Friday July 1 Update – Meet the Team

[Thee_oddball]

Originally Posted by Insuber

What's a good space SIM nowadays?

I just had a flash back to playing privateer and jumping through gates

Vendetta

S!

[Artist]

Me too, please.
(Played Wing Commander I - IV lately...)

[Damixu]

Originally Posted by Insuber

What's a good space SIM nowadays?

Asteroids

[159th_Jester]

Originally Posted by Insuber

What's a good space SIM nowadays?

Give Evochron Mercenary a try.

http://www.starwraith.com/main/go.htm

[Strike]

Originally Posted by 159th_Jester

Give Evochron Mercenary a try.

http://www.starwraith.com/main/go.htm

Sorry for off topic, but look at this

Two part tech demo, still in development

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7eRE...eature=related

Link to second part is in the right hand playlist

[159th_Jester]

For pre-Alpha that looks really good. Thanks Strike.

[Orpheus]

Cor, forgot all about Evochron mercenary... it looks good but the hideous 1980s cockpit always puts me off, which is a shame.

@ Strike - that looks cracking, bm'd their website! Good find! Checked the website and it's going to be an MMO, could be an EVE killer maybe?

I mentioned it in my PM, but there's a new X-Series game due this winter, details on the egosoft.com website

[159th_Jester]

Originally Posted by Orpheus

Cor, forgot all about Evochron mercenary... it looks good but the hideous 1980s cockpit always puts me off, which is a shame.

I know what you mean but I can look past it (.... No pun intended but feel free to groan if you wish!!!! )

The great thing about it is that it's not modelled in sector boxes as many older space games are. You can litterally travel from the "northern" most co-ordinate to the "southern" most co-ordinate in a continuous flight (if you're masochistic enough to sit and watch something akin to the old DOS flying through space screensaver for a bout a week or two!)

As I understand it, even though the game's been out something like nearly two years now, and not every star system has been "discovered."

Anyway. Sorry all. Well off topic now.

[White Owl]

Yes the Evochron series linked above is polished and some great fun. Highly recommended. Support your friendly local indy game developer! Evochron is made by one guy with a vision.

Allegiance isn't exactly a space sim, but if you like team-based PvP dogfighting in outer space this will satisfy. The game is over ten years old but is kept alive by a fanatically loyal volunteer community.

The X series of games are true space sims. Kind of lacking on the active dogfighting and heavy on the micromanaging tons of fiddly details with your star empire, but still a lot of fun. The new sequel supposedly coming out this year looks like the most visually beautiful spaceship game ever, IMO.

That classic of classics, Freespace is alive, healthy, and steadily growing more awesome all the time thanks to modders at Hard Light productions. Has any game ever done outer space dogfighting like Freespace? I don't think so.

If you're at all interested in space sims, you need to know about Space Sim Central, a website and forum set up by a guy dedicated to keeping track of absolutely everything going in with space sims. You'll be surprised at how many independent projects are in the works out there. Mainstream developers have largely left the genre behind, but there's still a lot of talent and dedication outside the big developers.

Speaking of talented independent developers... Shores of Hazeron is also made by just one guy with a vision, and it's one of the most ambitious bits of game design I have ever seen or heard of. Ever. This is a space sim MMO that promises everything Infinity: Quest for Earth does, with the enormous difference that Hazeron is functioning and playable right now, while Infinity is stuck in a neverending development process that puts Dover to shame. In Shores of Hazeron you design your own character kind of like Spore, explore your homeworld, collect resources, build up an industrial base, design your own spaceships(!!!), fly those spaceships seamlessly from planetary surface to atmosphere to orbit to deep space and all the way back down to some other planetary surface... all smooth, no loading screens. (Ok, ok... there's a loading screen for traveling from one star system to another.) The galaxy and all native life forms populating it are procedurally generated; trillions of possible combinations, so no two systems will ever be alike. Planetary orbits are modeled - including binary and trinary systems with multiple gas giants and dozens of moons - so the heavens are constantly in motion, unlike Eve's and Evochron's stationary stars and planets. My homeworld orbits a gas giant... I have to be careful about when I launch, because if the giant is in the sky I might accidentally launch straight into its atmosphere and burn up. I colonized another moon of the same gas giant, and later when I returned to my homeworld I looked up in the sky and could see the lights of my colony on the moon's surface. I'm starting diplomatic gestures with the empires exploring and colonizing star systems nearby; maybe we'll be allies, maybe we're going to war. And oh yeah... there's opportunity to do some real dogfighting in this game, not just Eve's point and click combat.

Hazeron is in early alpha testing. Only a fraction of the planned features are implemented right now. All the game's graphics and sounds are ugly placeholders. The servers are unstable. The game is buggy as hell. On a busy night there are 40 people online. With all that... it's the best space sim and the best MMO I've ever seen.

But right now I'm enjoying Dover more.

/hijack

[albx]

everytime i go in this thread to check new posts I see something not related to the discussion, can we please come back on topic?

thanks