> ArcElite is perhaps most famous for being the first non-player-centric version - meaning that the AI would fight amongst itself and pursue its own interest. The player was no longer the centre of the universe. From the AFE FAQ: "Now you can encounter pirate packs battling it out for dominance of their private patches, traders under attack, Bushmaster mining vessels smashing asteroids into chunks and scooping up the pieces, vipers towing disabled ships back to the station, vipers flying along in formation looking for some lawbreaker to fight. There are even other ships like yourself - Cobras armed to the teeth looking for pirates to fight, to boost their Elite rating."
Compare this to the claims about oolite:
> In Elite, the universe centers around the player, spawning random events in their path to encounter. oOlite is very different, in that when a player is thrown into any system, it is populated with NPCs, with their own individual AIs, so that as you travel through a system, there are pirates plundering, miners recovering minerals from asteroids, and Escort ships traveling through the star system
ArcElite was released 13 years before oolite started development, it deserves some credit.
If the article was framed as "Oolite is a combination of classic Elite mechanics, merged with the best of the features from the sequels, and user-generated plugins to seal the deal" then it would be a good article.
> These things will happen regardless as to whether you are there or not. THAT!.. is one of the major points that differentiates between the two games, which makes oOlite a game of its own. > >This was more or less in the original (Acorn) Elite and was absolutely in Frontier.
For Frontier, maybe relatively extensively. For the original, I'm 99% certain that a system for all intents and purposes does not exist when you're not there, at all, and that the ship traffic is simply a pseudo-random property of things like tech level and government type. So while you're in a solar system, yes, that's there, though only in a very crude fashion in the original (the ships are pseudo-randomly created on each entry to a system). And yes, maintaining state when you leave a system isn't exactly new either.
> ... But it quickly falls back into a revisionist history.
I agree, in fact what I like about oOlite is that unlike the Frontier games, it does not try to "transform it into something huge".
> Considering that "Elite: Dangerous" is only half done, a bold claim.
Agreed, it's clear that Braben at least has never really been satisfied and have wanted to stretch things very far. In my opinion the Frontier games fell flat because he was too ambitious at the time, while oOlite works because it's not trying to be everything that Braben at least wanted, but something small and hackable. And that's awesome, but if Elite: Dangerous is "just" at the level of oOlite, it'll be a massive disappointment, and a massive underdelivery on the concepts they've presented.