Frontier: Elite 2 Review, David Braben, 1993

cf.: History of 1990s Computer Games.

Frontier: Elite II

Frontier: Elite 2 is a 16 bit space trading and space combat flight simulator designed and coded by David Braben of Frontier Developments for the Amiga, Atari ST and PC MS-DOS platforms.

Released in 1993 Frontier is notable for its open-ended gameplay, hierarchical design, momentum-based Newtonian flight physics and god-tier procedural generation packed into one 880 KB diskette.

Coded in 68000 assembly by Braben over a period of five and one half years, Frontier was, along with Doom, the most impressive 3D game of the early 90s. Frontier continues to exert influence in the 2010s and beyond, through games like Mount & Blade: Warband.

Note that Braben also coded Elite of 1984 and the Zarch shoot 'em up of 1987.

Even though it came out in the early 90s when landmark tech was yet to come from Intel (Pentium), IBM (SVGA) and Microsoft (Direct3D), Frontier remained one of the most notable games of that decade.

Braben and Ian Bell actually had "Elite 2" in a semi-playable state on the 8-bit BBC Micro and C=64, but it was decided that a 16 bit platform was needed for such an ambitious game engine. At the end of the day 8 bit micros could not render flat-shaded geometry above 5 FPS, for example.

It is important to remember that the original Elite of 1984 needed to run within 22 kbytes of memory. And Amigas and STs had 512 kbytes RAM stock-standard. And by 1988 practically all serious ST/Amiga gamers had installed a memory upgrade, bringing that to 1 meg of RAM.

Braben's 68k assembly was ported to i80286 assembly by Chris Sawyer. The IBM PC MS-DOS 3.0 version employs a mix of flat-shaded and texture-mapped vector graphics whereas the ST/Amiga versions are flat-shaded only. Arguably though, the flat-shaded polygons have stood the test of time better than the texture-mapped ones.

Frontier's geometry is light-sourced; that is, the degree to which polygons are visible is dependent upon their angle to the lightsource, and only illuminated polygons are visible.

In addition, smoke trails are emitted by damaged ships from the location of the damage impact-point.

Frontier's visuals are spartan, its color scheme is sensible and its framerate is smooth (though that is dependent on CPU speed).

On 7 MHz Amiga 500s and 8 MHz ST 520-1040s, Frontier's framerate was lacking but the game was still playable.

During development Braben himself used an A2000 50 MHz 030 to run Frontier at 50 FPS.

• MOS Tech 6502 clocked at 1 MHz came in at 0.43 MIPS (C=64 that ran Elite)
• Motorola 68000 clocked at 8 MHz came in at 1.40 MIPS (Atari ST and ~Amiga 500)
• Intel 80286 clocked at 12.5 MHz came in at 2.60 MIPS
• Motorola 68030 clocked at 50 MHz came in at 18 MIPS (accel. A1200, 2000, 3000)

I don't remember how well the engine scaled with faster Amiga CPUs. From memory A1200s ran Frontier better than A500s, but since the engine employed the blitter that could have been due to the A1200's extra RAM, not so much its CPU. The blitter is slower than 020s and above so Braben must have been using a build of the engine that wasn't tied to the blitter.

Also, in terms of raw processing power 520 STs are 14% faster than Amiga 500s. And late-80s versions of 3D games ran better on STs than on Amigas, often even when the Amiga employed the blitter. However, I can't remember if this was also the case with Frontier.

Below is depicted several buildings that are rendered in realtime 3D. On the Amiga this level of 3D had been the exclusive province of tech-demos, not full-featured computer games of galactic scope.

Frontier is a game of hyperspace interstellar travel, missions, space-trading and starship combat.

Frontier's galactic map stretches out from built-up central or "core" systems to sparsely-populated uncharted "outer-rim" systems in the same way that Asimov's Galactic Empire extends outward from the hyper-populated and tech-advanced Trantor to Anacreon and Terminus at the outer end of The Periphery.

There are two primary factions dominating the "core": The Federation of the Sol System (Earth: Year 3200) and The Empire of the Achenar system.

In case that is misleading to a cRPG readership: As a space-sim, and as it pertains to lore, Frontier does not have a fleshed out setting like Asimov's Foundation or SMAC do. The Thargoids of 84's Elite did not make it into Frontier, for example; only as code remnants in the gamefiles. And there is no focused factional opposition or reactivity underpinning galactic politics.

By undertaking missions that are given on planet starbases, players can take up several different careers: trader, miner, cabbie, pirate, smuggler or bounty hunter. Or they can join the Federal and Imperial forces in order to climb their military ranks. [1]

Employment types do not constitute classes, but are simply modes of playing the game (a means of exploration and wealth accumulation).

The object of trading is to purchase where the stock is abundant and cheap and sell it off where it is scarce. In order to know what to buy and where to sell, the social and economics models of star systems can be checked.

However, trading is not free-flowing due to piracy. That is, your ship may be attacked en route.

Frontier Elite 2 Galactic Map

Made up of 100 billion stars, the 3D Galactic Map shows Zebulon Intergalactic Trading Corporation trade routes and geographical and physical planetary data such as average surface temperature, major starports, orbital period, average orbital radius and orbital eccentricity and inclination.

The rotatable, zoomable and truckable map is clear, colorful and functional. The 3D functionality of the map was a genuine innovation, one which no flight sim before had implemented (their geographic maps were almost always static 2D bitmaps).

In addition, the game allows players to set a variety of options without needing to right-click a menu bar for dropdowns, which was an uncommon feature in 1993.

Frontier Elite 2 Flight

The three basic modes of flight are Autopilot, Manual and Engines Off. Flight controls include acceleration, deceleration, diving, climbing and left-right movement as well as surface take off and landing, launching from and docking at space stations (via docking tunnels) and targeting and firing missiles. There is also (engineless) sling-shot orbiting.

Frontier spaceflight employs realistic Newtonian physics: a spaceship that gains momentum in one direction will continue to travel in that direction even if the ship is trying to sharply turn. The ship's nose will turn in the new direction but the ship itself will continue to slide or skid along in the direction of its momentum. The time it takes to turn a ship is dependent on its type and weight.

During flight, time controls allow players to increase the passage of time by 10 to 10,000 times the normal rate (aka time compression or fast-forwarding).

In order to travel between star systems, hyperspace jumps are employed. Starship hyperdrive engines may be purchased from shipyards in spaceports. Measured in lightyears, hyperspace jump range is dependent on fuel, engine type and engine class.

Frontier is also notable for the number of starships and upgrades for them. Ships are purchased, outfitted and repaired at shipyards in spaceports.

The rotating spaceship models are lightsourced even in the GUI. Falcon 3.0 1991 featured rotating air and ground models in the GUI as well, but they were not lightsourced.

cf. Frontier Elite 2 Ships for more info.

Frontier: Elite 2 Soundtrack

On MS-DOS, the Frontier: Elite 2 soundtrack supports Roland LAPC1 compatible sound board or AdLib / SoundBlaster compatible sound board. The Amiga's onboard Paula soundchip outputs the tracks at comparable quality. Both versions feature environmental and thruster sound effects.

• Lowe: Frontier Main Theme
• Lowe: Frontier Second Theme
• Grieg: In the Hall of the Mountain King
• Mussorgsky: Baba Yaga
• Mussorgsky: Night on the Bear Mountain
• Mussorgsky: Great Gates of Kiev
• Wagner: Ride of the Valkyries
• Strauss: Blue Danube

Frontier Elite 2 Conclusion

I still love playing Frontier Elite 2. 30 years later changes nothing. For me, Frontier is a very special and visionary game: a Herculean feat of coding, design and imagination.

From History of 1990s Computer Games:

Frontier represents coding and design wizardry of the highest order.

Frontier ignited imaginations like no computer game before it. And that goes beyond entertainment and into the realm of significance to humanity. It is a work of genius, a digital artifact.

Frontier ran on 1985-tech yet anyone who played it in 1993 felt like they were playing something from the future: it was the space-age subject matter coupled with the geometric lightsourced graphics, physics engine and spartan color scheme that made Frontier a futuristic experience, a computer game that evoked the scope of Asimov's Foundation (1951).

[1]

Frontier: Elite 2 keeps track of player ranks and ratings:

Federal Ranks (Federation Military ranks)

• None
• Private
• Corporal
• Sergeant
• Sergeant Major
• Major
• Colonel
• Lieutenant
• Lieutenant Commander
• Captain
• Commodore
• Rear Admiral
• Admiral

Imperial Titles (Aristocratic military ranks)

• Outsider
• Serf
• Master
• Sir
• Squire
• Lord
• Baron Viscount
• Count
• Earl
• Marquis
• Duke
• Prince

Federation and Empire medals can be awarded for heroism (such as the Certificate of Valor and the medal of Imperial Celestial Warrior).

Legal Rating

Governing your legal status, data is collected by three police forces:

• The Federal Security Service of the Federation
• The Imperial Guard of the Empire
• Interpol of the Independent Systems

Elite Rating

The Elite rating is given by the Elite Federation of Pilots. It is based on killcount and type of kills:

• Harmless
• Mostly Harmless
• Poor
• Below Average
• Average
• Above Average
• Competent
• Dangerous
• Deadly
• ELITE

Frontier First Encounters: The Third Elite Computer Game

Frontier First Encounters (FFE) was developed by Frontier Developments Ltd. in 1995 for IBM PC MS-DOS only, not the Amiga. FFE features more complex geometry and procedural texture-mapping as well as FMVs and digitized speech. In addition, FFE reintroduces the Thargoids from the original Elite.

And while FFE ran on i80386 processors with 4 megs of RAM, you really wanted a Pentium 100 with 8 megs of RAM (190 MIPS) in order to maintain smooth framerates when the polygon-count picked up. 

As in Frontier and Quake FFE is software-rendered by the CPU, not hardware-accelerated via GPU. This is because 3D graphics cards had not yet flooded the mainstream market in 1995; certainly not during FFE's dev-cycle.

It is worth noting as well that FFE did not support square-pixel SVGA 640x480 whereas MS-DOS Grand Prix 2 supported SVGA and Quake supported SXGA 1280x1024 in 1996.

In my humble opinion, FFE should have supported SVGA straight out of the box; assuming they were refactored for that fidelity, it would have puts FFE's viewports and user interface on a whole other level.

See also: Combat Flight Simulators --- WinUAE Amiga Emulator --- Best Amiga Games.