Just my IMO but I think lot more should be made of having a Human or even alien character in these games, players seem to respond better to a Human avatar rather than a vehicle one. also interesting to see the niche problem come up.

Posted a interview with Lehahn in the X part of the forum, viewtopic.php?f=44&t=2507 some interesting comments about having just one ship and along with the comments from Gamasutra. It looks like some developers are thinking about this as a way to reengage the mainstream audience

Neat link and interview.

Jabber's Salvation prophecy has a "avatar" that you can control on ground missions and in bases etc. My project will have some sort of an in game avatar, whether through cutscenes or dialogs or actual fps like movement (this being the dream of mine, we'll see). Freelancer had an avatar during cut scenes, and so did the Wing Commander series, in everygame I can think of there was always a link to a human and frequent references to it. In EVE Online you were the avatar 😉 Yes you see a vehicle, but there is always a mention of a human driver.

I think you should have bought it for that price. It is not as bad a game, as he thinks.

I do think game player tastes have changed a lot in the last 15 years if you look at modern games you often get vehicles in them but they play a secondary role to the player human avatar.

They are used to complete missions or get from one point to another.

Yet when developer come to make a space sim they tend make the same game they were making 15 years ago, so after the cut scene you find yourself in space as a ship again.

It's true enough that most space sim have a human link but it is usually conveyed thorough cut scenes or clicking on a hot spot within a scene where the player has little or no control over where the avatar goes.

Maybe it's time to take the pilot out of the ship.

How would you propose to do that in a game that is in the "space sim" genre? To me space sim means focus is given to the space flight portion - so how do you take the pilot out of the ship?

Like nearly everything, making a game is about making a choice, if you add more first or third person elements, you sacrifice ship elements. What can be given up to add in the person elements from a space ship?

Theres no reason why a game can’t have the normal space sim experience it’s more about adding to the players immersion. The best place to let the pilot out would be the space station or star base, there have been a few games which have tried it although the latter two tend to focus more on FPS gameplay when they are on the planet.

Earth and Beyond

Parkan2

Precursors

Eve has its walking on station part and the new X game looks like it will have some pilot interaction so there some developer who are starting to think along these lines.

Even the more linear games could still have section where the pilot could get out for example most of them have a capitol ship as a base and IIRC StarLancer allowed the player to move around a bit of the ship in first person view.

Another example would be to have some thing like inside of the Normandy from Mass Effect where the player could move around and interact with the ship crew between missions.

What I'm saying is that everything has a cost. The coder codes ship flight or codes the fps. The artist draws another ship or draws a fps guy. So in a space sim there would be a sacrifice of the space flight for the fps.

So the question is: is the space sim audience ok with that? Why not just start up Halo or Battlefield or whatever fps instead, if you want first person elements?

Again having said all that I'd love to add first person elements to my project, I'm just saying that it needs to be carefuly evaluated and that it should happen only if there's enough resources avaiable after the space sim portion is nailed.

Also I'd like to try Precursors though I hear its very buggy and sort of incomplete.

Wesp did a very good job with the patches. I think you will like it, especially if if you 've ever played "Boilling Point". (It's 70% FPS with RPG elements, and 30% Space Sim). Parkan II is also good.

The funniest quote from this, regarding DS1:

"We have seen wing commander prophecy. We have freelancer. And they are absolutely not comparable to this game because this game really sucked balls."

Heh. The only thing I hated about DS1 was the main character. Other than that, I found it playable, with some good parts and some not-so-good parts. I'd recommend freelancer before DS1.

Very true.

Hello ... I'm new to this forum and I like Space games although in last time I don't play it much. But I read whole topic and my opinion is that genre needs new wind. When I played first Wing Commander, X-wing, Tie-fighter and Frontier everything was OK. You just do what in real life you could not. But times has changed. I think that bring FPS elements is good direction. As many from you stated there are basically two kinds of space flight games. Mission driven (XW, WC) and freeform sandbox (Elite,Frontier, etc... ). To make a sandbox game with FPS elements needs a looooooot of work. You need to create believable universe, many planets to move on, cities, space stations either build up in editor or programatically generated, then random missions or RPG elements etc ... etc ... Shortly a lot of work. It is strange that many developers focusing to create this kind of game. On other side look on mission based games. As example I will take essential space movie, Star Wars. There is action which is held in space, then there is some action on space stations and finally on asteroids and planets (also with flight). Yes we have FPS Dark Forces, Jedi Knights, Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy and we have X-Wing up to X-Wing alliance, but if you really want to BE SW universe hero, what you really need is game with combination of those two or three (with planetary flight) genres. Then it would be possible to create for example such mission: Flight with your X-Wing to some asteroid (kill some enemies which hunt you then kill those who defend asteroid) find some hidden place on asteroid to land, then take up you space suit open your ship get out of you X-Wing by ladder get on your feet and find way how to infiltrate to base (and not get killed) get Death Star plans (or whatever else) then find way to the hangar to steal them some Tie-Figher or Shuttle and flight away, of course that you need first to clear your path from enemies... I really would "sign my spirit to the devil" to play such game even if it would be simple linear mission based game (like the first X-Wing game was) without variability. I know game will end and you just put it on shelf and replayability is low, but we have Half-Life which ends too and it is Great game... I think this kind of Space game is missing on the market and at least is easier to make it than sandbox game, dev just need to mix just two or three engines, create gorgeous sci-fi levels with some puzzles and not so easy find solution (not just "to shot up everything what moves") like in any other good FPS game then add some nice space battle engine (there are many good of them), create some clever, interesting missions and I think such game could be successful on market even if linear mission based... I personally don't know of any such game (I hope I did not miss any) did I? Of course, my favorite game was Frontier, so If I could, I would rather choose to play sandbox game with FPS elements, but I thing it is very, very hard to make such game to be good and interesting... Maybe Elite IV? 🙂

One thing I have always thought is the space flight and FPS games have always been separate because to do it all at once means compromise and compromise means that both aspects of the game would suffer. So how can you combine the two?

One answer is the airlock. You could use the airlock to transfer over between the two different modes of the game. In effect, you actually have two separate games in one that only swap "positional data" (eg what colour is the ground, are there any nearby buildings, does the sky have a moon and if so, where is it in relation to the player's point of view, what other ships are parked close by ect) with each other to maintain immersion.

Doing things this way you could have two dev teams working independently from each other on their own section to refine and perfect it. The only time they get together is to make sure both the space sim and the FPS sections can share their data with each other during the airlock recycle. So hows about someone like a certain Cambridge Development company doing the space sim part and someone like (insert favorite FPS dev house here) working together?

Of course... best way is seamless transition but there are other possibilities ... 1) loading screen 2) some cutsceene

Two quasi independent team is good idea ...

Getting out of the cockpit has to be the most requested feature on any forum which has a topic about space sims, it’s truly amazing that most developers just ignore it.

Although A few developers are starting to take an interest, 😀 Dangerous devs has said they will be adding it in the future and Evochron are proposing to put it into there game. Even Egosoft makers of the world most dullest space sim are adding a ship and crew to their new game.

Yes seamless would be ideal merli, but the game mechanic between the two sections would be different. To try and impose one model over another is where the comprise problems start and so the game overall sufferers from that. Using the airlock keeps up the immersion and makes the translation over to the other section as painless as possible.

To me at least, letting a dev company who makes really great on foot and or ground (or near ground) vehicle exploration, focus on doing their thing is just as important as the space flight model. For me, Frontier Developments and say, Rockstar working together (but just on their own respective sections), could produce something very special indeed. David Braben's contribution would be obvious, but just imagine landing at a starport and then have a GTA style city (with it's own stories going on) laid out before you once you pop the hatch on your ship. All of this of course on every planet with a space port. I guess someone like Rockstar would have to learn how to procedurally create their cities with both random and hand coded missions thrown into the mix. Add that to a procedurally created galaxy of 100,000,000 star systems (or there abouts) and then what do you have?

THAT would be the next gen space sim that would change everything :triniti:

I can picture the ad for it now...GTA's Tommy, standing on a busy street corner, penniless, looks up to see a Cobra MkIII arcing away into the sky on full burn before engaging its jump drive into the big black. "One day I am gonna get off this mud ball!" he says.

Oh and it's got to be installable from one 880k floppy disk! :girlcrazy: :girlcrazy:

Now That’s the game I want to play. 😎 😎

If you look back at the primary gamer demographic during the "golden age" of space games, the 13 to 18 year olds then were the same folks (us 30+ folks now) who witnessed Star Wars for the first time on the big screen. Never before had there been a movie like that, and in IMO it had a profound influence on us as gamers. What we had seen in Star Wars and shortly after in Star Trek: The Motion Picture could now be controlled by US, in OUR own HOMES!!

Then a new generation of gamers came along. No longer influenced by Star Wars, who's F/X now looked dated but by a whole crop of action movies with big guns, big explosions, fast cars and faster women. This influences the youth, which are the majority demographic of gamers, which influences the developers and publishers to produce what will sell to the most customers.

Then Star Wars comes back. But it's not OUR star wars. There's Jar-Jar and glorified Samuri's with magic powers fighting faceless Nazi.. er Droid hordes. Gone was the Space Opera with the dog fights in space, the epic Galaxy spanning conflict, the epic battles between Fleets of ships and the space based super weapons. If you look at the old Star Wars games, x-wing, tie fighters, ect. and the new ones: the force unleashed and KOTOR, the space aspect of it is just a means to get from point a to point b.

Videogames in general used to be a thinking mans sport, we all wanted be in the dog fights over Britton, command the forces on the western front, build cities, raise empires. Now it's all about getting your hands covered in blood faster then the other guy on XBL and then telling him how bad his mom sux afterwards.

And quite frankly, I feel the space sim and good old adventure games belong in the hands of the Indie developer, far from the decisions of the corporate board rooms where item one is profit, item two is profit and item three is how fast we can get our product to market to make a profit. Sure we have to deal with lower quality graphics, poor support and log development times, but as technology progresses, the tools avallible to the Indie team or the lone-gunman style basement nerd get better and better, and the hidden gems of games become that much more beautiful.

So why are Space Sims so unpopular? I chalk it up to popular media and the youth of today. We used to listen to epic rock ballads, watch star wars and read books like ender's game. Now it's fast and furious, 3 min nu metal tracks about how much you hate everyone, and watered down blogs half written in 3 letter txt abbrevieations (sp?) Video Games have followed suit where it's all about the speed at which the information is delivered, not the quality OF the information.

Just the 2 cents of a Star Wars watchin', Trekkie lovin', Alstair Rynolds readin', X3 Playin opld man 😎

Leks

There are probably a number of different reason why space sim have fallen into a niche market, it’s why I tend to think that developers need to rethink the basics of these games.

In what way pinback? you strike me as a very intelligent space man, how would you change the basics of the space sim genre? Me presonaly? i'd like top see the space sim take on more RPG/adventure elements. As I'm what might be considered and "aging" gamer, I imagine that most of my ideas would seem fairly dated.

Leks

Very true Pinback, they need to innovate instead of replicate. Its strange to think that the space sim genre has not had a new idea injected into it in over a decade. Yes graphics have improved, no doubts there, but the actual core gameplay is little unchanged from those classic games created back then when the genre was more vibrant.

I wouldn’t go that far 😆 just mention an Xgame 😀

Anyhow as I have said before And this is just my IMO is that you have to have a human or even alien avatar in these games now.

You have to let the pilot out of the ship be it on a planet or station, the old idea of just having a ship which trundles between to points delivering cargo or flying to a waypoint is not enough for today gamers. They are used to having a human avatar in the games and any vehicles are there to be used by that human avatar.

Developers seem to be too hung up on the idea that a space sim must be all about a ship maybe it time they started to treat the ship as a tools for the player to use.

IMO I'd prefer something that lets me get out and wander around a station or a planet, even if it's very simple,menu based or top down movement (looking at you Prospector....for all your bugs you do a great job with it), it'd add a lot to the genre, I think in ten or twenty years, the 'big' companies (Acti/EA) will have given up on space or made it FPS-esque (SOL Exodus is like so already)

If you want to find out why space sim gaming is unpopular, then you have to find out why the most popular genre is most popular. And then figure out what it is about space sim games that people aren't getting.

This is the crucial point in my eyes. There is something about the walking-around-as-a-character thing that is desired by most people, including myself. Perhaps its being the hero that saves the world that grips the mind? Or the way it lets you live an alternate life to some degree like being a sniper. Pioneer is a truly immense game in terms of space realism. If you ever wanted to fly a ship into space and explore the universe this is what you would play. But there have been comments on the Pioneer pages asking whether a ground vehicle could be implemented or something to explore planets. The need to walk around must be hard wired into our brains, resulting in games which focus on this. FPS games give us all we could want to feed this desire, and we feast on them feeding our minds. And for your average gamer who is fed a seemingly infinte supply of FPS action they forget to step outside into another idea of gaming, slowly but surely people get so used to this that other games don't hit he spot. Even puzzle game like Portal need to be in first person to have any success.

I've been playing Shores of Hazeron lately and this game comes closest to what the modern gamer might cope with in terms of a space sim. And its because you are in first person the whole time, you can walk around your ship and walk around on new planets, you can even shoot things. BUT, for whatever reason, the whole space/sci fi thing is maybe seen as geeky or nerdy, which rules out a huge number of young gamers. Maybe I'm out of touch with kids and what they think is un-cool, but you could make a lawnmower sim game that was brilliant, but unless you a fan of lawns and mowing you're just not gonna play it.

One thing I can't quite figure out yet is why we all love running round killing people so much. I have to admit I'm guilty of this but I really don't know why.

I think theirs an expectation by players that is not being met by developers of these games.

It can be said that all simulation apart from car racing games have ended up as niche games

Weather it be flying a plane or a starship, driving a tank or a ship, their just has not been any evolution of the genre. Far too much of just remaking the same thing with better graphics

Look at the huge success of Mass Effect which is basically just a adventure game with a bolt on 3rd person shooter, Granted it lacks any ship control but I think this is the direction that developers should be looking at.

Adding landmines would livening it up a bit. 😆

But it has to said that the FPS genre has been recycled over and over, and although they do come up with different ways to implement it it remains pretty much the same. Look at all the COD games there are now, they're all the same but with updated gfx and new storylines. But people still can't get enough.(Although now I think of it I stopped at COD4 and have never played any subsequent COD games). One great game for me was Dead Space, the atmosphere that game created was just incredible, I found myself nervously looking back all the time and actually affected by the tension. If you could bring another dimesion to the space sim game like in that way(not that exact way of course, but a way that msuits the genre) then you may have the answer.

Good grief, I didn't know it had been done! My reference actually came from a spoof game back in the early 90's called "Advanced Lawnmower Simulator". It was on spectrum and all you had was a green screen of grass and a man with mower at top left of the screen. Press "M" and your man mows away from top to bottom. From what I remember it was an April fools joke, and there may have been a deliberate bug that stopped you being able to finish!

Never played Deadspace myself but one way to get more atmosphere into theses games might be to add sections which are set on set on a base or a capital ship, where you have to repel borders or investigate a derelict ship.

It would probably work better in the more linear story driven game like wing commander rather than the more open sand box type of games although it could still be done in them.

It's a classic 😀 you wouldn’t think anyone would be daft enough to try making a game out of it, well apart from Excalibur Publishing the king of the random simulators.

http://www.excalibur-publishing.com/games_sims.htm

Think I will have to have a look at “Underground mining simulator” looks positively riveting. 😆 😆