Elite: Dangerous

Any fans of Elite, Wing Commander, Freelancer or X: Beyond the Frontier in here? You might want to check this out…

//youtu.be/epmBEYfpra0

Yes it’s a new Elite! Only this time we get a massively multiplayer living 3D universe. More information can be found here and on the Elite Forum.

They are looking for funding on kickstarter. I have pledged at the £20 preorder tier, thinking about upping that to get into the second round beta tests.

I can’t wait for this to get made, it is going to be awesome.

BS

Already chipped in too. Hope it goes ahead…

Just over 50 hours to go and only 5k more needed. Looks like it’s going to get made.

We have announced a stretch goal for a Mac version of the game. If we reach the stretch goal of £1.4 million through the Kickstarter we will release a Mac version approximately 3 months after the Windows PC release.

New stretch goal announced, if we reach £1.5 million then we’ll add another 10 playable ships to the game.

Happy New Year!!

:slight_smile:

It’s there!

:banana::nanasplit::banana::nanasplit::banana::nanasplit::banana::nanasplit::banana::nanasplit::banana::nanasplit::banana::nanasplit:

Excellent news! Can’t wait to see how it turns out. Hopefully thre will be a beta test

Not sure there’ll be a public beta. The funding levels include access to private beta, estimates listed as first round in Jan. 2014, 2nd round in Feb. and release in March.

Getting close to 2 million raised now!! :cool:

Pleased to say that since the last post, the Alpha phase has come and gone and many a lucky soul has posted videos of their exploits on Youtube and quite impressive they were too.

Now it is into the Beta phase and I took the plunge before the July 29th deadline and signed into the Beta with an additional lifetime update for future proofing.

Only word to describe it…AWESOME!!

The detail that has gone into E: D is phenomenal and I have been gob-smacked by the attention to the smallest things, such as the planets, the stations the ships, asteroid fields…I could go on and on. My humble dual core system with Win7 and 4gb RAM is way under the specs recommended, but after a bit of tweaking I managed to get it playing very smoothly and graphically not too shabby. What it must look like in its full glory with a quad core CPU, 8gb RAM and a decent GPU I can’t wait to see, but judging by the vids on Youtube, way better than I’m currently experiencing.

Gameplay wise, excellent. Nuff said. Ship controls are much more involving than I was used to with Frontier: Elite 2, but considering that game could be played on an Amiga 600 from a floppy disc, no more than I would expect. I initially played the game in my usual way with mouse and keyboard as I did with FE2, but soon found out this was not going to be enough. Key mapping has become a long haul to find the best set up for my playing style and I had to resort to buying a sub £20 Thrustmaster joystick to gauge what you need to enjoy the game more. This is not a jump in and have a quick shoot-em-up style game, this is a full on simulation and not for the faint-hearted.

The basics. Docking at a space station. At the moment, no more auto-pilot. You want to land, you have to land it yourself in a designated bay in the correct manner, guided by your HUD. I trashed my ship and half the station the first 3 times trying :smiley: Once I mapped the manoeuvering thrusters and used them instead of the joystick to land, it all worked, although it still was not pretty to watch. I got down on the ground in one piece and within the set time limits. As I said this is not easy and you will be shot down for incorrect procedure, landing bay loitering, etc or kicked out of the station.

Combat is a challenge. No more set the autopilot on your enemy and then let the computer do the chasing. You set the target on them and then you have to catch them. Set your throttle too fast and you’ll never get them, but manoeuver into place and get the throttle at the sweet spot and your sat on their tail ready to unleash your pulse lasers on them. Great when it all comes off, but you certainly know you’ve done the work afterwards. RSI anyone? :slight_smile: Chasing them through asteroid fields whilst dodging those same asteroids is manic fun, Glad I had Monster drink to keep me alert. Proximity alerts warn you of impending crashes with large rocks, ships etc, so as long as you have your wits about you, its not bad. Challenge in open space is still there and I decided to take a trip out from the station to the nearest planet and met up with a nots-so friendly CPU controlled pilot who took it on themselves to taunt me in comms before attacking me, but not totally killing me, just leaving me in space with no weapons, no engines and no chance of getting back home either! Bar-steward. You have 2 choices then 1) self-destruct - you blow up and start again with a loan (basic) ship or 2) set off a distress beacon and hope you get picked up by someone friendly. I blew up. :lol:

So far, only been playing just over a week when I can, but I’m absolutely loving the challenge. You can team up with friends and go on missions when you’re ready, to take on, whoever you get to have a grudge against. The game is still evolving and there will be more and more elements as time goes on. I can’t wait to see it in its full glory, but because of the open nature I probably never will.

More info and newletters/updates etc here

See you in space…

I only tried it for the first time last night. Dusted off my ancient MS Sidewinder Precision 2 joystick from… a long time ago, and was fortunate enough it is still recognised by Windows! I’ve only had time to do a few of the solo/training missions so far, and have started to work out how I want to map the controls. Not much of a tutorial here, just got to go ahead and see how it works. I think I ended up ramming most of the targets on the first mission than shooting them :slight_smile:

Dog fighting… I royally suck. Either I’m really rubbish, or it has just been too long since I done anything like this. I think I want to play about more with the thrust mapping. Don’t think I need reverse gear too much somehow. Also free flight should help, maybe I should find a toggle for that. If I don’t get much better that this fast, then I might be limiting myself more to non-combative type roles in the final game.

Playing this on my desktop, no slouch but far from cutting edge gaming box now. During the game I hardly saw any CPU load. I presume most of it is GPU limited.

Have to say, the thought of needing to manually dock every time doesn’t appeal to me. In the original, the docking computer was a massive time saver.

I’m in pretty much the same position as Droid, been playing for about a week now. I started trying to use the mouse and keyboard but the flight model doesn’t really suit it. Plumped for a Thrustmaster x10 HOTAS joystick and the whole thing came alive. I have got the hang of docking and general space flight but finding it pretty impossible to fight using non-gimbled weapons, I need some practice.

It runs sweet as a nut on my Alienware M17 :slight_smile:

BS

Ooh, gimbled weapons… will need to look further into that. Thinking more, in the 1st training mission I noticed even if I was a little off target the weapons tracked, but I didn’t see this happening in the two combat training missions I did. Now I have to wonder if that was intentional or did I turn it off somehow! I could nearly aim at a flying ship, and that would have made a big difference.

I think all the weapons track to some extent but the gimblling (is that a word) gives you something like 20 degrees of auto aim. This has really helped me stop crashing my ship into the target, I lost two Eagles that way :doh:, back in the free sidewinder at the moment with 2x class 1 burst lasers [G].

BS

I had an issue in that again, I took a trip out to the nearest planet with mineral oil as that was all the goods I could find, but found that the super cruise would not shut down and I was stuck at 30 km/s and could not get close to the station to even attempt docking. Got the ship near and then it just flew past and by the time I had slowed I was over 20000 km from it and found myself with another bot in an eagle tracking me and then locking on. I tried to get a lock on and succeeded a couple of times but could not shoot into the hull, just kept hitting the shields, I finally managed to get a head-on shot at him and the bar-steward rammed straight into me and destroyed my ship.

Damned annoying as I now only have 238 credits and a weak-assed free ship. Gonna be hard to make a living like this :smiley:

Finally getting some time to do something with this game! Bought a Mad Catz Fly 5 to replace the ancient sidewinder, then spent the rest of the evening looking at the button mappings to work out where everything is. I did a few of the early combat training missions now, and I sucked less than I did the last time I tried it.

The docking training wasn’t fun and took me a while to figure out where you select what. Almost flew into the sun a few time… gonna do the docking training once more now I have a clue what I’m doing then tomorrow I’ll sign into the game for real!

The best thing to do when docking is to let down your undercarriage. That at least stops from accidentally hitting the boost button you’ve mapped and slamming yourself into the station. Docking manually is important, even though you can install a docking computer, if you can find one anywhere. I don’t use one now and docking is getting a lot easier. It’s just practice like everything else.

Also some missions make you bring illegal items into the station and you have to do it before you are scanned by the local cops. To do this you have to line yourself up with the station access about 9km out, hit the boost button and then ask for docking permission as you fly. It’s a scary ride and I’ve slammed into ships leaving the station as I fly in on occasion. Stopping once inside is the fun bit :D.

I just spent my first 30 minutes in game. I went for the kickstarter explorer pack, which gets me a Cobra mk III and 40k credits which I’ve spent about half on a fuel scoop. Did one mission delivering stuff to the next station to make sure I got the basics down, and my next target is to have dinner then see how far I can get exploring before Top Gear starts :smiley:

Had my 1st crash already. I’m in solo mode, so some NPC decided to fly right across my path just as I was about to enter a station. Don’t they get done for loitering too? No damage taken at least.

They don’t seem to, although some NPC ships get killed in the entrance. Not sure what for though. I’m in a Cobra at the mo. Its a great ship and I’ve played with the layout to get a good all-rounder. The main consideration when adding upgrades is power. Try to up your power plant to at least 10k. This will allow you to add shields, better guns, larger cargo holds, that sort of thing. It will also give you better frame shift drive range. I’m running 2xlevel 2 gimballed cannons which are huge fun to shoot things with, 36 tons of cargo space, better shields and other odds and ends and I still have a 10.4 light year range. You have to play with it and I always check mine just outside the station no fire zone to make sure I don’t lose powers when everything is powered up. If you do find you’re low on power, just turn things off in the right side menu and head back into the station to tweak them again.

Starting to clock up the hours now… the kickstarter explorer Cobra mk3 has some scanners on it. Can’t remember the rest of the stats but I did replace a 2T rack with a fuel scoop, leaving me with 16T cargo space. Can’t afford any better equipment than I already have it seems. Got somewhere over 40k credits now, from some light trading, missions and exploring. That earned me my first exploration rank update to “mostly aimless” and whatever the first step up is on the federation ranks. My vague goal is to fly to the outer edge of the galaxy and see what’s out there along the way.

It’s a good goal to have. Some of the guys on the Elite Facebook page have started the other way, into the centre of the galaxy and have encountered Black Holes! :slight_smile: You can sign up on Facebook at Elite Dangerous(Spacesim) and see posts, videos and gets some great tips on getting cash quick, that sort of thing. There’s the usual trash talk from some, but mostly it’s helpful info and feedback.