Elite Dangerous  

I used to play that on my commodore 64! really keen to play it!

Haha same. Although I'm more interested in the release of Star Citizen. I will more than likely play this first though, as Star Citizen is still a fair time away. I've been playing a bit of Eve, but it's losing my interest fairly rapidly.

Elite: Dangerous will support Oculus Rift


Great news that we know many of you have been hoping for – today we’re announcing that Elite: Dangerous will support Oculus Rift. We’re very excited by this and if you aren’t aware of what Oculus Rift is then visit their website to find out more:

http://www.oculusvr.com/

I’m sure you’ll also be pleased to learn that the Oculus Rift version of Elite:Dangerous will be available to ALL backers that have an Oculus Rift headset for no extra cost.

Here’s David’s opinion on this:

“We’ve been playing with the Oculus Rift dev kits and are excited about the potential – just glancing around your cockpit or being totally immersed in a space battle. Many of our backers have made it clear that they would like Oculus Rift support – and so do we! We’re very pleased with the results so far.”

Thanks as ever for reading and why not pop by our forums to discuss the latest news:

http://forums.frontier.co.uk/forumdisplay.php?f=29

Thanks for reading

Michael

Alpha, Beta and Gamma Dates.

Alpha is now live, this will continue until Frontier decides that the game is ready to goto Premium Beta (1st stage), this is scheduled for early 2014 at the moment, but Frontier will announce details when they are ready to proceed.

Currently these are set as follows.

Alpha Phases 1.0 started December 2013 (£200) includes expansion pass
Alpha Phase 2.0 to started 4th Feb 2014 (£200) includes expansion pass
Beta Phase Premium Beta (formally 1st beta) to start after Alpha has finished. (£100) includes expansion pass
Beta Phase Standard Beta (formally 2nd beta) to start after Premium Beta has finished. (£50)
Gamma Phase to start after Standard Beta has finished. (£35)
Commercial release end part of 2014

With the new upgrades option you can now include your original pledge in your price when upgrading to a higher level. This includes the expansion pass

Alpha release 2.2 is now live, here is the change log:

Additions/Changes

- Pilot's chair and pilot added to cockpit
- Damage to shields is scaled based on the power distribution, now defined by the shield generator item.
- OPtion to turn off shadows added.
- Updated fire damage FX.
- "You died" is now "You were killed by [CMDR name]"
- Anaconda material tweaks.
- Weapons balance tweaks.
- Added small dot to center of targeting reticles.
- Added option for logarithmic or linear scanner scaling.
- [audio] latest soundbanks - numerous fixes and mix tweaks.
- Art pass on lens flares
- Pass on class 4 A drive lens flare and lighting
- Add UI messages for cargo scoop actions
- Loading screen movie replaced with model (not final)
- Updated options - players will need to resave their options!
- Thinned targeting brackets

Crash Fixes

- Crash fix: multiplayer joining another player would cause that player to crash immediately and the new player to crash shortly after.
- Audio: Fixed crash in AudioSourceBlendRTPC when the ship is destroyed
- Help debug and recover with out crashing from using the results of a raycast that contains invalid physics objects and shapes.
- Speculative crash fix for moon.
- Fix for crashes with multiplayerand guided missiles
- Fix AudioManager hang on shut down
- Fix for crash caused by failed loads on texture resources (seen on some low end Nvidia cards)
- Authority of multiplayer scenarios leaving while other players are able to take the authority will no longer cause the remaining players to crash.
- Fix crash exiting Endless War
- Fix crash for invalid factions in Endless War
- Fix zero length vector crash when loading new scenario
- Fix for crash when second capital ship created (don't create it)
- AMD crash fix worjaround no longer needed


General Fixes

- Sparks appearing on cockpit creation fixed.
- Audio: fix assorted aspects of cargo scanner, pulse laser, rail gun, gatling gun and submunition audio.
- Added improvements and lighting to damage effects and rolling out to all ships
- Fix for DamageParticleActivity destructor assert.
- Encourage the window to go full screen as soon as we can when creating the display. Prevents a window from appearing immediately before going fullscreen.
- Fix for VFXes in FireParticleActivity.
- Fixes and performance improvements in noise generators.
- Don't include the machine name in the upnp port description: we don't need it, and it sometimes causes trouble
- Hide the desired speed indicator when flight assist is turned off.
- Updated effects used for hull damage
- Make the restored game window appear on the monitor specified in options.
- Negative indent on the message to make blocks of text easier to read.
- Impact fires don't happen on every hit, now a 0.15 chance (the pyromaniac inside me is sad )
- Added separate path, for when you are disconnected from the server, that allows the game to unload while the dialog remains on screen. This prevents you getting

killed while view the dialog and the game trying to move you into the player has died state.
- Adjustments to the radar-highlighting of things firing at player
- Automatically time out and repoll for a different server if not connected
- Updated new heavy damage FX and added it to the various prototype files.
- Right of retaliation now implemented.If attacked, the victim can legally attack and kill the aggressor, but won't collect bounty unless scanned.
- Increased the min value of the velocity overrides as a temporary fix for the drives having strange velocity alignment behaviour
- Add the collidable flag to cargo canisters so they'll collide with things that aren't ships (asteroids specifically).
- Reduce aim assist effect at longer ranges
- Added distance scaling to the pulse and rail gun impact FX
- Network replication fixes for core system, following up with specific gameplay instances
- Stats updated after scenario end rather than shut down.
- Prevent missile lock audio looping
- Optimise network replication
- Replicating variable length variables is now guaranteed to give the correct variable value.
- Fix authority conflict slowing down return to menu
- Fix for joining a multiplayer game dupe-spawning the scenario ships for multiplayer factions.
- Fix multiplayer-join dupe-spawning on free for all.
- Fix for multiplayer-join dupe-spawn for ethics.
- Fix for wrong background when player is not the authority
- Occulus shadows fixed
- Occulus targetting reticule renders at appropriate distance

Michael

Elite: Dangerous — Alpha 3 adds a station, systems and hyperspace jumps, is also brilliant


By Steve Hogarty, 8 hours 44 mins ago, 1 Comment


Elite: Dangerous


I've been playing Alpha 2, the next to latest version, of Elite: Dangerous, zooping around in my spaceboat, swishing between asteroids and kablooshing enemy ships in its series of single player combat missions. Elite, it turns out, is really, seriously good. It controls remarkably similarly to the original game, with dogfights consisting of a rolling and pitching your craft, twisting and arcing through space in your attempts to keep your target in view. But at the same time it introduces some of the kinetic spirit of Frontier, Elite's sequel, with less rigid physics and a touch more Newtonian space-skidding giving combat real momentum and punch. Braben's development team have worked some real nostalgia black magic here, merging our fuzzy memory of how Elite used to be with a modern, uncompromised space combat sim.

Alpha 2 is tremendous, yes, but the soon to be released Alpha 3 is another beast entirely. Alpha 3 dumps on Alpha 2 from orbit. Alpha Poo, you'll be calling it before long.

I've been playing the latest version of Elite: Dangerous, and here's what's up with it.



The current version of Elite is a fairly comprehensive demonstration of the game's combat scenarios, ranging from destroying static targets, to one on one dogfights, to defence missions with multiple enemy ships. There's nothing connecting these missions besides a scant bit of loading screen plottery, and as such these scenarios exist as stand alone levels accessed from a menu screen.

In Alpha 3 however, these combat scenarios exist as locations in space that can be travelled to. Glancing to your left during flight will trigger your in-cockpit navigation screen to appear, listing local systems to which you may hyperspace jump. Each of these systems contain one of the missions from the previous alpha, which can be jumped into and out of at will, with no loading screen or jarring exit to the game's main menu required. There is, as it stands, a brief pause during hyperspace jumps in lieu of the fancy spacewarping effects still being developed, but in later versions Braben promises this will be seamless.

Hyperspace jumps require a few moments to charge, around ten seconds, during which your ship will rapidly begin to warm up, opening all of its exhaust ports to disperse heat as much as possible. Heat signatures in Elite: Dangerous give away your position to any nearby players or AI ships, so managing heat dispersal becomes an integral skill during combat. Stealth can be achieved by locking down your exhausts, but this allows heat to build up inside your ship's internal systems, eventually overheating your cockpit and causing a nasty explosion. "It's the spaceship equivalent of holding your breath," Braben informs me.

Jumping away from danger not only paints a giant temperature target on your back, but as with the classic games you'll also be leaving behind a warp signature, one that can be traced to its destination with the proper technology. That same delay between activating your hyperspace drive and actually jumping is used to begin to generate an arrival warp signature in your destination system. That is to say, your arrival will be wee telegraphed in whatever system you're jumping to, allowing opportunistic pirates to take advantage of your piping hot ship as it sluices, exhausted and combat unready, through spacetime.

Alpha 3 only contains a handful of systems, enough to contain all of the missions from the previous version, plus at least one more 'neutral' system. Eventually however, explains Braben, all of the stars you see will be real places you can visit, each one a system unto itself. From Earth you'll see all of the familiar constellations, but click on Alpha Proximi from your cockpit, hyperspace jump to it and you'll get a whole new perspective on the heavens, one where the constellations have been skewed by a few light years. Elite: Dangerous is a living planetarium. That's tremendously exciting stuff.


That additional system is home to one of Alpha 3's most incredible new features, the epic and iconic Fort Zelado space station. The slowly rotating megastructure is immediately identifiable as the polygonal sort seen in the original Elite, a vast and roughly round station with a narrow rectangular docking port. This time around the base is rendered so much larger, a miniature Death Star hanging in the darkness, bronze light bouncing off its intricately detailed and greebled exterior.

Approaching it triggers another nostalgia-gush. After requesting permission to land, you must line up to face the docking port using lateral thrusters, before attempting to match the gentle speed at which the station rotates — there are no separate controls used here, from combat to docking you'll be using the same thrusters and throttles. An instruction to head to Bay 12 is met with some confusion. I ask if there are multiple ports on the station's exterior. Braben explains, as I sail through the opening, that the bay I'm looking for is inside the station.

As he speaks, the vast structure's interior comes into view, a ring of small landing pads arranged evenly around what resembles the inside of a high-tech washing machine. There's an atmosphere held inside the station, evident by the whooshing and audible thrumming of engine sounds the moment I passed through the docking port's magic vacuum-field. Again, there's no loading screen and no faked scaling of interior and exterior spaces, just a smooth transition from outside to inside.


The slow spinning of the station gives it a micro-gravity one tenth that of Earth, Braben proudly informs as I navigate my way to bay 12, deploying my landing gear and using vertical thrusters to manually set down. The radar switched to a special landing mode, in which I must manoeuvre my craft to align it with the centre of the landing pad. Once touched down, I can communicate with the on-board BBS or outfit my ship with new weapons and tools, such as heatsinks and cargo scanners.

The latter option carries your ship via an elevator to the bay's hangar. From your cockpit, as you descend into the station's innards, you're faced with two flickering advertisement billboards. By this point, Elite fans will be weeping.

There's no trading yet, but the ability to sell cargo collected from destroyed AI ships and use that money to upgrade your craft means that there's a gameplay loop. And with that small update Elite: Dangerous takes the giant leap from an impressive proof of concept demonstration to an actual, playable thing, a hub around which a fuller and fuller game can be built.

The direction in which the game is expanding and the care with which features are being added already makes Elite: Dangerous a more exciting prospect than the disappointingly cruddy X: Rebirth, and the rate of development looks set to outpace the vastly overfunded Star Citizen. Elite: Dangerous is perfectly placed to become the frontrunner in this next generation space race.

Alpha 3 will be released to backers "soon", with a paid beta release coming later this year.

Progress diary

So - phase one of the Alpha allowed us to test the moment to moment combat gameplay.

Phase two got to grips with the multiplayer technology and with your help we were were able to test and battle-harden it in a live environment.

Now - Alpha 3 is live and we start to move towards building out the game by adding docking, an early version of hyperspace jumps between multiple locations and ship outfitting within the iconic Coriolis space station.

Our latest Progress video diary shows David Braben talking through the features and intricacies of a Coriolis starport, including the procedure for docking. You can view the video here:

Once successfully docked in the station – a notoriously difficult skill to master in the original Elite – Elite: Dangerous Alpha phase three offers progression where you can use your honest profit or ill-gotten gains from your in-game actions to improve your ship.

Ship upgrades include modules such as heat sinks and cargo scanners, a variety of weapons, repair to any damage sustained in combat and clear bounties.

Once you have earned enough credits, you can even purchase (and fly) that firm favourite from the Falcon de Lacy shipyards, and one of the most notorious ships in the galaxy – the Cobra Mk III…!

Finally, the consequences of combat now also have a price, with repairs being cheaper than buying a new ship you will need to make split second decisions on when to pull back from battle!

In-coming - Alpha 4 release date announced
The final stage of the Alpha, Alpha 4 will be released on May 15th and will be followed two weeks later by the first stage of the Premium Beta on May 30th.

“The end of Alpha is now in sight and it is amazing looking back to see how far we have come since the start of the Kickstarter campaign. Support from you all has been fantastic, and input especially from the Design Discussion Forum has been a great help – in fact we are about to deliver one of the features we changed very significantly as a result of discussion on the DDF – ‘super-cruise’. Premium Beta backers already have access to the combat test, and we look forward to welcoming them when the Premium Beta itself starts, and seeing many more people actually playing the game. We couldn’t have done this without your support, which is something we really appreciate.

Thank you!”

David Braben

Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore…



Lave. Diso. Leesti. Zaonce. The classic systems in the original Elite game evoke fond memories. Elite was the original ‘open-world’ experience, and one of the very first 3D games. It famously used every byte in the legendary the legendary BBC Micro computer to create 8 ‘galaxies’ using just 22k of program and data memory. Yes, 22 kilobytes – that’s probably smaller than just about any email you’ll get today.

Crucially, though, it used amazing techniques that allowed a generation of gamers to experience something unique as they carved their own path through a dog-eat-dog, go anywhere, do anything galaxy and worked their way to the most iconic rank in gaming history – Elite. Those techniques were further expanded in Frontier a decade later, fitting an even bigger, richer world into 512k.

And of course, as everyone reading this newsletter knows, with Elite: Dangerous we are taking another huge step for today’s hardware. Detail and accuracy has taken another great leap, but, we have a confession to make: Alpha builds 1, 2 and 3 have all used a ‘skydome’ – a static, painted backdrop around a 64 bit play space roughly 1 light year across. Within that all the planets and stars are still modelled, but the galaxy beyond was not. Until now.

Alpha 4 genuinely contains over 400 billion star systems. And they are all moving correctly; spinning, orbiting each other in an incredible astronomical ballet. We are also modelling interstellar molecular clouds, and though some of the detail in these (particularly for nebulae) will come after Alpha 4, wherever you are, the ‘night sky’ is accurate. Beyond our galaxy, perhaps surprisingly we do still have a ‘skydome’ - but it is now a staggering 100,000 light years away, containing all the other galaxies, including the Magellanic Clouds. That’s one heck of a draw distance…

If you go to Earth (not available to travel to in Alpha 4 – but you can see Sol in the galactic map), you’ll see our familiar constellations. In fact over 130,000 objects in the night sky – including all stars visible to the naked eye – are modelled. We can even show those joined-up Solar-centric constellations when viewed from elsewhere – which become stretched and distorted due to parallax. Want to travel to Orion’s belt and see what good old Sol looks like from there? Do it. Or just sit and marvel at the local sunrise (yes all the planets are moving too) over the rings and moons of a gas giant you’ve just found.



To achieve this, we start out with the precise locations all the known stars, exo-planets, celestial bodies and phenomena. Beyond that, procedural techniques are used in conjunction with real, ‘hard’ physics to model the other hundreds of billions of star systems – the star’s location, type, temperature, chemical compositions, what planetary systems there are, etc.

Each individual aspect of the vast galaxy is also represented with unprecedented visual fidelity, making the most of the latest lighting and ‘physically based rendering’ (PBR) pixel-shader techniques along with procedural algorithms that leverage our talented artists’ efforts.

You can seamlessly go from being pressed up close against an asteroid, thermal systems ‘buttoned down’ as you stalk your prey, to super-cruising at super-luminal speeds through a system to travelling through hyperspace across light years of galaxy.

And then there is the networking traffic which communicates the location, velocity and status of your and other players’ ship, bullets, missiles, lasers, heat-sinks, shields, current thermal profile, cargo, and of course all the AIs etc.

The sheer, raw scale of the galaxy means that even being able to accurately represent the position and vast scale of planetary objects, asteroids, ships, missiles and so on is a huge challenge in itself, requiring the use of very high numeric precision. The 32 bit tools and technology of the previous generation of computers and engines is simply not up to the job.

Being able to compute everything we need to, from the motions of those 400 billion star systems worth of stars, planets, moons, rings and asteroid fields, to the lazy whorls in a gas giant’s atmosphere and the precise self-shadowing surface detail of that small asteroid you are currently hiding behind, is a similarly Herculean task. As is fully communicating all the necessary information between players.

Beta 1 Date Announced

We are delighted to announced that development continues to go very well, and July 29th will be the date when we enter the standard Beta phase!

Over the next few weeks we will be outlining the fantastic new features and content that we will add to the Beta – it’s a huge release, so ‘watch this space’ for more information.

You can purchase access to the standard Beta phase. If you already have access to the full game, the correct discount will be automatically deducted when you check out.

Lifetime Expansion Pack - to be withdrawn from sale


Alpha and Premium Beta came with a whole lot more than early access to the game - the Lifetime Expansion pack that is included is a significant benefit of being an early backer of Elite: Dangerous.

We have regularly said that depending on the level of success of Elite: Dangerous we intend to continue expanding it with new content and new features.

We plan to follow that same incremental development philosophy that we’ve done throughout our Alpha and Beta phases, and continue to significantly enhance the game via further expansions post-launch.

We do intend to release small, free updates after launch, but expansions that include significant new features and content will be charged for separately. For example, our current roadmap is to add (in no particular order): •Landing/ driving / prospecting on airless rocky planets, moons & asteroids
•Walking around interiors and combative boarding of other ships
•Combat and other interactions with other players and AIs in the internal areas of star ports
•Accessing richly detailed planetary surfaces
•Availability of giant ‘executive control’ ships to players

Alpha and Premium Beta customers, and those who have already bought the £35 expansion pass alongside either Beta or the full game, will have access to all these features and updates for as long as we create them at no further cost.

This means that if we are as successful as we hope to be, you will still be benefiting from the fantastic early support you gave us for a long time to come.

As we are now fast approaching the standard Beta phase, the time is right to withdraw the Lifetime Expansion Pass from sale.

On 29th July the Lifetime Expansion Pack will no longer be available to buy in the store shop, to coincide with the start of full Beta.

So if you are planning to join the Beta or buy the final game and want to add the Lifetime Expansion Pack, you now have one month to get automatic access to all future major expansions of Elite: Dangerous for £35.

You can purchase the Lifetime Expansion Pack here.

Alternatively you can purchase or upgrade to Premium Beta and start playing Elite: Dangerous today, which includes the Lifetime Expansion Pack. Premium Beta will be available until 15th July, as we announced last week.

Each paid-for expansion will subsequently be put on sale separately (for people that don’t have the Lifetime Expansion Pack), before its release.

We are very close to the release of Beta 2 next Tuesday so this week we continue to highlight some of the features to come. We have also been at the Eurogamer Expo (EGX) in London’s Earls Court and are continuing to celebrate the 30th Anniversary of Elite.

There is another special GalNet bulletin with some shocking news from 3300. Many of you will have been following the extra bulletins this week, and we explain some of the background behind the events and how it is helping us with our plans for the evolving galaxy.

The Elite: Dangerous Mercenary Edition, a bonus pre-order game collection loaded with digital extras is now available to buy. The pack is listed on our store for new customers at a discounted price of £35.00 ($50 and €40) and anyone who has already pre-ordered the final release version of Elite: Dangerous (including those with Beta access and higher) will also receive the bonus pre-order collection when the game is released.

Beta 3.0 introduces a host of new features including: Multiple ship ownership, and the introduction of two new ships, the Imperial Clipper and the Federal Dropship. Player driven interdiction where players can interdict NPC ships out of supercruise and new Philanthropy missions have been added. Fuel scooping and asteroid mining have been added and outposts landing pads now reflect a low gravity environment.

The play area has been expanded to over 2,400 systems with an improved galaxy map. Planet visuals have been overhauled, ice planets have fracture features and all planets have dynamic ice caps and liquid levels. Plus many other improvements and optimisations.

Elite: Dangerous Development


From David Braben:

The team here have been doing an excellent job developing what is almost certainly the largest game ever created, with a framework of frequent publically released builds executed to such a high quality. It has been an amazing achievement. Their enthusiasm, professionalism and grace under pressure with which they have carried it out is to their eternal credit. I know for a fact they are spurred on in their efforts by the great reaction and enthusiasm you have shown for their work - as am I.

In addition to creating features and content, there has always been an amount of unseen, unglamorous but vital ‘work under the hood’ that has necessarily gone on as we optimize, refactor, fix and tweak to increase frame-rate, stability and general quality of experience. There is an even greater temporary emphasis on such tasks at the moment, to get the game ‘shippable’ with countless fixes, polish and tweaking and fewer features (although of course we still have some surprises left up our sleeves for you leading up to the 16th December!).

Also, as those of you have followed us from the start know, we have some grand plans for the future.

After the 16th December we will continue to update with more polish and content such as the playable ships we committed to in our Kickstarter campaign – in fact I’m delighted to be able to tell you that we are now planning to eventually have 30 playable ships in Elite: Dangerous, 5 more than we committed to in Kickstarter. And most exciting of all, we will start the work on a longer term roadmap that includes getting you up out of your pilot’s seats and out of your starships.

These additional features will come post-launch, as we have always planned. That is solely because we want to make sure it is done correctly and to a quality we are proud of and that matches the other aspects of what we plan to be an incredible experience that we will deliver on 16th December.

We will continue to fully and openly engage with you.

Continuing to grow the game past the launch date as we plan would just not be possible at all with the constraints of physical disc manufacture and distribution, and is made possible only by the online nature of Elite: Dangerous.

When we set out on this journey, our ambition was to make Elite: Dangerous as large a technical step forward today as Elite and Frontier were in their time. The way the game embraces and pushes forward the online aspects of technology has been a particularly exciting aspect of that for me.

The basic fact of being able to interact online with our community during development has been tremendous. Just as in a film, based on feedback some of the things we originally thought would work have been left ‘on the cutting room floor’. We have also added unplanned features which I think are fundamentally key to the experience, and have made the game all the better. For example shifting design emphasis towards fantastic major new features such as supercruise, outposts and multiple ship ownership, to name just a few.


We have also been able to create a connected experience which lets you play your own story whilst in a dynamic, ever unfolding galaxy that is constantly reacting to what you and every other player is doing, be that trading, combat, exploration or missions. This has become fundamental to the whole experience.

Going forwards, being online lets us constantly both curate and evolve the galaxy, with stories unfolding according to the actions of commanders. Exploration is also a key factor, too, and it is important that what a single player explores matches what other players explore whether single or multiplayer – a complex, coherent world – something we have achieved. Galaxy, story, missions, have to match, and it does mean the single player has to connect to the server from time to time, but this has the added advantage that everyone can participate in the activities that can happen in the galaxy. A fully offline experience would be unacceptably limited and static compared to the dynamic, ever unfolding experience we are delivering.

If you were able to offer me on the 3rd January 2013 what we will deliver on the 16th December 2014, I would have grabbed it with both hands. It is fantastic what the team have done, and are still doing – a phenomenal job.

I’m really looking forward to meeting those of you who are able to come to the Premiere event on 22nd November to help celebrate that achievement, and thanking you for helping to make this possible.

And more importantly, I’m looking forward to seeing you and many, many more out in space on the 16th December and for a long time afterwards.

Right on, Commanders.

Elite: Dangerous 1.1 is out now. New features in 1.1 include city lights on the dark side of planets, community goals, an updated trade route planner, and more. Visit www.elitedangerous.com for more information.

Rock Band 4 is coming, Kojima says he’s done with Metal Gear Solid, and Elite: Dangerous will be Xbox One exclusive, but not forever.