We Miss You Paul...
Paul Kossoff
September 14th 1950 - March 19th 1976
Another sad anniversary... So
lets go somewhere different. Yes, play some Paul Kossoff music - and play it LOUDLY. 'Tuesday Morning' on a
Sunday... why the hell not! But here's something very 'left field' I think you
might like to hear about.
In cyberspace Paul Kossoff
Lives!
'Elite' goes WAY back where home
computers are concerned and was originally released by developers David Braben
and Ian Bell by Acornsoft for the BBC Mirco and Acorn Electron computers in
September 1984. It used 3D wire graphics and was basically a combat and trading
game but with massive gameplay options. You could be a miner, a trader, bounty
hunter or even a pirate and it took the idea of the old role playing text games
to a whole new level. I first became aware of it on the Commadore 64 and then
the Amiga but truthfully I found it WAY to complex and really, I didn't get
very far. Yup, it sure was geeky and some people really got lost in it's
immense playing world and gameplay.
Over the years there were various
versions released but in 2012 a 'Kickstarter' campaign for funding from players
themselves provided developers the opportunity to really bring the game into
the 21st century with ludicrously VAST playing area based factually on the
stars and planets within the Milky Way. Players can explore anywhere they like
in what is a completely real time experience while interacting with others
programmed into the game or on the multi-player platform aided greatly by
faster broadband speeds via Fibre. Wikipedia explains better than me that;
The player is able to explore
the game's galaxy of some 400 billion star systems, complete with planets and
moons that rotate and orbit in real-time, resulting in dynamic day/night
cycles. Around 150,000 of the game's star systems are taken from real-world
astronomical data, while the remainder are procedurally generated according to
scientific models. Throughout the galaxy, the player is able to dock with space
stations and outposts to trade goods, purchase new spacecraft, re-arm their
ship, effect repairs and to seek or complete missions from text-based station
"bulletin boards". The player may also find cargo or encounter other
ships while in flight by investigating 'Unidentified Signal Sources'.
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| Scanning to see who's aboard AND... Its Koss! |
So yeah, its pretty deep. People who gave money to the project were offered different 'incentives' to donate. One of them was the option to NAME an in-game player, and that's where Angus Manwaring; an Elite player and a huge Paul Kossoff fan, decided the choice was obvious. Why not have Paul Kossoff flying around the Elite universe for eternity, doing his own thing, and allowing anyone with the audacity to go out there and find him. It works for me - and so on this, the sad 41st anniversary of Paul's death we are pleased to announce he's been spotted by Angus - who has been looking for him for a couple of years - and he's doing fine. He appears randomly in the game so just finding him in the HUGE Elite universe is an accomplishment all in itself. Over to Angus...
In Space, There's one great bluesman...
Life had been
pretty good, I’d made a fortune running missions and bounty-hunting – to the
point where I’d finally achieved a lifelong ambition, I could finally afford a
Federal Corvette, a very serious combat ship, not a dogfighter (but not far off
one in the handling stakes) but a ship powerful and heavily enough armed to
take down the fearsome Anacondas and Cutters, and an accompanying wing of
dogfighters if need be. Yeah, she was something all right, but what I hadn’t
fully appreciated was so was the money I’d need to fit her up properly. Make
her tough enough to defend herself and not become a token kill for some hotshot
Vulture pilot. Well, I got that pretty much done, but that left me broke again,
I needed her to earn her keep. I needed some quick, good paying jobs to
replenish what I’d spent, to give me some security. In short, putting some
money back under the mattress.
With this in mind
I accepted a lucrative bounty job, down in the Rahu system. It seemed an
Alliance convoy had been shot up by local outlaws, and the efforts to rescue
the survivors needed some additional security. It looked pretty standard, most
of the activity took place off the Rings of Rahu 1, and I spent several days
flying patrols and racking up a bounty tally on a fairly unimaginative enemy.
It would have been the 4th or 5th day of the operation
that it happened.
Now you should know, I’m a Bluesman – not the stuff they churn out these days, I mean back in the 20th and 21st century, the real stuff, when it wasn’t a career option – they did it because they had to. A guy from back then, a Paul Kossoff, he could play guitar so pretty it would make a grown man weep, or smile, or just stand there and feel it, well, that day I ran into a ship drawing fire from every direction. There must have been four or five guys gunning for him. He wasn’t calling for help, he was just fighting them off, casual, methodical like. Methodical or not, there was no way he could win, not with those odds, then I saw the name on my scanner display- Paul Kossoff. So I pitched in – now truth be told, I’m no great fighter pilot, but I had the ship, and I had the firepower – and together we took down all those ships. When it was over we just flew along side by side for maybe a minute or two, he didn’t answer my hails, never said a word, then he just rolled out, and 'high waked' out of there – it was the damnedest thing.
Elite
If you had any involvement with the “home micro” game scene in
the early/mid eighties, it would have been hard to avoid the legend that was
(and is) Elite. Cambridge university students David Braben and Colin Bell came
up with a unique game that was at once a shoot-em-up, a role-playing-game, and
an adventure. It blurred the lines of established genres, and it did it in
first person perspective 3D! The player was presented with a capable but poorly
equipped spaceship, the Cobra Mk III, and could choose his own method of
progression: Trader, Bounty Hunter, Pirate, Miner or any combination. There was
no score, no ‘three lives’ it was just you, your ship, the eight galaxies, and
whatever path you decided to take. David Braben (now OBE) made a couple of
sequels in the nineties but since then let the game be, to await better
technology to further develop it.
Well, that time came a couple of years back with the
release of Elite: Dangerous. Now a multiplayer, online game, taking place in a
1:1 scale simulation of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. Every star you can see
in the night sky is there in the game, mapped as accurately as the current data
allows. Beyond that, the developers have had to create star systems using
procedural generation software - what they call the Galactic Forge, which works
from first principles to place and populate stars, 400, 000, million of them,
as realistically as they can. This goes down to the type of minerals and gases
most likely to exist on the orbiting planets. And it seems they’re doing
something right because when NASA recently announced 7 Earth-like worlds in the
Trappist 1 system, that’s just how Elite Dangerous had already rendered the
system at that location.
Over the intervening years between the sequels and the present,
David Braben quietly had his company, Frontier Developments, working on
possible development tools for the sequel. At one point, Elite IV was
announced, but this proved premature and was not released. Work did continue on
the Cobra engine however, and over the years , in the background things
steadily began to take shape.
In 2012 it was decided the new game would be crowd-funded, and
by the end of the funding period, the game was confirmed as were a host of
stretch goals which included additional ships, and a Mac version. Backers
received various perks, depending on their generosity and these included the
right to name a non-player character who would appear randomly within the game.
Who would you have chosen? I chose Paul Kossoff. In December 2014, the game,
having passed through its alpha and beta phases was released to its backers,
and shortly after, to the world in general.
Since its release, a host of updates have been added, including
Planetary Landings, Wings, Engineers, and as I type the Commaders update
(allowing multi-crewing of a single ship) is undergoing its beta period. The
future of the game, its players, and its non-player characters, looks good.
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| View of Paul's ship (left) from the cockpit 25-02-2017 |
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