Elite: Dangerous

[Sir T]

I always mishear 'Frameshift Drive,' so in the middle of that with all the sounds for engines warming up and the hull shaking and the demons being whipped into pulling with all their might, I hear;

"Attention Carrier crew. Friendship Drive engaged."

And I just laughed out loud.

[Tale]

I've made it back to the Bubble, cradle of humanity.

A note from our bus driver:

A huge thank you to all Sleeper Service passengers. If I'm counting right we had more than 40 commanders on board today. This honestly is the most fun I've had in Elite Dangerous.

We formed a community for a few days on Discord while he carried us through space. He'll do it all again next week.

I'm now in a position to play the content of the upcoming expansion, but in the meantime (after a bit of a break) I plan to work on building and engineering a PvE combat vessel or two. No plans to leave the Bubble ever again anytime soon.

[Trippy]

What made this trip more fun for him than his other ones?

[Sir T]

Probably this set of passangers actually talked to him and had a few laughs

I was very surprised to learn that Carriers appear to have no cockpit view. They couldn't even bolt on another ships cockpit so you could sit in your ship while it slowly penetrates the galactic Barrier? Bad form.

[Tale]

What made this trip more fun for him than his other ones?

I think because he had far more passengers than ever before. Heaps of fleet carrier owners are busy playing the alpha for the expansion, so those of us stuck out in the black needing a ride home were concentrated into this one fleet carrier. In gaming terms, it's good use of a sandbox. He (we) created fun content and his Discord announcements were quality.

=== @💤Sleeper Service passengers announcement  ===

I hope you have all had the chance to enjoy the Collection of Wonders. In 30 minutes we will depart non-stop for the Bubble, with an ETA of 15:00.

For a jump-by-jump schedule for today's journey, please see here: https://www.notion.so/Colonia-Skaude-AA-A-h294-Collection-of-Wonders-LHS-2687-Bubble-2e4a479f4f6447cc9be9a2d4f05e9223

For other schedules, tourist information, forthcoming trips and more, please see the main Sleeper Service passenger information page here: https://www.notion.so/jonedwards/Sleeper-Service-H2T-LHV-passenger-information-e9e09a8fbfb64cc292522c653d1ea6cb

X - If you would prefer to not be pinged with travel updates, please react to this post with X and I will remove your "Sleeper Service passengers" server role.

=== Announcement ends ===

I'm so excited to be able to do things in the bubble for the first time in two years (been out at Beagle Point). My other ships must be rusty by now. This is like an actual long haul flight home.

On behalf of the crew I apologise that you have to remain in your ship. Brewer Corporation and their parent company FDev did not include on-foot amenities in their carrier specifications, and apparently have no intention of doing so. A complaint has been filed.

Welcome to the Bubble. We've reached our destination system, LHS 2867 - the home system of the Fleet Carrier Owners Club. We have arrived 20 minutes behind schedule, owing to a server error. I apologise for any inconvenience.

I’m reminded of the time I flew ANA to Japan and the checkout counter opened 10 minutes late. The entire staff came out to bow in apology. Perfection is a good standard to pursue, but doubt anyone else is bothered :laughing:

I work full time and have children; if I know I have 30 minutes to game in between RL things, I want reliable timetables!

[01101010]

Should have named the carrier Mr Bones' Wild Ride. 

[Tale]

One passenger wondered if we were actually going to end up in a space gulag. Another misunderstood that as goulash. International crowd...

[Tale]

Odyssey expansion to launch on May 19.

[Riggswolfe]

I have Elite and logged all of an hour of it. It just felt...overwhelming. Which is weird because I used to love Space Sim games like Wing Commander and such. I also got the feeling that if you want to be good you A) need a joystick or controller (I think I have some spare Xbox One controllers I could plug in?) and B) practically have to treat it like a 2nd job.

[Sky]

Should have named the carrier Mr Bones' Wild Ride. 

steverogersgotthatreference.gif

[Falconeer]

I have Elite and logged all of an hour of it. It just felt...overwhelming. Which is weird because I used to love Space Sim games like Wing Commander and such. I also got the feeling that if you want to be good you A) need a joystick or controller (I think I have some spare Xbox One controllers I could plug in?) and B) practically have to treat it like a 2nd job.

Not really. Mouse and keyboard works great. It could be a matter of finding the right setup for you, which at this point in life could feel like a chore. But they work great, better than a controller for sure in my case.

[Tale]

I have Elite and logged all of an hour of it. It just felt...overwhelming. Which is weird because I used to love Space Sim games like Wing Commander and such. I also got the feeling that if you want to be good you A) need a joystick or controller (I think I have some spare Xbox One controllers I could plug in?) and B) practically have to treat it like a 2nd job.

On a popular PvE tactics website they've devised an improved mouse and keyboard layout you can download and tweak.

I've been using keyboard and mouse since I started. You definitely don't need a joystick or a controller. That said, now that I'm getting into PvE instead of exploration, I'm thinking of getting a cheap HOTAS.

To me, the reason Elite Dangerous feels overwhelming is that they've actually pulled off "you are just one human being in a giant galaxy". You have to choose your own paths. Unlike most sandboxes, you cannot be a completionist even if you make it your second job, so aim small.

[Rendakor]

I played it fine with a keyboard and mouse, but only put about 20 hours in. I didn't do a lot of combat, though.

[rattran]

I did quite a bit of pirate hunting when I started as a way to make money, as I found mining horrible and tedious. Switched from my old hotas setup to keyboard and mouse, and found it overall better.

[Tale]

BTW there's a New Pilots Initiative, a group that assigns you an in-game mentor to help with the learning curve.

Other famous player groups include the Fuel Rats, a rescue refuelling service (you can run out if you are careless) whose motto is "we have fuel, you don't - any questions?". And the Hull Seals, who will fly to your location and do repairs if your ship has taken severe damage.

[Count Nerfedalot]

This is the keyboard layout I started with. I've tweaked a couple things, but it's mostly the same. I still have to keep the picture up on the other monitor while I'm playing though, I'm too old anymore to remember all that!

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=478686362

[Tale]

The community's favourite YouTuber reviews the expansion alpha. Good video with honest thoughts. If you can't spare 15 minutes: "an average update with potential to be great" is his summary. "Feels like a freshly-laid foundation with just a functional house built on it, which isn't actually fully built yet". Best parts are apparently the new-look planets and seeing the sheer scale of the ships when you're on foot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5mp2qOZslE

[Trippy]

OA needs to stop deepthroating his mic. This is the first time I've watched one of his video and I had to stop watching after a couple of minutes because of his abuse of the proximity effect.

[Tale]

Haha. I like his radio voice. He gets $1/month from me on Patreon. (edit) He looks nothing like he sounds!

[Trippy]

Yeah I get why people do it but it's literally causing a low frequency rumble on my monitor speakers. He needs a high pass filter / bass rolloff on his mic / EQ setup and he'll still get the Howard Stern / "voice of god" effect, just not as rumbly for people who are listening on good speakers / headphones.

[Sky]

The irony of everyone being able to create is that few know the skills.

I'm rusty through disuse over the past 20 years, but we were taught in studio engineering school to test our mixing process through any setup we could get our hands on. On a field trip to one instructor's home studio, he showed us his 'listening room', which had a really sweet audiophile hifi setup. But he also had walkmans (walkmen?), boomboxes, cheap consumer electronics. Back then one of the most important places to check a mix was in a Honda Civic. If it can sound good on crap, the people can enjoy it.

But as you point out, it can also develop your ears to find problems that exist outside your personal studio setup.

I get a similar issue in Rocksmith CDLC with people who don't play bass and just slap a generic tone (usually with tons of distortion or the bass sliders cranked) on the bass track. On my system with a beefy sub, it will wake up the neighborhood with unintended bass waves.

Sorry to pursue the digression, pet peeve (one which I've probably committed many times due to my general level of laziness, and probably my young punk nature of wanting to make an audiophile's setup sound like a boom box had recorded the track live in a garage)

[Tale]

Player-made music video from the Odyssey alpha (for an original song)... one player made the video, another player wrote the song and it's his daughter singing.

[Falconeer]

I think you linked the wrong video

[Tale]

I linked the right video.

Edit: In fact, here's another one - from the 2019 expedition I documented my return from in this thread. Another original song by the father and daughter (Tom Cook and Heli), with a different video maker.

[Falconeer]

Those are really cool.

[Tale]

OFFICIAL TRAILER: Elite Dangerous Odyssey

Releasing May 19 on PC.

[koro]

Odyssey is an absolute shitshow. Do not under any circumstances buy this for at least a few months.

The new UI is a disaster and makes it much more difficult to do basic things quickly, like change out modules on your ship or even see what's currently equipped onto it. Performance varies wildly, even among systems with similar hardware. Crashes are super common. The rendering on planets is busted and atmospheric planets are being rendered like barren moons, which also removes buildings and tech that you're there to look for. Team play is also pretty busted, with unfixable desyncing being the norm, preventing you from seeing your group mates, not that it matters since team-based ground missions were disabled some time between announcement and release. And on top of it all, a lot of missions are bugged and try to send you from the bubble to Colonia, over 22,000 LY away. There's also bugs that are nuking your engineering materials, replacing them with only what you looted in the previous session, undoing hours of grinding.

Very disappointing. I was really excited for this but didn't keep myself in the loop on news about it, otherwise I'd have canceled my order for it when I saw that it was going from "Alpha" to "release" in the span of two weeks.

[Tale]

I've managed to time a family holiday for Odyssey release week, so all I've done is watch YouTube videos and read reddit about the poor launch. The videos of Horizons (previous client) vs Odyssey show some horrible graphical bugs affecting shaders and lighting, especially inside space stations which used to be beautiful.

I did preorder however and I'm happy to have done so, because I've played the absolute shit out of this game and paid no subscription fee.

I understand you can still log into the Horizons client even if you own Odyssey. You select it from the launcher. This is because they're keeping people without the expansion separate from those with it, so the intention is that if you want to instance with someone who doesn't have Odyssey, you log into Horizons. Hopefully that can be used to get around the mess until they fix it.

It seemed pretty silly to go from an alpha to release on the PC because we're clearly now paying for a beta while they ready it for Playstation and Xbox.

[Samprimary]

Anything in this universe capable of actually making elite dangerous' ship loadout interface worse and harder to navigate than it already was is unholy enough to deserves its own SCP entry

[Tale]

Got home from my holiday and played 2 hours of Odyssey in solo. It was.... absolutely fine?

I liked the tutorial. You log into the game as you normally would, but the Odyssey tutorial happens like a cutscene before your usual commander and ship loads. You run a first-person shooter type mission on a planet's surface, then an NPC flies you to another planet with good scenery, then you're back being your usual commander at wherever you left off.

I'm running a 3070 as an eGPU attached to a Dell XPS laptop. The ground game ran at about 40fps, dropping to 30fps occasionally. Space flight by comparison runs at 120fps and can go higher (I set a 120fps limit).

I had no crashes and no funky lighting or textures. Everything looked great, including the new planet terrain. Space seemed a bit too dark, but it was prettier than it used to be. I had one slowdown after talking to a mission giver on foot in a starport... everything dropped to about 10 fps until I talked to another mission giver. I was then restored to 30-40fps.

I flew to another starport and was disappointed to get the same starport layout when on foot. But it is extremely cool after all this time to walk away from your ship in the hangar, into the space station elevator, seeing the space traffic outside the window.

I've a lot more to try, but it feels like a complex first-person shooter-style ground game added to an already immense spaceflight game. The style of gameplay on the ground seems the same as in space: sandbox with missions to run, collecting materials for suit and weapon engineering, and doing exploration for rewards. I'm not particularly inspired to do that just yet, as I'm engineering my spaceships and equipping to do both PvE bounty hunting and Thargoid fighting. But it genuinely felt like I was playing an upgraded version of Elite Dangerous, with better graphics and more to do.

[Tale]

"Review" of Odyssey by Elite Dangerous comedy YouTuber Yamiks. He used to be a hardcore Planetside 2 player. His normal attitude is to slam everything, which he does here, but it's also a commentary on the bad things that have happened with launch.

My take is that all this is leading to a Thargoid-fighting ground game. Because Odyssey is a Horizons-esque on-foot version of Elite Dangerous (i.e. original game plus engineering, with on-foot versions of PvE, PvP, exploration, trading, bounty hunting, etc). In the background to launch, the Thargoids have attacked again in space. Thargoid models have been found in the Odyssey client. There are existing Thargoid bases that feel like FPS shooter bases (until now we've driven around them in SRVs or flown into them in small ships). I think they're trying to get a fully functioning on-foot version of Elite Dangerous working alongside the space game, whereupon the Thargoids will invade on the ground as well as in space.

I also think the reason for Exobiology being the non-violent part of the ground game, featuring botany only, is that the insectoid Thargoids are all about plants. Their spaceships are organic and look like flowers. Their bases are similar plant-like technology. They grow plants on planet surfaces to refuel their ships. There has to be some kind of plan where the botany in Odyssey meets the Thargoid plant-based technology, perhaps as a way to fight them. Humanity probably loses and loses and loses, and then we figure out we can use the plants against them, and off we go harvesting alien plants that do different things. Either that or there's no method to Braben's madness, and I doubt that.

[01101010]

"Review" of Odyssey by Elite Dangerous comedy YouTuber Yamiks. He used to be a hardcore Planetside 2 player. His normal attitude is to slam everything, which he does here, but it's also a commentary on the bad things that have happened with launch.

My take is that all this is leading to a Thargoid-fighting ground game. Because Odyssey is a Horizons-esque on-foot version of Elite Dangerous (i.e. original game plus engineering, with on-foot versions of PvE, PvP, exploration, trading, bounty hunting, etc). In the background to launch, the Thargoids have attacked again in space. Thargoid models have been found in the Odyssey client. There are existing Thargoid bases that feel like FPS shooter bases (until now we've driven around them in SRVs or flown into them in small ships). I think they're trying to get a fully functioning on-foot version of Elite Dangerous working alongside the space game, whereupon the Thargoids will invade on the ground as well as in space.

I also think the reason for Exobiology being the non-violent part of the ground game, featuring botany only, is that the insectoid Thargoids are all about plants. Their spaceships are organic and look like flowers. Their bases are similar plant-like technology. They grow plants on planet surfaces to refuel their ships. There has to be some kind of plan where the botany in Odyssey meets the Thargoid plant-based technology, perhaps as a way to fight them. Humanity probably loses and loses and loses, and then we figure out we can use the plants against them, and off we go harvesting alien plants that do different things. Either that or there's no method to Braben's madness, and I doubt that.

BOOOOOOOONG..... the Yamiks is still at it. He's a bit like OA, doesn't look like how he sounds.

[Tale]

BOOOOOOOONG..... the Yamiks is still at it. He's a bit like OA, doesn't look like how he sounds.

Yamiks four days ago in one of his other videos. He's from Latvia.

[Tale]

A player who claims to be a graphics engineer did a thorough investigation into what's wrong with the rendering in Odyssey. Some pretty fundamental and obvious stuff slowing it down even on a 3090, but the investigator reckons it can be fixed.

Also, it turns out that Frontier's year end in their financial calendar is 31 May. That's why this thing had an inflexible ship date.

There are many people having good experiences, posting awesome screenshots of how the planets look now (in addition to a few bugged-looking screenshots). There's a thread.

[koro]

Today's hotfix fixed most of my problems I've been having with Odyssey. Some tweaks to the module management UI and fixing the awful multiplayer desync and I'll be happy.