Star Citizen

[bozon]

For those that cannot wait for Star Citizen, a little something to get you in the mood - "Wing commander saga"

http://www.wcsaga.com/

[Fulcrum]

Played it.  Most of the FreeSpace 2 mods are pretty fun....the BSG Mods (Beyond the Line and Diaspora) are all especially impressive.



For those who either liked Freespace and Freespace 2 or have never played them, I encourage you to download FreeSpace Open over at Hard Light Productions (http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page).  The mod community has spent years updating the engine after Volition released the source code to the community.  As a result the game with the new engine is still visually impressive.  Even unmodded the FreeSpace games are in my opinion, and with all due respect to the Wing Commander and X-Wing series of games, maybe the finest space shooter series ever produced.

KV

[hotcoffe]

wooaw everything is so expensive for me...and I am still saving for decent hotas + rudders

[Karnak]

Here are a couple of videos of Elite Dangerous's alpha with flight assist off:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KAJuR5giGo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kH5WYPquCbM


I always preferred the scale and freedom of Elite compared to the cramped size of Chris Robert's stuff.  I hope both games thrive, but Elite is far more enticing to me.

[SirNuke]

what I dislike about the new Elite is that they dropped any realism for the combat. You had to play with thrusters and inertia to do what you wanted, now It look like another wing commander....I hope that gravitation is simulated tho, I liked putting my ship in orbit manually, landing on planets, scooping hydrogen from stars and giant gaseous planets...

[Karnak]

what I dislike about the new Elite is that they dropped any realism for the combat. You had to play with thrusters and inertia to do what you wanted, now It look like another wing commander....I hope that gravitation is simulated tho, I liked putting my ship in orbit manually, landing on planets, scooping hydrogen from stars and giant gaseous planets...

Watch the videos that I linked.  You can turn off flight assist.  (Elite didn't model thrusters and inertia at all, but what do you expect from 1984?)  I also am not that skeptical of the aircraft style flight models in Star Citizen and Elite Dangerous given that they seem to be modeled as being done by thrusters under computer control making the ship do what the pilot is asking for.  Turning off flight assist just tells the computer to stop doing that and leaves it all up to you.  Star Citizen says they will model damage to the thrusters which will affect how the computer accomplishes that, or if it even can.  In the Elite alpha videos you can see the AI ship's thrusters firing to make them maneuver.  So basically what you say they dropped is actually still in the game.

It does limit speed because of its multiplayer nature.  As any Aces High player ought to know, WWII fighter speeds are about as fast as is viable in a multiplayer game over the internet.  In Frontier and First Encounters the ships could easily reach relativistic speeds and in a multiplayer game that would lead to huge differences in what player's front ends were displaying.

[Gemini]

Played it.  Most of the FreeSpace 2 mods are pretty fun....the BSG Mods (Beyond the Line and Diaspora) are all especially impressive.

(Image removed from quote.)

For those who either liked Freespace and Freespace 2 or have never played them, I encourage you to download FreeSpace Open over at Hard Light Productions (http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page).  The mod community has spent years updating the engine after Volition released the source code to the community.  As a result the game with the new engine is still visually impressive.  Even unmodded the FreeSpace games are in my opinion, and with all due respect to the Wing Commander and X-Wing series of games, maybe the finest space shooter series ever produced.

KV

I loved Freespace 2...on two fairly recent occasions now I have downloaded the Open source with the aim of playing it through again and/or trying some mods...but I can never get my joysticks to work properly with it! Back when I first played it I just used a mouse, but now I have the stick etc from playing AH it seems silly not to use them.

Can you offer any tips on configuring the controls for a stick? Should it be obvious and I am just being really dense?  

[Fulcrum]

I loved Freespace 2...on two occasions now I have downloaded the Open source with the aim of playing it through again and/or trying some mods...but I can never get my joysticks to work properly with it! Back when I first played it I just used a mouse, but now I have the stick etc for playing AH it seems silly not to use them.

Can you offer any tips on configuring the controls for a stick? Should it be obvious and I am just being really dense? 

Did you go into the control panel for FSO and make sure the stick is selected?  I've never had a problem getting a stick to work if it's recognized by Windows. 

Also, do you have more than one Game control device on your system i.e. a separate throttle, gamepad, etc?

[Gemini]

Yeah I have the full monty...stick/throttle/pedals although the gamepad is not plugged in at the same time as the flight sim stuff.

Will give it another try with just 1 device plugged in to start with, and will check the FSO control panel to make sure it is recognized  

[Fulcrum]

Yeah I have the full monty...stick/throttle/pedals although the gamepad is not plugged in at the same time as the flight sim stuff.

Will give it another try with just 1 device plugged in to start with, and will check the FSO control panel to make sure it is recognized  

Freespace can only use one DirectX control i.e. if you have the HOTAS setup you can use the stick but not the throttle or rudders unless you have software that combines them into a single virtual controller.  The Thrustmaster and CH sticks have software that can do this for their controllers.  There also used to be some free software called PPJoy that can do this for you as well.

[Gemini]

Luckily I have one of these as backup, which works as one device, so i'll give that a try first