CommanderRegel

Great question!

I recently played with the Karma Flight Trainer on an Archimedes emulator. The interface was not great and it was very accurate, but quite boring. The life model (that was never finished) was very interesting though. A couple of examples:

1) The player hails a ship orbiting a mining colony. The pilot identifies itself as a mineralogist.

2) At the end of the working day (local time), a ship leaves a mining complex and docks at a night club. The ship will obviously be carrying workers from the mine who are winding down at the end of the day. A bit later on the player detects an ambulance or police ship going to the night club because some drunk miners have started a fight.

Why is this clever? Because none of the above is hard coded. Instead, the events happen because the rules of the life model have generated the ships, locations and events.

Now, obviously this was never completed so is vapourware, but what a vision!

This sort of NPC behaviour in Elite:Dangerous would be incredible.

A few questions regarding non-player ships:

1) How much interaction will players be able to have with NPC ships? Will we be able to hail them, ask where they're going, what they're carrying?

2) Will NPC ships have their own purposes? Will we be able to follow NPC ships to their destinations? Will their cargo and destinations "make sense" (i.e., carrying cargo that would make a profit)?

3) Will NPC ships fight among themselves (as in ArcElite)?

Thanks David and team. Really looking forward to this game!

That would be excellent! I'd buy that book.

David, any thoughts on combining Elite:Dangerous with your other project, the Raspberry Pi? Presumably this would be pretty straightforward in terms of porting as it would be to a single device, with defined hardware?

You could even run it on a slimmed down, custom Linux distribution: insert SD, boot into Elite:Dangerous...