News From orbit down to Europa

[Robert Maynard]

The real number of 0.13G was being clipped by the precision of 1 decimal place. I've upped this to 2 decimal places.

Thanks very much! One significant digit wasn't enough in that scenario.

While you're here, is there any chance that "time to destination" display (in Super-Cruise) can be tweaked to allow more than one significant digit when below 10 seconds?

 

[Griefed]

I was hoping you would spawn under your ship and had to drive out of the hangar, when deploying the SRV. :/

 

[CMDR_UberDude]

Can we not talk about Braben's end please, although now that I think about it, thats a great name for a starport!

Only if it has a matching "Braben's Front" somewhere else in the bubble.

 

[Dippy]

I have never pre ordered a game in my life.

Me before todays video.

After.......

ORDERED!

To David and the FD team, well done.

 

[OriginalBadBoy]

Right now the proccess goes like this:

Orbital cruise - supercruise instance
"Shake" - no instance and therefore invisible to others since you have dropped the SC one and not yet connected to the new one.
Glide - new instance

What I'm proposing is "simply" that people drop directly to "Glide" even if they in the beginning of this phase from a network point of view will not be connected to any instance (like SOLO mode if you like), the same thing as the "shake". Then, as the connections have been made you enter that instance and "fade into view" for other players.

Possibly ..

Personally I would prefer the whole local system you are in to be one big instance, and the boundary between instances would then just be hyperspace.

However you would need to increase the player count for that to work from a gameplay point of view.

 

[The Law]

Whatever happens on monday, FD will go in history as the first studio to ever release open space game with full 3D planetary graphics on such scale. Great job everyone at FD.

 

[Fosdyke]

Overjoyed by what i saw Monday gonna be awesome!!! Thanks FD Team!!!

 

[Mu77ley]

It is, but is being overridden overtly rather than covertly - as each wheel as a directable thruster in it (visible in some of the multiplayer videos we've uploaded), which can stick you to the surface.

Here's a video of what came next. The tumbling down the slope (oops) gives an indication of how this works. You can correct a fall using a thruster, but this didn't quite go right, except at the end...

https://youtu.be/t9F0HC18sSI

I think that video's been mangled by YouTube. The audio is out of sync and it stops before you start going down the slope.

 

[Cmdr Spooky]

What was that i saw when you took off from the star port about Drives at 50% power?

 

[govny]

I want that glide speed in combat.

 

[tdshooter]

gah i cant wait! i want it naow! xD

 

[shikage]

This looks great and a feature I have REALLY been looking forward to in E. The base there looks awesome. Can't wait until they start adding more life and interaction to these locations as well!

 

[QziQza]

How do you mean "one must"? If you're god, it may be easier to level the terrain. In reality, it's easier to build structures around the terrain, meaning that you need to plan for ground level differences, canyon walls, etc.

as with all property, domestic, commercial and industrial, its location location location. if the operation is dependant on that exact spot, say for mining, then you have no option but to modify the site to build on, rather than looking for a site already fit to build on.

also, that was a big site, so for all we know the material excavated could have been the resource, and the settlement has increased in scale, over time, around the extraction. or for the sake of protection it was worth the expense of excavating the site into the side of that crevice/canyon/crater.

 

[mossfoot]

The glide currently disengages at ~7km above (an approximate) floor height, 11km short of face-firsting into the landscape, or when you come in too steep (60 degrees plus). If you don't want to take in the views you can dive bomb in a fair bit faster - I've certainly managed orbit to landed on a small world within a minute, given an inappropriate disregard for safety.

Personally I LOVE it the way it is, but hearing this reminds me that there will always be a certain group of players that react to that information like this:

[video=youtube;c9EBhaULToU]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9EBhaULToU[/video]

 

[Kissinger]

Following on from the last peek, here is another unedited video, this time showing some orbital cruise around Europa, then docking at Haberlandt Survey on the surface. Sub-surface scattering is not working on the ice, and a few other things that will be improved.

https://youtu.be/uyPoaVRErE0

Beautiful - but can we have apparently seamless transitions from SC to normal flight like this in the main game too? (i.e. view screen not losing focus on the destination?) If it can be implemented here..

 

[peteuplink]

I think it looks great!

 

[MarcusVatta]

Awesome! Exactly what I was hoping for. Already planning my first planetological expedition once we're out of beta. Going to use the beta to test out equipment and procedures.
One advantage to living where I do: Midnight Monday night is 4pm Monday my time, so I really can't wait to begin downloading the beta on Monday!
Can't wait for Tuesday!
(No criticism implied, FD. Just managing my own expectations. If you happen to be in a position to exceed them, that would be GREAT!)

 

[Jack Schitt]

I think it's mostly been fixed as of 1.5 beta, I didn't have any problems with overshoots there - the drop is pretty much instantaneous (maybe a quarter-second delay at most) when you disengage.

In 1.5 they "cheat" by removing the HUD element slightly sooner when you press the disengage button. It helps, but if you exit late and fast enough it's still a problem because your brain perceives it either as an overshoot (by interpolation of the HUD numbers and movement) or as a temporary dead stop, neither of which feels right. And I can't say I've noticed an overall reduction in the transition time. It still depends on the mode and the number of P2P connections. It's always fastest in Solo of course, unless there's serious network congestion.

I've slowly (more than a year!) come to accept that it's probably the best we're going to get so it doesn't bother me as much as it once did. But it must be particularly annoying for new players who won't necessarily have read about the underlying networking model. To many it must appear to be a very poorly optimised loading routine, when it fact nothing is "loading" at all.

 

[SpionKop]

Looking great... now we just need some NPC life scattered around the Galaxy (next year hopefully) and that sense of scale I've been craving will be complete.

 

[who?]

Latest video (from the newsletter).

One thing that might get confusing is the "Return to Surface" when you board your ship at a landing pad. Considering you go "up" from the SRV into your ship, you'd think "Return to Surface" would lower you down again, instead it raises you up again to the landing pad. Consistent with the stations yes, but seems a bit odd in this context.