Pioneer Space Sim - Free Indie Frontier: Elite 2 Remake

Soldato
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Mmmmm looks ok, but seeing the screenshots it doesn't feel uh spacey, have you got any shots of neburiosity like the orion nebula? or being able to see andromeda galaxy?
 
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Mmmmm looks ok, but seeing the screenshots it doesn't feel uh spacey, have you got any shots of neburiosity like the orion nebula? or being able to see andromeda galaxy?
As a percentage of sky coverage, those objects are so close to zero as makes no difference at all. Pioneer models our own galaxy, and includes real star catalogue data. If you want eye-candy backgrounds, I'm sorry to say you're going to have to get that fix elsewhere. Many of the dev team are astronomy nuts on the side. (-:
 
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So are you saying that every point of light in the sky is a star you can travel to?

If so that would be extremely impressive

Wasnt that virtually how it was in Frontier? The galaxy map seemed to be a pretty comprehensive list of all the stars in our galaxy. Obviously they put a lot of planets around them which probably dont exist, but you could go pretty much anywhere.
 
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So are you saying that every point of light in the sky is a star you can travel to?

If so that would be extremely impressive

In the displayed sky within a system, no. While one of our devs is looking at making the sky truly representative of available stars, that's for the future.

We do have a complete galaxy, though. I'm not sure how many stars are in it, but its size and density is comparable to the real thing, so we're talking about hundreds of billions of systems. It might not be feasible to visit many, what with fuel and maintenance concerns, but I personally ran a script which hyper-jumped my ship at about thirty light-years per hop from the solar system to the super massive black hole at the centre of the galaxy. It took me five hours, just watching jump after jump. Jumps last up to about ten seconds. There were many.

Unlike Frontier's galaxy, ours isn't a flat plane with fake depth. The stars extend in all directions. There's a cube 64 light years along each edge, with the solar system at its centre, within which all the stars are real ones, in their correct places. In addition to that, many bright stars which are visible from Earth are in their respective spots in the galaxy. The rest of the galaxy is procedurally generated, complete with spiral arms, central globe and so on.

It's big.
 
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As a percentage of sky coverage, those objects are so close to zero as makes no difference at all. Pioneer models our own galaxy, and includes real star catalogue data. If you want eye-candy backgrounds, I'm sorry to say you're going to have to get that fix elsewhere. Many of the dev team are astronomy nuts on the side. (-:

Thats such a shame, being an astromoner nut myself it would have been cool to go to somewhere like orions belt and being able to see the orion nebula up close, and see new stars being born or fly through the pillars of creation.
 
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The Orion Nebula, up close, isn't really very bright, or very dense. While I think we'd like that sort of thing in there, too, it would be hard to do. First, we'd need to figure out what it might look like up close (and it certainly won't look like it does from a distance). Then we'd need to find somebody really keen to design and code that up.

If it does happen, I can't honestly see it happening soon. We still have to cram an actual game into this somewhere. (-:
 
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How detailed are your planets going to be? Will there be actual stuff on the planets like cities, local spacecraft flying about etc etc or will it be a vast featureless landscape?
 
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The planets are already detailed. Gas giants need some work (they look OK, but you can land on them), but rocky planets have a huge variety of terrains and atmospheres. We currently only have cities adjacent to starports, but the long term goal is to have many unrelated cities dotted about the place, proportional to the listed system population.

We already have NPC ships flying about the universe. While you might see traders near space stations, pirates do also exist. Unfortunately, space is very big, and while pirates might try to chase you, you're unlikely to ever see one. We're working on designing around that, with the current idea being thrown around being micro-jumps of some kind. Of course, we don't want to lose the Frontier feel, but Frontier itself got around this problem by cheating like crazy, teleporting ships to where they were needed.

We also have a working script API, and there are plenty of missions available on the station bulletin boards. Scripts are written in Lua.
 
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Well had a quick go. Took off, went around earth then out to the moon. (Couldn't get into orbit manually, kept overshooting by a lot -.-)

I'm very very impressed. Looks good (once i noticed the options). Loving the music too.
From my short go its very much elite :D

Now I need to get a handle on the flight...
 
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Not worth it? In the starting ship, your hydrogen fuel for the journey will cost you 0.86cr, and your docking fee at the destination will be between 1cr and 6cr. At worst you'd be 19cr up.

That said, yes, we'll be looking at balance and gameplay in depth, once we've got the polit system all worked out. Right now, system information and prices are all placeholder values.
 
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