Elite Strike status update
Posted: Fri Aug 17, 2007 5:47 pm
I think that you all deserve a status update.
Elite Strike has clearly been on the back burner of everyone involved for over a year. Noz has been busy with art school, and is under certain restrictions that make it difficult for him to share his artwork.
As for myself, I have lots of priorities to balance. That said, Elite Strike is my personal labor of love and I'm not going to let it die anytime soon. Currently, my hands are full with prepping content for Vega Strike 0.5.0, but after that is out, I might be able to make time during the semester to brush up what we have and finish adding the great ships, bases, and cockpit done by Chuck starchaser.
Who knows, I might even put together another pre-release.
I've also come to thinking that I am ill-equipped to serve as an art director. My previous decisions concerning artstyle were based mostly on pragmatism, as the current simplistic style with solid-color textures are the only thing I'm capable of making. In absence of any commited texture artists, keeping the artstyle simple is the only way for me to produce enough content for the game.
However, I realize now that my decision may have been off-putting for a lot of people who grew up with Elite (I did not) and want to see it's universe fully realized.
As long as I'm the only person doing textures, things will stay simple. But I want to make it known that I am totally open to new directions in art style (such as those being taken by JAELC and, to a lesser extent, Oolite) as long as there are people who are willing to put in the effort to pursue them.
This really echoes back to Elite Strike's origins as a simple ship mod pack. We've actually gotten damned close to my initial goal of getting all of the original Elite ships into the game. I dared to dream bigger after the great reception I got, but I'm still not able to do everything. The deal is, and always has been: If you want to see something done in Elite Strike, do it yourself, or otherwise convince me that it's a really really good idea. Preferably one that doesn't require weeks of work on my part.
I will now post my train of thought from my recent re-encounter with the game:
Yesterday, I dusted off my Elite Strike data dir and fired the old girl up again, this time under linux (my SVN build of the VS engine worked fine)...
and my mistake of using Privateer as a base has once again become glaringly clear. I'd been meaning to transition over to pure VS as a base for a while, which I'll do at some point. Shouldn't be very tough at all.
I realized I should be making use of Version.txt to name the user directory .elitestrike.
I did finally manage to fix the ads in the coriolis station. It haunted me for months as to why they wouldn't load. Now I realize it's because they weren't a power of two.
Here are screens:
In the long term, I would like to make some bases now that I know how. I think that a static landing screen can be coupled with some Frontier-style base screen graphics. Won't be perfect but I think I can approximate some of it.
I have some Frontier fonts, but I need to figure out how to make them work with VS.
Also, the elite-style radar still needs to be fixed. I'll need help from a VS dev for this.
Still not sure how I want to handle flight. VS time compression does not seem like a good idea since it's so buggy. That's not really an option unless a dev volunteers to clean it up. I'm thinking maybe I can make use of SPEC but without star streaks. Currently I am unhappy with using the privateer autopilot.
That about wraps up my current thoughts on what to do with Elite Strike in the forseeable near future.
I'm more than happy to hear yours.
Elite Strike has clearly been on the back burner of everyone involved for over a year. Noz has been busy with art school, and is under certain restrictions that make it difficult for him to share his artwork.
As for myself, I have lots of priorities to balance. That said, Elite Strike is my personal labor of love and I'm not going to let it die anytime soon. Currently, my hands are full with prepping content for Vega Strike 0.5.0, but after that is out, I might be able to make time during the semester to brush up what we have and finish adding the great ships, bases, and cockpit done by Chuck starchaser.
Who knows, I might even put together another pre-release.
I've also come to thinking that I am ill-equipped to serve as an art director. My previous decisions concerning artstyle were based mostly on pragmatism, as the current simplistic style with solid-color textures are the only thing I'm capable of making. In absence of any commited texture artists, keeping the artstyle simple is the only way for me to produce enough content for the game.
However, I realize now that my decision may have been off-putting for a lot of people who grew up with Elite (I did not) and want to see it's universe fully realized.
As long as I'm the only person doing textures, things will stay simple. But I want to make it known that I am totally open to new directions in art style (such as those being taken by JAELC and, to a lesser extent, Oolite) as long as there are people who are willing to put in the effort to pursue them.
This really echoes back to Elite Strike's origins as a simple ship mod pack. We've actually gotten damned close to my initial goal of getting all of the original Elite ships into the game. I dared to dream bigger after the great reception I got, but I'm still not able to do everything. The deal is, and always has been: If you want to see something done in Elite Strike, do it yourself, or otherwise convince me that it's a really really good idea. Preferably one that doesn't require weeks of work on my part.
I will now post my train of thought from my recent re-encounter with the game:
Yesterday, I dusted off my Elite Strike data dir and fired the old girl up again, this time under linux (my SVN build of the VS engine worked fine)...
and my mistake of using Privateer as a base has once again become glaringly clear. I'd been meaning to transition over to pure VS as a base for a while, which I'll do at some point. Shouldn't be very tough at all.
I realized I should be making use of Version.txt to name the user directory .elitestrike.
I did finally manage to fix the ads in the coriolis station. It haunted me for months as to why they wouldn't load. Now I realize it's because they weren't a power of two.
Here are screens:
In the long term, I would like to make some bases now that I know how. I think that a static landing screen can be coupled with some Frontier-style base screen graphics. Won't be perfect but I think I can approximate some of it.
I have some Frontier fonts, but I need to figure out how to make them work with VS.
Also, the elite-style radar still needs to be fixed. I'll need help from a VS dev for this.
Still not sure how I want to handle flight. VS time compression does not seem like a good idea since it's so buggy. That's not really an option unless a dev volunteers to clean it up. I'm thinking maybe I can make use of SPEC but without star streaks. Currently I am unhappy with using the privateer autopilot.
That about wraps up my current thoughts on what to do with Elite Strike in the forseeable near future.
I'm more than happy to hear yours.