Hehe. I actually did some poking around on the newsgroups earlier, and spotted a few familiar names, though they don't necessarily belong to the same people as they do on this forum. The ones that I can remember from the top of my head are Memnoch and Rafe Zetter.
The reason I was looking was I accidentally stumbled on this fascinating page, while looking for an old quote from a PC games magazine.
http://www.sslmit.unibo.it/zat/files/elite4/afe_E4news.htm
The news from 15 years ago is that:
- Elite 4 is currently scheduled for the end of 2002, and as with any game in development there is always the possibility of it being slightly later. [Hmm... slightly later you say?]
- Elite IV will be more Elite-like in the combat, but mainly because we want combat to be (at least potentially) between loads of ships, not one spec in the distance. We will do our best to retain as much of the nice aspects of Newtonian flight as possible, and the underlying flight model is likely to still be Newtonian.
- [T]he current plan for Elite IV is a Newtonian flight model (but with hyperspace etc) with thruster corrections (like Frontier, except better) to give an Elite-like feel. (This way, Frontier fans can still hurtle sideways out of control in to a planet for old time's sake, by turning the fly-by-wire off.)
- We will support hardware render etc on PC through DX7
- We will probably support Playstation 2 rather than PlayStation [Bad luck if you wanted a PS4 port]
- Elite IV has to be vastly superior to any competition, in order to revive the Elite name after the FFE debacle [Gloves off Chris Roberts!]
- Elite, Frontier, Zelda are 'open' (in that you can still so what you like mid-game) whereas games like Wing Commander and Final Fantasy are closed. By 'closed' I mean the game story dictates what the player can do within a set of different options, but the game portions could be (cruelly) described as elaborate "Press to continue" to see the next bit of FMV. [Take that!]
- In the previous games the technology was not sufficient to give the player total freedom. In Elite, you couldn't fly over planet surfaces, but that was rectified in Frontier. In Frontier you couldn't get out of your ship, but we aim to rectify that in Elite 4.
- It'll be completely photorealistic and massively multiplayer, but different to what people expect. We're planning to move the goalposts in the same way the original Elite did
DrBaggy predates Steve OB Have by a month or so, by the way, and he still posts.
