Frontier (computer game)

Frontier: Elite 2 is a computer game written by David Braben and published by Gametek. It is the first sequel to Ian Bell and David Braben's earlier game Elite, and is available for Commodore Amiga, Atari ST and PC computers.

Frontier (or FE2 as it is commonly referred to) retained the same principle component of Elite—namely completely open-ended gameplay—and added to this realistic physics and an accurately modelled galaxy. There is no plot within Frontier, nor are there pre-scripted missions (as there were in its sequel, First Encounters); instead players explore space while trading legally or illegally, carrying out missions for the military, ferrying passengers from system to system, engaging in piracy or any combination of the above. As a consequence, Frontier cannot be completed or "won"—instead, players themselves decide what to aspire to and set out to achieve it.

The game has since been released as Shareware and is available as a free downloadalthough being a DOS game, users of Windows 2000 and Windows XP may initially have difficulty getting it to run.[http://www.frontier.co.uk/games/frontier/support.html

Game play

In Frontier, the player assumes the role of one of Commander Jameson's grandchildren, having inherited from Commander Jameson one hundred credits and an Eagle Long Range Fighter. By the game’s standards, this is incredibly modest, and is used as a spur to encourage players to earn money by whatever means they feel is appropriate.

As with Elite, much of Frontier is concerned with trading: players can buy and sell much—from food and computer parts to guns and slaves—with the intent of making the most profit from each trading run. Thus, learning to compare prices in various systems is essential for profitability, and calculating overheads for each trip (such as fuel, missiles, and hull repair) are essential skills. It often becomes apparent that a particular trading route is profitable, such as the Barnard’s Star-Sol route. It is worth noting that some items (particularly narcotics, weaponry and slaves) are illegal in most systems and attempting to trade these in a system in which they are illegal will result in being fined by the police, which can often escalate into violence. It is often worth the risk, however, as illegal goods generally have a very high price on the black market.

Frontier substitutes Elite’s arcade flying style for one based rigidly on Newtonian physics: momentum must first be neutralised to bring the player's craft to a stop, and turning 180° has no effect on the direction of travel until previous momentum has been counteracted. The craft’s control is largely left to the player, but often day-to-day tasks—such as navigating from a hyperspace exit-point to a desired planet or space-station and docking—can be handed over to a ship's autopilot.

The issue of interstellar navigation is solved by the use of a hyperdrive to travel between stars. The use of hyperspace in the Elite series is somewhat different to Star Trek’s warp drive; whereas the warp drive accelerates the ship to translight speeds, hyperspace in Frontier appears to be a form of dimensional shifting, “jumping” into another, more compressed dimension then exiting it at a point equating to the desired destination. In this respect, hyperspace is treated in a similar manner to the hyperspatial travel utilised in Babylon 5. Each jump takes approximately a week in relativistic terms, and to counteract this the duration of the flight is spent in a form of suspended animation. A hyperspace jump leaves a visible energy signature, the "hyperspace cloud" at the entry and exit points, visible during the duration of the jump and for some hours afterwards. This makes it possible for pirates and assassins to track a ship through hyperspace, arrive at its destination first and attack without police intervention.

Sooner or later the player is bound to run into enemies, most likely in the form of space pirates. The different star systems had differing government and social structures, meaning that some systems were safer than others. The Core worlds were usually the safest, with anarchic systems ("Reidquat" and "Phekda" as arguably the most notorious anarchies in the game) being the most hazardous zones. Combat inevitably ensues, and is handled completely realistically. In practice, this means both ships taking slingshot thrusts at each other, lasers being fired constantly at each other, until one of the ships is destroyed. All enemy ships destroyed count towards the player's combat rating, starting from “Harmless” and progressing towards “Elite”.

There is something of a “background story” to Frontier, establishing two major factions in the galaxy: The “Federation”, based in the Sol system, and the “Empire”, based in the Achenar system. These two factions are bitter enemies, but for the current time (the whole duration of the game, it seems) they are in some kind of cease-fire, akin to the Cold War in the 1960s.

Players are free to side themselves with the Federation, with the Empire, with both, or with neither. The game does not restrict one's political career. Both sides have a military force that a player can run freelance missions for, with successes leading to potential a military rank. The ranks of the Federation and the Empire are independent of each other. Playing for both sides adds to the difficulty to acquire a rank promotion for either.

Compared with Elite

Frontier has better graphics than Elite, but this is mostly due to the differences in the underlying computer platforms—the Amiga, Atari ST and IBM PC offer much more power than the BBC Micro and Commodore 64.

The graphics engine was advanced for its time, featuring curved polygons, and texture mapping in the PC version. The range of scales covered is surpassed only by the yet to be released Spore. It was, for example, possible to do realistic gravitational slingshots around supermassive stars, and in the same engine fly close enough to the ground to read the (accurate) time from the face of a clock.

Frontier built on Elite in other aspects as well. It was now possible to land on planets in a space craft, something not possible in Elite. Most stars also had a system of planets around them, when in the previous game there would only be one planet and a space station in all the systems. In addition to this many were impressed that some real stars had been placed in the Frontier universe, mostly near Sol, such as Alpha Centauri and Sirius. Other brighter stars such as Antares, Betelgeuse and Polaris which are much further out, were also included. All planets and most major moons in the Sol system (such as Earth, Mars and Moon) could also be visited.

The biggest improvement in the actual gameplay is that players are no longer confined to the same ship (the "Cobra Mk. III") for the whole game. Frontier offers dozens of ships, from small but nippy fighters like the Eagle and the Cobra to huge cruisers such as the Anaconda or the Panther. Players can only have one ship at a time, so every time a new ship is purchased, the old ship is traded in, with its trade value deducted from the new ship’s price.

Some people feel that Frontier’s strict realism and totally open-ended structure made the game less interesting than Elite, as there is less opportunity for intense action and combat. Indeed, while Elite can be properly described as a space combat game with trading elements attached, Frontier might be better classified as an RPG, in that the focus is on exploring worlds, upgrading the ship, enhancing weaponry, amassing cash, increasing skill levels, and fighting random enemies.

Music

Perhaps taking a cue from the film A Space Odyssey (film), the game used a selection of classical music to provide background. Pieces (in fact, MIDI-reinterpretations) by Wagner, Mussorgsky, Grieg joined Strauss’s “The Blue Danube”, the latter being played during any space station docking sequence, as in 2001.

David Lowe also provided two original classical style pieces, one for the intro sequence.

Box Contents

As was common in the mid-1990s, the game box included more than just the disk. It included a quick start guide, a detailed manual, a fictional gazetteer of some star systems from the game, a book of short stories set in the game universe, and a very large fold out map of the local part of the galaxy.

Copy-protection system

The manual formed an integral part of the copy-protection system. At certain intervals in the game, the player had to type text of certain pages of the manual. The police would ask the player to: 'please enter the first letter of word X, row Y on page Z', as a check-up. If the player mistyped a few letters, or didn't have access to the manual, the game would stop. This was handled in the context of the game as a police spot-check, verifying that the player owned his ship legally. If the player fails 3 spot-checks, he is arrested and his ship impounded, and the game ends.

Bugs

Frontier’s development was running behind schedule near its slated release date, and, to meet their advertised release date, Gametek published the game before it was totally completed. As a result, there were some bugs left in the first release.

The most famous of these was the “wormhole” bug: Normally a ship’s hyperdrive has a range of about 15 light years at most, so planetary systems dozens of light years away are too far to reach in one hyperspace jump. However, if the player happened to find a system 655.36 to 670.36 light years away, it was suddenly within the '15 light year' range! The same would happen for systems slightly beyond 1310.72, 1966.08, and other multiples of 655.36 light years. With a bit of careful triangulation it was usually possible to get near or directly to a destination system any distance away by means of just two such 'wormhole' jumps.

Die-hard fans have tried to explain this with a wormhole theory, but the most probable explanation is that the game only uses 16-bit maths instead of 32-bit when calculating system distances for hyperspace jumps, and its internal variable rolls over when reaching 655.36 (2 to the power of 16, divided by 100). Indeed, this bug has been fixed in later versions of the game (at least for the PC).

The original Amiga version would crash if the player tried to analyse his own hyperspace cloud remnant on arrival.

Another bug causes a passenger to sometimes want to go to a system with no planets, making a successful delivery impossible.

Frontier in the media

Frontier was relatively well received by the media. Most magazines were awestruck by its sheer volume and accurate depiction of real-world physics, and gave it relatively high ratings. Frontier's rating was severely harmed in the case of most reviews by how long it had taken to be produced- and accordingly that its graphics by the standards of the time were well below par.

One notable exception was Amiga Power, who viewed the game not as a successor to Elite’s throne, but as a space flying game on its own right, and were disappointed by its lack of action. This made them dismiss the game as boring, rating it 65% (75% for A1200 users) ranking #100 in their top 100 games list. They were also critical of the game’s bugs, and its slow framerate on non-AGA Amigas, hence the 10 percentage points higher for players lucky enough to own an Amiga 1200 or 4000.

Trivia

The first two combat ratings, “Harmless” and “Mostly Harmless”, are references to the book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.
The entire universe in Frontier: Elite 2 fit onto a single Floppy disk. For the Amiga version, this was a single 880 KB disk (disk 2 was only a selection of interesting saved games), and for the PC/DOS platform a 1.44 MB HD floppy — a feat many consider unmatched. For the Amiga version, the actual executable file was only around 400 KB (uncompressed), its small size partly due to the entire game being written in assembler while its universe was mostly procedurally generated.
It was possible to use a hex editor to modify the game, or to look for secrets in the game executable file (no data files were used). The programmers included at least one cryptic message for people to find in this way.
The legendary (but fictional) Thargoid ships from the first Elite game can be seen as part of military installations in Elite II. It is unknown if this is a direct reference or simply re-use of the old model. The Thargoid ship can be flown by modifying a saved game.
Very rarely the hyperdrive can misfire leaving you stranded tens or hundreds of systems away from your destination. This is called a "Hyperspace Mis-Jump". There is generally nothing at the location you arrive at. This happens much more frequently if the hyperdrive is not serviced for a long time. It is possible to mine fuel in order to reach an inhabited system, but this is unlikely. It is possible to force a mis-jump by holding shift while activating the hyperdrive. A particularly severe mis-jump would destroy the hyperdrive, leaving the ship completely stranded. In some versions of Elite, it was possible to force a mis-jump by holding full pitch and roll during the jump.

Successors

Frontier was succeeded by First Encounters, which was available for PC (no Atari version was released as by the time of its publication it was no longer profitable to create games for the Atari, and for similar reasons the Amiga version was also canceled).

External links

Frontier: Elite 2

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