There have been a few things that i would like to see as well, such as a built in ship designer, and if the game is large enough a good auto pilot(not to land you, but to get you there.

Those who miss elite, do as search on elite IV. Someone is doing a rebuild on it.

well Parkan 2 is +/- as you described… but it sucks badly due too its world emptyness and screwed up space flying.

but yeah, such game is a game of my dreams and untold wishes.

if you are still interested in the topic theres also Infinity: Quest for Earth (or something along those lines) which is still in development but is also the only thing that can make our wishes come true

anyway, if anybody knows such a game (even in top-down 2D view) please name it. i am dying to play my childhood fav genhre again :)

I may be speaking too late, but I know of an engine that is free and probably capable to do whatever you like. It is good looking, easy to use, and has some sort of commercial license you can use. To model, I recommend Blender, which is also free. The game engine is called Unity 3D. Go check it out!

[…] Also, big thanks to Domcoppinger for cluing me in on this. […]

The game looks great, but it doesn’t seem to have any RPG element in it. Only space exploration and FPS. However, my Russian is abysmal, so maybe I missed something in the video. But it does look great.

I know I may be a little late but what the hell! I can confirm this game has been made! And the game looks AWESOME!

However there are one or to issues! :( Sadly there hasn’t yet, and may never be, an English release of it as it has so far been released in Russian only. And it has been made by a particularly small company that it seems has been hit extremely hard by the recession! So it may seem that, unless you speak Russian and can get your hands on a copy, the game is a bust! Which is such a shame as it did look so good! :D

Anyways after all that here is the link to it if you want to go check it out and feel sad at all we have missed out on! :(

http://www.precursors-game.com/eng/news/

CHECK IT OUT!

great idea. been looking for something like that myself. make it soon plz!

Elite/Frontier was an excellent game and we will never forget them. This said, we need to have this done at the proper scale. Nothing less than the scale of Morrowind would do. I wonder how these things work, but I’d suggest using a decent existing 3D engine. Actually, does it matter if it is not the same engine for the flight and for the exploration and RPG stuff? I think not. There would necessarily be a transition between the “space part” and the exploring part anyway. I would say the engine Oblivion is using is more than good enough for the exploration (I wouldn’t even mind the good old TES, except that it is extremely long to use, but on the other hand, it handles scripted events natively). For the space part, I don’t have a clue, but there are many games out there doing this, so I guess it exists.

As for the problem of size and how to make areas out of reach to the players, I would warn against the problems we see in so many FPS and RPGs and that you denounced in other posts: the impassable wall. I don’t know how to do this. I am not worrying about the overflight possibility: the speed and altitude at which space ships would fly would make the viewing of details difficult. So basic details only. I don’t think randomly generated terrain would be an option. But maybe the computer could load only the portion of space the ship is “likely to be in” (that is the current “cell” and the adjacent ones).

@Jaded Judas: Have you tried Oolite? Also, I was actually fairly successful running the PC version of Frontieer in DosBox. :)

Thanks for the recommendation. Did I mention I have ZERO experience in game development btw? I’d love to make a game like this, but I’m at a loss to where even start. Also, I’m not sure when I would actually have time to work on this…

Maybe if I’d quit sleeping I would have few extra hours each day… Nah… That totally did not work for me last time I tried that. :P

That said, the panda3d engine looks cool, and I’m totally going to play around with it when I get home from work. Maybe something good will come out of it.

The only “modern” engine I know built to handle planetary spaceflight with landings is i-novae, used to build the indie game ‘Infinity: The quest for Earth’. Check out the videos on their website (especially the one titled ‘Seamless planetary landing video’), it does look amazing. However, nothing but a very restricted demo is released yet, so I don’t think they even license it to third-parties.

However, if you are actually seriously considering turning something like this to a few-man side-project, I would go with panda3d. It is a nice, well-documented python 3d engine. Not that it can do anything resembling seamless planetary scapes out of the box, but you will get to something resembling a working prototype much, much faster than with anything else. If I remember correctly, one of their demos is a guy running around on uneven terrain, in like 50 lines of python.