Posts by Martind Forlon

  • Round Up of 3.3 Impressions - FDev Community Visit

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    Small group of community guests was invited to visit the Frontier game studios. There are not much any details given out yet, but I guess that it for sure is interesting reading for anyone who like ED. And the best is that all this should come this year ... yup, I can't wait :D ...


    By Edwar Lewis (Lead CM): "Today is one of those exciting days that you hear about from time to time! We've got a small group of community guests coming to see some of the pre-alpha Chapter 4 content we've been working on, before the beta rolls out "soon"."


    Source of below posted stuff: Round Up of 3.3 Impressions - FDev Community Visit



    Reactions on the Forum Thread:

    Alec Turner

    • If I say what I saw was awesome your expectatations will go through the roof and when Q4 drops you'll say ... but Alec, I thought you said it was going to be awesome. On the other hand I could say meh and deliberately play the game then you'd all be pleasantly surprised at how good it is and think I was a grumpy. I don't know what to say, it's like thermonuclear war! Who fancies a nice game of chess?
    • Here's a thing that happened ... so they were about to show us something in mining. They reckoned they knew what the reaction was gonna be so it turned out Will filmed it. Anyway, they did the thing and yeah ... the room went frickin' nuts. After the mining section ... well, you know how most everyone thinks current mining is really boring ... well the buzz around the room was "hell, when this drops I'm heading into the rings and I ain't ever gonna come back out again!"
    • How's that for hype?

    Vingtetun

    • Frontier dedicated 5 of their team for the entire day to presenting many of the changes and improvements coming to the game in the next release.
    • It was by no means a polished puff piece for streamers, it was a detailed exposee and q&a on the content, with senior staff on hand asking questions of us, feedback on what was good and what needed work or improvements. There was very little of the 'it is on the roadmap for later' and an awful lot of 'let me just go and ask that part of the team' where we got into detail and provided constructive feedback on the new items we have seen already in live stream but also things they will be revealing over the forthcoming weeks.
    • They took away extensive notes from a broad range of the audience based on how their communities would react to certain elements, where the areas of improvement were wanted and how the new mechanics would affect people's gaming time.
    • Our questions weren't dodged, they weren't cagey about their answers and no, wasn't the community team presenting. They were there but the presentation was done by the team doing the doing not the talking about, if you see what I mean.
    • Whilst some streamers were there, others of us were representing chunks of player groups or event/content creators for in game fun. Stuff we CAN talk about at the moment: Exploration. Works nicely, looks great, really makes you feel like you are working to discover things and not just honk jump magic wand discovery.
    • The mining things that were first talked about at Lavecon have come along really nicely. Once again, there is a lot more to do whilst mining. I reckon people will enjoy it.
    • The lighting changes shown at Lavecon... Was nice to see it in action on a 'live' build and not just screenshots. Once again, think once people get into beta, they will be pleased with it.
    • Shout out as usual to the sound team. Got a big round of applause at one point. Couple of times we all shushed each other so we could just listen.
    • The stuff we can't mention yet as it isn't public. A huge amount of work and thought has gone into it all, am looking forward to getting my teeth into it both testing in beta and in final live release. Lots of the regular grumbles have been addressed.
    • It really is a large body of work. Took 6 hours to fully showcase the lot and there is still more we didn't get see. We over ran by over an hour on their plans as we were asking so many pointy questions and debating their answers. A number of the visitors put some STRONG pressure on frontier on various matters on behalf of wider player audience.
    • To the question earlier about the 'feel' in the office.... quite a few of the team members dropped their heads in to say hi, some of them were new faces had not met or seen on live streams before. There is a good vibe about the office there, happy looking staff (we quizzed one and the answer was 'even better now that the food isn't as bad as it was at the old office ;-) ). Delicious sandwiches btw.
    • For the record, yes, the numbers of people working JUST on ED are what they say, their other games were on other floors and no, jobs like HR and finance etc staff weren't part of that number,.It was all people actively working on Elite. Compared to my last visit, they arent kidding when they say the team has never been bigger. The sweeping improvements and changes have satisfied me that they havent been idle in the last year of the free 'Beyond' update.
    • All in all, and I appreciate there will be lots of 'but why wasn't xxx person invited', and realise I am lucky to have been invited. Am hoping we did you lot proud in terms of shouting loudly about things we are all passionate about, was great to see huge progress and my goodness am I going to have to set aside a whole day just to read the patch notes. Can't wait to get my teeth into it all.

    Sir.Tj

    • Well I don't stream content or have any kind of Internet presence apart from the forum and twitter both of which are to be honest pretty minimal. Frontier at points were robustly challenged on aspects of the update and productive discussions followed. This is a pretty big update with a broad range of new features and updates to existing features at the same time. From what I have seen there has been a large amount of work out into this and from my point of view it was all positive. Explorers get done great new content to make traversing the galaxy more enjoyable and engaging.
    • BGS fans again have a lot to look forward too with the codex etc..
    • Miners again get some great new features and from someone who's never been interested in mining I'll definitely be giving it a go.
    • Visual improvements are always a good thing and a lot of work has been done on it, Audio is as ever stunning Ed and I agreed that the audio team are vastly underrated on how good they are.
    • The passion FD still has for the game and the community is very apparent and I can't see that dissipating any time in the future. I've tweeted a few things about the visit this being one of them https://twitter.com/tjdamod/status/1045654717722963968?s=19 Yeah not everyone is going to love every aspect of the update but they should be encouraged that FD are still working very hard on the game we all love.

    StuartGT

    • On the new USS system - we were very impressed by what we saw.
    • On the new Discovery Scanner mechanic - Wait for the live stream demoes. There's a learning curve and depth, yet with experience it should be quick and easy to identify interesting Star Systems.
    • Morale is great internally, they're hyped for the community's response when 3.3 is demoed and goes live. The Elite Dangerous devroom has 100 people (+- 5) for gameplay/content creation; this excludes QA, audio recording, trailer team, website, etc who were in a different area.

    helloitskolo

    • (reddit source) I can completely echo what others have said about the staffing levels. There is half a floor, exclusive to ED. I can also confirm that many of them came to say hi and were genuinely interested in our reactions.
    • The presentation was done mostly by Adam. It included actual game play as well as video stuff. We bombarded them with A LOT of questions and they did not make a habit of avoiding them. More than once, the answer wasn't known and someone left the room to go find out what it was; they genuinely were interested in hearing thoughts. It was not FDev sitting us down and presenting AT us; it was two way; they wanted feedback and were excited to share. The consensus in the room was definitely positive but don't let that make you think that no-one challenged anything. Things WERE challenged. Tough questions were asked, and responded to. Any comments, suggestions, any questions unknown were all recorded to be looked into. I did not feel any of the comments made were ignored.
    • When FDev first did the live stream and explained a little about the exploration changes, I was worried that it wouldn't flow; that it would be like a clunky mini game. It's not. It's far more intuitive and smooth than that. The sound team have absolutely out done themselves, I would have loved to meet some of them, shake their hands and fan girl all over them. The sound is just absolutely wonderful.
    • I'm going to *have* to try mining now; I've never done it before and I want to see the 'before'! The mining updates are wild. More than one mining-adverse person in the room declared 'Well... I'm a miner_ now' after we saw the mining stuff.
    • There is also a lot more to this update than exploration and mining. There is so much to be excited about, but I'm very wary of hyping everything up massively as I would never want people to be so over-hyped that they would then be disappointed by *anything*, regardless of what it is. This means that in some ways, I'm holding my hype in! I don't want that to translate as me being unexcited; I am very excited.

  • PC upgrade

    Thx!


    I was looking at the card when the benchmarking demo was started and they both started spinning few seconds after testing started. I was looking on the card from 10 cm and I did not hear any increased/additinal sound. People opinions which I read in advance seem were exactly like it is ... I'm usually littlebit sceptic to avoid disappointment, but that was not needed :) ...

  • PC upgrade

    :D ehh, I meant fan(s) ... there are 2 (GK cooler) and I now tried Fire Strike 1.1 Demo with score 16 129. Need to check these fans in further testing, but all I can hear is fan on my CPU and case and both are quite silent (and I have open case) ... looks good so far :)

  • PC upgrade

    It was quite long wait, but now I have installed in PC MSI GTX 1070Ti (was GTX 960) ... now I'm downloading 3DMark Basic Edition for testing (3,9 GB :redeyealien:). Installation was easy going, card vents are stopped for now, obviously are not needed when not playing games :)

  • Chapter Four - planned for end of 2018

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    Few days ago were released first more detailed informations about latest chapter of the Beyond season which should bring bigger changes to the ED. And it really looks like it will have big impact on play, especially exploration. Personally I want wait for ingame application (mean I want test it myself) before making any final judgenment ... however first feeling are positive.



    Source: Chapter Four - Exploration Reveal

    Exploration

    Will Flanagan (Community Manager): Hello Commanders!


    We're going to be shaking the format up slightly for the final main topic of discussion surrounding some of the major features of Chapter Four of Beyond. We're soon going to be revealing more details about the next update, so for this post, we'd like you to share all of your questions and comments in reply to this thread, and we'll try to respond to as many as we can!


    In this post we’ll be presenting just some of the improvements coming to exploration in the next update. There's a number of benefits that we are aiming to bring in with this exploration overhaul which we've listed out below, with more detailed explanation underneath.

    Benefits of Exploration Improvements

    • Make exploration more involved: By introducing a process we aim to make exploration feel more meaningful, making the results more satisfying and rewarding.
    • Replace flying time with gameplay: We want to reduce the amount of time you have to spend flying to a planet just to discover it. The only time we want you to fly to a planet is because you want to visit it as there’s something there you want to see or do. Ultimately that will make exploring planetary bodies and getting first discoveries in a system quicker and more engaging at the same time.
    • Remove Random USS Spawning: You will now be able to use your skill to locate signal sources rather than rely on luck. you will have the ability to identify a USS from anywhere in the system and then explore and discover these locations.
    • Reduce the time to find planet surface locations: You will now be able to employ game play to make searching out interesting surface locations/POIs quicker and more interesting rather than flying across the planet in low orbit.
    • Improve multiplayer exploration: With both of the module upgrades we are making sure that wings and multi-crew are supported.
    • Holistic System:The improvements to exploration mechanics tie together not just new discoveries, but mining, missions and signal source location in one package.
    • All new "First mapped": You'll be able to add a first mapped across any planet within the galaxy, including within the bubble. Giving all players that have joined the game since it's launch even more opportunity to make their mark on the galaxy.


    Check out the full details below.


    The Discovery Scanner_

    Because explorers ply their trade far from civilized space, we’ve decided to not add new module requirements. Instead, we’re improving the discovery scanner_ and detailed surface scanner_ so Commanders can jump right in as soon as the update is released, without having to spend time traveling back to a port to purchase new gear.


    When you activate the discovery scanner_ you will now be taken to an all-new scanning interface and view. In this augmented camera view you are able to interrogate the system using new functionality of the scanner_.


    81128e21-a080-408a-a9e3-cf1218325b19.png


    The process still starts with the “honk” (system scan), though its usage is now the start of a more engaging process (if all you did before was scan for some credits_, don't worry, the scan still awards credits_.)


    The system scan now returns an aggregated display of how energetic the electromagnetic emissions are in the system. Signals are sorted on a low to high scale by their apparent energy. For example, emissions from rocky clusters will appear at the lower end of the scale, hot gas giants at the upper range. This information requires some interpretation as signals can overlap.


    You are able to tune the focus of your sensors to a particular point on the scale, making emissions from objects at this range much clearer, at the cost of filtering out signals returned from bodies not emitting at this range.


    As you move the view around, you are aiming your discovery scanner_ sensors. To aid you, the discovery scanner_ view also features a repeating sweep of gravitational disturbance detected in the system. You can use this sweep to narrow your search for stellar bodies, as well as start your search around the star's orbital plane, which is revealed by the initial system scan.


    Emissions that come close enough to your view’s focus are represented by signature patterns around a central reticule. If you are tuned to the correct point on the energy scale the signal will show as a symmetrical pattern clearly showing the direction towards the origin of the signal, allowing you to locate it. The further away your energy tuning, the more distorted and asymmetrical the pattern becomes, hiding the precise direction and location.


    Once you have a candidate origin, you can use the scanner_ to reconstruct a massively zoomed in view. If you aimed precisely enough, you will discover the stellar body. If there are a number of stellar bodies in relative close proximity to your focus, you may need to repeat the process to isolate individual signals.


    59d7bcf4-618c-43e9-9b3e-3ae4515c299d.png


    As you locate and identify stellar bodies their emissions are filtered out, instead becoming markers on the energy range, making it easier to find the remaining bodies. It's at this point in that you will gain the “first discovered” tag, rather than having to physically visit the planet (you still need to sell the data at a port to gain the tag). All current first discovered tags will remain.


    Importantly, when you uncover a planet using the discovery scanner_, as well as being informed of the resources available on it, the presence of unusual locations, such as Guardian_ sites, will also be revealed. However, their precise location won’t be shown until you have mapped the planet with the detailed surface scanner_.

    Unidentified Signal Sources

    Along with the Exploration update, we are improving the way that USSs work. USSs will now spawn throughout the entire system when you first enter it. This enables you to use the new exploration tools to find USSs throughout the system, not just in the area around you. You can still interrogate nav beacons to find the locations.


    Whilst USSs do still have a decay time, the timers have been increased to allow you time to find and fly to the ones you are interested in. The decay time is also now displayed when targeted. Signal sources still obey rules determining where they can appear within a system, and mission critical signal sources will still be highlighted to differentiate themselves once located.


    The Detailed Surface Scanner_

    Again, this module will not be replaced. Instead, the detailed surface scanner_ gains the ability to launch micro sensor probes in supercruise. You will use these probes to “map” a planet’s surface and locate resource hotspots in its rings.


    These flight-assisted probes are launched via a new aiming interface when activating the detailed surface scanner_. The probes will arc towards a planet’s surface and when close enough will “display” sensor coverage over a large area. Once enough of the surface has coverage, the probes will collate and report their findings. To map rings around a planet you need to hit each ring with a single probe.


    To allow for skilled play you can aim probes away from the planet, allowing them to arc around it, potentially letting you hit the surface on far side of the planet. If you aim too far away, the probe will fly right past and miss, but by using mass and size information displayed on the HUD you will be able to lob probes and get full coverage without having to fly around the planet.


    You will be able to synthesise micro-probes for the detailed surface scanner_, but the better aim you are, the less probes you will need to get complete coverage.


    When you do achieve this, any unusual locations will be revealed to your ship’s navigation systems. So no more eyeballing an entire planet to find those brain trees!


    First Mapped By

    We are also adding a new opportunity to get your Commander's name immortalised in the game with the new 'First Mapped By' tag. The first person to successfully map a planet to 100% and sell the resulting data at a port, will be awarded this tag. This also applies for planets that have already got a 'First Discovered' tag as well.


    Multi-Crew

    As part of the exploration update, we are making sure that multi-crew members can use the discovery scanner_ and detailed surface scanner_ at the same time and all discoveries are shared among crew or wing.


    This allows wings or commanders in multi-crew to engage in exploration together, each earning credits_ and exploration rank and making the process more efficient.


    -----------------------------------------------------------------------


    We'll be revealing more details about Beyond - Chapter Four in the coming weeks and we can't wait to show you, but in the meantime, please post your feedback regarding Exploration in this thread and we'll try to respond to as many queries as we can.


    This particular thread is not an area for debate between community members – it’s fine to read what others have put, but try to ensure your posts are directed at us rather than your fellow posters.


    Youtube livestream with FDDevs:

  • Is it normal that the game updates every time I launch single player?

    Greetings, Dreamer1986,


    files downloaded for SP (except first time, when it download patches) are mainly for dynamic economy which changes market prices in whole CF universe. You can skip these files if you want to do so, for play CF campaign (and singleplayer) they are not needed if you don't mind static market. One from latest additions to Crossfire are local changes to environment (mainly system X-3043), but these I'm not sure if are applied only for multiplayer (or also for open SP).

  • Hiruga help needed

    Well, it is a maze system, get out of it need to learn where are leading different jumps. Map of jump areas is here: Hiruga


    The shortest way from starting point (i.e. Shingu Station) is:


    Display Spoiler

    You can also map whole system (ideally making a own map) where you will mark where each jump lead.