Elite: Dangerous Discussion

[Det.Bullock]

Thrustmaster HOTAS X that is throttle and stick are one piece.

You can actually split them apart and the cable between them is a reasonable length. I would definitely recommend one before buying anything else more expensive if you’re only thinking of dipping your feet into the waters. I had one for ages before I upgraded to the TCWS with throttle and pedals. Don’t use the pedals for ED though.

Better get a Logitech 3D Pro or a standalone T-16000 and add a TCWS throttle later, the HOTAS X has less controls (it’s basically a PS3 gamepad shaped like a HOTAS) and that huge throttle lever is useless with older games and there is no programmability out of the box.

[Wednesday]

Can some one round out the exploration changes and what they’re like to actually play?

[Blackcompany]

Boring.

The FSS scanner is now required to find bodies in a system. It’s a low effort, tacked on 2D phone game style mini game. Its fiddly and cumbersome to control, boring and repetitive to use and ensures I will never leave the bubble again, as its mercifully unnecessary there. The FSS can also be used to locate USS, as they are now persistent, but you must be in Cruise, at a standstill, and cannot see your cockpit. Its basically Sitting Duck mode.

The DSS now requires a separate HUD mode, in which weapons do not work. Bind a key to toggle modes. Its incredibly tedious. The DSS now fires probes at planets. No ammo/limits, but probes use a cumbersome, finicky control method (and yet another screen unrelated to flight) to map a planet. It’s really a tedium filled timesink.

All in all, Exploration is cumbersome, fiddly and tedious, almost completely divorced from piloting a ship and has little to do with actually exploring star systems. Colossal disappointment.

[riesje]

The FSS can also be used to locate USS, as they are now persistent, but you must be in Cruise, at a standstill, and cannot see your cockpit. Its basically Sitting Duck mode.

jup this annoyed the hell out me when I first started trying it out. Of course I also got interdicted the moment I entered FSS mode, so it automaticly submitted to interdiction. I wonder if this was really the design philosophy behind this. Also lets make another screen outside the SC mode, why not in SC mode itself?

What it basicly boils down to is more hoops to jump through to get to the same content.

[Det.Bullock]

Boring.

The FSS scanner is now required to find bodies in a system. It’s a low effort, tacked on 2D phone game style mini game. Its fiddly and cumbersome to control, boring and repetitive to use and ensures I will never leave the bubble again, as its mercifully unnecessary there. The FSS can also be used to locate USS, as they are now persistent, but you must be in Cruise, at a standstill, and cannot see your cockpit. Its basically Sitting Duck mode.

The DSS now requires a separate HUD mode, in which weapons do not work. Bind a key to toggle modes. Its incredibly tedious. The DSS now fires probes at planets. No ammo/limits, but probes use a cumbersome, finicky control method (and yet another screen unrelated to flight) to map a planet. It’s really a tedium filled timesink.

All in all, Exploration is cumbersome, fiddly and tedious, almost completely divorced from piloting a ship and has little to do with actually exploring star systems. Colossal disappointment.

No, you don’t need to lose hours to have a celestial body marked as “discovered by you” which is a great quality of life improvement and most of all no more trips of hours to scan that remote star in a binary system or just want to know if that landable body has the stuff you need.

Besides having to tune up to a sensor signal is one of the most sci fi things they could come up with and I love it, though it probably helps that I have an extra throttle axis on my joystick that could be configured as the tune axis which makes the process more immersive.

Can some one round out the exploration changes and what they’re like to actually play?

Very interesting, you don’t need to get up and close to claim a discovery now and can scan an entire system in a few moments instead of hours, if you want extra cash and an extra “first mapped” claim you can go up close and fire probes at planets which is also usable to identify points of interest on landable bodies.
Overall I find exploration much more interesting, and the possibility of having points of interest marked from orbit is a godsend, I was able to identify a single sulfur geiser field on a huge ringed planet, with the old esplorations mechanics it would have never been possible.
Hell, just the possibility of identifying remote Earthlikes and terraformable without losing heaps of time to get close enough to them for a surface scan is a massive improvement.

In short: it’s more involved but also more snappy, you can scan an average system (star plus ten or so planets) in less than a half minute and know instantly if something is worth getting close for detailed mapping.

Only thing is that you’ll probably have to map all the new controls manually and it took me a couple of attempts to map everything I needed to use the new mechanics properly.

The FSS can also be used to locate USS, as they are now persistent, but you must be in Cruise, at a standstill, and cannot see your cockpit. Its basically Sitting Duck mode.

jup this annoyed the hell out me when I first started trying it out. Of course I also got interdicted the moment I entered FSS mode, so it automaticly submitted to interdiction. I wonder if this was really the design philosophy behind this. Also lets make another screen outside the SC mode, why not in SC mode itself?

What it basicly boils down to is more hoops to jump through to get to the same content.

You forget that previously the same content required much more time, because the new sensor mechanics basically allow you to do the equivalent of the old surface scan (reveals material and claims first discovery if the body was unclaimed) without having to get close to the planet and authomatically scans any star in the system this way.
You need to get close only if you want the “first mapped” claim along the normal “discovered by” or want to identify points of interest on landable bodies.

But then again I never tried them in a populated system, I’m now about half-way to the galaxy core mapping all the Earth-likes I discovered during my travels plus a few choice locations.

[Dave_L]

What Bullock said. Exploration is about a 1000x faster than it was and actually fun. Jump into a system, honk while skimming the star with the fuel scoop to get a count of how many bodies there are, throttle down and switch to FSS and check the frequencies if there are any valuable or interesting planets, if yes: scan 'em, if no: jump again. If they’re really interesting (Earthlikes, water worlds, whatever), take the time to fly over and map them. Heck, you even instantly know if the system has been explored before or not because all previously discovered planets show up in the system list before you even honk, now.

You also still passively scan in a pretty decent radius around you, and larger for USS and Asteroid Clusters, so if you’re in the Bubble looking for USS you can still just fly around in the system for a couple of minutes and you’ll probably find them.

For someone who is always complaining about how tedious flying around in supercruise is, it’s real weird that you’re so mad about a feature that removes the need for about 90% of that tedium.

Of course we’re probably another two weeks from you’re quarterly I QUIT ELITE FOREVER DAVID BRABEN IS A TALENTLESS HACK WHO DOESN’T KNOW HOW TO PROGRAM AND FRONTIER IS GOING TO BE OUT OF BUSINESS IN SIX MONTHS posts, so whatever.

[Blackcompany]

Agreed.

That was the worst part for me: There is STILL nothing new to actually FIND out there. No reason or purpose to explore beyond generating screen shots. And certainly nothing new to interact with. But hey, lets tack on a mobile phone style mini game to make you jump through more hoops to figure all that out, and CALL it content.

This game is doomed. Its no wonder its not profitable enough to avoid maintenance mode as fdev move on this year to new titles once again. With content like this and barren, brown rocks, I will be surprised if the servers are still powered on in 2021. I mean, I would love to see a change of direction - beginning with firing Braben and Sock Man - and a complete turnaround. But lets face it: corporate culture at fdev is Minimum Viable Product focused, so, thats not going to happen. Fortunately, it looks like Double Damage is making an actual GAME in space, complete with fun, interactive mechanics, so there is that.

[Blackcompany]

Ahh, relying on personal insults to try and invalidate my opinion. Hope you feel about your life. Based on your reply, you could use a boost.

Frankly, I am happy that you like it. I actually gave it an honest try, but…yeah, this added nothing. Just created more obstacles between us and the already lackluster amount of content in this glorified tech demo. So by all means, enjoy it. Dont let me stop you. Glad you are getting your money’s worth.

[Det.Bullock]

Agreed.

That was the worst part for me: There is STILL nothing new to actually FIND out there. No reason or purpose to explore beyond generating screen shots. And certainly nothing new to interact with. But hey, lets tack on a mobile phone style mini game to make you jump through more hoops to figure all that out, and CALL it content.

This game is doomed. Its no wonder its not profitable enough to avoid maintenance mode as fdev move on this year to new titles once again. With content like this and barren, brown rocks, I will be surprised if the servers are still powered on in 2021. I mean, I would love to see a change of direction - beginning with firing Braben and Sock Man - and a complete turnaround. But lets face it: corporate culture at fdev is Minimum Viable Product focused, so, thats not going to happen. Fortunately, it looks like Double Damage is making an actual GAME in space, complete with fun, interactive mechanics, so there is that.

Or it’s just that their exploration is more something for astronomy nerds rather than something more immediate?
I still remember finding my first gas dwarf (a gas giant that is basically only slightly bigger than a normal rocky planet) and googling that yes, they are something that might exist. Or the time that I had to travel to a carbon star.

Keep in mind that I’d probably prefer RGO overall but the level of nerdy stuff in Elite is largely what keeps me exploring.

[Dave_L]

Ahh, relying on personal insults to try and invalidate my opinion. Hope you feel about your life. Based on your reply, you could use a boost.

Uhhh. How is “I QUIT ELITE FOREVER DAVID BRABEN IS A TALENTLESS HACK WHO DOESN’T KNOW HOW TO PROGRAM AND FRONTIER IS GOING TO BE OUT OF BUSINESS IN SIX MONTHS” anything but an accurate representation of your posting history in this thread. Especially since in your post IMMEDIATELY BEFORE THIS ONE you say

This game is doomed. Its no wonder its not profitable enough to avoid maintenance mode as fdev move on this year to new titles once again. …I will be surprised if the servers are still powered on in 2021. …firing Braben and Sock Man.

I didn’t call you a troll or an idiot who doesn’t know anything about software and game development. I just said the gist of things that you’ve posted in this thread with remarkable regularity for well over a year now.

It’s also funny how in January last year you said you wanted to be able to scan planets for POI, now that system exists and your reaction is ‘this sucks and I hate it.’

You don’t like the game? Fine. You do you. You’ve made your opinion more than clear. Stop playing it. But if you’re going to continue to hate play it, stop threadshitting about it. Quite a few of us are playing it, and enjoying it, and like having a thread where we can talk and/or read about cool stuff that we’ve found or done in it.

[riesje]

fail to see how someone else giving his opinion about a game should be considered “threadshitting” (learned a new word today), You seem awfully fixated about a person’s posting habits, wich is weird since he doesnt post that much.

[Det.Bullock]

fail to see how someone else giving his opinion about a game should be considered “threadshitting” (learned a new word today), You seem awfully fixated about a person’s posting habits, wich is weird since he doesnt post that much.

Frankly, I never quite understood what Blackcompany wanted from the game, many of his complaints have been rather incoherent, one time he seems to want some sort of interactive planetarium without needing to deal with piloting a spaceship another he complains about the lack of gameplay. And while I agree the game has some huge problems (even in Solo Play the on-line nature of the game doesn’t allow for a Privateer-like autopilot for example) that makes it seem like he rages at the game “just 'cause”.

[Dave_L]

Come into a game’s dedicated thread and express a negative opinion about it once, then you’re just expressing your opinion.

Habitually post in that thread reiterating your negative opinion, throw in ad hominem attacks on the game’s creators, engage in specious speculation about the financial state of the company that made the game? You’re threadshitting.

Is Elite: Dangerous a perfect game? Far far from it. To be honest, there’re quite a few things about it I would change if I could (ships shouldn’t have top speeds when FA is off and you’re using thruster overrides. They should have max acceleration, and fuel consumption should be affected based on thruster rating and ship mass, but an actual top speed? In SPACE? That’s dumb. You should be able to set weapons that are on the same fire button to chain fire or link fire. You should be able to set it so navigational routes re-plot automatically after every jump to account for skimming fuel at every skimmable star instead of just at the plotted fuel stars. You should be able to filter the Galaxy Map for ships/modules/etc that can be purchased in systems. And yeah, some sort of autopilot would be cool. Or some way to buy passage on a mega-ship to go to some other station with all your ships instead of having to spend however long going there yourself. Conflict Zones should be in asteroid clusters or planetary ring systems, if available, instead of in empty space.)

But despite all that I still love throwing on my Vive and getting lost in the black for a few hours on weekends. It’s a nice, relaxing, borderline meditative experience that occasionally throws some surprises at you.

Sometimes they’re cool, like today I just found my first LaGrange Cloud, and later a planet with those bio-luminescent pumpkin things, totally unexpectedly.

And sometimes they totally fucking suck, like the assholes who occasionally roam my ‘home’ system for Power Play ganking purposes.

[Chaz]

fail to see how someone else giving his opinion about a game should be considered “threadshitting” (learned a new word today), You seem awfully fixated about a person’s posting habits, wich is weird since he doesnt post that much.

Because this is what Blackcompany does, time and time again. Not just on here either, he’s well know for this on the Frontier forums too. Lost count of the amount of times over the past few years he’s thrown his toys out the pram, slagged the game off to the max, “I’m never playing this game again, this games going to fail” etc etc, and yet here we are four years on from release still playing it, as is he. It’s his favourite game he loves to hate.

Don’t get me wrong, when I have issues with the game I voice them too, but I also have plenty of positive things to say about it as well. From Blackcompany all you hear is a constant stream of extreme negativity. Yet he’s still playing the game, so he must be enjoying something about it, although you’ll never hear him say it.

[Wednesday]

To be fair, you’re ragging on the guy, but he answered a question I asked, and the little bit I played last night seem to bare out what he’s said.

I can’t really respond to his other post history.

What I’m really hoping to see are the odd oddity. Something strange and rare that ain’t planet sized and ain’t a geyser.

Elite’s bizarre and I think inspires this kind of response in that it’s both brilliant and fucking awful at the same time. As a work, as thing, it’s just astounding, but as a thing you play it can be just imbecilic.

[ThatFuzzyTiger]

Elite’s bizarre and I think inspires this kind of response in that it’s both brilliant and fucking awful at the same time. As a work, as thing, it’s just astounding, but as a thing you play it can be just imbecilic.

This is particularly borne out by the constant shitting out of also-ran ships that whilst externally look pretty tend to have copy/paste cockpits and don’t really offer much visual variety. I’m starting to wonder if BlackCompany is Yamiks in disguise.

[Dave_L]

Finally finished the long-haul passenger mission, with a week to spare. ~27,000 LY round trip from Cubeo to the Holy Twins and back, doing a detailed scan of almost every system I went through on the way out, being somewhat less in depth on the way back. After turning in the mission, the exploration data, and the codex bonuses went from a 33 millionaire to a 200 millionaire, and ranked up my explorer rank twice to Pioneer. So that’s nice.

I think I’m going to go back to grinding my Imperial rank a bit so I can buy a Clipper. Or maybe an Anaconda.

[Chaz]

To be fair, you’re ragging on the guy, but he answered a question I asked, and the little bit I played last night seem to bare out what he’s said.

True, and to be fair some of his criticisms of the game are legitimate and I agree with a good few of them. However his posts then often devolve into the most vehement bashing of the game and its developers that goes well beyond what you could consider constructive or reasonable criticism.

Generally speaking I would shy away from criticising other peoples posting habits, but when they’re continually making provocative and contentious posts, you can’t really expect not to be called out about it at some point.

There are quite a few of us here that have played the game for quite some time and continue to enjoy it for all its faults. I think we all give criticism where it’s due. There’s certainly no white knights here. So when you have someone that unceasingly runs the game down at every opportunity, it does start to rankle somewhat.

[Det.Bullock]

Elite’s bizarre and I think inspires this kind of response in that it’s both brilliant and fucking awful at the same time. As a work, as thing, it’s just astounding, but as a thing you play it can be just imbecilic.

This is particularly borne out by the constant shitting out of also-ran ships that whilst externally look pretty tend to have copy/paste cockpits and don’t really offer much visual variety. I’m starting to wonder if BlackCompany is Yamiks in disguise.

I’ve spoken with some modders of the X-wing series community and according to them cockpits are quite a hassle to model properly compared to a ship, especially if you have free look and VR as an option, with XWVM at the moment they’ve done only the Y-wing cockpit and even that is still incomplete if functional. Even the guys at Double Damage from what I understand won’t have VR in RGO partly for this reason (the other being that the progammer can’t use it without getting motion sickness). I guess it’s easier to use slight variations on existing designs with the excuse they are from the same manifacturer in-game.

[ThatFuzzyTiger]

I’ve spoken with some modders of the X-wing series community and according to them cockpits are quite a hassle to model properly compared to a ship, especially if you have free look and VR as an option, with XWVM at the moment they’ve done only the Y-wing cockpit and even that is still incomplete if functional. Even the guys at Double Damage from what I understand won’t have VR in RGO partly for this reason (the other being that the progammer can’t use it without getting motion sickness). I guess it’s easier to use slight variations on existing designs with the excuse they are from the same manifacturer in-game.

Yeah, that follows. It’s still a bit sad though considering, and this is particularly true with Elite Dangerous - The ship is the experience, so it really matters that what you’re sitting in offers a really good experience. Dirt Rally for instance did great cockpit. If you’re going to be staring at the interior of something, make it a nice interior.