Oolite ?
 

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Ah Oolite, yes I remember playing a really old version of that.

Anyway, I wonder if you've played "Hardwar" . It's also a worthy successor to Elite, it doesn't take place in space though. You're restricted to Titan (a moon of Saturn). The game's developers are long dead though.

Game's available for free here :

http://zedo.hardwar.org.uk

Btw Mikhayl, what mods do you recommend for OOlite? There's a lot as you mentioned.... I'm confused as to which ones to download.

Face it, the space sim genre is dead these days. There is a small market for X3-type games that imo don't have much in common with being in space.

Oolite is very good, but I got tired of it after a while. It would really need a big graphic overhaul to get me into playing it again. Especially the planet surfaces are really not state of the art. To illustrate my point, some planets from a demo I did with the Ogre3d engine. These planets were done on the basis of free NASA textures with some photoshopping. It really does not require a million $ budget to do so.




http://www.christian-wendt.org/ORIONARM/1.jpg

http://www.christian-wendt.org/ORIONARM/6.jpg

http://www.christian-wendt.org/ORIONARM/7.jpg

http://www.christian-wendt.org/ORIONARM/11.jpg

http://www.christian-wendt.org/ORIONARM/12.jpg

And what actually happened to Beyond the Red Line?

The craft do indeed look sweet .. and concerning planets it's of course unfair to compare procedural worlds with static textures like mine. Still, they need to look better to convince me.

Anyway, good to see there is this new development, I always thought Oolite programming stood out among noncommercial projects, very much like the original elite did among its peer.

Mikhayl - thanks for pointing it out - I dl'd it and have been playing it some. You can tell its still a bit old school interface wise - but thats the intent and a good thing. Thanks!

Just reminded me i came across this game few weeks back "Vega-Strike (Windows/Linux/Mac) and marked it for download then forgot all about it, till now. Trekies might be interested going by the pictures up on the site.

vegastrike (last updated 6 Feb 2009)
http://tinyurl.com/avvne7

I have played with VS some - and the VS engine is used in alot of game ports - freelancer remakes and whatnot. Its pretty good.

Incidentally, I wanted to ask if there were any fans of Wing Commander in here?

Yep an old fan of the Wing Commander series. Did not play all of them but favourites were Wing Commander & WC the price of freedom, Prophecy. I even went and saw the movie Wing Commander, which i thought rocked while everyone i knew said it sucked :DL

Yes I loved WC. Can you imagine WC Armada (the attempt at strategy) with today's machines? Sweet!

I enjoyed all the WC games - though the Price of Freedom was a bit on the cheesy side. Prophecy was MUCH better. WC3 was really the generational jump - and one of the hardest of the series. WC and WC2 - both with secret ops - were addicting!!

I think WC sucked, and the only thing it has in common with elite is space.

Wing Commander : Privateer has more than space in common with Elite, as it uses the same trading/freeform/combat concept.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privateer_(video_game)

There are 2 major free standalone games using the Vegas Strike engine, aiming at recreating Privateer.

Privateer Gemini Gold
Parallel Universe (built on the Privateer Remake[/url] that is no more updated)