Please FD make the transitions between SC and normal more like Star Citizen.

[StuartGT]

By 'made ED what it is', do you mean a game that consumes a lot of of time quite unnecessarily, and consequently is hemorrhaging player numbers?

You might want to check your data sources, because you now look very foolish.

This weekend on Steam alone player numbers reached 2016 record highs, in both Average Concurrent (3780 and rising) and Peak Concurrent (8915), while the Players Per Fortnight reached a 6 month high (96k). Player data not included and is unknown: standard/EDFX/Oculus launchers, and Xbox.

Traffic on the Elite Subreddit has increased by 80% during the past 9 days: now 28k unique visitors daily.

Elite is (re)gaining players.

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

You might want to check your data sources, because you now look very foolish.

This weekend on Steam alone player numbers reached 2016 record highs, in both Average Concurrent (3780 and rising) and Peak Concurrent (8915), while the Players Per Fortnight reached a 6 month high (96k). Player data not included and is unknown: standard/EDFX/Oculus launchers, and Xbox.

Traffic on the Elite Subreddit has increased by 80% during the past 9 days: now 28k unique visitors daily.

Elite is (re)gaining players.

And additionally most casual players show thumbs up about 2.2 reveals.

ED is coming back (well it never really went away actually).

 

[CMDR Pugwash]

Thanks for posting that. I now know what all the fuss is about. Star Citizen really does look pretty. It reminds me of the Assassins Creed games, in particular that bit where you rode a horse between towns. All very pretty but no real substance. ED is different in that it is presenting a real environment. SC is all smoke and mirrors to give you the feeling of the real environment without actually producing it. This is fine of course because it is a different type of game and I look forward to playing it, for a while. Then like everyone else, I will be back playing ED, enjoying a realistic universe.

That is if it is not spoilt by the demands of Kanja Club. FD seem to be desperate to cater for them and I now understand what is fuelling those demands. They want ED to be what they think Star Citizen will be, GTA in space.

Elite Dangerous is much more than that, please keep it that way.

 

[salad]

We used to have threads like this before NMS was released

"Its seamless, wow!" "Much better than ED!"

Turns out they had a real good reason to make it look seamless.

I say lets wait and see.

 

[Bambi]

That is why you come out of supercruise at 100km away and let the computer take over as I very much doubt we could stop our ships at the correct place. You would likely drop out a 100 or more km away and then have a very long journey to the station.

Actually I've managed to come within 20-30 kms with an emergency stop.

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Loading screen implies assets being loaded to and unloaded from memory, such as looking through the game files, retreiving necessary ones and putting them in their appropriate places.

This is a very pedantic definition. In the real world, loading covers many more things than simply reading files off the disc into memory. The transition to and from supercruise is definitely a loading screen because the action is stopped in order to load in the next instance. Whether the assets are cached or not while this happens is definitely irrelevant.

 

[thorn-]

Just because you like strawberry doesn't mean that blueberry is awful.

I honestly don't have a real issue with loading screens. The first time i jumped in Elite, it gave me a big smile. I still think it's a nice "here we go...." moment.

But, I will also say that SC's quantum drive ... transition ... is also really pretty neat. There is really is a weird feeling (a cool one) when you engage QD and just - boom, you're going, and it feels more seamless.

 

[Bambi]

Just because you like strawberry doesn't mean that blueberry is awful.

I honestly don't have a real issue with loading screens. The first time i jumped in Elite, it gave me a big smile. I still think it's a nice "here we go...." moment.

But, I will also say that SC's quantum drive ... transition ... is also really pretty neat. There is really is a weird feeling (a cool one) when you engage QD and just - boom, you're going, and it feels more seamless.

What's the point of this post? This isn't like comparing berries. The way the instancing system works is fine, at least to me. But it objectively would be better if it was smooth and seamless rather than jittery, slow and filled with pop-in.

 

[Raile]

I prefer warping in Rebel Galaxy. You retain the features of Supercruise but without the 7 second dance and can set up blockades and conflict zones without them being separate instances.

 

[Soon(TM)]

Check out this video and tell me that ED wouldn't benefit from these types of transitions. ED looks clunky by comparison.

https://youtu.be/C1wX1Kk3Ajg?t=6m8s

Starts at 6 mins 8 secs

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...and one other thing. How can multiplayer and load times be so smooth and ED suffer from such problems with instancing and load times when exiting supercruise (at times) and orbital cruise ????

EDs instancing mechanics is what breaks the immersion, those are your loading screens . Transitioning from one state to another and activating the assets, creating the instance.

That's why when you drop into a RES or Nav beacon there are no other ships whatsoever for the first few seconds while the instance is populated.

It seems like nothing pre exists in the game until you go there, and when you've gone, its wiped.

That's procedural generation.

SC doesn't use procedural generation in the same way.

 

[thorn-]

What's the point of this post? This isn't like comparing berries. The way the instancing system works is fine, at least to me. But it objectively would be better if it was smooth and seamless rather than jittery, slow and filled with pop-in.

God forbid that I make at least ONE non-negative post every month.

 

[Toumal]

Some people like wallpapering, ironing and browsing the socks at M&S, but that's hardly a recommendation.

I like being able to actually traverse space. It makes feel ED like something more than a computer game.

 

[Devari]

I will have to check whether stations are rendered in SC. Pretty sure I flew past one in SC. Saw it for a millisecond.

Stations are fully rendered in normal space (assuming they are within visual distance). As soon as you jump to SC however the station "disappears". Most players don't notice this because they are usually pointing away from the station when entering SC and don't usually see the station "disappear" upon entry into SC. I just got some screenshots to show what I'm referring to, if you try it yourself it is quite apparent and obvious.

First, this is Bluford orbital in normal space:

This is Blueford orbital once the FSD countdown timer starts, with the station still present as I'm still in normal space:

This is Bluford orbital as I'm making the transition to SC, it hasn't disappeared yet because I haven't "jumped" to SC yet and the game still has a station to render in that frame:

This is Bluford orbital the moment I enter SC, it has disappeared completely and I actually fly right "through" where the physical station should be. It simply does not physically exist in SC and cannot interact with me in any way. Assuming I don't actually hit the station itself I should at least instantly become masslocked and drop out of SC immediately upon entering SC. This doesn't happen however because there is no station to render and there is nothing to masslock me. The station simply does not exist as a physical 3D model in SC at all despite being directly in my path (less than 5 km distance) upon entering SC:

Try it yourself, with any station, you'll see that the stations do not exist as rendered objects in SC as soon as your FSD completes the transition to SC. They are just nav points on your HUD, that is all. The stations can only "masslock" you prior to entering SC but once you've entered SC the station only exists as a "point" on your HUD.

 

[Smugallo]

I like the way supercruise works, but the instance loading has always bothered me.

 

[TenakaFurey]

One thing I like in SC that Elite Dangerous doesn't have is that you can make such jumps to planets and stations. In Elite Dangerous you always hyperjump to right in front of super bright stars.

Can we please hyperjump to planets or anything, but stars??

I believe the reason why ED is the way it is is so that there are mechanics around fro actions such as piracy.

It also makes the game feel "vast".

Conversely, it's also responsible for the "empty" feeling some players talk about.

I've tried SC - so far I haven't really been impressed. But its early days yet. There are some things I like about it - such as the ability to navigate via the HUD.

But yes - a lot of the advantage you see on the videos right now is because SC isn't really working over a network. It's a partial game with a partial player base.

 

[Soon(TM)]

I thought it would be cute if the galaxy map faded into your cockpit overlaying the stars you could see, then the cockpit could optionally fade out. So if you wanted to know what a star was, click on it. Zooming out would pop it onto the holo-display.

Worst thing about the galaxy map is you have to access it in real time, same as galnet.

So if your super cruising to a station and use the galaxy map, you can easily overshoot, or be interdicted and torn out of the galaxy map with a "   " is going on!

Galaxy map can be as immersion breaking as transitions.

 

[[DOOK] Droogie]

Demo which you won't be able to play for at least six months or more and clearly will not work flawlessly when released to crowds?

It might be out this year. This is 2.7, but they're renaming it 3.0 because it's so big. Regardless, it is incredible and far exceeds anything anyone else has to offer.

 

[Devari]

Regardless, it is incredible and far exceeds anything anyone else has to offer.

It doesn't even exist yet other than a very limited sandbox demo. I hardly consider that either "incredible" or "far exceeding" anything anyone else has to offer.

 

[thorn-]

It doesn't even exist yet other than a very limited sandbox demo. I hardly consider that either "incredible" or "far exceeding" anything anyone else has to offer.

Elite was in Alpha at one point, too.

And here we are with a released game.

 

[Long Star]

Believe it or not, Elite is utterly seamless, the 'transistions' you see is the game's way of speeding up things, to do that it has to insert you back into the game state. Often this involves asking the network what's going on, and that can take time. You can fly from anywhere to anywhere in a system as long as you have the time to do it, seamlessly at the 'normal space' speed. There are videos about this.

IIRC early Elite demos had nil waiting instant jumps because doing things over a gigabit LAN is a bit faster than the internet. Especially if you are on rural BT. Now, SC may have a better architecture, we don't know, but I'm willing to wager that the networking bit of it will detract from that enjoyment and seamlessness one way or another.

Elite is anything but "seamless"

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I agree, but that pesky speed of light thing gets in the way as machines start to be further and further apart and routes become less direct. CIG may have found a way around this some way, but until it's out in the wild we simply don't know.

It's a little something STEAMING VIDEO INVENTED in the 1990s It's called BUFFERING! It isn't some revolutionary technology. It's just "not stupid" programming. Of course Elite Dangerous programmers didn't go to that school or get that degree.

 

[Devari]

Elite was in Alpha at one point, too.

And here we are with a released game.

Elite had well-defined and achievable goals, used a limited amount of initial funding to achieve those goals and has generally managed to deliver content on schedule. Star Citizen has had an absolutely massive amount of funding (over 100 million so far) and has done none of these things despite being several years beyond it's initial launch date. If they ever do manage to release a final product it will not be anywhere near "feature complete" and will be essentially a "demo" version of what the game was originally advertised as. It's much like the situation with NMS being hyped as a "groundbreaking" game when it turned out to be quite mediocre and disappointing. Not to mention the massive game balance issues with Star Citizen already relying on a "pay to win" model with the ability to buy starships costing $200-300, or even as much as $1000 or more, with equivalent ships only being achievable to earn in-game by investing massive amounts of gameplay time that are not accessible to the average player. That would be like having some players allowed to purchase Federal Corvettes or Imperial Cutters during Elite alpha and then somehow expecting that to work in the same universe as someone staring off in the Sidewinder.