Elite: Dangerous

[Foliage]

Im on single monitor, don't think id want to use more than 1 tbh.

Im also using keyboard and mouse & I prefer it due to the 6 degrees of freedom, im not sure how competitive it will be in pvp though as ive that pvp needs the pilot to switch off the flight computer which ive not tried yet. I cant see how a hotas would have an advantage over keyboard and mouse.

I have an mmo mouse and have setup all directional controls onto the mouse, this does have a couple of limitation that Ive yet to iron out, as my thumb controls vertical & horizontal movement and yaw & can only really press 1 button at a time. But then you only have so many fingers.

[Bullett]

I've not played but I'll be picking up a HOTAS in December (because.... oooh shiney)
and because I have a Rift so it will be my only option.

Does it support something like an xbox controller?

[Foliage]

Bullett said:

I've not played but I'll be picking up a HOTAS in December (because.... oooh shiney)
and because I have a Rift so it will be my only option.

Does it support something like an xbox controller?

yeah it does but not sure it would have enough buttons, I have 20+ buttons bound on my keyboard, none of which are for flying (you need 2/3 sets of direction controls to fly + accel/decal, yaw, pitch, roll, thrust left/right, thrust up/down & thrust forward/back), I use 10ish of them in combat (cap transfer, targeting, afterburner, weapon group switch, primary and secondary fire, flight computer on/off, target sub-systems, heatsink, chaff etc) im not sure a controller would have enough buttons.

Edited by Foliage on Tuesday 18th November 16:38

[motorizer]

David Braben has done a Q&A on the forums today, including some answers about cutting offline mode and what happens if they shut the server, I guess he had to with all the fuss that's arising....

David Braben said:

We have no intention of taking the servers down, but I understand what you are getting at. We plan to archive the game from time to time (ie matching client and servers and game world state), and would release such an archive if the servers were to come down. That would also address the issue of how you preserve an online game for the future, from the whole 'retro' perspective.

[weyland yutani]

How will trading work in the final game? The videos I've seen involves taking your sweet time to land at a space station only to buy/sell commodities in a boring, plain hud window for a few seconds before taking off again.

[JustinF]

weyland yutani said:

How will trading work in the final game? The videos I've seen involves taking your sweet time to land at a space station only to buy/sell commodities in a boring, plain hud window for a few seconds before taking off again.

There's talk of first person perspective, out of ship, face to face dealings with NPC to barter good/deal black market. I'd imagine it's a long way down the priority list though, they've got 'sexier' stuff to do first like planetary landings & atmosphere processing.
Player to player direct trading would be awesome too.

edit to add, great user name, ' I'll go. I mean, I'm the only one qualified to remote-pilot the ship anyway. ' seems appropriate

Edited by JustinF on Tuesday 18th November 20:33

[HiAsAKite]

Foliage said:

First generation (ie 6-7year old) i7 (D0 bloomfield?) here overclocked though and with a GTX770 and 12gig of corsair dominator ram. elite on max settings. 144hz monitor I generally see 100fps.

Latest i5's are quadcore & 64bit I think, but I think the reference to quad core is reference to a specific chip anything newer than that would do the job (i3 etc), Im not sure if elite runs over multiple cores, if it does it wont be more than 2 I wouldn't think.

Also the version of the game that is beta 3 could be very old (6 months old), the game on release will be optimised and run better.

Beta 3 appears to be just checking for exploits & checking game mechanics of new modules, final release will likely be a tad different. Do we get a character creator, proper naming, grouping in open play systems etc etc etc? these are things that might be in the final release.

Edited by Foliage on Tuesday 18th November 09:42

Just add, and provide perspective, my set-up gives 30-37fps in normal flight, c 25 near to stations, 13-19inside stations, and in dense asteroid fields can drop to c8 (which is no good for combat)

To make a major difference on this,would probably put my money into a desktop as opposed to laptop..

[deckster]

JustinF said:

weyland yutani said:

How will trading work in the final game? The videos I've seen involves taking your sweet time to land at a space station only to buy/sell commodities in a boring, plain hud window for a few seconds before taking off again.

There's talk of first person perspective, out of ship, face to face dealings with NPC to barter good/deal black market.

Blimey, I hope they don't do this. Tedious cut-screens every time I want to look at the bulletin board? No thanks. It's bad enough when you go to the outfitters and it insists on making you watch the ship move into the hangar. I'm absolutely not a fan of anything that gets in the way of the actual gameplay and to be fair they seem to have got it pretty well bang on so far.

JustinF said:

Player to player direct trading would be awesome too.

Now this would be fantastic.

[Foliage]

Trading I find is better than eve in the respect that it has far more risk, you can be interdicted in any system anywhere or you can crash in the station and lose it all. I can understand the wanting to barter & make things more interesting and the addition of market pvp would be very welcome I think.

Outfitters Id like to see the ability to browse and add stuff to 'basket' without having to go inside the hanger but when it comes to fitting the items the ship goes into the hanger, and it could perhaps be a little faster.

Edited by Foliage on Wednesday 19th November 09:30

[JustinF]

And high speed docking so they don't have time to scan and fine you

[scorp]

anonymous said:

[redacted]

There are random encounters, ship upgrades, faction wars, exploration, etc... Somewhat similar to a mmorpg. It's hard to tell from the BETA as content is missing.

[RobGT81]

Direct player to player trading confirmed, which is nice.

[RichTT]

Foliage said:

yeah it does but not sure it would have enough buttons, I have 20+ buttons bound on my keyboard, none of which are for flying (you need 2/3 sets of direction controls to fly + accel/decal, yaw, pitch, roll, thrust left/right, thrust up/down & thrust forward/back), I use 10ish of them in combat (cap transfer, targeting, afterburner, weapon group switch, primary and secondary fire, flight computer on/off, target sub-systems, heatsink, chaff etc) im not sure a controller would have enough buttons.

Edited by Foliage on Tuesday 18th November 16:38

I played the initial part of Beta 2 with my Xbox controller. The only thing I had to reach the keyboard for was the shortcut to enter/exit the hyperdrive. There are a lot more buttons than you expect on a pad including combo presses etc.

[Baron Greenback]

Elite Kickstarter dont think ever had offline in game and completed all start up fundning. Only after lots of people wanting to have an offline mode they said they will look into it! It was always advertised as a mmo game, think offline would spoil the game.

[Foliage]

anonymous said:

[redacted]

my understanding is that Kickstarters are a business proposal and that the proposed features are just that, proposed. Their are no guarantee's.

BUT if you use Archeage as a good example a large proportion of people got refunds due to them announcing a 10% discount that never materialised, so while you may not get a refund from frontier it may be possible to use uk law and your bank to do you bidding and get your money back.

[Guvernator]

If they definitely stated that it was going to have an offline mode then despite the get out clause that no features are guaranteed, it's still a bit of a kick in teeth. Personally I don't mind games which require online, I don't really see how else you can do an mmo game without it and we live in a modern country where you can get a decent internet connection almost anywhere so that shouldn't really be an issue.

The only real issue I have with online only games is that they keep taking the servers down for maintenance, updates or issues. Surely in this day and age there should be no need to take a service down for this kind of stuff, have they not heard of resilient systems in the gaming world?

[Baron Greenback]

Guvernator said:

The only real issue I have with online only games is that they keep taking the servers down for maintenance, updates or issues.

This is in beta development! This is one of the best beta game I have played for down time and if when down time occurs its not long down! If you don't like down time in server dont buy into beta games!

[Foliage]

Guvernator said:

The only real issue I have with online only games is that they keep taking the servers down for maintenance, updates or issues. Surely in this day and age there should be no need to take a service down for this kind of stuff, have they not heard of resilient systems in the gaming world?

Its unlikely that after the 16th December it will come down for more than an hour or 2 once a week and that will be likely to be outside of all (most) timezones prime time (3-5am gmt ish)

There are no such thing as resilient systems in the gaming world due to the nature of the having to balance and patch exploits BUT gw2 is capable of being hot patched, the servers can be patched while live and then players receive the patch when they log out and back in, frontier may have put a similar system in place in their final build but its highly unlikely.

[Guvernator]

Foliage said:

Its unlikely that after the 16th December it will come down for more than an hour or 2 once a week and that will be likely to be outside of all (most) timezones prime time (3-5am gmt ish)

There are no such thing as resilient systems in the gaming world due to the nature of the having to balance and patch exploits BUT gw2 is capable of being hot patched, the servers can be patched while live and then players receive the patch when they log out and back in, frontier may have put a similar system in place in their final build but its highly unlikely.

No such thing as resilient systems in the gaming world? The gaming world run there games on server farms, just like any other large organisation. I work in the IT industry and put these kinds of things together. I think my banking clients would find it very amusing if I told them I had to take their systems down for a few hours every few weeks to patch the servers. This technology has been available for quite a while too. It's very easy to build almost 100% uptime into any system, the industry standard is 5 nines (99.999%) which is near as dammit to 100% that it doesn't make a difference.

Peak demand\high load making servers slow\unreliable is also another unforgiveable area considering you can spin extra server capacity up and down as user load dictates in seconds these days. Large online internet companies like Amazon et manage to cope with fluctuating user traffic\load by using this technology.

For an alleged technology led sector, the gaming industry appears to be living in the dark ages sometimes. Rather worrying when with the massive push these days to online only. I also play Destiny, another online only game. It was down for 4 hours the other day, right in the middle of the evening prime playing time "for updates". Very poor to be honest.

[Bullett]

Cost vs benefits I would imagine.

The costs of designing a system that never goes down would outweigh the benefits it offered in gaming. We don't agree a service level with the game providers and I doubt anyone would pay the extra to get that level of support.
Most of the time if you go to play a game and it's not available you go play something else. Annoying but ultimately no big deal.

They should plan updates at non-peak times though. That is inexcusable.