

Interview with David Braben
For Amiga Format (March 1994)



Few games have generated as much interest as Frontier, the sequel to the
classic game Elite which was a heady mix of the interstellar trading,
ship-to-ship combat, and boldly going places.

Frontier follows a similar formula, but with the added attraction of
assassinations, passengers and doing the dirty work of the two Empires
which dominate the galaxy.

It took David Braben five years to create Frontier and it went straight
to the top of the games of 1993. But it`s bugged and many people have
become disenchanted with the game due to the number of problems.
We put these complaints to David Braben: 


Copy Protection

Firstly, there is the matter of the copy protection. It`s a distinctly
confusing system of picking a letter from a word on a page which was not
helped by the omission of any instructions in the manual. 

The problem is that you have to type in words from a specific point in
the manual at various stages of the game. For example, you could be asked
to type in the first letter of the third word on page 62. But the prompt
doesn`t make it clear if the third word includes the headline at the top
of the page (it does include the headline, by the way). 

If you type in the wrong letter, the time you have until you have to type
in the next password is halved. Get it wrong a few times and you are
uncermoniously dumped out of the game, which seems a rather clumsy way of
going about things. David agrees the system is flowed, but points out that
the manual now includes an insert with clearer instructions. 

"We got a lot of complaints about this, so we have revised the
documentation." 



Autopilot

Several people have also made comments about the Autopilot, and the annoying
habit it sometimes has of driving like a drunken space cadet and crashing
into space stations and planets. 

"The problem with Frontier, is that it`s trying to make Autopilot realistic
by simulating inertia. The Autopilot isn`t cheating, it`s working out what
thrust to do and it`s very complicated. It does get its knickers in a twist
occasionally, because it tries to avoid targets, so if there is a planet in
the way it will try to go round, but it won`t necessarily get it right." 



Assassinations

Assassinations are one of the most important parts of the game, and provide
a good way of getting rich quick. However, sometimes an apparently successful
assassination trip is greeted by a curt message about shooting the ship but
missing the target. 

"This isn`t a bug. It`s a feature. If there is a ship on the Tarmac, the
target will get on board only shortly before it takes off. If you shoot the
ship before it takes off, the target will not be onboard." 



Bug Fixes

There are also a number of other bugs, such as the screen display in the
Bulletin Board becoming corrupted in some systems and your ship being
destroyed while paused. 

"We`ve done three bug fix revisons of Frontier since it was first released.
None of the bugs are serious enough not to have work-arounds. You can get a
revised version by sending the original disk with an SAE to Gametek." 

But shouldn`t a game that has taken nearly five years to write be bug free? 

"Most of these bugs require really obscure circumstances. It`s very
difficult to test every possibility, even with the 10 full-time beta
testers that Gametek used. With most games, the code is pathetically
small, with most of the space being taken up by the graphics. With
Frontier, it`s all code." 

So why did it take David Braben so long to finish Frontier? 

"The total time was five years, but in the meantime I did write Elite for
the Nintendo with Ian Bell, and I have done other bits and pieces. It`s
amazing how quickly that sort of time goes. I also spent a lot of that time
looking into how things work and simulating the behaviour of solar systems,
because a lot of work has gone into the astronomy side." 

"I was in touch with the Cambridge University astronomy department, because
nobody had tried this sort of simulation before. I also spent a lot of time
setting up all of the thousands of planets, space stations and other ships
in the game." 

"It was pretty well ready to go in very early 1993, but we had a lot of
problems with the sound. In the end we had to completely rewrite a lot of
the code, and that took time." 

Given that Frontier was several years in the making, how does David feel
about the criticism for it being heavily bugged? 

"Yes, there are bugs in it, but most of them appeared pretty late in the day.
I`m not exactly over the moon about it myself." 



What happens next?

David is now planning enhanced AGA and CD32 versions of Frontier, although
he has yet to decide a release date and exactly how they will be enhanced.
But will there be an Elite 3? 

"I have got no plans for an Elite 3 as such, but there will problably be a
follow on, which will still be Frontier. I don`t want the Frontier worlds to
die, so the follow-up will problably be more of an add-on to the existing
systems, perhaps with more of a sense of a goal. One of the things that will
be in there is a major alien race, with lots of missions associated with
them." 

David is now busy with other projects, including starting his own company,
so the Frontier add-on is unlikely to appear for a few months. Hopefully,
it won`t take five years. 
