Gaming History: Frontier Elite 2 “A galaxy on a single floppy disk”
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- Опубліковано 11 сер 2016
- Frontier Elite 2 - You could call Elite 2 No Man's Sky before it was cool, but that would be just a pale description of what this game has to offer. It's not pretty, it's not easy, it pulls no punches, it holds nothing back. But it gives you a recreation of the galaxy so accurate that you could fly down to a planet's surface and check the time on a clocktower.
(Game Description) Frontier: Elite II is a space trading and combat simulator video game written by David Braben and published by GameTek in 1993 and released on the Amiga, Atari ST and DOS. It is the first sequel to the seminal game Elite from 1984.
The game retains the same principal component of Elite, namely open-ended gameplay, and adds realistic physics and an accurately modelled galaxy.
Frontier: Elite II had a number of firsts to its name. It was the first game to feature procedurally generated star systems. These were generated by the game aggregating the mass of material within an early solar system into planets and moons that obey the laws of physics, but which have slightly randomised material distribution in order to ensure each system’s uniqueness.[2]
It was followed by Frontier: First Encounters in 1995 and another sequel, Elite: Dangerous in 2014.
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It's absolutely crazy the amount of game old programmers used to be able to fit onto one floppy disk. The coding talent back then was amazing.
Most of it today are just fancy graphics. And game engines which allow for faster and better developement. :) If you just write it and only use solid colors instead of textures, it's not so "absolutely crazy"... 800kB of code, that's a lot of text.
Yes it was amazing, code was written only to run the game. For some time a significant amount of code, wasn't code but instructions and reminders for new coders.
For nearly 45 years I rarely played videogames (arcade?) but I've backed Star Citizen (keybindings need fixing) and I'm seriously thinking on playing Elite Dangerous and maybe PUBG?
Looking at the classic Elite II and Elite Dangerous, I probably wouldn't buy it because of the rudimentary graphics and I didn't have a PC until Win95 was released. ;-)
I agree E.D. and S.C. take up a lot of space and your computer must be more powerful ($$$) to handle these graphics laden games but those semi-realistic graphics enticed me to try and play them. ;-)
800kB of code is indeed a lot of text, but better yet that human readable source code gets compiled down into machine code which is far smaller. The marvel of Frontier was just how much it managed to procedurally generate. I expect the bits that hogged the most disk space were the images for the UI, because there's only so much you can do to compress them. Most of the galaxy on the other hand was procedurally generated along with the star names, and planet orbits.
The video is slightly misleading when it says the game has an accurate representation of the galaxy. That's true for local systems, Sol and the systems relatively near by are accurate, but once you travel further out they are more and more procedurally generated. After all there's an estimated 100 - 400 billion stars in the Milky Way, and if you allocated just 1 byte to represent each one (the equivalent of a number between 0 and 255) it would take a 95mb data file to store the lower estimate.
@@michalvalta5231 "Better."
I used to play this with my best friend as a kid on his Amiga, I then got it on my Amiga cd 32 and it consumed my life when I was young living in New Zealand. So good! So good 20 years later I still search it on UA-cam!
Nice to know that some kid in new zealand was doing exactly the same thing as me in the uk. Nice one cmdr.
I played 30 years ago and I still play Frontier today!
The autopilot in this game was a godsend
To see that game again... it brings back to many memories.... so many hours spent there!
are you telling me that, in elite 2 you were able to land on earth WAY BEFORE elite dangerous was an idea...
Yes. You could land anywhere... or crash into the Earth while trying to.
The problem in terms of development time nowadays is the much higher complexity due to graphics etc. It's not hard to recreate whole worlds and allowing players to land on them when your physics ignore atmosphere, your graphics don't even have shadows and you aren't connected to online servers and players all around the world.
Earth and any planet in the Galaxy. All that on a damn floppy disk!
I once was trying to have all crimes possible and so, i landed in Paris and mined the Eiffel tower!
@@SaHaRaSquad It does have both shadows and air drag in atmosphear. I do agree its easier to develop when graphical fidelity is not a big concern, but the underlying mechanics are still very impressive.
I mean the game needs to be able to tell your position accurate to the centimeter in an instance that is two billion kilometers across, and calculate collisions happening at hundreds of kilometers/sec.
Than you for taking me back to my childhood. This game was truly a pioneer and stands today as the predecessor to games like Eve Online and Star Citizen.
My Amiga 1200 is still up and running at present day. Sometimes I play Elite 2 on it as I used to do as kid and it never gets old to me. I really love this game
Frontier: FIrst Encounters had the "slow down time when near planet" mechanic, and it would also automatically land from space to airport if you accelerated time to max. It also had an actual storyline, involving the Turner's Quest experimental hyperdrive ship, and meeting the alien ship in the intro. My last activities in the game were 1) stocking up on fuel and letting the engines burn through it all, resulting in a top speed of 0.3c.And 2) travelling deep into the unexplored region using hyperspace jumps and refuelling at stars, going in a single direction for many many ingame years, until my ship components started to randomly break from old age and I had to save-scum to keep going.
If only that game let you establish outposts to repair yourself and expand the frontier of civilization so you could keep going forever.
Yeah, the trick when using the autopilot to land was always to whack the time to max speed, anything below that and you were almost guaranteed the autopilot would fly you right into the planet or space station instead. More a bug than a feature I think as it certainly doesn't tell you this anywhere in the manual.
I played this game for countless hours while listening to David Bowie in the background. Probably my favourit of all times, Elite Dangerous isn't at this level yet.
Of all the games I have ever played this title holds a very special place in my gaming heart. I played for hours upon hours, day after week after month and still, all these years later I could quite effortlessly devote more to it. Supreme adventure that outshines almost everything that followed. Unbelievably good.
And neither NMS or SC have the 1 to 1 scale that places nicely with my brain. Ever since Elite 2, the cartoonishly small scaled space games that came after like Space Engineers, Star Citizen or No Mans sky all touched my brain in a bad way and weren't enjoyable. I guess I was brought up on hardcore sims.
Playing this without autopilot must have been interesting.. I loved Frontier though, played it for so many years and Elite Dangerous is always being updated, you can land on planets now I think? They will be updating that game for years to come - a dream come true for Elite fans!
Elite the Daddy of all space Sims ,
Excellent content.
Watched from start to finish.
This game is a predominant player in my childhood, as it is for my any others, and I still open the game every now and again.
Thanks for this :) I'll show it to my peers that don't understand my fascination for it
Great ! Thanks :)
Always loved this game, still play it on an old laptop every couple of years or so.
Loved this game on the A500 and occasionally played it upto Elite Dangerous
Still playing this in 2023! Not on an Amiga anymore, but in dosbox now.
Great overview. Love the history.
without autopilot aiming at destination was a nightmare (for example when it was damaged during a mission), but why would you play without it and "overshoot" all the time?
These games we don't have nowadays😔
Funny games😢
we shall be your weapon of vengeance ;) great review of that game I spent so much time also frustratingly trying to fight pirates in lightspeed!
This game had perfect physics for my taste.
I moved to Elite: First Encounters pretty fast, but it was 90% the same game - some CD enhancements and little tweaks.
EFE is the best space simulator to date. I love Lucasart’s X-wing series, but the open world Braben has created with his mates is unbeatable - even better than E:Dangerous, that felt clinical and missed the Star Trek feel of boldly going towards enigmatic adventures.
I still have my Frontier disk around somewhere!
This is quite the achievement and it's Dangerous remake too...is cool to see how it grows up even more :)
Absolutely loved it, and having it squashed onto one floppy disk was impressive, but consider that the original Elite, on the BBC micro fit in something like 100th the space of that floppy disk.. but was a lot better than 100th as good.
Oh I was totally amazed at how they fit a galaxy on a disc back then. It was just that my poor Amiga 500 just didn't run it good enough. Like 1-2 fps even back then that was unplayable.
I ran the PC version on my dad's 25mhz 486 machine. with 4mb of RAM and a 100mb HD, in 1993.
oogaftw 4mb of ram? Wtf does that even run?
My first pc was a 80286 cpu running at 10 or maybe 12.5 mhz with 640 kb ram !
My first hard drive was 5 MB Seagate and cost 480$ dollars.....
If you sit really still and quietly. You can hear my genius :)
Ive played all the elite games and this is my favorite one. (not including elite dangerous)
Edit: Now including Elite Dangerous. :)
@@acklord7145 First mistake you've made with ED!
@@gamingtonight1526 lol yep! Thought it was a good game. And it was... Three years ago.
800 kb... wtf
Procedual gen algorytms, assembly code and great programmers hehe :)
I had frontier running on a 386 I did have a svga card and a adlib on my PC so maybe that helped but I remember it running really good
cool video brought back memories :) I was 13 when this came out and (cos of how complicated and ground breaking it was) I had no idea what I was doing and so thought I had a broken demo or something. I couldnt just check a lets play for info back then lol. When I finally figuered it out, this game owned my life. Shame these days frontier are ripping people off with elite dangerous making us wait so long for atmospheric planet landings etc
You did not travel FTL during regular play, you used a time compression selection to speed up insystem travel. And there was the navigation system you could purchase and mount on your ship, which most of the time did a good job of keeping you from crashing and still getting where you wanted. It did have some blind spots though which could cause you to crash if you speeded up time while having the autonav locked on the wrong place.
Great video but one point, Elite II did not exceed the speed of light. The entire game ran using conventional physics, but you could change the passage of time for convenience. Also you had a full Autopilot which occasionally killed you unless you sped time up to x5 for instant docking... I played this when i was 15 years old :D
Did you capture the OpenGL version of the game? It looks cleaner than other versions I've seen on UA-cam.
Yes, part of this is from the OpenGL version.
Am I the only one who used Power Packer on the excutable game file and turned it into an auto unpacking file around 455k in size? (Yes, the whole game was under 500k in a packed state) :p
I got glfrontier but is there a way to get the original on modern pcs easily
you can find it as an abandonware, with dosbox for the pc version.
Here you go...David Braben put them all out as shareware awhile back....
www.ffeartpage.com/ffed3d.htm
Have you tried just pressing ctrl+e ?
It Switches over to the original graphics
It’s essentially the original that way
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U know that ships in Frontier Elite 2 have autopilot ?
You said, it hadn't a slow down mode, but that's not true: Normally you had an autopilot with you that helped you.
Except when it bugged and the autopilot decided to shortcut through the planet the station orbited around. :P
...or just rubber-banded from one side of the station to another without slowing down. :o
Well the workaround for the AP problem was using time dillution on 3 to 5 directly after activation the autopilot. On the higher time dillution settings the AP worked fine.
never played it but i heard that docking o coriolis starports where a problem, the docking computer would get confuse and would try to enter by the wrong side leading to crash boom boom
04:26 DOOM1 & D2 ARE indeed 3d games (3d engine/logic). I honestly don't get where retro gamers got the nonsense that said otherwise. Yes it used sprites and it was limited (rooms above rooms, no verical free-look with auto-aim hardcoded) but still 3d
@Keltic D Sorry but that doesn't make much sense. As I stated the game features indeed a 3d game space where you and your enemies move alongside 6 degrees of movement, as well as calculations alongside 3 axis. Projectiles also move alongside said 6 degrees of movement. If you played quake1 and half-life1, you would know that auto aim was enabled by default, due to the perception of the developers that aiming up and down would be too confusing for the player. Build engine games also featured auto aim by default and were sprite based. are they not 3d? Try booting dukenukem3d and enabling vertical mouse look. Then look up and down and notice how the warping is disorienting and for some people, even sickness inducing. The way the game world is RENDERED has nothing to do with it being 3d or not. Rooms above rooms are not a feature due to tech limitations, not number of dimensions. Imagine you asked me to build you a 2 story barn with the last few resources in the whole world, and midthru I runned out of materials after building the first floor. Does that mean you have a 2d barn?
@Keltic D (...) one of the first things you did in quake 1 was slapping the console commands "+mlook" and "sv_aim 2" on a autoexec.cfg config file. I have to look further on the auto aiming part but even if you were correct about that particular point, my argument still stands.
The autopilot works "good", albeit not perfectly....occasionally smashing you into its target.....
The the docking computers in 3303
elite. one of the few games that had a play mad for it.
Based on your video... I hope you knew Autopilot exists on the game, right?
There was this one weird thing I came across in this game when I played it in the 90s. I want to know if anyone else came across anything like it. To describe... It was a blue hyperspace remnant cloud that behaved like a ship. It moved around, it shot white lasers out of its middle when approached, it was invincible, and when I Hyperspace-Cloud-Analyser'd it, the reading showed different departure and arrival systems, changing every second. And when I paused the game and checked where these systems were on the map, I seem to remember it showed that the... whatever it was... was travelling in a straight line across the map, apparently jumping from system to system at an impossible speed. It made me think at the time, "This must be the one Thargoid ship that David Braben said he'd hidden somewhere in the game", but seeing how it couldn't be identified as a ship, I doubt that now. It might have been a glitch, but then again it might have been something deliberate. Thoughts???
Never encountered one in Elite 2. I'd love to think it was a thargoid, snooping around, lurking, awaiting their full introduction 25 years later.
Hey, thanks for the reply. It was a completely one-off thing that I've never seen mentioned on any website about the game, so I have to assume it was a glitch. A mystery though.
A game ahead of its time and to be fair even elite dangerous is ahead of its time too.
Space is black! Not blue! Even as kid I hated David Braben for its decision to make space blue in this game.
Elite 2 was a great game for its time but like No Mans' Sky it promised more than it could possible hope to deliver. It was a good challenge and offered hours of gameplay, but once you had the biggest ship and plenty of money, there was little to actually achieve in the game. Elite ranking took far longer than the natural lifespan of the game to attain, and highest ranks in the federation or empire seemed to be practically impossible to get. Despite having an entire galaxy on the disk, outside of the core systems (only a few dozen of them) there was nothing of interest, small systems with few trade goods or missions, and beyond that, completely uninhabited systems with nothing to offer. No reason at all to visit anywhere remote and no unique items or events.
the sequel close encounters remedied this somewhat with a storyline arc, but it was a buggy mess. And suffered from the game having a emptiness feeling when the storyline was complete. Again the more you played the game the less of a challenge it was and it became boring. Still great achievments for the time. It would be nice to see a single player experience today with modern ambitions. Eve online and Elite dangerous are restirctive to me as MMOs tend to require a lot of time. X2 and its sequels came close, but the latest version X4 is a mess and almost impossible to get into.
A technical marvel of course but very much flawed as a game. Played this pretty much non stop but some crucial aspects prevented it being the game it should have been
At lacked things to actually do. The sequel partially fixed that, but I still geel it could use some modding love with todays systems infinitely greater capability allowing for some more in depth scripting.
You forgot about wolfienstine 3D
Wolf3d did not come out in 1993, like the other games mentioned in the begining of the vid
More proof that necessity breeds invention. With limited memory and disk space, coding had to be tight and innovative. Now it's easy to be cheap and sloppy with your coding, and it shows.
iM FrOm tHe FuTuRe !
Mr.DAVID BRABEN FoR EuRoPeAn "Alliance" PRESIDENT!ThE mAn wHo saVeD tHe WoRlD..
sry foR mE BaD EnGLiiish!
iN tHe FuTUrE We sPeAk EsPeRaNto...BuT Ja jEsTeM HiEr i JA learn DaZu!
I’m not on this planet right now.... just saying 😏😂
I remember 1993 because is the year I was born... not rhat anybody cares u.u
😤 come on please set earth like planets to be landable already i was visit sol and land on my home country