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I’ll surely read that link, it sounds great. What I find extraordinarily interesting is all the various sci-fi things you can make up, to enable radar-screen-based (BVR) space gameplay. You say, surely quite correct, that heat cannot be masked effectively and that weapons won’t have engagement envelopes of lightyear distances, but fictionally it just has so many possibilities.

Think of the radar jamming of today, which is just spamming the air with false radar returns to delay the enemy lock-on even though you are broadcasting your presense to everyone. And the counter to that: “Home on jamming” missiles. Let some developer genius like the Infinity guy think about the future possibilities of space-stealthing for a year, and it could end up in a very intricate game of cat and mouse. That would be just up my alley of all time favorite games.

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Inside, a Nebula is only slightly denser than interstellar vacuum. You wouldn’t actually be able to tell the difference between interstellar space or a nebula, in most cases. (check out this thread on the Infinity Universe forum about the same topic: http://www.infinity-universe.com/Infinity/index.php?option=com_smf&Itemid=75&topic=10771.0 )

But yeah, glad someone else misses those amazing old games! Lucasarts really are shit :(

D, i’m not sure about that. Even in games like Freelance you usually use your targetting computer to identify the enemies, and rarely visual identification. I think they added in Nebulae to make things “prettier”

It’s true though, that in space especially wars would be fought at astronomical distances (sic). Although finding the enemy in space isn’t hard. A spaceship’s drives give off so much heat and radiation they’d stand out like a sore thumb anywhere in space. There is No Stealth in Space. You’d be able to see the enemy coming from light years away, long before they are close enough to be hurt by your weapons.

You should check out Atomic Rockets (http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/) It’s all about building realistic spacecraft, and how War in space would probably be fought. It’s a good read, I recommend it to anyone who likes outer space, and is looking for something good to read.

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Actually, nebulae are quite black if you are sitting in them, instead of looking at them through telescopes thousands of light years away.

Black space I guess gets boring eventually, and is a bit disorientating. I for one enjoy the new colourful space.

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Personally I’m in the other end of the court, silently waiting the space game that is primarily played with a radar screen, ECM, ECCM and a big “FIRE MISSILES” button. I’ve said it before: realistically, weapons will evolve to kill from further and further away, and true space combat will not be played with your maneuvering ability, only your skill in finding the enemy before he finds you. This is true for combat jets too :)

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But yeah, I’d love a new (and good) X-wing or TIE Fighter game. Will never, ever happen though. Ever. Lucasarts are shit.

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I honestly can’t get into most new space games because of that. What ever happened to the inky blackness of space? It was quite stylish, i thought. It was more atmospheric than the colorful circus of space we have today.

What I’m waiting for is a worthy sequel to X-Wing and TIE Fighter series.

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Essentially, your ship tried to fly like a fighter plane, but did so automatically using whatever thrusters it had available. Hence, turning ninety degrees to the right is not about turning the ship and letting magical “space air” redirect your inertia, Wing Commander style — it’s about turning the ship, then applying lateral thrust to stop your existing movement (originally forward, now leftward) and applying main thrust to get you moving in the new direction (originally rightward, now forward). And obviously, if your speed-to-lateral-thrust ratio is too low, you might be “falling” leftwards for quite a while.

Your “throttle” was simply your intended speed, up to an arbitrary limit (applied only by your flight computer). Throttling up applies main thrust, throttling down applies reverse thrust — and in some cases, the latter might be slow enough that it really is worth flipping around and applying a reverse burn.

You could also disable all that and just apply thrust manually, or increase the speed limiter by a few orders of magnitude if you really wanted to get somewhere on conventional thrust. Of course, good luck turning or slowing down again …

It also finally recognised that there’s no such thing as true speed in space — your “speed” is your relative speed compared to a reference object, defaulting to the local star. You can set your reference to anything, though, including other ships. Nothing makes docking with a high-speed moving ship easier than setting them as your speed reference point and treating it like you were docking with a stationary platform, even while planets float on past.

And, yes, it also had a 3D cockpit — but it was also lacking in any information whatsoever, such that I did indeed spend most of my time in no-cockpit first person.

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Man I loved that game.

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@Fighter-planes-in-space: it’s admittedly silly but it makes for cool space fights and allows for fighter pilot heroes.

:( I’ve given up hoping for a ‘realistic’ spaceflight game, These days I just hope for some shiny lasers and maybe if I’m good my ship won’t slow down when I stop thrusting.

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Still, good that at least one company is making 3d cockpits, everyone else seems to have given up : (

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And things do seem to be shaping together in the forums, a lot of the art is done and I suspect they’re further on with gameplay than they let people know. Otherwise they would get the horror that is the Gameplay part of the forum advising them.

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