I'm sure my question has been asked before, but searches didn't bring it up, so forgive me if I'm going over old ground.
Since First Encounters is, by today's standards, going to represent some fairly straightforward programming (and bearing in mind I'm someone who got as far as '20 goto 10', so you can take my assumptions for what they're worth), would it be a tremendous drain on FD's time and resources to revamp FFE and re-release it? To be honest, it already has most of the things I'd want to see in Elite 4 anyway: fairly realistic physics; procedurally-generated planets; a massive environment; and not least complete freedom.
But FFE with higher-resolution graphics (even just 1024x768 would be a huge improvement); mildly improved sound and music; new background images; smoke effects and clouds; terrain and other surface textures; lighting and laser/explosion effects; and so on... I know that sounds like a long list of demands, but given the skills of the programmers involved I can't imagine it'd be too unreasonable. I'm not asking for cutting-edge stuff: just a reworking of a 12-year-old game to make it look like, say, a 6-year-old game instead.
Of course, I may be entirely misguided in assuming that such a thing would be possible, in which case, fair enough. As I said, I'm not a programmer so I probably don't understand what's involved. I just know that I love FFE, and I still play it today, because in all the games released since that're even vaguely similar (X; Freelancer; EVE Online) there still hasn't been anything to match the freedom, the atmosphere and the immersiveness (and dare I say the realism?) of FFE. The basic game concept still beats of all these hands down. I for one would even pay money for such an update, provided it was a reasonably significant overhaul. All I know is that it would help at least one fan keep the faith.
Since First Encounters is, by today's standards, going to represent some fairly straightforward programming (and bearing in mind I'm someone who got as far as '20 goto 10', so you can take my assumptions for what they're worth), would it be a tremendous drain on FD's time and resources to revamp FFE and re-release it? To be honest, it already has most of the things I'd want to see in Elite 4 anyway: fairly realistic physics; procedurally-generated planets; a massive environment; and not least complete freedom.
But FFE with higher-resolution graphics (even just 1024x768 would be a huge improvement); mildly improved sound and music; new background images; smoke effects and clouds; terrain and other surface textures; lighting and laser/explosion effects; and so on... I know that sounds like a long list of demands, but given the skills of the programmers involved I can't imagine it'd be too unreasonable. I'm not asking for cutting-edge stuff: just a reworking of a 12-year-old game to make it look like, say, a 6-year-old game instead.
Of course, I may be entirely misguided in assuming that such a thing would be possible, in which case, fair enough. As I said, I'm not a programmer so I probably don't understand what's involved. I just know that I love FFE, and I still play it today, because in all the games released since that're even vaguely similar (X; Freelancer; EVE Online) there still hasn't been anything to match the freedom, the atmosphere and the immersiveness (and dare I say the realism?) of FFE. The basic game concept still beats of all these hands down. I for one would even pay money for such an update, provided it was a reasonably significant overhaul. All I know is that it would help at least one fan keep the faith.
