Join the Elite
 

The older ages in this forum may remember the year 1984, which was the year of Elite. If you are in a sentimental mood and want to have a look at it again and how it played, you can relive your past fascination by paying a visually almost perfect clone of it which is free under the GNU license, called Oolite. Make a stash and clean the universe of that Thargoid dirt! Dock your ship and try to not perforate that space station while doing so!

http://www.oolite.org/

Why the change to the forum layout? Beige writing on light-grey background is - kind of new, one might say... Is the Navy doing desert warfare now?

What change to the forum layout?

I've never played the original Elite, though I have played Frontier: Elite 2 and Frontier: First Encounters.

We do have an other games section you know. :O:

This one:

http://img138.imageshack.us/img138/4273/image1ijd.jpg


Note that I am logged in (else I would not be able to open the message and edit it), but the forum is not blue-silver anymore, but like you see it when you are not logged in, dark-brown-greyish, somehow. Writing a post before, was black on silver/light grey, now it is beige on dark grey. Logged in-status and reading a thread was silver on blue. The "quote" button has changed, too, before it was written in letters, now it just is some small icon.

Always been like that.
IIRC, you can customize it however in your User CP.

Has it? I did not change anything recently - and certainly not the forum layout option.

But checking for the according cookie shows me half a dozen subsim cookies - all of them cannot be deleted. You right-click on them, choose "delete" - and they don't.

Something'S going on here. I only enter the user CP every couple of weeks to change the signature, nothing else. But I didn't recently.

@SB

Neal disabled the other themes until the Java trojan issue has been resolved.


No option to choose forum colors/format etc.?

java problem and more

Ah, that clears it.

I remember that game, played it for many a good night :yeah: but it makes no mention of being playable on the W& OS :hmmm:

I never did play Elite, but I have played Oolite. And a number of Elite spinoffs that probably weren't nearly as good as the original. :yep:


@Jim - they're looking for a maintainer to build a 64-bit version, so a Win7 version can't be far off. Apparently it will run in 32-bit compatibility mode:

http://aegidian.org/bb/viewtopic.php?t=8183


...

I'm way old enough to remember 1984, but I don't recall ever hearing of Elite.

I'm glad the forum thing is explained, though. When I saw your picture I said, "Oh, SmartDark! Where's the problem?" :sunny:

Anyone's opinion of how the original Elite compared to its sequels? I still occasionally play Frontier: Elite 2, and it's great, but perhaps the original is better...

I have spent muzch time with Oolite today, the better part of the day. I is pretty much like Elite 84 for the Amiga.

The nice touch about Oolite is that it is very open for addons. New ship types, missions, skins, planetary surfaces, sounds etc etc are available, letting the looks of 1984 (Amiga was solid coloured polygons, no white-line wirferames like the PC version) timejumping to the late 90s/early 2000.

If you do not know Elite, it is one of THE most classical games there are in gaming history. The principle is simple, but proved to be brilliant and influenced a whole branch of computer games. Practically every space trading, duel-fighting, ship building game owes to it in one way or the other, and often: in several ways.

I also had Elite II: Frontier for Amiga, but it did not ran too well on the Amiga, and using Newton physics created a totally different space combat experience, that did not meet much sympathy amongst fans - the game sank, silent and quickly. Later there were titles that without Elite would have been unthinkable: Privateer, Freelancer, and a whole branch of clones. They became more complex and more sophisticated in visual presentation, but the basic principle is that of Elite.

I doubt that I will play it for many more days, I just will check some of the addons and visual updates, for the sake of curiosity. But after that I will enjoy the knoweldge that I could play it if I want to - that way I must not play it at all. It is just nice to own it, like I also own but do not play an emulation of Dungeon Master - another one of these highly classic, highly influential game designs without whose ideas behind their designs games today would not be what they are.

What has come of Carrier Command II? Wasn't there a new version in the making since many years now? Carrier Command also is one of these legendary classics.