Out beyond the new frontier

[DavidN]

#10086

My dad got this game from someone at work, I assume – most PC games seemed to grow on our hard drive mysteriously without me or my siblings knowing about it. Without anything in the way of documentation my experience was quite limited (it’s amazing to think back on the amount of patience I had for experimenting back then) – I could talk to people at the starting docks, take off, and… that was about it, attempting anything else seemed to result in me being scattered in a million bits across deep space.

So I’m trying again this month – I’ve found what looks to be a great tutorial series called Frontier Fundamentals by JimPlaysGames, https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9E1E1F7AA6193498&si=fqh6uNLsZRDyHZYs , and I’m hoping that this will guide me into playing the game somewhat functionally at last! Already I’ve landed a ship without breaking it in half for the first time since I first played this thirty years ago.

[SpaceGameJunkie]

#10088

Congrats on your first landing!

[Spoonboy]

#10090

I’ve just started saying this for the first time today, and it’s blowing my mind already.
I searched for tutorials and found the very one you mention above! The JimPlaysGames episodes are short, friendly and helpful. I have also just successfully taken off and landed, and will be using these videos from now on!
The scale of this game is only just dawning on me.

[voxel]

#10091

Yeah! Love to see people get excited about Frontier. Try making a trip without autopilot, or parking somewhere and turning up the simulation speed to watch the impressive simulation play out its cosmic ballet to the Blue Danube. Just watch out for nasty federation propaganda and be sure to sign up at your nearest imperial navy recruitment office asap

[falselogic]

#10093

Is there any place to source this that isn’t abandonware?

[DavidN]

#10095

I have made a second breakthrough (just by watching the above videos really) – that the state of the star map is important! This is something that’s completely non-obvious visually, but in the early 90s you would have been expected to have discovered in the manual. Scrolling the map around doesn’t really indicate that you’re selecting anything – the star in the centre of the screen highlights and you get some information about it, but if you leave the map with that star highlighted it becomes your selected destination!

This is the key to getting the hyperspace option to appear (it’s also dependent on the amount of fuel you’re carrying, so it can take a bit to diagnose why it isn’t there). With that revelation, I can finally travel between locations. And that means I can make some money by trading – buy goods classified as exports, take them to places where those goods are imports.

So my bank account is going upwards, but at a very slow rate – and it takes so much clicking to go back and forth! Scroll to destination star, hyperspace, call up the solar system map, zoom it in, twirl it around a bit, click around on your destination until it registers, autopilot, advance time, come in for landing. I think I’ll aim for buying a ship with a bit more space in its boot as a first goal.

[SpaceGameJunkie]

#10102

Sadly not, falselogic, as it’s not available for digital purchase anywhere.

Glad you’re getting the hang of things, David!

[Pix]

#10103

I’ve gone for the easy option and downloaded a cheat to start the game with 2 million credits. I still wouldn’t say it makes life simple but it’s one less thing to worry about while I’m learning the ropes. Having figured out my way around to some extent, I reckon I’d be OK starting up again now. This is definitely a game in dire need of tutorials as it’s quite inscrutable at first despite having read the manual before I began.

I must have sunk 10 hours into this now at least, mainly working for the federation. It’s strangely compelling but there isn’t enough happening to necessarily convince me that I’m not wasting my time playing it. Newtonian combat is the most exciting and doesn’t feel all that tactical or arcade-like at the moment. I’ve been switching my engines off and using manual thrust which seems to work most of the time but if an opponent gets you in their sights I can have had it before I even have chance to do anything. Joystick support seems to be digital only which was disappointing so I may as well have been playing with the keyboard – I’m using the mouse instead which works well enough.

I do like stories in my games and they are entirely lacking here. I have read the first of the many short storied included in one of the games 3 manuals (which was below average at best). I’ll still probably read the rest before the month is out for scene setting. There is a gazetteer as well telling you about many of the worlds but it wasn’t interesting reading. Maybe with the context of having played for a bit, I may get more out of it.

The amount packed onto one 720K disk is certainly astounding. You could spend months playing this. The sound seems a little buggy – I’ve not been able to get any life from the MT-32 option on either a 486 or PII. The adlib works but seems patchy as to whether I’ll hear my laser fire or other sound effects. This is probably yet another DOS game that runs better on DOSBox than real hardware.

When I was scanning the magazines, I noticed that this released the same month as Privateer which is quite the coincidence. Privateer was probably more up my street but there is enough to admire here that I expect it to keep me occupied all this month.

[SpaceGameJunkie]

#10104

Back in the day I DID spend months playing this. Though *I* joined the Empire. 😉

[DavidN]

#10110

I’ve been having a good old time ferrying things back and forward between Sol and the Ross systems, and bought myself a Cobra Mk 1 with a much roomier hold and some more beverage cup holders. I’ve mostly been dealing in computers and robots, with an occasional venture into illegal goods.

The Ross 128 prison system is a good place to load up on goods that are banned in most places (animal skins are the ones I’m most ethically comfortable carrying), then you have to make it back to another star system and find someone dodgy enough to accept them (the space station Gorbachev around Earth seems to be a fairly reliable place to find them). Sometimes the police will fine you for carrying illegal goods when you land, but bizarrely, they then allow you to keep them for selling anyway! Although they can get you again if you try to sell to one of the police plants on the bulletin board. In any case, they only get annoyed if you fail to pay your fines before taking off again.

Much was made of the size of the game at the time, and it’s definitely impressive to have made this procedurally-generated galaxy – the size of it is absurd, but… there doesn’t seem to be a lot of reason to explore very far? You have to keep your fuel topped up, so moving between unpopulated systems is risky – and once you get about a hundred light years away from the start point, all the stars show no registered settlements. Is there something beyond my freelance delivery service that I should be aiming for?

[DavidN]

#10111

Oh, and I love the billboards for Chris Sawyer’s Transport Game which I’m going to assume became Transport Tycoon a year later! I recognize that he carried the way that the game assembles people’s faces from photofit parts into that game as well 🙂