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Posted by: boggo2300
« on: September 23, 2014, 04:46:15 PM »

Braben is a amazing. Even to this day I can't help but be awestruck at Elite 2 containing a galaxy 1:1 sized (pretty big Galaxy...), Newtonian physics, even the music it had as well, all that stuff in one floppy disk...

Just amazing really.

It makes me sad that Elite Dangerous won't really have much of the same stuff as Elite 2, mainly because you can't have a fast-forward time button in a multiplayer game and ships travelling at super fast speeds might make the game very difficult to play.

Wish I could afford the beta but glad I kick-started it and looking forward to the release.

They work around that with "supercruise" which is basically using your Hyperspace drive in-system, allowing you to travel many times c.  The game effect is pretty much the same as the time dilation in Frontier, and First Encounter but with pretty special effects,  the systems are still gigantic, and even supercruising around say a quaternary system can take quite awhile!
Posted by: boggo2300
« on: September 23, 2014, 04:42:06 PM »

oops,  well more than I'll ever see!

changed my joystick order to an X-52 since, however there don't seem to be any in the country,  I suspect related to it being the suggested joystick, and the ones the dev team are using,  hopefully I should have it next week, in time for Beta 2.  I've discovered that I for one can't fight worth a damn with mouse/keyboard, so I'm sticking to safe route trading until I get myself joysticked.

I had very high expectations for this game, and so far they've all been surpassed, I really love the fact that all the stars you can see in the starfield outside your cockpit are the actual stars in the game that you can go to (well not in beta as theyre restricting players to a small sphere to concentrate interaction an loads) I spent about 10 minutes last night just tooling around the front of a station reading the billboards
Posted by: Sharp
« on: September 23, 2014, 04:39:31 PM »

Braben is a amazing. Even to this day I can't help but be awestruck at Elite 2 containing a galaxy 1:1 sized (pretty big Galaxy...), Newtonian physics, even the music it had as well, all that stuff in one floppy disk...

Just amazing really.

It makes me sad that Elite Dangerous won't really have much of the same stuff as Elite 2, mainly because you can't have a fast-forward time button in a multiplayer game and ships travelling at super fast speeds might make the game very difficult to play.

Wish I could afford the beta but glad I kick-started it and looking forward to the release.
Posted by: Steve Walmsley
« on: September 23, 2014, 04:48:11 AM »


It's exceeded my expectations (for the little I've seen so far) and my expectations were really high.  I like the one server for all players (just instancing busy zones to make it work, and since you can move between instances, and it biases automatically to placing you in instances with people you've previously interacted with)  though theres a reasonable chance that very few places will get overcrowded since theres 400,000 systems in the game (though my understanding is that's limited during Beta to force more player interaction)


It's 400,000,000,000 systems :)

Currently 50 systems in Beta-1 but that will increase to 500 in Beta-2 from September 30th. I haven't played for a while but I'll be back in the cockpit for Beta-2


Posted by: boggo2300
« on: September 22, 2014, 04:56:27 PM »

Finally got the Elite:Dangerous beta,
First Impression:         HOLY COW!
Second Impression:     SWEET MOTHER!
Third Impression:        WOW!

The game is playable, ships quite flyable with mouse & keyboard,  but it's not FUN with mouse and keyboard,  I'm looking at a Sytek X-55 HOTAS Rhino, to be different from all you guys buying Warthogs!.
Awesome touch that they've done a Steve and scoured star catalogues to add 150,000 real stars to the game,  and even gone the extra mile and added all the known exo-planets.
The feeling of scale is truly stupendous.

It's exceeded my expectations (for the little I've seen so far) and my expectations were really high.  I like the one server for all players (just instancing busy zones to make it work, and since you can move between instances, and it biases automatically to placing you in instances with people you've previously interacted with)  though theres a reasonable chance that very few places will get overcrowded since theres 400,000 systems in the game (though my understanding is that's limited during Beta to force more player interaction)
Posted by: Hawkeye
« on: August 15, 2014, 04:20:22 AM »

A gameport to USB adapter costs between 15-20 bucks but you could make one for maybe 6 bucks if you're handy with a soldering iron/could be bothered....

Yeah, that´s what I implied with the "could probably get around that" part. A bigger problem was the programming software, which was, IIRC, a DOS program, and simply refused to work in the more recent windows versions - and to be honest, the Warthog is a huge step up from the FCS, no matter how good it was.
Posted by: chrislocke2000
« on: August 15, 2014, 03:30:44 AM »

Cripes, I just had a look at that Thrustmaster joystick - it's a beast! Having said that I think I'm going to have to follow, been trying to play just with keyboard and mouse and have struggled to say the least.

Ending up spending a small fortune on the kickstarter so intend to make the most of the game. (Elite was pretty much my intorduction to gaming on the BBC B and have fond memories of playing this with for such long sessions we ended up overheating the computer).

Posted by: MarcAFK
« on: August 14, 2014, 09:08:02 AM »

A gameport to USB adapter costs between 15-20 bucks but you could make one for maybe 6 bucks if you're handy with a soldering iron/could be bothered....
Posted by: Steve Walmsley
« on: August 14, 2014, 03:20:36 AM »

LOL, no, the FCS stick/throttle (and TM pedals) are still very much alive, but they use a game port to connect and my new PCs don´t _have_ a game port anymore.
I could probably work around that, but also had problems with the programming software from TM on new-ish Windows, so I finally decided it was time to "upgrade".

Yes, exactly same problem here. I also used to have the FCS.

Posted by: Hawkeye
« on: August 14, 2014, 01:41:04 AM »

"never have to buy another one for the rest of my life"
"I had a Thrustmaster FCS stick back in the late 80s"
"I got myself a Warthog for Star Citizen"
Er, so what happened to the warthog? I understand getting a second joystick but use of the word was makes me think you did actually wear the FCS out or something.


LOL, no, the FCS stick/throttle (and TM pedals) are still very much alive, but they use a game port to connect and my new PCs don´t _have_ a game port anymore.
I could probably work around that, but also had problems with the programming software from TM on new-ish Windows, so I finally decided it was time to "upgrade".
Posted by: TallTroll
« on: August 13, 2014, 05:52:48 AM »

>> IMO they are doing one big thing wrong though, and that is trying hand craft unique 3D model environments for 300-400 landing locations.

There's hand-crafting and hand-crafting. If you watch the Gary Whitta / David Braben / Chris Roberts interview, Chris and David mention that they have had some back and forth on procedural generation. A given city only needs certain areas to be hand crafted, as suburbs / commercial districts etc IRL all feel a bit samey... ideal for PG treatment. There's no need to make every dwelling or office block a unique, special snowflake. Similarly, many large scale farms IRL are just huge areas of fields, all growing a very limited number of crops. You could model millions of acres, entirely "realistically" with very simple PG routines.


Posted by: MarcAFK
« on: August 12, 2014, 07:18:39 PM »

I got myself a Warthog for Star Citizen and man, I can tell you, you won´t regret it. The feel of this piece of massive steel (well metal anyway, not sure it is steel but it sure has the mass :) ) is incredible.

I had a Thrustmaster FCS stick back in the late 80s and that thing has been with me through about 10 years of MechWarrior and Wing Commander without a hitch (and it could be used to hammer nails into the wall too), so my argument was:
I can either buy a new stick for 50 or 80 bucks every 2 or 3 years or I can buy this extremely solid stick for 300 bucks and never have to buy another one for the rest of my life.

"never have to buy another one for the rest of my life"
"I had a Thrustmaster FCS stick back in the late 80s"
"I got myself a Warthog for Star Citizen"
Er, so what happened to the warthog? I understand getting a second joystick but use of the word was makes me think you did actually wear the FCS out or something.

IMO they are doing one big thing wrong though, and that is trying hand craft unique 3D model environments for 300-400 landing locations. They should be working at a framework and assets here instead so that players can design most of the stuff with player owned/run shops and houses in the same planetary themes. That would allow them to have 10 times more content in the final game, for 10 times less work.
Or doing what Braben is doing (and did with the original Elite) Procedurally generated universe.
I think a combination of those 2 would work better, use procedural generation as a placeholder with varying amounts of predesigned enviroment thrown in where needed, but allow the modding community to contribute, either making frameworks for the porcedural generation or for the predesigned stuff, then allow players to interact with the preexisting enviroment and alter it to their own whim, to an extent.
Posted by: Steve Walmsley
« on: August 11, 2014, 04:26:07 PM »

I've signed up for the Standard Beta of Elite Dangerous and bought the HOTAS Thrustmaster Warthog :)

Very impressed so far - just wish I had some more free time to play around with it.

Also been playing Divinity: Original Sin with my son when we are both not working at the same time (which is about one evening a week) and that is an excellent game too.
Posted by: boggo2300
« on: August 07, 2014, 04:36:43 PM »

Thanks TallTroll,  you've made my jonesing so much worse, and I'm getting on a damn plane in 23 hours so have to wait til I get home :P

Matt
Posted by: TallTroll
« on: August 07, 2014, 04:35:03 AM »

I've been Following E : D for a little while now, and it is right on the cusp of exploding. Beta 1.03 is out at time of writing (with 1.04 probably arriving this week some time), and the love it is getting on YouTube and especially Twitch is just amazing. There are several YT vids / Twitch streamers who have bought it, knowing absolutely nothing about it, and they are being blown away, almost without exception.

SC is getting some quite unfair blowback as a result. A lot of people don't realise that Elite has been in dev since 1998, on and off, so it is unsurprising that they have a pretty solid codebase, and are able to rapidly roll new stuff out. A lot of it has been in the can for some time. There is a persistent strain of "why can't it be more like EVE?" from a certain section of the audience, and a lot of pointless ED / SC fanboi-ism, and people not knowing why certain design decisions have been made, like the criticisms of the Elite ship designs, which are direct descendants of the old wireframe models in many cases.