A few days ago, a buddy of mine from the old days on Jumpgate emailed me and said the game is now up again, thanks to something of a reverse engineered hack of the original client and server software packages by some awesome folks who we don’t even know the identity of, as far as I can tell. Since my buddy wasn’t clear on the legalities of this — I’m not either, really — he asked me not to blog about it, but that didn’t stop me from logging in and putting in a few hours already. Welp, now that the news is on Blue’s News, and I’ve been given permission by folks behind this new iteration of the game, I’m sharing the news.
JUMPGATE IS BACK BABY, and no one is happier about this than myself. If you wanna try this seminal game, head on over to the new website, register your user name and then download the client. Then grab your ship and hop into the closest thing we had to an online Elite for years before either Elite: Dangerous or Star Citizen were glints in their daddy’s eyes. ;)
If you hop on, look out for me (Veloxi) and say hello! See ya in the universe!
Hmm, is it good for the player that never seen it before? I remember triying resurrected Earth and Beyond a year ago and finding it pretty bland, more like WoW in space. with empasis on “WoW”. Well of cause, it was from 2002, when WoW hasn;t been hatched yet and must have been lookd pretty awesome, but now E&B are more of a sentimental value, for those who played it back in days.
Oh, question is gameplay wise of cause, Don’t care much for graphic, i’m still playing some old DOS games, like you :)
Well, graphically it’s still mostly stuck in 1999, but it’s a true space sim that has mostly Newtonian physics (as well as drag) and needs skill to actually accomplish anything. While there are aides for the new player, such as a docking computer, much of everything, from mining to hauling, is done manually. I’ve played several MMO space sims, including ENB, and this is the one that clicked the most because it (as of yet) came the closest to a Privateer or Elite Online.
Have tried it yesterday. Pretty nice, althought it takes a looong time to travel anywhere, Well figures, no autopilot for you in MMO. i’ll stick around for some time. Tried partol mission and get dumbfounded about how to make system go to “patrolled” status. maybe check beacon…will try to ask ingame,
Anyway, thank you for this input. Never liked EVE just because it is not a space sim in a straight sense. THis one is much more to my liking.
Yay, welcome to the game! And Patrol missions don’t have much in the way of reward I don’t think. Which of the three races are you?
Well since that nobody has the source code for Jumpgate, I was thinking about making a spinoff game which is pretty much a de-facto successor of Jumpgate with the difference of having more of an original and whooped up graphics where you still have the red, green, and blue functions along with the simple tag feature. For the reasons of being legal, and have the ability to update the game. I’ve been trying to do this for a long time but still in doubt that it will happen for a couple of reasons such as lacking network knowledge, along with didn’t want anybody to pay tons of cash to have a main universe server hosted(I’m trying to come up with alternative ideas for this where players can host different parts of the universe), and I wanted to be just the part of the mainstream playerbase too.
I usually come up with simple gameplay instead of full blown alternatives that try to be realistic as well.
Hmm.. someone might be doing something like that already…