About the Elite Project

Main Page

News

About the Project

• History
• Game Design
• Designer's View
• Coder's View
• The Team
• Communications

Progress

TEP Specifications

Download WIP

TEP Websites

Contact The Team

History

Frontier: First Encounters (FFE) was released in 1995, as the second sequel to the pioneering BBC micro game Elite. It introduced an advanced simulation of an entire galaxy, with realistic flight models, ships, trading, plotlines, planets and solar systems. In some aspects, it was however deemed to be a bit... lacking.
With hundreds of recorded bugs, a fragmented plot, a glitchy graphics engine, no character interaction, limited combat and highly suspect video clips the game could clearly have been much, much better than it eventually turned out.
Thus, from the melting pot of Elite discussion that is alt.fan.elite, The EliteProject was born.

Game Design

The above said, TEP is very much a new game. We're not using any of the FFE or Elite source (even if we wanted to it hasn't been released).

Designer's View

The main design philosophy of TEP is customisability and flexibility. Where possible hard coding has been and will be avoided. Ship designs, missions and plot lines will be (and are) `pluggable' into the main engine. Essentially if someone decided they wanted to use the game engine to depict an different scenario with an entirely different plotline, different characters and a new ship design philosophy they could without touching the source.

The TEP galaxy is a dynamic one. Each ship you may encounter on your travels is unique and has it's own decision making powers. Help out a trading ship under attack and if you're in trouble and they're near by they may well choose to help you. Trade between system actually occurs; wars which reduce the amount of trade going on have a marked effect on planetary economies. Galactic powers fight wars who's outcome is by no means certain; the player's actions could shift the balance of power.

Although TEP could work with just a dynamic universe, a strong plotline often helps to make the player feel more involved with the situation and inhabitants of the future galaxy. Due to the modular nature of TEP a plotline is optional but we will doubtless feature one in an official release.

The flight engine which feature Newtonian flight for combat, docking and landing procedures, a fast intrasystem drive and an additional intersystem drive. The ship you fly may be enhanced, upgraded and crewed with the best gunners and engineers the galaxy can offer...well the best you can afford in any case :).

Coder's View

The philosophy of pluggability extends to all levels of the source tree. Sound and graphics are implemented in a modular fashion allowing ease of porting.

TEP uses it's own assembly coded 3d engine at present. However support for 3d accelerated APIs is planned.

The TEEISL scripting language together with dynamic linking code provides support for extra modules extending the scope of the TEP Engine. Datafiles are stored in tar format, allowing ease of access.

The game engine runs on an event based system and this facilitates the use of messaging based applets written for the TEP Graphical User Interface to handle tasks as diverse as music selection and HUD/HDD operation. Text is generally output using the TEP MarkUp Language which with the TEPGUI provides an easy and customisable solution for game displays.

The core of TEP is written in C++ with speed critical parts in assembly language.

The Team

TEP has currently a core design team of about five people of whom three are coders, two of whom work on the main tree. We tend to suffer from a large number of transient members who post `Hi, I'm your new member. I can't programme but give me something to do!' to the mailing lists and then promptly disappear without trace when we do. If you are thinking of helping us, and please do, please bear in mind that we have little enough time to code without having to think up tasks for people who don't even read the specifications. Generally if you've got something you want to do we'll be happy to assist you to achieve it.
It's not essential that you can programme but coders are the people we require most urgently. Please read the webpages and preferably the source, pick an area which is need of work and produce something good :).

Communications

There are two main channels of communication for the Project, the mailing lists [tep], [tepplot], [tepphys], [tepprog] and [tepcode] and the newsgroup alt.fan.elite.project. The newsgroup is primirily used for asking general questions about the Project with the mailing lists reserved for design discussion. For mailing list details please refer to the FAQ.

Feel free ask questions on alt.fan.elite.project (but read the FAQ). As implied above if you wish to join the mailing lists go ahead but read the archives and lurk for a while since this will cause a lot less potential bad feeling on both sides.

We also have regular meetings on IRC on DALnet. These occur at 20:00 GMT on Friday evenings. The primary channels are #eliteproject and #tepprogrammers.

Every so often some of us get together in real life and spend several days chatting, eating and thinking about TEP. These are the TEPMeets.