Elite Dangerous plans for 2024

[amigacooke]

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

loved blackadder but that series specifically was genuinely brilliant..... funny of course but really poignant as well at the end! They did a sterling job of conveying the sacrifice the men on the front made for us when they went over the top knowing what was going to happen. (sorry totally OT)

 

[amigacooke]

loved blackadder but that series specifically was genuinely brilliant..... funny of course but really poignant as well at the end! (sorry totally OT)

Not at all, despite all the news I’m still hoping ED will win the greatest victory since the Winchester flower arranging team beat Harrow by etc.

 

[Fizzatron]

I'm fine with noobs coming and going as long as they subsidize my game...

I'd say "found the Star Citizen player", but you'd have to have said "I'm fine with noobs making disastrously life-changing financial decisions in regards to ship purchases as long as they subsidize my game.." for that..

 

[metatheurgist]

........ A bit like that old Chris Roberts game Freelancer.... that really came alive after the game died.

And from that he learned that the path to true success was to never let a game live at all....

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

loved blackadder but that series specifically was genuinely brilliant..... funny of course but really poignant as well at the end! They did a sterling job of conveying the sacrifice the men on the front made for us when they went over the top knowing what was going to happen. (sorry totally OT)

But going over the top was basically useless. Holding the line, yes, but getting massacred in machine gun fire, what good did that do? And THAT's the message I get from these bits. It's the idiotic uselessness of it all.

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

But going over the top was basically useless. Holding the line, yes, but getting massacred in machine gun fire, what good did that do? And THAT's the message I get from these bits. It's the idiotic uselessness of it all.

absolutely......... but that doesn't take anything away from the courage of the soldiers who did it. The whole thing was a sickening waste of life.......... war in a nutshell i guess, but this thread is about the much more serious subject of what is going on with elite dangerous development

 

[Fizzatron]

Maybe a somewhat reasonable comparison would be one new ship per quarter for 15-20 bucks each. Would players be happy with that? I feel Elite's playerbase is more demanding than PZ's for example.

I personally do not see selling ships outright being a viable path at this point. However, a while back I posted in the Suggestions section an idea of having something like an optional Battle Pass type thing that provides exclusive and/or time-limited cosmetics which would help fund more cosmetics and revenue for development of the game. I bring that up at this point as I could see the battle-pass system being used to release new ships with a six month exclusive lead for the battle-pass holders, which would be kinda like selling ship, but not exactly. And also the Battle-Pass would be good non-mandatory way for folks to show their support while still getting some perks rather than going down the subscription route.

 

[Fizzatron]

View attachment 381239
I wondered how long before that was suggested

Not going to lie, the thought crossed my mind also..

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

absolutely......... but that doesn't take anything away from the courage of the soldiers who did it. The whole thing was a sickening waste of life.......... war in a nutshell i guess,

Holding out in a muddy trench with wet boots and feet, sharing your food with rats, enduring crappy officers, living in day and night shelling, hearing your buddies and the enemy slowly die to a shot to their guts in No Mans Land. There is a lot of courage, sacrifice and endurance without glorifying climbing out of a trench to get shredded. That war bled out nations and gave birth to yet another stupid war with even more idiocy. WWI was an utterly pointless war. There is nothing heroic in it. Heroic would have been to shoot the officers and go back home.

 

[Alien]

The fact they don't mention Elite by name is telling - no DLC incoming so all those ELW / Ship Interiors / Asteroid Fields / Tourist Beacon DLC are not getting any closer

So ... no news is good news?

The silence (from Frontier) is deafening, in my opinion. Let's look at some of Elite's competitors:

• No Man's Sky ... had a horrible launch, but continued community engagement and free expansion after free expansion won over the players and Hello Games have not looked back.
• X4 Foundations ... Egosoft have been making this game in various incarnations for almost as long as Frontier have been a company. They had a rough period with Rebirth, but they showed they listened, started again from scratch and made X4 Foundations, which (as far as I am aware) is very well loved. Yes, it has bugs, but they'd had four paid expansions with a fifth on the way.
• Star Citizen ... we all here know about Star Citizen, and I will only say this, at least they show they are constantly developing the game and enagaging with the community.

No, I'm not mentioning Starfield, a) it's a new IP, the others are not new and b) it was not a true competitor to Elite and the others. There may be smaller space sim games, and if I am forgetting them, forgive me. My point here is that the three main competitors to Elite seem to be doing ok or better, and Frontier are standing still by comparison.

Excuse me while I beat the dead horse here, but Frontier need to wake up and commit to developing Elite and engaging with the community instead of worrying about the shareholders (apologies to any shareholders reading this, I mean nothing personal). Frontier's problem has always been staying quiet when they should be talking.

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

Star Citizen ... we all here know about Star Citizen, and I will only say this, at least they show they are constantly developing the game and enagaging with the community.

Apparently Squadron 42 is now feature complete and it is "just" polishing and bug testing now, so it could be light at the end of the tunnel on that part of the project at least.
Dont get me wrong, i am not expecting a release this year....... but early next year? maybe (but i guess end of this year is possible if that is a good time to launch games)

 

[Jack Winter]

If we are theory crafting what might "save" the game, how about voice acted mission packs?

They could be cheap to produce while leveraging the assets and mechanics already present in the game.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

If we are theory crafting what might "save" the game, how about voice acted mission packs?

They could be cheap to produce while leveraging the assets and mechanics already present in the game.

Sometimes I am amazed what players come up with just by taking in the sandbox and making their own of it. Obstacle courses, visiting peculiar places stacking a buggy onto a ship and taking it to orbit.
I just learned about the EDCoPilot tool that seems to be full of suggestions to try.

 

[Jack Winter]

Yes. IMO those are the best parts of Elite.

Regarding mission packs there's the recent fan made: https://elitedangereuse.fr/en/

But I could see myself paying a fiver or a tenner for a voice acted mission pack, maybe throw in some bling for suits and ships.

 

[galahad2069]

It sounds less, but it involves a similar number of distinct reference frames
- the player (and therefore the viewpoint for display) are on board the ship, which is rotating and moving within ...
- the station interior, which is rotating relative to ...
- the station instance, which is moving and rotating around ...
- the planet, which is moving through the star system

So if the player looks from their ship through the mailslot, their orientation relative to the background starfield - and therefore which bit of it they can see and which way up it is - is a combination of four separate reference frames.

Your example has the motions be at higher speed and less predictable, but I'll try to explain below why that doesn't matter.


Yes.

You're walking about the deck of the ship, at ship coordinates 0,0,2 and you move to coordinates 0,1,3
The ship meanwhile moves from system coordinates [three extremely big numbers] to coordinates [three extremely big numbers]

Your final position (relative to the system) is then the "sum" of those two coordinates.


What a game developer could do instead (but very definitely shouldn't!) is say that you and the ship are both at slightly different [extremely big numbers], then when you try to move within the ship that gives you a very slightly different velocity to the ship, and so your final coordinates are [extremely big numbers] and the ship's final coordinates are [extremely big numbers] ... and at that point, yes, the calculation errors introduced by imprecision probably lead to you taking a single step and being catapulted several hundred kilometres outside the ship.


I have no idea how Frontier does it, so can only say how I'd do it, of course ... but it shouldn't be all that difficult in principle. The game doesn't need to run in continuous time - it just needs to simulate quantised steps at least as fast as the display hardware can show them.

So a basic program flow could be like this
- determine objects relevant to the current instance, and what frame of reference "owns" those objects
- run their individual routines [1] to calculate their move for the next 1/60th second, relative to their owning frame of reference. Because the time step is so small, you can do this in series one after the other and the errors that introduces with collision detection or "I wouldn't have done that if I'd known you were going to do that first" should be so small as to be undetectable.
- usually there won't be any, but there might be a need to hand-off an object between two different frames of reference, so if so, calculate its current coordinates in that reference, add it to that reference and delete it from the old one. (Say, when a player ship moves from "system space" to "planet space" in supercruise)
- determine the position and current frame of reference of the camera
- calculate every object's position relative to the camera frame of reference
- run the display routines to show the picture
- back to the top for another run

(There are plenty of refinements possible here and Frontier probably has done at least some of them)

The key from this is that it doesn't really matter how fast or unpredictably something is moving - it's the same "was here, is now here" calculation at every 1/60 second step whether something is moving at 1m/s on a predictable ballistic trajectory, or at 55c being controlled by a player trying to break an interdiction, it's still just adding two numbers together in response to input conditions. If the player turns a completely different way in the next frame ... well, the game adds on those different numbers and carries on.

[1] For an NPC, determined by their AI. For a planet or asteroid, probably determined by an extremely simple "AI" which tells it to rotate and move on its orbit. For a player, determined by active controller inputs. For objects "owned" by another computer - e.g. another player - determined by an interpolation routine that receives updates from that other computer and tries to smooth out and guess trajectories (so, rubberbanding if it gets it wrong - but rubberbanding only within the current reference frame for that object). The instance itself might well have an "AI" which tells it to orbit the nearby planet.

For the network inputs, you might have a separate thread just listening for those, and adding them when they're received to the data set for each object. Then the next movement+display calculation done with that object has those network inputs ready and can make use of them. There's some incredible complexity in getting this to work properly and avoid obvious visual artefacts (which is well outside my expertise on the details!) but that's true even if everything is taking place in a single frame of reference at relatively low speeds.

There is no fixed 1/60 s time steps. Not everyone is playing @60 fps on a 240 Hz monitor using gsync.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

There is no fixed 1/60 s time steps. Not everyone is playing @60 fps on a 240 Hz monitor using gsync.

Of course. I should probably have said 1/73s time steps instead so that it was clearer that it was just whatever FPS the game was running at at that point.

(I also didn't mention the big complexity of variable frame rates for "real time" types of game in that you need to decide how much to simulate in the next run through the loop before you know how long it will take to do that simulation. Lots of possibilities for that, of course)

 

[Markov Chaney]

iRacing is a brain-melter: the base for the physics engine is 60Hz; it's decoupled from the rendering engine (but still supports Reflex - how??); and sensitive physics goes faster when it matters eg loaded tyres.

 

[BigBANGerZ]

Frontier want to focus on 'CMS games' apparently and 'an increased level of operational focus to be applied to Frontier's own internally developed portfolio of titles, which has delivered a strong return on investment' which could mean anything frankly.

Personally I think where Frontier need to start is treating players/gamers as customers and build that reputation back up with good quality instead of chasing acquisitions and licenses, but it doesn't help when the average age of the board is close to 60 that needs fixing too imho.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

My point here is that the three main competitors to Elite seem to be doing ok or better, and Frontier are standing still by comparison.

Sure, but the other three have their own big advantages in the financial sphere.

1) No Mans Sky had a horrible launch in terms of things like "reviews" but had a truly excellent launch in terms of things like "money", which makes the "fix it after release" strategy a lot more financially viable than it was for, say, Odyssey. (Starfield can probably end up in this zone too)

2) X4 is singleplayer, which substantially decreases both complexity and operational non-development costs. Similar or fewer sales to ED - I can't find any official figures but there's no obvious sign that it's more - let them get further more profitably. (Kerbal Space Program fits in here; the sequel is probably at least hoping to do the same but is itself massively delayed)

3) SC has access to the "bored millionaire" market so can somehow get by on less than half of ED's unit sales. Frontier would also be doing great if its mean-average player was willing to pay something like £200 rather than something like £20.

There have also been a lot of other attempts to make a competitor, some of which would have really appreciated having even Odyssey's "success". "Not dead on arrival" is a hard enough bar to clear in this field that there's still only three-to-six meaningful competitors after a decade, depending on exactly where you draw the "a bit like Elite" line. Ultimately it comes down to money which is pretty scarce for AAA-ish games in a niche genre.



For Frontier to invest any significant money into Elite Dangerous they need to have some hope of a return on that investment. They can talk all they like - daily updates on how Update 18 is still on track, dev interviews into how they're working on https://issues.frontierstore.net/issue-detail/62914, four hour slideshow livestreams of the latest community screenshots, and so on - but without actual money to pay a larger development team so that there's substance and specifically "good news" to the communications it won't matter.

So ... where do they get that money from?
1) From sales of their other games. Might be a possibility in future if their new management sims do well but not any time in the next few years since their other games aren't exactly working out well either.
2) From sales of the existing ED, Odyssey and ARX. The graphs in the latest investor presentation show that's only enough to fund the current pace of development.
3) Make a paid DLC and get the money back on release from new unit sales. Would need a very convincing reason why this would work several times better than Odyssey did on the "making money" side of things, especially since it won't be possible to sell it to the console quarter.

Any big investment needs:
- either to be so obviously "missing" that pretty much every remaining PC player will buy it as a DLC at or near full price
- or to improve the general game quality and reputation so much that either sales to new players roughly doubles, or long-term player retention and ARX sales does.
and either way to also be implementable in roughly a year so it doesn't cost too much upfront.

We can probably be fairly confident by now that Frontier haven't though of anything they could implement in a timescale of a year (or even a "Frontier year") of expensive-pace development that fits either of those options. I certainly can't either. That's "two Horizons headline features" or "a bunch of Beyond style adjustments to existing features" rather than something the size of all of Horizons or Odyssey.

Which leaves what they're currently doing: whatever additional development existing ED sales can fund on top of operational costs. It's slower than we want. It's slower than they want. It doesn't give them much to talk about because not much is happening and they can't budget for the Thesaurus Deluxe with 500 more synonyms for "development continues on Update 18".