Soldato
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Sounds good to be but the way it is going to be instanced sounds gay.
*** The Official Elite: Dangerous Thread ***
- Thread starter SteveOBHave
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Yes the whole cruise control thing in systems with points of interest has me worried. Sounds like jumping into instanced pockets and not free roam like it should be.
From reading a bit of the banter on the design discussion forum the main problem seems to be the max speed you can travel is around 500m/s within a multiplayer session or instance.
This is too slow to travel anywhere, even locally would take over ten minutes to get from earth to the iss at this speed.
The game is supposed to have newtonian physics, there should be no artificial max speed. If i drop out of a multiplayer instance above 500m/s then fine, but the process should be seamless.
This would be a make or break issue for me. I'd gladly give up the mp aspect entirely for it. The flight experience is what made those games what they were.
From reading a bit of the banter on the design discussion forum the main problem seems to be the max speed you can travel is around 500m/s within a multiplayer session or instance.
This is too slow to travel anywhere, even locally would take over ten minutes to get from earth to the iss at this speed.
The game is supposed to have newtonian physics, there should be no artificial max speed. If i drop out of a multiplayer instance above 500m/s then fine, but the process should be seamless.
This would be a make or break issue for me. I'd gladly give up the mp aspect entirely for it. The flight experience is what made those games what they were.
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How exactly are you going to get positional precision across such a large area. It's not really possible in the way you want it to work. They have no choice but to do such things because they are limited by what computers can actually do. They have to compromise somewhere they have no choice.
Is there any concrete info on how interiors will be modelled?
Ultimately you'll be able to get out of your pilot's seat and wander (or float) round your ship. As it is, you'll be able to view your cockpit in first person, much like it's depicted in the battle scene video, though it's not in game footage that part.
Where have you read a maximum speed of 500m/s?
Couple of points:-
1) They've got hyper drive haven't they as a means to move quickly from A to B? This is s necessary evil in order to help game play.
2) I suspect the max speed is for two reasons:-
. a) So you don't change your area bubble too quickly. Imagine if you were travelling at 1,000,000m/s You'd be flying past other people's instances in a single second, and that would cause all manner of issues.
. b) To produce a flight model more like Elite and less like Frontier. ie: More interesting game play.
I've been discussing this on the official forum.
I see major problems with this. ie: Unless you put in a whole new game engine for first person game play, I really think that first person will turn into a five minute wonder; Why would you ever want to wonder around your ship after you've done it a few times? Why would you ever want to float around your craft after you've done it a few times. Why would you want to walk around space station corridors after you've done it a few times.
People seem to think first person game play will bring loads of immersion, but unless it adds true gameplay and depth IMHO it will be a five minute novelty.
And by gameplay and depth, in this day and age of Far Cry and GTA 5, that's what people will expect from first person in Elite Dangerous. They will expect to be able to get out of their ship and wonder around a base and take part in first person missions involving combat, stealth and interaction.
Frontier will really have their work cut out for themselves IMHO as they will basically need a whole new game engine bolted on for first person offering game play comparable in quality to modern FPS games... else what's the point?
As if an example of this concern I recall watching a Star Citizen video where they were showing the First Person gameplay, walking around craft. And the ONLY thing I seem to recall them offering as gameplay was the fact you could walk to the bridge on one craft, and wave to your mate as he flew by in another ship. Really? There needs to be serious depth and gamplay else it's a waste of time IMHO!
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In one of the dev diaries, braben was talking about performing repairs and putting out fires, preventing cargo from being ejected through a hull breach etc. That said I'm with you, I don't really see the point
Planetary landing is more important - that's not going to be on release unfortunately.In one of the dev diaries, braben was talking about performing repairs and putting out fires, preventing cargo from being ejected through a hull breach etc. That said I'm with you, I don't really see the point
I've been desperately trying to find some mention of game play that justifies first person game play in ED. I've not really found any yet
The idea of carrying out repairs sound very tiresome! Or am I just be cynical?
Surely if this is to be done, then you need to have missions. eg: Where you need to sneak into a pirate base or something. So you need to land your craft nearby out of site, and then sneak in, or fight your way in, to get item X, before returning it to person Y, possibly fighting your way off the planet in your craft?
But I'm having serious trouble working out how it will be interesting game play rather than a gimick that won't get worn out in ten minutes?
In summary though, unless there is full first person shooter functionality/depth/game play as we expect as of 2013/2014, you'll surely feel let down?
Yeah I don't like the get out of the chair side of things at all. They're wanting to ultimately let you get out of your ship and wander around the space port/planet surface. If that's limited in what you can do gameplay wise, don't see the point of it.
This is latest dev post on it i can find on dff forum (the archived version that anyone can look at)
Originally Posted by Mike Evans View Post
So some clarifications that may help you guys see why we proposed something so counter to what you guys want:
* Within a session we're dealing with a speed limit of around 500m/s relative to the reference frame. So at most you'll be able to fly at 1000m/s relative to another moving object if you're both going directly away from each other.
* With the above limitation you can certainly try to fly to the moon from low earth orbit but it'll take you hundreds of hours to do so! Imagine how long it would take to get to another planet. So although the engine can handle that no one in their right mind would try it.
* In our proposal and in any alternative when a player is travelling faster than the speed limit above we have to take them out of the reality of the game as it was in a session. They're out of session at this time and when they return to normal flight speed the server on our end needs to do the hand shaking and session matching it needs to do to get the player back into the games reality.
* Doing point to point helps the above in that all that handshaking can be done immediately and the player can be shown an appropriate visual effect which again can be pre-calculated immediately. Manually being able to alter the route means compromises will need to be made in the visual department and in the server handshaking which can only happen once the player has either chosen to stop or selected a poi somehow during the flight.
* A manual flight system is possible but its very hard to do both technically and designing all the systems to allow players to use such a system effectively as well. However even if we did such a model yet wanted to have some concept of an autopilot that could handle it for you (like in our proposal) it almost defeats the point in all the extra work because only a small portion of players will want to use it along with the fact that the autopilot does exactly the same thing only more efficiently. A manual travel model almost dictates that it should be the only way to fast travel between things in my opinion.
If there isnt meaningful 1st person content/gameplay i might just give this a miss.
I dont frequent frontier forums too much but i hope that you can get a human crew together and they can have different tasks all over the ship (all in 1st person view) e.g. gunner, rear gunner, engineer, putting out fires, just stuff like that. Would be cool if you could have someone pilot a shuttle from within your ship that you send down to planets to do whatever..e.g. missions. Because some ships are too big or not recommended for planetary drop e.g. voyager (yeah i know they did it anyway)
There is a LOT of history and great content in the world of the free-roam (ish) scifi ship sim games...from wing commander to elite to Evochron to freelancer to Edge of Chaos to X series. Surely to goodness someone will figure out "ohh this was awesome in this game we should put that in"
I dont frequent frontier forums too much but i hope that you can get a human crew together and they can have different tasks all over the ship (all in 1st person view) e.g. gunner, rear gunner, engineer, putting out fires, just stuff like that. Would be cool if you could have someone pilot a shuttle from within your ship that you send down to planets to do whatever..e.g. missions. Because some ships are too big or not recommended for planetary drop e.g. voyager (yeah i know they did it anyway)
There is a LOT of history and great content in the world of the free-roam (ish) scifi ship sim games...from wing commander to elite to Evochron to freelancer to Edge of Chaos to X series. Surely to goodness someone will figure out "ohh this was awesome in this game we should put that in"
What tier/level kickstarted has access to the alpha? Ive not been keeping up to date and cannot really remember what i funded at.
*** answering my own question ***
£200 pledges+ get access to Alpha... I pledged £150 so have to wait for Beta estimated for Jan '14.
*** answering my own question ***
£200 pledges+ get access to Alpha... I pledged £150 so have to wait for Beta estimated for Jan '14.
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Just better grapics with the same core gameplay with a few more bells and whistles will suit me. Without all this open world sandbox ****** that everyone raves about now, ends up being who can be the biggest tool and grief the most. Not exactly awesome fun for me tbh.
Soldato
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- 7 Feb 2011
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Erm ... you know Elite is pretty much the original sandbox game, right?
Minimum PC specs for the Alpha test have been released. Minimum specs don't look to bad or though they are recommending minimum of 2gig vram.
I know there's been some discussion about the machine specs needed for the alpha test, as we're approaching the first build delivery I can share some of the development specs of where we are at the moment. Optimisation and performance are obviously ongoing tasks and as more features are added through the alpha and beta periods we'll need to keep revisiting it.
To play the first build released in December we're currently looking at the following:
Direct X 11
Quad Core CPU ( 4 x 2Ghz is a reasonable minimum)
2 GB System Ram (more is always better)
DX 10 hardware GPU (my reasonably low end machine has a GTX 285 with 2GB)
As I say we're looking to try and reduce the spec if possible through detail options and optimisations, so the final min spec for the game should be lower than that stated above, but for the initial alpha tests you'll need to be in that range.
Michael
I know there's been some discussion about the machine specs needed for the alpha test, as we're approaching the first build delivery I can share some of the development specs of where we are at the moment. Optimisation and performance are obviously ongoing tasks and as more features are added through the alpha and beta periods we'll need to keep revisiting it.
To play the first build released in December we're currently looking at the following:
Direct X 11
Quad Core CPU ( 4 x 2Ghz is a reasonable minimum)
2 GB System Ram (more is always better)
DX 10 hardware GPU (my reasonably low end machine has a GTX 285 with 2GB)
As I say we're looking to try and reduce the spec if possible through detail options and optimisations, so the final min spec for the game should be lower than that stated above, but for the initial alpha tests you'll need to be in that range.
Michael
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