Elite / Frontier Ive often wondered why Elite 2 had the huge procedural generated galaxy.

bongorider

B
Only a handful of the systems have the highest tech level, and as you get 3 or 4 jumps away from Sol or Achenar, you end up in places with very little to buy or do, then a few more jumps and you're in uninhabited space. Whats the point of 65 billion stars when 99.9999% of them are empty? Wouldn't a much much smaller, but designed galaxy have been more interesting?

I remember reading the box of frontier before I bought the game ( I was 11), and I just couldn't wait to play it. I played the hell out of it on and off for years, but the complete lack of anything interesting outside of the core star systems always bugged me. That and the other obvious flaws with the game.

Later when I read the descriptions for games like Spore, and No Man's sky, I always thought back to that Elite 2 promotional material, and just knew that they promised more than they could possibly hope to deliver.
 

Steve

Steve
I guess this was just a limitation of the game 25 years ago.

If you want civilisations spread throughout the galaxy in a Frontier game, try the HellMod version of FFED3DAJ. There are inhabited systems everywhere in that version of the game, though tbh they don't really add very much. Just somewhere new to go :)
 

marx

marx
Anisotropic's FFE mod had a pretty good starting option: a couple of centuries later into the future, with many more inhabited systems, first taking the original generation, then doing another pass of how things would have changed from then onward. The end result was really quite good, with more distinct regions (especially the frontier), but not smeared all over the galaxy like HellMod.

Hm, it seems like the source code for the mod has vanished since Aniso's site went down. I don't suppose anyone has it lying around?
 

gunbladelad

gunbladelad
I might have a copy somewhere of the executable.

If I have it I'll upload it to Space Sim Central over the weekend - and post here to let you know.
 

ibmalone

I
RELSPI said:
Elite Dangerous also has a massive, uninhabited procedural galaxy. The only difference is you get money for travelling in it.
Click to expand...

There's another difference actually: you can travel in it. In FFE you'd never have made it far outside inhabited space. Jumps took a week in-game time, and after a year without servicing your ship would start to fail, that's fifty two jumps with no way back, or about 26 away from inhabited space. Assuming that you could manage the fuel scooping, scooping from stars was pretty dangerous, scooping from gas giants was easier, provided you could set up a slingshot that didn't re-enact Shoemaker-Levy. In FFE, even with the Argent's Quest (or was it Turner's?) supership it seemed like a one-way trip to Polaris.

Why they did it that way? Not sure really. At the time it was exciting to see the full galaxy represented to some degree. They could have populated the whole lot, maybe they thought that the limits of the procedural generation would become more even more apparent?

This whole thing has reminded me to visit Ross 154.
 

Bounder

Bounder
The version I lived, man and boy, was the Amiga version - where you actually have small pockets of habitation right across the galaxy.

They're very remote, and hard to find, but out there, amongst the countless "Unexplored Systems", are the odd Coriolis or ground station where you can make repairs, maybe buy a journal subscription or make a donation, hire and fire some crew... umm.. that's about it tho.

I forget the average distance between them - IIRC it's hundreds of LY anyway - and you could reach some of 'em via the old 'wormhole bug', where if you scrolled far enough across the galaxy, suddenly a cluster of systems would inexplicably be within jump range...

...but you didn't / don't have to use that trick to reach them (it just helped) - so they make long-range waypoints to head for if you're making longer forays out into the sticks..


I spent many, many lost years diligently searching for the black hole DB insisted was somewhere near galactic center.. but even when i was playing through 'properly' the first time, i had one epic voyage back to civilisation in a knackered Puma clipper following a mis-jump that landed me hundreds of LY west of the bubble. That's why you want a whole galaxy - just for having that great wilderness in your backyard. Otherwise the 'bubble' is 'the universe'. The reality - and central aesthetic of manned flight into the future - is our insignificance in the grander scale of things; it's about context and narrative..

Really wish Anistropic would re-appear and team up with Andy J! AJ's Aniso build of FFE is really the only one to still be playing, all these years later, IMHO..
 

Steve

Steve
Bounder said:
Really wish Anistropic would re-appear and team up with Andy J! AJ's Aniso build of FFE is really the only one to still be playing, all these years later, IMHO..
Click to expand...
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but are you aware that Andy includes an "Anistropic" build with each release of FFED3DAJ??
 

MickyG1982

M
There was a bug / limitation in FE2 (definitely on the Amiga) where if you went out 655.36ly (there or there about abouts) the calculation would suffer an overflow and essentially reset your jump distance back to zero (please anything over that figure). This meant you could do massive jumps for very little fuel anywhere in the galaxy...

https://www.sharoma.com/frontierverse/wormholes.htm
 

Bounder

Bounder
Steve said:
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but are you aware that Andy includes an "Anistropic" build with each release of FFED3DAJ??
Click to expand...

LOL of course, that's all i've been playing for the last few years... just meant i'd like to see more of his vision for what makes a kickass Elite-sesh - Andy J obviously also 'gets it' - so i'm just playing fantasy dev teams, is all..
 

Bounder

Bounder
MickyG1982 said:
There was a bug / limitation in FE2 (definitely on the Amiga) where if you went out 655.36ly (there or there about abouts) the calculation would suffer an overflow and essentially reset your jump distance back to zero (please anything over that figure). This meant you could do massive jumps for very little fuel anywhere in the galaxy...

https://www.sharoma.com/frontierverse/wormholes.htm
Click to expand...

That'll be the ticket. Remains unpatched in the standard 'miggy version IIRC.

I don't know if these remote patches of inhabited systems are related to the same rollover, but you can usually find a cluster not far from any of these 'wormhole' exit points..

Like i say, wouldn't wanna trade out there, but for exploring - with or without using the exploit - these remote conurbations form a network of 'R&R' waypoints that make the entire galaxy traversable..
 

Iskariot

Iskariot
bongorider said:
Only a handful of the systems have the highest tech level, and as you get 3 or 4 jumps away from Sol or Achenar, you end up in places with very little to buy or do, then a few more jumps and you're in uninhabited space. Whats the point of 65 billion stars when 99.9999% of them are empty? Wouldn't a much much smaller, but designed galaxy have been more interesting?

I remember reading the box of frontier before I bought the game ( I was 11), and I just couldn't wait to play it. I played the hell out of it on and off for years, but the complete lack of anything interesting outside of the core star systems always bugged me. That and the other obvious flaws with the game.

Later when I read the descriptions for games like Spore, and No Man's sky, I always thought back to that Elite 2 promotional material, and just knew that they promised more than they could possibly hope to deliver.
Click to expand...

I agree with most you said, but...
For me at least this huge galaxy gave (and in ED even more so) me the feeling of true infinite space.
I have pondered this a lot and I believe it is a psychological thing.

Other space sims, like the X games and Star Citizen have limited galaxies, that in a very short space of time will have no unknown space at all.
There is no feeling of infinity, endless space in those games... The true space explorer psychology is completely absent.
The Elite games always had and have that "behind the horizon" feeling to them.... that true infinite space psychological effect.

For me that is what is mesmerizing, hypnotic, utterly fascinating about the Elite series of games...

And now Elite Dangerous is doing this better than ever before. The Star systems look more awesome than ever, more and more interesting stuff is added, cool phenomena, cool alien lifeforms etc. etc.

I wish I could travel a few years in the future to have a look at where ED is at then.
I expect and hope that this game will have reached legendary status by then, because of the incredible galaxy it presents to us by that time, filled with cool stuff (access to atmospheric planets with life, accessible gas giants etc.).
 
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ibmalone

I
Bounder said:
The version I lived, man and boy, was the Amiga version - where you actually have small pockets of habitation right across the galaxy.

They're very remote, and hard to find, but out there, amongst the countless "Unexplored Systems", are the odd Coriolis or ground station where you can make repairs, maybe buy a journal subscription or make a donation, hire and fire some crew... umm.. that's about it tho.

I forget the average distance between them - IIRC it's hundreds of LY anyway - and you could reach some of 'em via the old 'wormhole bug', where if you scrolled far enough across the galaxy, suddenly a cluster of systems would inexplicably be within jump range...

...but you didn't / don't have to use that trick to reach them (it just helped) - so they make long-range waypoints to head for if you're making longer forays out into the sticks..


I spent many, many lost years diligently searching for the black hole DB insisted was somewhere near galactic center.. but even when i was playing through 'properly' the first time, i had one epic voyage back to civilisation in a knackered Puma clipper following a mis-jump that landed me hundreds of LY west of the bubble. That's why you want a whole galaxy - just for having that great wilderness in your backyard. Otherwise the 'bubble' is 'the universe'. The reality - and central aesthetic of manned flight into the future - is our insignificance in the grander scale of things; it's about context and narrative..

Really wish Anistropic would re-appear and team up with Andy J! AJ's Aniso build of FFE is really the only one to still be playing, all these years later, IMHO..
Click to expand...

Interesting. I had PC version, but never spotted any habitation outside its bubble. Maybe it was there if I'd gone looking for it, I do remember scrolling around in the black, but it might not have been obvious. The wormhole bug was also sadly patched in my version, I heard of it at the time and did give it a go.
 

marx

marx
As far as I can remember, the PC versions all had the distant habitation bug. What I do wonder about now is whether Aniso's extended-bubble start built stuff around them or not. After all, if memory serves, the way that worked was that it took the output of the original galaxy generation, then built a new one with new rules based on that. To simulate decades of expansion, conflict and such. Will have to check that later, it would be cool if it did and ended up forming some smaller bubbles around the galaxy.
 
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