Be Excellent To Each Other

Apparently this is actually gameplay after they've added some additional rendering time and after adding a fake cockpit as it's not actually implemented yet.

Either way though with a bit of time and effort I'd hope this would look as good in real time gaming.

Most of the gaming assets we've seen via the news feed do look as good as this video though.

Looks good, but tempering any excitement by the fact I expect it to be too good to be true.

Totally. I can see it being fun but I'd be over the moon if it was as fun as it looks in the video.

Corr!

Yes?

The Mancorr would like to take the opportunity to point out that David Braben is a lizard person who is partly responsible for the special effects work undertaken on 11/9/01 in New York City shortly after he time travelled to kill Kennedy with his sharp arrow like lizard tongue.

That looks awesome!

Malc

Mancorr!
Mancorr promised!
Mancorr promised the teeth!

I seem to have been put in a lower payment category now they have moved everyone from the app to the E:D store



I have messaged them, I hope they sort it out!

Malc

You've all signed up for Star Citizen, right?

There's a reason it raised $34,000,000 to Elite's $3,500,000.

IE11 and that site are a massive clusterfuck regarding full-screen video-viewing.

That site is a massive clusterfuck in IE11.

Not just that, but when viewing the video is possible - STOP CONSTANTLY WAVING YOUR FUCKING HANDS, MAN.

Anyway, I'm sure Star Citizen/Squadron 42 are wonderful.

Haven't really read much about it, but the same guy did Freelancer, which I hated.

All of his space games do the thing where you have to fly to a specific jumpgate to jump to a specific destination, which I also hate - i much prefer Elite's method of "pick a system, if you have enough fuel and your hyperdrive has the range, you can go there from anywhere in the current system."

Because it's from the man who wrote Wing Commander, essentially a shooter on rails that every idiot coo'ed over when Frontier was far better.

Because it's probably got lots of backing from the USA whereas Elite is primarily a British game.

Star Citizen doesn't need my money so that Roberts can buy himself another helicopter.

I quite liked Freelancer and played that for a quite a while. But yeah, I like the look of E:D more than Star Citizen, although I might be tempted by SC at a later date.

Malc

You played a different version of Wing Commander to me.

Massive cutscene, fly to way point, fly to next waypoint, shoot some things on the way, next waypoint shoot more things, return to base, cutscene, zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Played Wing Commander on the Amiga and a later PC one spread across two CD's that was absolute dross.

The increasingly higher detail renditions of spaceships in hangars are really exciting.

Yeah, I quite extensively played Wing Commanders 1 - 4 and the original Privateer and liked them well enough, but I was always much, much more into Frontier and First Encounters (and the original Elite for that matter - used to play it a lot on the school Archimedes computers and still whack the NES version on from time to time). For that reason alone, I'm vastly more interested in Elite Dangerous than Star Citizen, although I don't doubt I'll end up with both once they're released.

Have you ever inadvertently stumbled upon information so devastating, that you wish you'd just stayed oblivious? Ignorance being bliss and all that?

This evening I discovered that there's a version of JJFFE available for the Mac, and has been for some time. And with that, any last remaining hope I might have had of ever doing anything useful with my life died:

Via a comments thread on RPS my attention was directed towards this:

http://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=7892

It's the currently proposed design for the various modes of travel. It sounds right proper good, pretty much like a severely updated version of the original Elite, allowing full free roaming while still supporting multiplayer.

I can't wait.

The alpha is fucking brilliant, and by the end of the month Alpha 2 comes out which is centred around online multiplayer.

I'm so stoked for the full game I can't even put it into words.

I think it's the nail in the coffin of any chance of me renewing my Xbox Sub.

I couldn't be bothered renewing mine. Not helped by microsoft increasing security and in so doing stopping me from logging in.

I didn't renew my XBL Gold account either, surprisingly.

I accidentally bought two years of the fucking thing

Enjoy your seven year old free games that you've probably already played!

Those space travel proposals sound amazing. I really cannot wait for this game! Seriously wondering if there's any way on Earth I can justify increasing my pledge from just a digital download of the game up to Beta access.

Video of docking process:



Edit: Note that the "tutorial voice" is just a silly thing they made for the video, it won't be in the game.

Pleased to hear about the voice being a temporary thing - while it was amusing it didn't seem to fit somehow.

So goddamn excited about this game. So jealous of Gazchap! So thinking of paying up to be on the Beta.

Ironically enough, I've barely played the alpha because I've had no time.

A video of someone going through the process of docking, "shopping", and then leaving the space station in the alpha. Nice closeup showing how one of the classic Elite ships will be represented in the new game.



I never imagined they would actually model the inside of the space stations like this, so already this game has gone way beyond my expectations.

So I decided to stump up for the Premium Beta of this. If you've already pledged on the game, you can join the beta for £65 instead of £100, so it seemed easier to justify in my slightly warped brain.

Anyway, the actual beta doesn't start till the end of May, but Premium Beta types get to download the Alpha single-player combat demo for now. And I can report that, from what I've seen so far, this game is going to be absolutely staggering! It's incredible to look at and runs silky smooth on my fairly old PC. It took a little while to adjust to the controls (using an Xbox 360 controller for this), but once it clicks, it works incredibly well. The actual combat and ship controls are a true evolution of Elite, with the emphasis on fluid movement rather than the Newtonian physics of Frontier (which were a nice idea in principle, but made combat boring and unworkable). You get into proper actual dogfights in this. The early scenarios are set in an asteroid field and you genuinely find yourself ducking and weaving around asteroids to fight or evade your prey, whilst a later scenario has you in open space up against an Anaconda freighter with an escort of Federation fighters, and it feels like a genuine achievement when you successfully defeat it.

From everything I've read and now played, this is basically shaping up to be my dream game, a better Elite 4 than I could have ever possibly imagined - all the fun of the Elite controls and combat, but set within the Frontier universe - with the whole thing massively multiplayer and looking more gorgeous than it has any right to be.

For the AE-types on the forum, my PC is a Core i5 2.66 GHz machine, 4GB DDR3 RAM and a GeForce GTX 660 Ti 2GB graphics card. I'm running the demo at 1080p with all graphics options set to maximum and it maintains 60 FPS throughout. And they reckon the final game should be even smoother as they optimise it further.

I haven't been this excited about a videogame release since I was a kid.

Edit: I thought I should qualify that my issues with the controls came from working out how to use the power control and secondary system targeting controls. Actually flying the ship and looking around your cockpit works amazingly well.

Sixty....five....pounds?

Or £100 if you've not already given them money?! What the actual fuck?

If it was anything else, I'd agree. But I've been a fan of Elite since discovering the Archimedes version at school. I've probably sunk more hours into Frontier and First Encounters than any other game I've ever played and I still play NES Elite (both on my actual NES when the bastard wants to work, and via an emulator on my Mac). Stumping up £20 on the Kickstarter was a no-brainer. Admittedly I've ummed and arred over joining the beta, because like you guys I suspect, I have issues with paying 3x as much as I'd normally spend on a game for the privilege of testing the fucker, but in the end I couldn't resist, especially when I heard about the discount. And, besides, I want to support this, they're making the game I've dreamed of playing, taking design influence from fans of the previous games like myself instead of publisher influence. Elite Dangerous interests me vastly more than Star Citizen does, just as Frontier got vastly more playtime out of me than Privateer ever did.

So far I've not been disappointed and I have no regrets either (and I usually get buyer's remorse about everything I buy). The game is shaping up to be something else.

I will buy it when it's out. For £35.

Thankfully there is no mac alpha or beta so I avoid temptation. That and I've no machine powerful enough. But god I want this game.

Is it getting Occulus support?

Alpha 4.0 starts on the 15th and is basically the final step before beta, and I can't bloody wait. It'll almost be a full indication of the game, but just in a tiny part of space.

It's also significantly better than Star Citizen, because the players (and forum moderators) of Elite Dangerous are not actively discussing the merits of allowing rape to be a part of the game.

It already has Oculus support, although I guess it'll get better support as the development progresses.

Check this out:

http://youtu.be/wWPUuVntq9I
(Sorry, despite all my time on this forum, I *still* don't know how to embed YouTube videos).

Almost makes me want an Oculus Rift myself.

Alpha 4.0 looks like it's going to be pretty cool - you'll finally get to try out interstellar travel. I'm hoping this means the beta test version means it really will be an early version of the complete product, with the full galaxy open for travel. Some of what they have planned sounds incredible. According to the last newsletter I read, they're going so far as to accurately map all known star positions, so if you park up in orbit of Earth, you'll be able to look out of your cockpit and see all the constellations as they appear to us IRL, but if you hyperspace off to another system, they'll appear differently depending on your relative position in the galaxy. I love little touches like that! I could spend hours just exploring in Frontier, despite the relatively pointless nature of it.

You just take the last bit of the URL, so the unique video code basically, and stick it between the YouTube tags like so:

Amused iPhone user.

Get a proper phone.

Awesomes. That's what the rift was designed for.

Like mine?

Get 4G.

What's Sat doing wrong then?