Re: Elite: Dangerous - and the return

[JazHaz]

Premium Beta 2 is due later today! Apparently, one of the new things to look out for is improved FPS. As I tend to only get about 10 FPS that'll be nice!

[Geraldine]

<grins> Excellent! For the gamma/release version, which start option are you thinking of choosing?

I am torn between the basic Sidewinder start or the long range spec'd Cobbie, decisions, decisions.
Have been flying and steadily upgrading a Cobbie and have now grown quite fond of it. It also makes rather strange and cool noises while speeding up or slowing down and those 4 hard points do come in handy indeed at times. Very different to the Sidewinder all in all, still, it will be gone too once the new Beta goes live.

[Cody]

I am torn between the basic Sidewinder start or the long range spec'd Cobbie...

Ah well... tempted though I am by the basic Sidewinder, I've decided it has to be the long-range Cobra Mk III for me.

@JazHaz: you still using a laptop, or have you got a desktop? 10 fps is terrible!

[Ranthe]

The Ars Technica review of E:D is pretty interesting...

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/06/a ... mium-beta/

[Smivs]

Hmmm, and predictable...

...and a tremendous number of the game’s beta players appear to be homicidal kill-crazed maniacs...

[Cody]

Hmmm, and predictable...

...and a tremendous number of the game’s beta players appear to be homicidal kill-crazed maniacs...

Yeah, it does sound wild atm - but as I understand it, there are no safe zones around stations yet, nor any police presence anywhere.

[Disembodied]

Yes, I understand it's all a bit of a consequence-free zone right now, and nobody gets to keep any progress beyond the next update. Things may calm down a bit when that changes.

Mind you, reading the comments on the Ars Technica thread, there are a lot of people who have no interest in PvP - and quite a few who have no real interest in being part of a "dynamic" anything either. The reviewer's own comments makes me think he should check out Oolite:

I'm interested in player-caused dynamic updates about as much as I'm interested in actually playing with others (i.e., not even a tiny bit). Like I said, if I find a great trade route in the core human systems, I'd like to take my time and exploit it and enjoy myself, rather than have it instantly stamped into oblivion by people who are playing 24-7 and have Lakons and are running 900 tons of cargo all at once.

I've got a few precious hours per week when I can game. When I can actually take the time, I want to do it at my own pace and not be rushed or have to compete. It's a cathartic, singular, solo experience that I'm after. Having to work around to find profitable trading in a galaxy beholden to the whims of Sperglord McSpreadsheet is almost as un-fun as having to hide from Ganky McGrieferson.

[Cody]

There are indeed plenty of people who have no interest in PvP (or co-op play) - like me, they seek the magic solace of aloneness in space!

[Diziet Sma]

The reviewer's own comments makes me think he should check out Oolite:

Indeed it does.. perhaps you should give him a heads-up..

[JazHaz]

@JazHaz: you still using a laptop, or have you got a desktop? 10 fps is terrible!

Yes, laptop. I get 60 fps in Oolite with full shaders 1080p. ED 10 fps near the station, impossible to dock, and thats at 1366x768. I can play recent games like Civilization V (admittedly not a twitch game) and Sniper Elite 2 fine.

[Disembodied]

Indeed it does.. perhaps you should give him a heads-up..

Done!

[JazHaz]

Hi,

Premium Beta 2 is now available. I've copied the change log below, please read the important bit at the top!

New Content/Features

- New space station type added (Orbis)
- Added Hauler ship type
- 3 x new visitable systems (Styx, Aulin and LHS 3006)
- German language support added
- Incremental install added (it will need to do a full install on its first use)
- Animated pilot added
- Price item bought for added to trading interface
- Customisable controls for galaxy map added
- Rear beacons inside station turned on
- Hyperspace effect tweaks
- Anaconda cockpit art improvements
- Lakon Type 9 cockpit art improvements
- Audio tweaks for Galaxy Map
- Additional controllers added
- Cloud layers use height separation for normals generation
- Charge bar for supercruise/hyperspace added to left panel
- High resolution screen capture added (Alt-F10)
- Art improvements for large docking pads
- Eagle cockpit art improvements
- Updated stars with hotspot colours
- GUI added to aid escaping masslock
- General audio tweak and balance pass
- Hyperspace arrive and depart VFX tweaks
- Add a default joystick device that maps to first available joystick
- Animation added to opening of star map
- Default descriptions for populated systems added to galaxy map
- More individual descriptions for systems added to galaxy map
- Updated trade goods
- Added connection stats debug (CTRL+B)
- Option for pilot gender added
- SCreenshots now saved in My Documents\Pictures folder

Crash Fixes

- Prevent crash when authority change occurs
- Fix for alt-tab crash
- Fix for crash in AI null value
- Fix for nullpointer crash in schematics
- Fix crash in location lighting shutdown
- Fix crash in faction interogation for AI
- Fix softlock caused by LogicTriggerGlitch receiving negative damage
- Material crash fixed
- Fix for assert when enabling / disabling SSAO
- Fix for server island crash
- Fix for crash spawning AI
- Fix for ejecting cargo crash
- When resurrecting, wait properly instead of soft lock
- Fix to stop crash when quitting the game at the same time as dying
- Fix for vertex crash in galaxy map

General Fixes/Tweaks

- Server moderated docking pad control added
- Interdiction frequency balancing
- Fix Anaconda's collision avoidance to prevent flying into asteroids
- Station name and status information always available
- Format changed for galaxy map coordinates
- Apostrophe can now be used in galaxy map search
- Kinematic optimisations
- Improved prediction for Oculus Rift
- Control sticks can now be used in menus
- Various text fixes
- Missing texture on capital ship fixed
- NPCs can now check if another NPC has a bounty
- Hyperspace exit flash restored
- Functions panel now indicates that flight assist is in cruise mode and cannot be changed
- Contacts aren't counted until they are fully resolved
- Ships no longer need an armour module
- Fixed X52 controller naming
- Greebles optimisations
- Cobra death explosion tweaks
- In windowed mode, don't update display mode in response to focus events
- Various trading tweak
- Better cargo integrity checks
- General avoidance behaviour improvements
- Don't make target locking SFX if weapon isn't deployed
- Stations appear on scanner at fixed distance
- Ships must be within range for docking request to be accepted
- Try and reduce AI tendency to ram opposition
- Move FOV setting out of presets section in options screen
- Additional safety checks for authority changes
- Camera lag and orientation clamping for gun and navigation sights
- LODs for ships and weapons updated
- Reduce message spam when spamming the supercruise control
- Fix for gimballed weapon sights
- Physics around docking port improved
- Clean up session change in supercruise
- Network connection and session creation takes into account connection health scoring
- Star database fixes
- Assorted audio tech fixes
- Wait until station voice has stopped speaking before performing the timeout
- Emergency drops force FAOff which blends out over a duration
- Stop friction noises continuing when docked
- Fixed vertical stalk scaling on larger landing pads
- Emergency drops cause ghost controls to fight with which blend out over a duration
- Change ship's voice to use the headset effect atmospheric effect setting when at the galaxy map
- Fix for the flashing black boxes on AMD cards.
- Collision damage improvements
- Added a separate row type for toggle bindings to help with the toggle mode confusion
- Fixed a mouse scroll losing focus bug.
- Tweaked docking assist params (remove angular help and lowered linear help so docking still requires you to at least roll properly to align).
- Keep the processing flight scheme active when in the galaxy map to preserve your speed
- FSD charge rate changes while you're charging, rather than being fixed when you start charging
- Fix message spam when docking is declined
- Add '+' to allowable search characters in galaxy map
- Supercruise speed balanced (Top speed lowered, acceleration lowered, min speed increased, gravity wells shrunk, star mass lock reduced)
- Fixed hull health discrepency when docked
- Confirm equipment purchase added
- Outfitting screen remembers list location after cancelled or failed request
- Canister infor split into two lines
- Fighter and large AI behaviour tweaks
- Fix network token deadlock
- Fix faction choice in single player scenario
- Flight assist off warning added
- Fix beam lasers passing through things and not causing damage
- Deactivate Proccessing_Flight while docked ('Docked' is now a distinct state)
- Show the inner-sphere for bodies from further away if you're moving at non-trivial speeds.
- Fix for trying to access MotionLineInstances before they are created
- Drop request time from 20 to 10 seconds for docking requests
- Don't disconnect if other party pauses
- Set defaults for shadow view near plane bias values. Expose these values as a shadow quality setting.
- Fix AI idle behaviour after scanning player
- Upped drop out speed and distance limits by a factor of 5
- When near a stellar body (within 4x it's "radius"), need to align away from the body to supercruise.
- Fix mask counter being reset between transitions
- Fix for motion lines being visible coming directly at the player
- Changed slice algorithm and shaders on planets to use the proper vertex and texture coordinates.
- Emergency air timeout now 10 minutes
- Deploying the cargo scoop or the landing gear will reduce the speed of the space ship
- Bounty hunter AI improvements
- Moons can now have moons of their own
- Prevent the "No fire zone entered" message if you're docked
- Bobblehead a little less crazy
- Reduce cockpit jitter in supercruise
- Cache cockpit blow out state across transitions
- Correct the firing bones used for the adv torp pylon
- Updated Advertising Drones beam effect. Fixed alignment of beams in relation to drone beam projectors
- Added Saitek Pro Flight Rudders to device list
- Reduced star spin rates
- Stop NPC Eagle friendly fire making you a hostile
- Better interaction of FAOff and throttle controls
- Updated hull explosions, removed spinny spinny smoke and rebalanced the textures
- The player should stop using the breathing mask once inside a space station
- The oxygen in the breathing mask should be replenished when docked
- Emergency drops cause damage to hull and modules
- Interdiction don't count as emergency drops anymore
- Ring optimisations
- Added new death explosion to the Cobra, also rebalanced hangar flares and removed the vertical anamorphic
- Fix "Don't report crimes against me" not working
- Damage states added to Anaconda
- Changed the inertia tensor for ships from a 10m radius ball to a box the size of the ship
- Fixed "no firegroups set" spam
- Shadowing improvements
- CustomiseCrime allowing ships to have bounties in lawless jurisdictions - now converts local to nearby bounty if local is lawless.
- You can no longer dock upside down
- Fix for missing activity lead to incorrect UI for railguns when retracting
- Improved resize handling
- Red ring of the star lens flare now has a nicer offset so it doesn't linger across the screen
- Coriolis optimisations
- Fixed issues with internal cockpit panel not showing proper ship schematics
- Fix for selecting Anaglyph 3D rendering resulting in nothing being shown
- Stations no longer show criminal status.
- Canisters display their contents in the contacts list
- Clear contacts list on entering supercruise
- AA modes can now be used with OR
- Fix for items not showing up in black market
- Increase spawn radii for scenarios
- When inside the space station, the ship's heat should increase gradually to some ambient level to simulate the temperature control of the station's atmosphere
- station interior fog now balanced to reflect lighting better
- Fix polyTrails for FrameShift arrival/departure
- Give ai something to do if their drive module is dead
- Improvements to handling of when mouse cursor shown be shown / hidden
- Locked exit button after submitting a transaction to prevent money-making exploit from UI side
- Change to ambient on distant ring cells
- Improved render rejection and lodding of kinematic models
- Change checks on values in algorithm getting barycentric co-ordinates from a ray intersection point with a triangle
- 3D settings in graphics options no longer take effect immediately, only when 'Apply' is pressed
- Push out shadow cascade end distances to fill available shadow map space
- Added Beam effects for the hyperspace clouds
- Fix for scenario initialisation in server
- Fixes the glitch where shadows flash off for a frame while moving
- Fix not emergency dropping when 'hitting' stellar bodies
- AI ships make the same hyperspace clouds as players on arrive/depart
- Quantise shadow cascade alignment axis by angle rather than quantising the vector directly
- Local dust cloud models tweaked in galaxy map
- Absolute magnitude calculation for neutron stars altered
- Reduce the mass range of the injected massive stars
- Moved some bones around in the sidewinder cockpit and rebalanced the damage effects
- Allow players to see unaffordable items when viewing the outfitting parts list
- Increased the speed at which ice forms on the windscreen when close to 0% temperature
- Location targeting is now 'locked' while the hyperdrive is charging
- Detect cases where CustomiseShipCargo is set up with invalid min/max quantities
- Fix for not submitting rocks that aren't spinning to the renderer
- Fix bounty min's that are greater than the max
- Fade Rotation correction out over 2 seconds when you leave the docking bay so it's a less jarring transition
- Reimplement the atmospheric failure ships voice line to take into account the state of the life support system
- Changed shadow filter to work in gamma colour space. This reduces blocky shadow artifacts and makes the size of shadows more consistent between cascades
- Keep the list of the asteroids active when time isn't passing
- When the shipyard is closing down consider the case that the ship is being destroyed
- The Local dust now has a subtle gradient at the end of the galaxy
- High quality shadow settings: Increased resolution
- Re-implemented gunsights
- Don't let the hyperdrive ask anything of the MainGameFlow when it's doing something else (anything that isn't InGame or Paused).
- Commander names that include a hyphen and are 22 characters long now show the last word on the contacts tab
- Galaxy map rendering optimisations
- AI ships can no longer jump when mass locked
- Added more state to SavedGames (heat, power settings, oxygen timer)
- Fix ship voice talking over itself during hyperspace/supercruise jumps
- Updated shadow slope scale calculation to be consistent when using orthographic projections. This also makes it more efficient.
- Fix being able to run out of air when in the station
- Fixed the label for galactic average column as it wasn't showing the whole text
- Fix issues with cursor not responding immediately to changes of state
- Fixed mismatched damage displayed on hull repair screen
- Fixed Bug With Eagle GUI Schematic Target Panel
- Missing stars in galaxy map now displayed
- k-warrant scan and cargo scan gui update from out of range if the fire button is held when flying into range
- Point defence weapons no longer listed in firegroups, they are activated and deactivated through modules
- Oculus fix for lens flares not converging properly
- EjectCargoActivity should only try to queue ejections of cargo units that are not currently ejecting
- Added density controls to the distant ring cell meshes. The density of the ring is now set as number of rocks per Km^3
- Prevent the stick-on damage models used in the Anaconda and Type9 from jittering
- If you respawn with the free sidewinder, bring your money up to a minimum of 1000
- Fixed panels' popup getting stuck
- Fixed the cameras in the hanger from focusing on wrong hardpoints on the Eagle
- Firing in a no-fire zone is now a crime
- Force Flight Assist on when playing frameshift exit effects
- Stop AI Ships attacking even when wanted level has been cleared
- Speed indication bar now "Flips" round when in "Reverse"
- Improvements to turret behaviour
- Heat seeking missiles track the enemy ship
- Added the ability to have modifier keys to input binding
- Weapons no longer turn on/off as you deploy/stow hardpoints
- Hardpoints don't draw power unless deployed (effects heat)
- If you hit an emergency stop but you're going slowly enough to drop safely, just do so
- Location/target/target location panels are mutually exclusive
- Distance to target takes target size into account
- Station shows up with the correct colour HUD
- Fixed the move-mouse-pointer-off-screen-when-using-the-pad-so-it-doesn't-trigger-rollovers thing
- Hardpoint modules can be set to "always deployed", so they ignore the player's "Deploy hardpoints" control. They still retract if unpowered
- Make sure aspect ratio is correctly calculated when Oculus Rift has been selected as an option but the device isn't available
- Fix for HeatSinkLauncher being usable when unpowered. Now it needs to be powered and deployed, but is always deployed when powered


Michael

[JazHaz]

More fixes because there were too many for a single post

- Using forward/backward thrust resets throttle fixed
- Fix bounty hunters with no crime scanners - was setting the (basic) scan time to 100s if there was no crime scanner, rather than 3s
- Once a ships engines are taken offline, AI should flee after a variable period of time
- If we fail to lock a vertex or index buffer, don't add it to the list of buffers to be unlocked
- Changed "dumping" price of a commodity from a constant 80% reduction below the galactic minimum to use the per-commodity ReductionBuyHomeGrown scale factor
- AI improvements for police patrols
- When buying ships from the shipyard, make sure the logic requests the appropriate state transitions depending on whether Oculus Rift is enabled or not
- Split bounty hunter state into patrolling and interdiction variants
- Tweaks to galaxy map for oculus
- Allow a chance for patrol pirates to jump away after scooping cargo
- Reduce network debug chatter
- Allow cargo hatch to begin retracting before it has fully extended and vice versa
- Fixed the jumping button focus on the cockpit launch/services panel
- Various WIP changes to get exit/entry into asteroid rings a little more graceful
- Trade Cargo screen: new tweaks, adjustments, fixes, improvements
- Removed Planet/Station/Sun initial lock on icons
- When buying/selling an item, then dropping back to the main page the item I was on should remain the focus
- Fix for unsynced stellarforge timings causing station rotation issues
- Background stars not flattened into background
- Optimisations for damage models
- Animations for small landing pad updated
- Don't allow the game to run without an input system
- Impose some sensible limits on the threading parameters parsed from AppConfig
- Fixing an in the power distrib that might have been hampering the cobra
- Clear the "arrive from supercruise" flag when you buy a ship so you don't appear in the hangar with a fantabulous flash
- Change cockpit glass edges to use different shader that doesn't argue with the background envmap
- Targeting system does its selection based on look direction rather than ship direction. TrackIR, Oculus & manual headlook now works to select targets
- Additional checks for missing space station
- If space station is missing then don't trap the player in a docked state
- Can now supercruise through rings (clusters that add mass locking to be added later)
- Added notification that player must sell cargo before selling their ship (when buying a new one)
- Additional safeguards when receiving authority changes
- Improved the loading when starting docked, there is no longer 1 frame when the ship is outside the station
- Don't replicate variables from a bad packet
- Planets, moons and stars ignores the "amd crash fix" graphic option.They would be rendered even if the amd crash fix is turned on.
- When testing if we're close enough to the station ot request docking, subtract its radius from the distance in the same way as the target UI so we're consistent
- Fix a huge missing texture on the corners of Coriolis station
- Fix for jerky motion in profile builds caused by excessive replication
- Added a way point between full cockpit control and the galaxy map so the player can't get up to any shenanigans while the galaxy map initialises
- Fix a bug where sessions do not start up, due to info lost relating to a cancelled message
- Fix for ship not appearing on other player's scene - due to order of initialisation of components

Michael

[JazHaz]

New video from Frontier, showing off the new Orbis station. Check out the parkland inside the wheel.... Wow, just gorgeous!

http://youtu.be/ex2nGIvbiVI

[ClymAngus]

Ah blue danube! I do have to say I'm finding the fronteer forum nastily addictive.
So much drama. It's like a honey coated turd fling. You want to lick your fingers by you really really shouldn't.

I've got to get off that forum. It's no good for me.