The Frontier WikiNews

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Starlance: Online Elite tribute game

'Smith' on the EBBS writes to tell us about a new massively multiplayer online tribute game at http://www.starlance.co.uk/. Called Starlance, it's a Web 2.0 online game - just play it with your browser, and it works with any connection of 28.8K or better. It looks a bit different in emphasis to Ulite (http://www.ulite.de) whose emphasis is more on alliance and station building - and more aimed at one-on-one kinds of encounters.

Winston 17:25, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

2006: The Year In Review

Happy new year!

As is traditional, the Frontier News has 2006 In Review, along with some predictions for 2007. Read it to recap on the last year's happenings.

Winston 16:50, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

Cambridge Evening News talks to The Breadbin

David Braben's local newspaper recently interviewed the man himself. The article of course mentions Elite (in the very first paragraph) - but there's no news about Elite 4 - just a little about "The Outsider", and Braben's ambitions for future gaming. You can read the article at the following link: [1]

Winston 14:23, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

Elite 5 Rumours

Yeah, so it's satire. But Timski posted a link to a site he made about Elite 5, satarising the current Elite 4 speculation... you can read it on his website: http://www.capsu.org/e5/

Winston 17:44, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

Bah, Humbug!

It had to happen... the most recent addition to Oosat - the expansions site for Oolite, is a Santa Claus ship, complete with sleigh and fat man. This add-on for Oolite can be downloaded from this link.

Winston 17:40, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

Elite 4 - After 'The Outsider'

In another C&VG interview, Computer and Video Games today has an article about Braben's plans for Elite 4. Unfortunately, it doesn't really tell us much that's new; Frontier had plans in 2000 to do a MMORPG version of Elite - which were dropped when Frontier realised the Internet just wasn't up to it yet, and current plans call for both a single player game and an MMORPG. Braben says that the single player version will come first, since there will be significantly more challenges in making a convincing MMORPG of Elite. Braben also hints that this will be the next development after Outsider is completed, and Elite 4 will use some of the technologies used in The Outsider.

Winston 15:20, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

Frontier Re-Releases for consoles?

Computer and Video Games is reporting that David Braben is contemplating releasing some classics such as Virus and Zarch on the XBox Live Arcade. Elite is specifically counted out from this contemplation though - undoubtedly because of the game's continuing legal limbo from the spat between the Breadbin and Ian Bell - and no mention of Frontier or FFE. Judging by the Herculean efforts that people have had to make just to make Frontier and FFE playable on modern PCs, unfortunately it's probably somewhat doubtful that they'd ever get an XBox port - but XBox 360 users can at least hope since Frontier have now dropped the hint they may go to their back catalogue.

Winston 11:46, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

Fiction: New PDF bundles

There are two new sets of stories - released as PDFs for your reading pleasure.

First up, Selezen has collected together the current collection of 'HPA2 - Deathwreaker' stories, which have been gradually evolving in the EBBS over the last few months. This collection is currently completely up to date with what has been posted on the EBBS, and is available at the Elite - Deathwreaker webpage.

Jason Togneri (aka Break) has also made PDFs of three of his works - Vendetta, Darkness Falls and the 25th Hour. Find links to these stories on Jason's wiki page here.

Winston 14:00, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Oosat: Broken - but will be repaired

It seems that Oosat, the repository for Oolite add-ons, has suffered a fairly catastrophic table corruption of its database. Unfortunately, this means...re-install Drupal (the content management system) from scratch, and re-insert all the files. This is a big job - so don't hold your breath - but work on the rebuild should commence this weekend.

Winston 16:49, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

Update: A new version of Drupal is installed, and work is progressing. But - still, don't hold your breath!

Winston 14:47, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Oolite - End of an era

It's with some sadness that Giles Williams has announced in his blog at http://oolite.livejournal.com that he's burned out on developing Oolite. He intends to finish some OpenGL enhancements before turning over the project to a new maintainer. Developer burn out on a project does happen, and Giles has been working on this for over two years now - and sometimes, you just have to move on and start on a new project - or even just do some real life things instead.

What does this mean for Oolite?

The game has come on far enough now that there's a large community of OXP writers who are continuously expanding the game. This bit of foresight - to make the game easily expandable - will mean Oolite will continue to grow even if there are few new features added to the code base. The game is already a highly competent enhancement on classic Elite. Oolite's future is assured, even if the original developer decides to do something new. As Giles hands over the baton on Oolite development to someone new, he is also going to make a few other changes - he plans to move the code base to a new license - the GNU General Public License, which amongst other things, will allow Linux distributions to include the game as part of their official repositories.

You can get the latest version of Oolite from http://oolite.aegidian.org . Find expansion packs at Oosat - http://oosat.alioth.net .

Winston 13:27, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

Opening the Frontier WikiNews

In the tradition of any new news source starting out by mostly reporting on itself, the Frontier WikiNews will now do this very thing.

The Frontier WikiNews comes from the ashes of the former Frontier News, which used to be at http://frontiernews.alioth.net. The old Frontier News is now closed for good - you can thank spammers for this, who were spamming the site so hard it was seriously impacting the performance of the entire web server. Thatware, the software that ran the Frontier News, just wasn't set up for the day and age of rampant spamming.

The good news about the new format is that if you have news to shout about, you can easily post it yourself rather than waiting for an editor to actually read and post your submission. Your submissions may of course be subsequently edited for grammar and consistency, but at least you can get your news out now rather than having to wait for a lazy sysop to read your submission and post it. To discuss news articles on this page, please use the Discussion tab (the Talk page) right here. Remember to sign all news articles and discussion by typing four tilde (~) signs after your submission or comment.

Winston 11:09, 4 October 2006 (UTC)