first one I saw when checking to see if they worked was a BBS advert for a crewmember called Belinda Swallow; their video was a thin bald bloke in a beige blazer

 

[gunbladelad]

Gotta love it - but perhaps Frontier Developments were way ahead of the curve with Transgender representation. (Seriously though, there's no way the random name generation could pick the right video for the gender that the name suggests - that would've likely needed an extra check and separating the names into 2 different tables)

Ona side-note, if memory serves me correctly the FFE intro actually references a cut mission from the late-game hand-coded missions. (Suffice to say, you got the [REDACTED] - aka, ship from the intro and made contact with the [REDACTED] who request you obtain the [CENSORED] from the [REDACTED] and return it to them.

 

[Arioch]

(Seriously though, there's no way the random name generation could pick the right video for the gender that the name suggests - that would've likely needed an extra check and separating the names into 2 different tables)

They were probably size-limited by CDs as well - there’s over 500MB of videos as it is. From what I’ve seen, you do get correctly themed people for what part of space you’re in, as well as military looking bods or engineers for those BBS boards.

Maybe it would have been given a bit more attention if the release wasn’t pushed out like it was, though doing a load more gender-specific videos with all the attendant editing, reshoots, rewrites etc to get them to the same standard as the existing ones - well, they probably couldn’t spare an afternoon for that

 

[Arioch]

Oh for goodness sake Humanity, what on Earth are you playing at on Earth? It’s only been 5 months since I sorted out the last ecological disaster and look what state you’ve got it in already:

(Yup, when I re-installed the game I’d forgotten to fix Brown Earth - time to flash up the hex-editor again!)

 

[gunbladelad]

I guess the ecological disaster hinted at in Alien Resurrection (where Ron Perlman's character literally says that Earth is a dump and you see the ruins of Paris in the directors' cut) happened in the FFE universe too,

 

[AndyJ]

One annoying little graphical bug that can be seen on my ship model above, and also visible using the external camera:
View attachment 207897
...my front-mounted Beam Laser appears to be pointing out from my ‘rse there

I was wondering how long it would take for you to spot this one!

Something I've fixed in my own build - the draw commands are checking the wrong data values for the ship, so front and rear positions are swapped.

It's a simple change to two values in the draw data, so here's how to find & patch the issue in any FFE executable with a hex editor such as HxD:
(if using an alternative editor, make a copy of the .exe first and also the two files should still be the same number of bytes in size after patching)

Fix for swapped front & rear guns on the Cobra MKIII:

find hex:
10 4d c1 9b 08 fd c2 c1 07 fb 18 48 00 00 28 00 20 13 01 9b 08

replace with:
08 4d c1 9b 08 fd c2 c1 07 fb 18 48 00 00 28 00 20 13 01 9b 10

Bonus fixes:

Fix for the missing front gun on the Sidewinder:

find hex:
ce 18 0e 06 06 00 13 01 9b 10

replace with:
ce 18 0e 06 06 00 13 01 9b 08

Fix for the missing front gun on the Asp Explorer:

find hex:
00 f0 44 04 06 00 13 01 9b 10

replace with:
00 f0 44 04 06 00 13 01 9b 08

Edit: I should mention that the Sidewinder data is before the Cobra's in the file, so if you search forward for the hex immediately after doing the CM3 patch then you won't find it - so search from the top of the file. If patching all 3 in one go, do in order of Sidewinder, Cobra, Asp.

 

[Arioch]

I was wondering how long it would take for you to spot this one!

Something I've fixed in my own build - the draw commands are checking the wrong data values for the ship, so front and rear positions are swapped.

It's a simple change to two values in the draw data, so here's how to find & patch the issue in any FFE executable with a hex editor such as HxD:
(if using an alternative editor, make a copy of the .exe first and also the two files should still be the same number of bytes in size after patching)

Fix for swapped front & rear guns Cobra MKIII:

find hex:
10 4d c1 9b 08 fd c2 c1 07 fb 18 48 00 00 28 00 20 13 01 9b 08

replace with:
08 4d c1 9b 08 fd c2 c1 07 fb 18 48 00 00 28 00 20 13 01 9b 10

Bonus fixes:

Fix for the missing front gun on the Sidewinder:

find hex:
ce 18 0e 06 06 00 13 01 9b 10
replace with:
ce 18 0e 06 06 00 13 01 9b 08

Fix for the missing front gun on the Asp Explorer:

find hex:
00 f0 44 04 06 00 13 01 9b 10

replace with:
00 f0 44 04 06 00 13 01 9b 08

Awesomeness! I’m going to be casting a hex on Earth in the morning, so I’ll swap over the gun mountings at the same time.

Cheers for the info