Welcome Magnox and look forward to seeing and reading more about your game in-progress. If you need a forum area you just have to say the word and I will make one for you. Enjoy the forums and cannot wait to see the dynamic economy <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//wink3.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=';)' />

Hi Magnox

Welcome to the SSC.

A spiritual successor to Freelancer? Sounds great. I must let Gibbon know about this. He is a premier mod maker for Freelancer and thanks to his efforts, the original game is as popular as ever. Perhaps he might even offer you some advice if you need it?

Take a look at his web site here http://gizmostudios.proboards.com/index.cgi

He is a very friendly guy, anyways good luck to you and your team, I will look forward to future updates! <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//nyam.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':nyam:' />

It's nice to see Gibbon making such good use of Griff's ships!

It's nice to see Gibbon making such good use of Griff's ships!

He certainly did Cody. I am really looking forward to his Awakening mod. Did you know that there is a very underused Oolite section on his forum? Sorry for being off topic! :offtopic:

Aye... it is very underused, ain't it. Maybe I'll need to become the Oolite Naval Attaché there too!

Oh... welcome to Magnox, btw... heh!

Welcome to the forum Magnox

You don't say which platform you thinking about, but I would say if it is the PC then you will need to have something unique as there is a lot of competition on the PC and we do seem to be in a bit of an renaissance with space game at the moment.

Good to see that you team are familiar with older games as it one of my points I make endlessly that there are some good ideas in older games which may not have work as well as they could have because of the hardware limitations.

Thanks for the welcome folks. As most of you know, Unity compiles directly to PC and Mac format - the consoles are so far out of our reach in terms of expense that they're not even a blip on the radar. Also, without being prejudiced because I am sure there are console gamers out there who would love an old-school space-sim, the return is just not there for the investment. Mobile platforms don't have the CPU/GPU power we need, currently, and even if this were met, the interface presents too many challenges.

Pinback - we're not doing anything ground-breaking. When we did our research, the most commonly recurring comment was basically 'I wish they'd done Freelancer 2'. This is what we're doing, it's not going to win any indie gaming awards for originality but we think it's what a lot of people want. To be honest, it's what we want! Look at Lunar Flight - no 'new' ideas there but a fresh and original look at a conecpt that dates back to the '70s. Anything unique there? Not really, but lots of old ideas have been melted in a pot to produce something great.

Anyone involved with game development knows the mantra - ditch one idea that didn't work, add a new one. We've ditched the static economy and empty space - we have dynamic traders and factions that randomly, but logically, expand and contract their influence due to their successes or failures. Thank multi-core processors for that, as we can thread the logic in another core without hitting the main gameplay. When you pitch up at a trading station, there are not just four or five 'same old' freighters queing up; it really is a living, breathing world in that respect. At the moment, though, all of our ships are a couple of blocks, spheres etc.!

What else can I say without incurring the wrath of the team - we've ditched the 'fly by mouse 3rd person view' and yet we've kept it. We've added a proper flight sim model using stick and rudder which you can ermm.. ditch in favour of the previous. We've dropped atmospheric flight modelling for Newtonian physics and, well, vice versa! I guess our USP in this game is that it is what you want it to be. Arcade or sim. We don't have a website, a demo or any screen shots yet because we're spending all our time on the game. The game. To immerse you. Want to fire up your ship manually, run through the start sequence by toggling in the battery, starting the APU, hooking up the electrics etc. etc.. sure. Want to just hit 'z' and start it up? Sure! Want to manage system failures manually.. of course. Want your onboard CPU to do it for you? No problem. I guess what I'm saying is we're giving back choice.

Quests/jobs/contracts? Nope.. they've gone. It's event driven and whether you decide to help or bug out changes the storyline and, sometimes in small ways, sometimes in large ways, the universe you play in. Before I start sounding like Molyneaux (heh!), it's an old idea, an old good idea, re-invented.

As it stands, we're looking at a PEGI 16 or even an 18 for the storyline. I'd like to get it down to 16 without losing any of the way the plotline runs, but our current thinking is that this is not going to appeal to the 13/14 yr old market anyway. The Freelancer story was trite and somewhat predictable, childish and uninvolving in places. It also dragged you about the universe with no thought as to what you, the player, might have wanted to do. Ours (imho of course!) is adult, complex, dark, sometimes disturbing, sometimes uplifting, but it will always challenge you. Interactive sci-fi is what we're aiming for; not necessarily 100% realism. Handwavium ? Fair bit of it, but it's sci-fi fun, not Flight Sim X.

Oh yes. Online - pretty much what has kept Freelancer going over these years, along with the fantastic mod packages. We'd be fools not to do this, and the mod-kit (i.e. our dev. tools) will be released at the same time as the game, as we're building them concurrently.

Unique? Sorry, not really. Just a polish of all the good things from 15 years ago and a new,adult way of looking at it <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_smile.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />

So you do have a unique take, <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_biggrin.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':D' /> they may be old ideas but we have not seen them much in modern games of this genre .

Any chance of having fuel for the ships and some proper mining which doesn't just involve shooting an asteroid and then tractor beaming in the goodies.

Go for an 18 just as long it does not involve the typical space cadet who returns home from space cadet school to find his parents siblings or dog has been killed by space aliens and then goes on a galaxy seeking quest upgrading his ship as he goes to reek vengeance on for mentioned aliens. How many times have we seen that before (hello Darkstar1/space force/ x games <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//haha.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':haha:' /> )

Fuel is in if you select the 'simulation' difficulty mode at the start of the game. Fuel never runs out if you select 'standard' difficulty. Some people like to micro-manage their games, some don't. Mining has gone completely, I'm afraid. We decided when we started this two years ago that there would be no 'grind' in the game. That's for MMOs with subs and microtransactions in our opinion, and our collective brains could not come up with anything that was fun, realistic and un-grindy (is that a word?!). One idea we came up with was that the player would be able to purchase an automated mining station that could be built on an asteroid and a bulk carrier could either be hired by the player to make regular runs to a trading station or you could fly them yourself. This, for us, was treading too much into the X games' territory of micro-managing fleets of ships and factories. Not for us. Sorry!

I am in two minds about this and this one is my call on the team. PEGI is voluntary for us, but somewhere down the road, someone we deal with may want it, so let's do a quick recap. Violence..check! Bad Language.. check! Fear... check! Sex... check! Drugs... check! Discrimination... no. Gambling... no. Online... check! That hauls us firmly into the 18 category but by cutting some of the more adult elements of the story we can get it down to 16.

Anyway, be assured you don't start off as a penniless nugget who trades and fights their way to better ships to beat some inappropriately named alien race. Our story has been written by someone who has been published in Gollancz but before we get to that decision there are a few more we need to make, which is why I subscribed here!

Thread coming asking some questions about why people like or dislike certain features (e.g. speed limitations, jump gates/drives) as we're getting to the point where we need to take them ourselves. From there, I guess another 3 months to get the models in and tested, another 3 months to test the 3rd party networking and persistent world and the killer stopper for us at the moment... voice acting. Music we've got, cut-scenes mostly done, but no-one to voice them. Plan is to hit the local drama/acting schools and colleges' noticeboards when they start the next term and see if we can find some cheap(ish) talent because we don't have the cash for professionals. Also, we have discovered my wife does not do a good 'ships computer' voice (heh), our AI programmer is absolutely awful at speaking into a microphone and that amateur voice acting is an absolute immersion killer!

It's the #1 concern at the mo, but new threads with questions and comments coming soon.

P.S. for what's on here, your sub is too cheap <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_smile.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />

Sounds like you've got the right ideas there, Magnox - Right on, Commander!

Fair enough about the mining, although I was only thinking along the lines of Elite where you had to have a fuel scoop and a mining laser rather than factories and fleets of ships.

We had a brainstorm on this, this 'eve, as it's weekend coding time and we can incorporate mining into the gameworld with very little additional coding. Mining will be entirely player-skill based, high-risk, high-reward, as you attempt to manually land a (expensive!) drilling ship onto high value asteroids which are rotating in multiple axes. I would honestly love to show you a video of what we're doing, but as I mentioned earlier, all the ships are simply primitives at the moment as we get the gameplay in and the eye-candy later. The challenge is not the mining - it's the disconnecting of the autopilot and flying. Mess it up, and you'll be calling for help to get you off a rock, with your expensive ship basically scrap. Get it right and in fairly rapid time you'll be flying away with a cargo hold full of rare minerals. Mining.. without the grind. We hope....

We also have another idea for mining which is way outside what the current game code is built for, so I'll reserve the right to bury that one into the archives of 'would have been great if we could...' and never mention it again if we can't do it.

Sadly, due to the nature of the 'net (youtube commentors, I'm looking at you in particular!) we're not posting anything until it looks the way we want it to!

Excellent I would also suggest that you add a scanner that the player can buy to scan the asteroids to see if they are worth landing on.

Have a look "Tomorrows War" http://spacesimcentr...e-tomorrow-war/ to see how they did it.

Would just like to add my tuppence worth, Magnox, and wish you and the team all the best for the game. Certainly sounds promising and I'd happily part with my hard-earned cash for a go at it in the future.

Good luck!

auryx

Thanks to everyone for the support - we've been at it two years now and kept relative radio silence but we're nearing the point where can put the shiny stuff into the game; the models, the textures, the shaders, the particle emitters etc., and that means we can start thinking about web sites and demo videos. I've seen too many projects start off with superb art concepts and demo videos only to die an undignified death later on, which is why we made core gameplay and *story* our priority. Believe it or not, the first thing we did was write a novella. When I say 'we', I mean Rich, our author, whose short stories have been published commercially (he's not a millionaire, sadly!).

I'm glad we did this because Unity has changed massively since we started and the latest version offers far more visual possibilities than the version we began with. Trying to update visual effects to keep pace with Unity would have been a nightmare. We'll pick a build version to stick with in about 3 months and then go for it. At the moment there are lots of grey rectangles flying around grey spheres, with smaller grey arrows flitting around them. I look at it and think 'did we build that ? It looks like a dynamic universe'. You'd probably look at it and think 'ermmm! grey stuff badly lit... what?!' but I'll explain how we got our models in the indie devs forum sometime. Gotta love the folks at DeviantArt!

Hahaha, nothing wrong with grey spheres <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_smile.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' /> And thanks for working on the backend and story first because really that is the 'core' of the game and what will really keep people coming back to play.

Freelancer has a good core to it and of course it is customizeable (which you stated your team is striving for), but what is really important that Freelancer did a decent job with but could have done more with is 'really' make you feel like you were a Freelancer/Bounty Hunter/Scavenger/Raider etc... that I think is the toughest part of your game is to make the player really feel like they are the role and the game treats them as so.

Rest of the mechanics I can talk about later. Will you be releasing the novel or short story about your game lore with the game?

Any more updates Magnox?