The overall popularity of First Encounters was greatly increased by the release of John Jordan's JJFFE, which allows First Encounters to be run natively in Windows.ĭuring the summer of 2006, Kolijoco released a version of JJFFE called GLFFE, which uses an OpenGL 2.0 renderer, and includes new control console graphics - allowing FFE to be played in high resolution full screen. A list of bugs will be found in the links under quirks! Many of these have been ironed out by the Third Party enhancements below - and also by E:D which introduces other issues instead! It is worth perusing the analysis & critique over at Frontier as they apply equally to FFE (which inherited the issues discussed there).

A series of videos of people on the BBS requesting the randomly determined missions.

Not being mandatory, this can be ignored by players who prefer the freeform nature of the game, or can be completed for fame, notoriety and substantial material rewards.

An overall plotline, which can be affected by the player completing the hard-coded missions.

Many clues to the hard-coded missions can be found within these journals.

A set of journals representing the news as seen by each of the major powers.

Ships from both its predecessors, as well as some new ships.

Newtonian modelling for both ships and interstellar bodies.

A patched shareware version can now be downloaded with most of the bugs fixed.

The game was originally released early, under pressure from the publishers Gametek, which led to an extremely buggy game. It builds substantially on its immediate predecessor Frontier and until the release of Elite: Dangerous was the last word in canonical Elite.

Frontier: First Encounters (most commonly abbreviated FFE) is the third game in the Elite Series by Frontier Developments.

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