Elite Dangerous

 

Had a bit of fun yesterday afternoon/evening becoming Baroness Chianti (so I could get "The cool looking" ship :D)

 

Ahem.... 2 days now :D

PS Thanks to the recent community goal... I might be a slight ah... billionaire... X'D

 

oooooo....

 

Been struggling to make up my mind for a while now whether to add another full-time occupation to the several I already have. It is finally done. Reason: No fantasy beats the real world™, and a sincere effort to model it as accurately as possible, and keeping it up as new data becomes known, this deserves paying your dues.

Talk about immersion...

https://www.twitch.tv/videos /315554101 (remove the space as the embed here is broken)

https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/murty5/a_had_an_insane_dream_about_elite_dangerous/

 

Despite (perhaps stupidly) getting Odyssey I've yet to try it (or indeed manage to even download it due to slow connection/laziness/busyness). I'm not sure if it will even run on my PC from the rumours that it is badly underoptimised. Still I don't mind. I consider it a donation for my 2nd bout of Elite during lockdown. I've got about half of it downloaded but currently can't keep up against the patch rate. Maybe by next winter I'll be ready to give it a go though. Certainly don't feel like a new computer purchase to play any game these days... meh, will just play the millions I can play still ;)

Wistrel

 

I got the free version from Epic and fired it up only a few times so far, seems to run fine on my current pc built entirely from older parts (4770K, 16 GB, GTX 970). I'll eventually want the standalone program, also most likely a better controller than just keyboard and mouse and this is going to cost a little bit. Before the budget is ready I'm in no hurry to jump in. We'll see.

Thanks to OP and all above for inspiration

 

Ah The free version of Elite on Epic was I think when they consolidated the original game with horizons. Horizons runs on my core2quad 8GB RAM 680GTX fine at maxed settings.

I hear that the expansion oddysey though is causing performance problems all over the place a the moment.

David Braben said he'd been running oddysey ok on a spec similar to yours though in ultra so there's a chance you'll be ok with your current computer even for odyssey.

 

There's a certain comedy in that I've still never been to earth... I got close. Went to sol following completion of a community goal that got me the pass but ended up at Neptune I think doing something then had to leave again for another goal elsewhere and sort been not playing much since.

Did some CQC the other day which was fun but think I've hit "summer gaming lul" now.

Suspect there won't be a huge amount of pick up now again until autumn... or in a couple of weeks if covid cases continue rising exponentially.

 

Turns out I was a bit overenthusiastic here, the map was created with catalogues available before 2014 (hence not including the Gaia data mentioned around here earlier) and is immutable since, with a few notable exceptions (e.g. Trappist-1). According to an older player that is, I have yet to see if they have an official stance about this or to what extent it could upset the players' experience if they change things too often. In Entropia they don't mind killing businesses if they want to remodel an area...

 

Coincidentally A friend of mine told me the other day that he asked the developers this in person when he was at an ED community event in Birmingham. They said no they were not going to try and keep things up to date. I think that's fair. It's a bit of an "ideal world" one but it makes so little impact given the amount of already reasonable accurate data in the game already it just isn't worth the time.

 

Fair enough, from a development point of view and I won't quibble about it. Kind of reflects my experience of growing up with the Perry Rhodan series, they used whatever was known at the time and just filled the gaps with their imagination. Ofc history was not rewritten later when something became outdated.

I also just learned that progress cannot be transferred between an Epic or Steam installation and the standalone client. Which means my current account will be for practice only.

 

oh I didn't know that! That's potentially kinda annoying as it takes aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaageeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesssssssss to patch in the standalone client and I hear steam is way better. Don't want to loose my progress though... so I guess I don't even have the choice of switching over to Steam. Ah well

 

For Steam, it depends. After some searching through the usual chaff of folks jumping each other's throats, found the authoritative source:
https://customersupport.frontier.co...ions-by-platform-Epic-Steam-Frontier-Console-

From what I can gather, the current patch frequency is due to the Odyssey release being burdened with problems. I expect the dust will have settled until I get around to it.

 

Yes can defo confirm all the patching going on right now is largely due to the poor appearance of things and the poor performance of odyssey. I've pretty much given up on trying to patch (and don't really have the HDD space for it) for now. It's summer (sort of) now anyhow so gaming isn't really the thing to do. Hopefully stuff will have calmed down by the time the nights draw in.

Thanks for the steam key info... sounds like I can claim one if need be (I have a Frontier copy from the kickstarter IIRC). Would prefer to keep it off steam if pos though... but good to know I have the option if the slow patching gets too annoying

 

And you can be as alone or as together as you like...

 

I've actually managed to wrangle around some files/space to make enough room to download Odyssey now and left it running over a night or two... so do at least have it now... still yet to try it. Was contemplating doing so on Saturday night with a friend... but go distracted mucking around with something else instead.

Will report back later as to how well (if) it runs on my old machine.

 

I'm still with Horizons but having learned a bit in the meantime, from what people report it seems with Odyssey the difference to performance can be much more drastic than I was aware of at first. They're working on it though and it gets a little better with each update.

I've also arrived at a viewpoint that the direction they're developing the game now is not actually what I was searching for. I thought after introducing planet landings with Horizons, the next evolutionary step being able to go out on foot would bring in more content in the vein of exploration of natural phenomena, ancient artifacts, alien races and such. Instead the new meta is kill guards and raid stations. But it already has its fans and everything is optional, it's an open world. From a development point of view I can understand that imagining the unknown and putting something there which is familiar are different beasts and getting more than one big thing done at the same time is always a tall order. We'll see where it goes after they sorted out the problems.

One thing I already find funny is the people who complain that it's "grindy" when it takes you several hours or even days of gameplay to achieve something. None of them knows anything like Entropia...

 

From what I understand/remember one of the first things they previewed was a tool for going exploring with and looking for natural stuff taking samples and general exploration'y things so I do believe that IS a thing in Odyssey. Indeed it's the thing I think I'm most interested in too. I likes a good explore I do. Yes there was a performance problem on release, I suspect there still is but they have been mega patching (which is why I didn't rush to install - that and the download size).

Still not tried it though (bloody cleaning).... maybe Sunday if the weather is poo.

Wist

PS yeh Elite is the sort of game you can play and play and unless you put in dedicated reading time it will take some time to pick everything up. There's still plenty in the main game that I still don't know much/anything about.

 

The original creator is still there at the helm. Since this game is a good number of years older than even Entropia, I think that's cool. Regardless that certain types of speeches sound the same everywhere.

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/odyssey-going-forwards.585652/

I haven't been in ED much this month since feeding a throwaway account feels kind of pointless, got too many other things on my plate, too. (How do you put cleaning above gaming... usually turns out the other way for me :P) That clipper is calling in the distance...