9 ms·

Elite: "The game that couldn't be written" [video]

133 points by PotatoNinja 3y ago

aldousd666 3y ago
I thoroughly enjoyed that story. I know it's a BBC patriotic puff piece a little but the tech tricks they did were neat. I hadn't heard of Elite at all and that's too bad because it would have been right up my alley back then.
- baz00 3y ago
  Very accurate emulation experience here :) https://virtual.bbcmic.ro/?disc1=elite.ssd&autoboot https://virtual.bbcmic.ro/?disc1=elite.ssd&autoboot
- dupertrooper 3y ago
  [dead]
- Levitating 3y ago
  > it would have been right up my alley back then. Maybe it still is? Elite: Dangerous is an absolute blast.
  - smolder 3y ago
    It's impressively immersive, but at least when I tried it, not something I would categorize as an absolute blast. The PvP aspect seemed to take a back seat to creating a beautiful and expansive spaceflight simulator. (Which it is!) Mining resources and transporting goods just seem like excuses to fly around and can become tedious. Exploration felt repetitive, too, though I can hardly imagine the excitement of the first player to have an alien encounter.
  - lawlessone 3y ago
    >Elite: Dangerous is an absolute blast. It's good for a while but it get's boring fast. There is still only one ground vehicle, they haven't added new ships in years, just skins to purchase for cash. Most updates they do now are just to the background story with events like systems changing hands due to the thargoids etc. Every space station is the same but with some changes to signage and colour. and mostly the same layouts despite existing in different empires so far apart the travel can take days. The stations just function as a 3d mission board. Star Citizen and even No Mans Sky appear to be moving ahead of them. Remove the FPS shooter and I don't think there is more here than what you would see in the old elite games. The distances are so vast and meeting other human players is so rare beyond certain star systems that the game should have just been made single player. a few edits: I played on PC but was a bit annoyed that they just nixed it for consoles when they couldn't get performance with graphics these consoles were more than capable of. And only came up with a process to transfer saves to PC after the fact(even though save data is stored with them) because players were obviously annoyed they would be losing a decade of progress. Their process for creating player factions was astonishingly bureaucratic, you had to fill out some google docs etc. As of 2023 they've removed that too. To make progress in any reasonable amount of time you basically need to be unemployed and constantly have a wiki or other 3rd party tools open in a browser. The had game that was years of the competition but have lost that lead and many of the original Kickstarter plans were dropped. FDev also doesn't seem to pay attention to anyone critical of issues or the direction things have went outside beyond their forum where their most uncritical players hangout and just share samesey screenshots of ships parked next to things.
    - dotnet00 3y ago
      Not only that but the networking is so unreliable that it effectively is single player, except that other players can hide away in private mode and affect things for everyone else, completely unopposed in a direct way. The game is pretty much in maintenance mode, so many mechanics that haven't received any updates despite needing them. The story has dragged on for years with anything of substance happening so rarely that it's like they wait for the hype to totally die down before moving forward.
      - lawlessone 3y ago
        I've had problems there too where I would have to email them because the game had a networking issue while transitioning from space to planet that just sort of locked me out of a save. Years ago they designated some large sector as closed , for story reasons. And I had to email them to get my ship moved as I loaded my game only to find I was locked in this bubble near the Horsehead nebula with no path my ship could take out. I logged about 1,500 hours, got all the updates/season passes and even bought some ship skins. It was a game I wanted and tried to like.
        dotnet00 3y ago
        Exactly the same situation here. I was really into the PvP aspect (especially powerplay - I liked to be a mercenary running defense for cargo ships hauling stuff into a system the power was trying to take over), put in a ton of time working through the engineering grind and learning to proficiently fly without flight assist (trying to navigate through the edge 'channels' of the Coriolis stations without colliding was fun practice). I gave it so many chances but eventually had to just accept that FDev didn't really care that much about improving the game when one of the powerplay powers 'collapsed'. The original deal with regard to that happening was that FDev would remove that power, progress the lore and maybe introduce another power eventually. Instead they ignored it and allowed other players to exploit the situation, completely breaking powerplay as a system.
    - ashes-of-sol 3y ago
      It's such a shame, because the flight engine is superb, the graphics and sound design are spectacular, and (especially in VR) the immersion is just superb. But the game is a _grind_. It does not respect the players time at all.
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    Eh, if you want to play a game that FEELS like it was balanced with a "pay real money to buy in game credits" feature but doesn't actually have that feature, then yes it's great. One of the most beautiful and engaging experiences in VR, flight is fun, the freedom is nice, but if you actually want to DO anything in the game, like get a good ship or participate in a plot or anything like that, you are basically stuck doing a couple specific trading routes that the community figured out were optimal and even then it's a slog. I don't know why video games you have to pay $60 for seem to be so against you actually playing through the game. If you want engineered ship components (some BS upgrade mechanic) you basically have to do a galaxy wide fetch quest that takes tens of hours real time even if you have a walkthrough.
- OnlyMortal 3y ago
  It was a technical marvel for the day. The C64 version had more features but was slower. The Sinclair Spectrum version was faster but missed the C64 docking music. There was an Amiga spin-off, as I recall, with filled polygons but it didn’t hold my interest.
emmelaich 3y ago
"6502 clocked at 2 GHz?" Was actually 2MHz of course. Fairly dramatic error for a tech video.
- gizajob 3y ago
  Just Braben and Bell made you believe it was clocking at 2Ghz
codeulike 3y ago
When Elite was released in 1984 I was 10 years old and had a BBC Micro and saw the poster in (probably) W H Smith and it looked interesting so persuaded my parents to buy it for me. In those days there weren't game trailers (obviously) and very little pre-publicity so no-one really knew how groundbreaking it was going to be. My family and me happened to be on holiday that weekend so then I had the fancy box and manual (and novella) to read but we weren't going to be back home for a few days (where the actual computer was). So I spent the whole weekend reading the manual. The manual was amazing, and done in 'in universe' style, as if you had just purchased a Cobra Mark II spaceship, the main control panel of which just happened to look like a BBC Micro Model B. I was reading it thinking 'Is all this in the game? docking, space combat, trading, all those different types of spaceship to encounter, upgradable weapons and peripherals, eight galaxies, police spaceships, planets with descriptions of their inhabitants, mysterious aliens that pluck you out of hyperspace. Readers: Yes, it was all in the game. edit: original manual at internet archive: https://archive.org/details/elite_acornsoft_manual/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/elite_acornsoft_manual/mode/2up As a ten year old it was a very hard game though. Docking was HARD. Understanding trading was hard, what should I buy with my 100 credits at Lave that I could profitably sell at Leesti? There wasn't an internet to look this up on. I suppose there might have been articles in magazines, but not sure it would have occured to me to go looking for those. Space combat was great though, the 3D scanner with the vertical bars made it very intuitive. The magic of locking a missile and then firing it off! I dont think I ever got above rating Poor though, because I never really grasped how to get the best out of trading (I was 10, ok? And no-one had ever seen a game like this before). A few years later Elite Cheat got released - a program to make fake 'save files', and then I really got to explore what the game could do.
- airblade 3y ago
  That’s very similar to my experience except docking was just too hard. No matter how carefully I tried to match the rotation, 99 times out of 100 I crashed. I still don’t really understand why! So I just stayed around the starting point, which was a shame but still quite fun.
  - infertainment 3y ago
mnw21cam 3y ago
I'd also recommend Oolite if you want to play what is basically a free version of this (but improved and with hundreds of community-build extensions). https://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Oolite_Main_Page https://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Oolite_Main_Page
- JKCalhoun 3y ago
  Just tried it for MacOS X. I didn't get past its request for permission to access keystrokes from all applications. I denied it and then even the menu shortcuts didn't work. Maybe need some fixes to the way they handle the event code on MacOS.
  - wtallis 3y ago
    I'm guessing you don't do a lot of gaming on macOS. That prompt shows up with lots of games.
    - JKCalhoun 3y ago
      I wrote a multi-platform (including MacOS) game last year using SDL and didn't have that issue getting keystrokes.
      - the-dude 3y ago
        Did you distribute it?
        JKCalhoun 3y ago
        Hmmm.... I may have self-signed. I distributed the game on Steam but my handful of sales may have all been Windows, ha ha. My own downloading and testing didn't show any prompt - but would it on my own devices? I don't know. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2318420/Glypha_Vintage/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/2318420/Glypha_Vintage/
      - OnlyMortal 3y ago
maxshm 3y ago
What shocked me when I saw Elite for the first time, is the huge number of star systems with their own names, population size and descriptions. I knew there was no way such volume of data in the tiny executable file.
- memsom 3y ago
  If you look at the version in C that Ian C Bell did for the trading engine, you can see how all that was procedurally generated. It is fascinating.
cptnapalm 3y ago
There was a "remake" in C of Elite called Elite: The New Kind. The source is on github (https://github.com/fesh0r/newkind https://github.com/fesh0r/newkind). There is a funny, albeit showstopper bug: if you try to look at a sun, it will try to explode, but it can't so the game crashes.
forinti 3y ago
The tape version was recorded at 1200 baud. The 22KB loaded in less than 3 minutes. It actually wasn't that bad.
- nickt 3y ago
  What was bad, on the Speccy at least, was that infernal Lenslok contraption! So while it was a 3-4 minute load, getting the Lenslok right the first time was a rare occurrence… Hateful thing. I still have mine :) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenslok https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenslok
  - forinti 3y ago
    Seems like a nice way to justify piracy.
solidsnack9000 3y ago
"Now let's look at the game itself..." https://youtu.be/lC4YLMLar5I?t=12m30s https://youtu.be/lC4YLMLar5I?t=12m30s
PlunderBunny 3y ago
I played Elite in my early teens, at that peek where free-time and maximal coordination and reaction time, intersect. I got so good with the keyboard that I could line up enemy ships in my crosshairs and destroy them before they were larger than a dot. Combat became tedious, like periodically wiping away a crumb, or a bit of dust. I still sunk more hours into it than any other game I had, only giving up when I was Elite status and had played all the special missions.
Andrew_nenakhov 3y ago
Played a lot of Elite on my trusty old ZX Spectrum. Contrary to what many people say here, I hardly ever had any problems with docking: the game was quite forgiving, and you could dock from rather insane angles, the only real requirement was to get into the 'dock' rectangle at an acceptable speed. I also fondly remember Elite successors, Frontier: Elite 2 and Frontier: First Encounters. The great feat of those was fitting an insanely huge galaxy with orbital stations, surface cities, mountains and such on ONE FLOPPY DISK!!! These days just an image on a launch screen would require more bytes than those whole games full of content and missions and ships.
trog 3y ago
Never played Elite, but I got to see Dave Braben do a post-mortem of the development of it at GDC many years ago. It was super interesting hearing about some of the optimisations they were doing to make it work. The talk is online; if you're interested in old school video games it's worth a look: https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014628/Classic-Game-Postmortem https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014628/Classic-Game-Postmorte...
junto 3y ago
I was nine in 1984 and had a BBC B for my 9th birthday earlier that year. Later I modded it with the speech ROM chip docked in the left hand panel open slot. That boot up noise brings back a lot of memories, as did the 5-10 minutes waiting for the cassette tape to load the games. I had to wait for my next birthday to get my hands on Elite, spending my time with Meteors and Kingdom and other games that I can no longer remember. Apart from dipping into games like Repton for my siblings, Elite became the game I played religiously, often late in the night without my parents knowledge, and giving up my TV rights to watch the A-Team and Knight Rider (but not Battlestar Galactica) — determined to reach Elite status. I became extremely proficient at trading slaves, drugs and people, and dogfighting with the police vipers and bounty hunting pirates. I amazed my friends how quickly I could dock, since for newbies it was extremely hard to get the right roll and trajectory until it finally “clicked”. A proficiency in hand-eye coordination in 3D space. I managed to complete it some three years later. It’s one of the few games I’ve actually ever “finished”, not that you could ever really finish Elite. This machine was what started me on my path to where I am today. Later I added a Commodore 64 to my collection, and the poor old Beeb was relegated to the attic and finally given to someone else by my parents, but that mottled cream tin box shell with its mechanical keyboard will always have a place in my heart. I also remember it being very heavy, but I was a nine year old child. I achieved Elite status and nobody can take that away from this nearly 50 year old geek. Sometimes I'm tempted to put that on my CV as a conversation starter.

133 points by PotatoNinja 3y ago

I thoroughly enjoyed that story. I know it's a BBC patriotic puff piece a little but the tech tricks they did were neat. I hadn't heard of Elite at all and that's too bad because it would have been right up my alley back then.

baz00 3y ago
Very accurate emulation experience here :) https://virtual.bbcmic.ro/?disc1=elite.ssd&autoboot https://virtual.bbcmic.ro/?disc1=elite.ssd&autoboot
dupertrooper 3y ago
[dead]
Levitating 3y ago
> it would have been right up my alley back then. Maybe it still is? Elite: Dangerous is an absolute blast.
- smolder 3y ago
  It's impressively immersive, but at least when I tried it, not something I would categorize as an absolute blast. The PvP aspect seemed to take a back seat to creating a beautiful and expansive spaceflight simulator. (Which it is!) Mining resources and transporting goods just seem like excuses to fly around and can become tedious. Exploration felt repetitive, too, though I can hardly imagine the excitement of the first player to have an alien encounter.
- lawlessone 3y ago
  >Elite: Dangerous is an absolute blast. It's good for a while but it get's boring fast. There is still only one ground vehicle, they haven't added new ships in years, just skins to purchase for cash. Most updates they do now are just to the background story with events like systems changing hands due to the thargoids etc. Every space station is the same but with some changes to signage and colour. and mostly the same layouts despite existing in different empires so far apart the travel can take days. The stations just function as a 3d mission board. Star Citizen and even No Mans Sky appear to be moving ahead of them. Remove the FPS shooter and I don't think there is more here than what you would see in the old elite games. The distances are so vast and meeting other human players is so rare beyond certain star systems that the game should have just been made single player. a few edits: I played on PC but was a bit annoyed that they just nixed it for consoles when they couldn't get performance with graphics these consoles were more than capable of. And only came up with a process to transfer saves to PC after the fact(even though save data is stored with them) because players were obviously annoyed they would be losing a decade of progress. Their process for creating player factions was astonishingly bureaucratic, you had to fill out some google docs etc. As of 2023 they've removed that too. To make progress in any reasonable amount of time you basically need to be unemployed and constantly have a wiki or other 3rd party tools open in a browser. The had game that was years of the competition but have lost that lead and many of the original Kickstarter plans were dropped. FDev also doesn't seem to pay attention to anyone critical of issues or the direction things have went outside beyond their forum where their most uncritical players hangout and just share samesey screenshots of ships parked next to things.
  - dotnet00 3y ago
    Not only that but the networking is so unreliable that it effectively is single player, except that other players can hide away in private mode and affect things for everyone else, completely unopposed in a direct way. The game is pretty much in maintenance mode, so many mechanics that haven't received any updates despite needing them. The story has dragged on for years with anything of substance happening so rarely that it's like they wait for the hype to totally die down before moving forward.
    - lawlessone 3y ago
      I've had problems there too where I would have to email them because the game had a networking issue while transitioning from space to planet that just sort of locked me out of a save. Years ago they designated some large sector as closed , for story reasons. And I had to email them to get my ship moved as I loaded my game only to find I was locked in this bubble near the Horsehead nebula with no path my ship could take out. I logged about 1,500 hours, got all the updates/season passes and even bought some ship skins. It was a game I wanted and tried to like.
      - dotnet00 3y ago
        Exactly the same situation here. I was really into the PvP aspect (especially powerplay - I liked to be a mercenary running defense for cargo ships hauling stuff into a system the power was trying to take over), put in a ton of time working through the engineering grind and learning to proficiently fly without flight assist (trying to navigate through the edge 'channels' of the Coriolis stations without colliding was fun practice). I gave it so many chances but eventually had to just accept that FDev didn't really care that much about improving the game when one of the powerplay powers 'collapsed'. The original deal with regard to that happening was that FDev would remove that power, progress the lore and maybe introduce another power eventually. Instead they ignored it and allowed other players to exploit the situation, completely breaking powerplay as a system.
  - ashes-of-sol 3y ago
    It's such a shame, because the flight engine is superb, the graphics and sound design are spectacular, and (especially in VR) the immersion is just superb. But the game is a _grind_. It does not respect the players time at all.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  Eh, if you want to play a game that FEELS like it was balanced with a "pay real money to buy in game credits" feature but doesn't actually have that feature, then yes it's great. One of the most beautiful and engaging experiences in VR, flight is fun, the freedom is nice, but if you actually want to DO anything in the game, like get a good ship or participate in a plot or anything like that, you are basically stuck doing a couple specific trading routes that the community figured out were optimal and even then it's a slog. I don't know why video games you have to pay $60 for seem to be so against you actually playing through the game. If you want engineered ship components (some BS upgrade mechanic) you basically have to do a galaxy wide fetch quest that takes tens of hours real time even if you have a walkthrough.
OnlyMortal 3y ago
It was a technical marvel for the day. The C64 version had more features but was slower. The Sinclair Spectrum version was faster but missed the C64 docking music. There was an Amiga spin-off, as I recall, with filled polygons but it didn’t hold my interest.

emmelaich 3y ago

"6502 clocked at 2 GHz?" Was actually 2MHz of course. Fairly dramatic error for a tech video.

gizajob 3y ago
Just Braben and Bell made you believe it was clocking at 2Ghz

codeulike 3y ago

When Elite was released in 1984 I was 10 years old and had a BBC Micro and saw the poster in (probably) W H Smith and it looked interesting so persuaded my parents to buy it for me. In those days there weren't game trailers (obviously) and very little pre-publicity so no-one really knew how groundbreaking it was going to be. My family and me happened to be on holiday that weekend so then I had the fancy box and manual (and novella) to read but we weren't going to be back home for a few days (where the actual computer was). So I spent the whole weekend reading the manual. The manual was amazing, and done in 'in universe' style, as if you had just purchased a Cobra Mark II spaceship, the main control panel of which just happened to look like a BBC Micro Model B. I was reading it thinking 'Is all this in the game? docking, space combat, trading, all those different types of spaceship to encounter, upgradable weapons and peripherals, eight galaxies, police spaceships, planets with descriptions of their inhabitants, mysterious aliens that pluck you out of hyperspace. Readers: Yes, it was all in the game. edit: original manual at internet archive: https://archive.org/details/elite_acornsoft_manual/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/elite_acornsoft_manual/mode/2up As a ten year old it was a very hard game though. Docking was HARD. Understanding trading was hard, what should I buy with my 100 credits at Lave that I could profitably sell at Leesti? There wasn't an internet to look this up on. I suppose there might have been articles in magazines, but not sure it would have occured to me to go looking for those. Space combat was great though, the 3D scanner with the vertical bars made it very intuitive. The magic of locking a missile and then firing it off! I dont think I ever got above rating Poor though, because I never really grasped how to get the best out of trading (I was 10, ok? And no-one had ever seen a game like this before). A few years later Elite Cheat got released - a program to make fake 'save files', and then I really got to explore what the game could do.

airblade 3y ago
That’s very similar to my experience except docking was just too hard. No matter how carefully I tried to match the rotation, 99 times out of 100 I crashed. I still don’t really understand why! So I just stayed around the starting point, which was a shame but still quite fun.
- infertainment 3y ago

mnw21cam 3y ago

I'd also recommend Oolite if you want to play what is basically a free version of this (but improved and with hundreds of community-build extensions). https://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Oolite_Main_Page https://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Oolite_Main_Page

JKCalhoun 3y ago
Just tried it for MacOS X. I didn't get past its request for permission to access keystrokes from all applications. I denied it and then even the menu shortcuts didn't work. Maybe need some fixes to the way they handle the event code on MacOS.
- wtallis 3y ago
  I'm guessing you don't do a lot of gaming on macOS. That prompt shows up with lots of games.
  - JKCalhoun 3y ago
    I wrote a multi-platform (including MacOS) game last year using SDL and didn't have that issue getting keystrokes.
    - the-dude 3y ago
      Did you distribute it?
      - JKCalhoun 3y ago
        Hmmm.... I may have self-signed. I distributed the game on Steam but my handful of sales may have all been Windows, ha ha. My own downloading and testing didn't show any prompt - but would it on my own devices? I don't know. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2318420/Glypha_Vintage/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/2318420/Glypha_Vintage/
    - OnlyMortal 3y ago

maxshm 3y ago

What shocked me when I saw Elite for the first time, is the huge number of star systems with their own names, population size and descriptions. I knew there was no way such volume of data in the tiny executable file.

memsom 3y ago
If you look at the version in C that Ian C Bell did for the trading engine, you can see how all that was procedurally generated. It is fascinating.

cptnapalm 3y ago

There was a "remake" in C of Elite called Elite: The New Kind. The source is on github (https://github.com/fesh0r/newkind https://github.com/fesh0r/newkind). There is a funny, albeit showstopper bug: if you try to look at a sun, it will try to explode, but it can't so the game crashes.

forinti 3y ago

The tape version was recorded at 1200 baud. The 22KB loaded in less than 3 minutes. It actually wasn't that bad.

nickt 3y ago
What was bad, on the Speccy at least, was that infernal Lenslok contraption! So while it was a 3-4 minute load, getting the Lenslok right the first time was a rare occurrence… Hateful thing. I still have mine :) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenslok https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenslok
- forinti 3y ago
  Seems like a nice way to justify piracy.

solidsnack9000 3y ago

"Now let's look at the game itself..." https://youtu.be/lC4YLMLar5I?t=12m30s https://youtu.be/lC4YLMLar5I?t=12m30s

PlunderBunny 3y ago

I played Elite in my early teens, at that peek where free-time and maximal coordination and reaction time, intersect. I got so good with the keyboard that I could line up enemy ships in my crosshairs and destroy them before they were larger than a dot. Combat became tedious, like periodically wiping away a crumb, or a bit of dust. I still sunk more hours into it than any other game I had, only giving up when I was Elite status and had played all the special missions.

Andrew_nenakhov 3y ago

Played a lot of Elite on my trusty old ZX Spectrum. Contrary to what many people say here, I hardly ever had any problems with docking: the game was quite forgiving, and you could dock from rather insane angles, the only real requirement was to get into the 'dock' rectangle at an acceptable speed. I also fondly remember Elite successors, Frontier: Elite 2 and Frontier: First Encounters. The great feat of those was fitting an insanely huge galaxy with orbital stations, surface cities, mountains and such on ONE FLOPPY DISK!!! These days just an image on a launch screen would require more bytes than those whole games full of content and missions and ships.

trog 3y ago

Never played Elite, but I got to see Dave Braben do a post-mortem of the development of it at GDC many years ago. It was super interesting hearing about some of the optimisations they were doing to make it work. The talk is online; if you're interested in old school video games it's worth a look: https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014628/Classic-Game-Postmortem https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014628/Classic-Game-Postmorte...

junto 3y ago

I was nine in 1984 and had a BBC B for my 9th birthday earlier that year. Later I modded it with the speech ROM chip docked in the left hand panel open slot. That boot up noise brings back a lot of memories, as did the 5-10 minutes waiting for the cassette tape to load the games. I had to wait for my next birthday to get my hands on Elite, spending my time with Meteors and Kingdom and other games that I can no longer remember. Apart from dipping into games like Repton for my siblings, Elite became the game I played religiously, often late in the night without my parents knowledge, and giving up my TV rights to watch the A-Team and Knight Rider (but not Battlestar Galactica) — determined to reach Elite status. I became extremely proficient at trading slaves, drugs and people, and dogfighting with the police vipers and bounty hunting pirates. I amazed my friends how quickly I could dock, since for newbies it was extremely hard to get the right roll and trajectory until it finally “clicked”. A proficiency in hand-eye coordination in 3D space. I managed to complete it some three years later. It’s one of the few games I’ve actually ever “finished”, not that you could ever really finish Elite. This machine was what started me on my path to where I am today. Later I added a Commodore 64 to my collection, and the poor old Beeb was relegated to the attic and finally given to someone else by my parents, but that mottled cream tin box shell with its mechanical keyboard will always have a place in my heart. I also remember it being very heavy, but I was a nine year old child. I achieved Elite status and nobody can take that away from this nearly 50 year old geek. Sometimes I'm tempted to put that on my CV as a conversation starter.