Re: Elite: Dangerous - and the return

[Cody]

Aye, true enough, Diz! I'd forgotten about all that stuff - it ain't within the experiment's remit.

Was it Big D that said something about being 'dim-witted' earlier? My wits are certainly getting dimmer - and I hate BST!

[Yah-Ta-Hey]

I did do some "find the container" runs before I had to start over and one ended up with me handing over the container at the risk of being blown out of space and then having to report to the faction that took the container to "get an appeciation" for not fighting them over the container... ended up making the federation very hostile to me. (shrugs shoulders ). Now , I don't touch those types of missions......only cargo carrys.

Tonight while exploring, came across an interesting scene: arrived at a system called Eriusas. There is a Pelligrino Platform circling Eriusas B 1. It is an unsanctioned prison colony and was no problem landing but there was no commerce at all yet they had all the metals, minerals, and hyrogen fuel they could handle. strange. They did take my cartographic materials and paid me 18K for them. sweet.

[Disembodied]

sometimes they'll be an individual who can tip you off to where you'll find someone you've been trying to hunt down, or an agent of a faction opposed to the faction you're ferrying cargo for, to make you a better offer for the goods you're carrying.. things like that.

But do they have a reason for being where they are? Are these NPCs on their own journeys who happen to have some contacts, or are they clearly and blatantly planted by the game, and just sitting there in space for players to go and find? Are they "alive" in the way that Oolite NPCs are, or are they just treasure chests and other items of furniture to be broken open?

[Diziet Sma]

sometimes they'll be an individual who can tip you off to where you'll find someone you've been trying to hunt down, or an agent of a faction opposed to the faction you're ferrying cargo for, to make you a better offer for the goods you're carrying.. things like that.

But do they have a reason for being where they are? Are these NPCs on their own journeys who happen to have some contacts, or are they clearly and blatantly planted by the game, and just sitting there in space for players to go and find? Are they "alive" in the way that Oolite NPCs are, or are they just treasure chests and other items of furniture to be broken open?

The impression I have is that they fit in somewhere in between those two points..

[Disembodied]

The impression I have is that they fit in somewhere in between those two points..

Hmm. Well, I suppose the game is still being updated and fiddled with - they might get round to implementing decent NPCs eventually. But I suspect their priority will always be the multiplayer crowd.

[Cody]

... or are they clearly and blatantly planted by the game, and just sitting there in space for players to go and find?

This is the impression I have - unfortunately! All is sacrificed on the altar of multiplayer!

[Cody]

If any ED players spot an original system name from BBC Elite, please let me know (merely curiosity on my part, I should add).
So far, aside from the Home Worlds (Lave, Riedquat, Diso, etc), I'm aware of these:

• Ededleen
  Ensoreus
  Isinor
  Qube
  Teorge
  Teveri
  Tianve

[OneoftheLost]

Regarding the Combat AI. I wasn't too impressed. I just picked up the game, a new video card, and some seriously fast internet. Ive done all the training missions, and I didn't have too many issues. The combat AI isnt completely braindead, and it will put up a serious challenge for new players. I'm still pretty bad, but once I figured out how the energy management works, I didn't have too many problems after that.

I havn't been in any battles with capital ships, so I'm excited to see how a big battle works. Before that, I need to figure out trading. LOL too much to learn in too little time.

Do we have a small group of players on the friendliest forums around? I think it would be cool to fly with some of you folks.

[another_commander]

Elite:Dangerous Beta for Mac is go: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=132742

[Cody]

This is a close-up of an asteroid's surface - is it just me, or is it poor quality?

See below for image!

[another_commander]

This is a close-up of an asteroid's surface - is it just me, or is it poor quality?

Sorry, can't tell - login request page for me.

[Cody]

Damn - try here!

[another_commander]

Hmm... not only the asteroid textures look bad in this shot, but also space looks horrible too - don't know if it's my monitor or image compression artifacts that I am seeing. Does it really look like that in-game?

[Cody]

Does it really look like that in-game?

Not my shot - I'll investigate later. It caught my eye as it is rather poor!

[cim]

Perhaps cim, or one of the other players, would have a better insight into how the AI is performing - after all, I am only a dumb pilot!

In terms of immediate combat tactics, reasonably good, more so on the rare occasions you get a group of them, but 1-on-1 not a serious threat. A few bugs here and there but nothing unexpected from having implemented similar-looking bugs myself.

Broader strategy ... not great, and aggressive groups are too rare to be a big deal; I've not died to NPCs yet (nor players, once I'd left the busy starting area), and I've generally only had to run away a few times, all due to mistakes on my part.

Feeling like reasonable sentient beings? No, not at all, though that's mostly not an AI problem as such
- supercruise persistence to normalspace is virtually non-existent. You can see an AI drop out on the station just a few seconds ahead of you; no sign of it when you drop out yourself. Similarly if you see an AI exit normalspace to supercruise it won't be there later
- for some reason, initial system population when you enter or exit supercruise isn't done - so you drop into supercruise and you're always the only one there [1], for a few seconds, and then ships start appearing at the entry point, and around stations ; you drop out of supercruise at a station and there's no-one about but the defense ships, who are all bunched up at one end and then start spreading out on patrol ; you drop in to a mining zone and only then do the miners, police and horribly outnumbered and irretrievably stupid pirates drop in.
- even in the more dangerous systems NPC attacks in supercruise are rare (on the one hand, somewhat reasonable since a well-armed Cobra probably isn't worth the effort required to extract its relatively low cargo capacity; on the other hand, the various comments on Oolite 1.80 show that a bit of pirate desperation is needed) so you don't see a lot of the pirate side of the ecosystem, you rarely see an NPC bounty hunter actually hunting at all, unless you get very lucky, and with no masslocking in supercruise if you aren't into piracy yourself you never really interact with the traders either.

It feels like there's a lot of good games (plural) in Elite: Dangerous - but the joins between them are too obvious, so it never really feels integrated. And it almost works but then doesn't quite, over and over again.

• Combat is fun - but only if you seek it out; if it seeks out you it probably will be more irritating than challenging
• Exploration works very well but I think the way it works makes a lot of ship-to-ship interaction outside of exploration very difficult (and while in gameplay terms it's very useful to encourage beginners, the number of unexplored systems in "core" space - even ones controlled by major powers! - is a bit implausible);
• Trading is the typical Elite model of "lots of varied and interesting commodities, about ten percent of which if that are actually useful once you've got a small bit of cash" (and has the usual FE2/FFE problem that profit scales linearly as you increase ship size, while all other occupations scale sub-linearly, which they probably could do something about but not easily).
• Bulletin board is okay in terms of variety, but pays like the beginner contracts in Oolite and never gets better, and is always to the local cluster reachable in 1-ish jump. And you get weird missions like a Federal faction paying you to destroy police ships which are owned by the neighbouring system's Federal faction.
• The game has the FE2/FFE mistake of making jump ranges far too variable - your basic Sidewinder will do about 7 LY; the right ship optimised for range will do around 35 LY. Inhabited space is roughly 150LY in radius, so in a fast ship it takes fewer jumps to cross from one edge to the other than it does to cross an Oolite galaxy (which is hardly an epic journey itself); combined with the full-3D galaxy being a major challenge for the map tool, it makes it feel at once far too big and far too small (and with a few exceptions most careers you've no incentive to leave the local group or even sometimes the current system, so the vast scale just means that you never meet anyone obnoxious ... a good thing, of course).
• Piracy - and illegality in general - is nowhere near profitable enough to make it believable that anyone does it (that's always been a problem with Elite-like games, but multiplayer makes it more of an issue).
• The graphics are highly detailed and (the occasional asteroid aside!) very well done ... but this has its own costs: every single station Coriolis or bigger regardless of external type has one of two docking bay plans [2], so far as I can tell to the exact position of the palm trees; greater variety would require huge amounts of work, but it does make you wonder whether the Interstellar Convention on Shipping Crate Stacking was only signed across inhabited space so that a bunch of diplomats could say "see, we can agree on something".

Some of this is an unavoidable consequence of the decisions to make it "realistic scale" and "multiplayer"; some of it is probably fixable in later patches; some of it could be fixed in theory but might need an Elite Dangerous II to do it in because it wouldn't work to make the change with an existing player population

(Lest that all seem too negative; it is still a fun game and they have a lot of scope for further improvements - I think definitely an improvement on the three previous ones, though I doubt I'll play it as much in total as I played FFE or Oolite)

[1] Unless another player is hanging around in the system and has kindly let the simulation run a few minutes for you.
[2] One of those is rare enough that I've only found three so far, all in at least semi-handcrafted systems, so maybe doesn't even count.