Elite Dangerous: Odyssey Update 7 Notes

[jpjeffrey]

I will try to be constructive, I love what Elite is / was / could be, I want it to be sucessfull and I WILL continue playing, but that being said this can only be considdered another botched update release.

From a business perspective Frontier's revenue from elite must now lie with ARX sales until any future paid content is released. If you believe steam player numbers as a guide (and other sources) , numbers have plumeted since EDO "released", every update since has seen a small increase followed by a sharper drop with a net loss each time. This will be affecting the ARX revenue streams, less players = less revenue = less development = vicious downward spiral. I personally will not comit to any further purchases of ARX or pre orders for Frontier games / seasons until a proper player / community alpha / beta testing and release cycle are introduced.

I ask any Fdev employee that can, and is willing to. To push for internal changes, improved quality contol, improved testing. Many boomers like me have way to much time on our hands and i'm sure, are willing to be part of something that would help, even if under NDA's.

Goodonya Cdr Chiggy
(I remember that rescue......)

 

[Deio]

The one playing with D2EA's "Iron Man" suit, I guess? Much harder to hit a flying target with rockets.

If you encounter more than 2 enforcers which is common in high intensity conflict zones, nothing will help. You can be very evasive and run, but one rocket - shield down. Another one - dead. I guess Frontier had many whinings from carebears that own factions, that they need stronger means for securing their precious factions.
Or players that wanted a real challenge, Battlefield type.
I have nothing against a good challenge. Except the fact that our weapons are water guns. And NPC weapons are using live bullets.
Maybe some extra engineering? That would be nice

 

[CaptainPugwash]

My last BR sandwich from long ago was cheese and (a lot of) onion and....I kind of liked it. EDO can be great, it just needs dev time- time it really does not have.

I agree Ody could still be good, but fdev really have to get their sw dev and testing organsed, and show that it’s not one step forward and two steps back.

 

[CaptainPugwash]

I will try to be constructive, I love what Elite is / was / could be, I want it to be sucessfull and I WILL continue playing, but that being said this can only be considdered another botched update release.

From a business perspective Frontier's revenue from elite must now lie with ARX sales until any future paid content is released. If you believe steam player numbers as a guide (and other sources) , numbers have plumeted since EDO "released", every update since has seen a small increase followed by a sharper drop with a net loss each time. This will be affecting the ARX revenue streams, less players = less revenue = less development = vicious downward spiral. I personally will not comit to any further purchases of ARX or pre orders for Frontier games / seasons until a proper player / community alpha / beta testing and release cycle are introduced.

I ask any Fdev employee that can, and is willing to. To push for internal changes, improved quality contol, improved testing. Many boomers like me have way to much time on our hands and i'm sure, are willing to be part of something that would help, even if under NDA's.

I was thinking of putting something in the suggestion forum along the lines of getting a group of pre-patch release testers together in return for a few arx.
People would do it for free, and they can’t keep letting updates like this out of the door.

 

[Freyja]

That would be great, many games have a pre-release version for testing purposes

 

[Riverside]

The carrier cargo transfer bug appears to be back. I mined 300t of trit last night, used the 'transfer all' button to put it in the hold of my carrier & the ship's cargo was not removed.

ISTR FDev treating this one as urgent last time it came up, I can't imagine an issue tracker report on such an exploitable bug as this gaining much attention but if anyone has a link to the best one to contribute to I'll add my findings.

 

[CaptainPugwash]

The carrier cargo transfer bug appears to be back. I mined 300t of trit last night, used the 'transfer all' button to put it in the hold of my carrier & the ship's cargo was not removed.

ISTR FDev treating this one as urgent last time it came up, I can't imagine an issue tracker report on such an exploitable bug as this gaining much attention but if anyone has a link to the best one to contribute to I'll add my findings.

I think Sally had it her list 20 pages or so ago, there is also this one, not quite the same though:

Source: https://youtu.be/5R-NRLUgm2I

 

[CaptainPugwash]

I know this is kind of "are we there yet?", but since U7 hasn't done anything to improve my VR performance, is there any hints when U8 will arrive?

Regarding performance in U7, I get ~45 fps with Reverb G2, RTX 3070 OC and 3950x at LOW settings. I thought that might be a good starting point for tinkering with the settings, but it does seem sort of a waste of time until some radical optimization happens.

Not that low/med/high makes the slightest difference

You get 45fps at a settlement I presume?

My lowly i7 4970k / GTX 1080 gets me around 80fps in space (so toggles between 45 and 90). At settlements a stuttery mess.

 

[TheRoninX]

And can all of these other engines generate entire planets, star systems and a galaxy at a 1:1 scale like this? The legs scale have been a whole other feature set for their in-house engine. And they chose to release without optimizing it, which as can be seen, optimization is a very lengthy process - we're going to be at least 8 patches, 6 extra months.

Do seriously think that everything in the elite universe is being loaded and rendered all at once. If you do you seriously have no idea how any of this works. As far as the game is concerned I can take any modern game not cull anything that should be culled that's viewable in camera and bring a system to its knees. God help us if they are rendering stuff off camera. Which seems to be what they are doing because there is no way people with high end cards/CPUs with SSDs should be seeing the FPS numbers they are getting. But if you choose to live in the land of denial that's on you. I am officially done with this topic.

 

[Danieros]

Do seriously think that everything in the elite universe is being loaded and rendered all at once. If you do you seriously have no idea how any of this works. As far as the game is concerned I can take any modern game not cull anything that should be culled that's viewable in camera and bring a system to its knees. God help us if they are rendering stuff off camera. Which seems to be what they are doing because there is no way people with high end cards/CPUs with SSDs should be seeing the FPS numbers they are getting. But if you choose to live in the land of denial that's on you. I am officially done with this topic.

You jump between star systems and supercruise, you know these are loading/instancing screens so you know I am not claiming it is all rendered at once, that is really silly... But every star you see, you can head there, and it's all done in a 40 gb installation, half or even a third of what those other games take for sometimes just a single city/region. Culling all these new Odyssey-scale things is, or at least was indeed an issue of Elite which wastes a lot of computer power and was noticed by players even during Alpha, which is part of its lack of optimizations. It was only added a few updates ago and I don't know how efficient it is currently but we all know the optimizations aren't done. Even loading the AI needs optimizations since Elite is a proc gen game the AI needs to calculate itself up for every location, I really doubt in your installation there is a file for the AI instructions in every of the 400k+ settlements out there.

This is completely different from CP and all those other FPS games which are limited to one or a few mostly handcrafted cities/locations and can have all of those things more directly stored.

 

[SirMaxxx]

Considering how much of the game revolves around procedural generation, I feel like the code base isn't large; it's just unorganized.

I"m not sure that's logical.
If it wasn't procedurally generated 'world' it would be hand crafted.
But the whole game still has to sit on top of that
So the code base is actually significantly more complex and large, not smaller, than a similar non Procedurally generated game, in terms of code.

 

[thistle]

Here.

Please.

 

[SirMaxxx]

And can all of these other engines generate entire planets, star systems and a galaxy at a 1:1 scale like this? The legs scale have been a whole other feature set for their in-house engine. And they chose to release without optimizing it, which as can be seen, optimization is a very lengthy process - we're going to be at least 8 patches, 6 extra months.

But the generation doesn't happen in real time - it happens as you move between systems etc.
So once you're playing, there's really no difference between ED and another FPS where every brick and chair has been lovingly hand crafted.
Yet other games (say Fortnite) can host 100 players in real time, significantly faster than ED can.
For goodness sake, Half Life 2 Death Match was more performant and that was released in 2004.

 

[Spaceman Si]

And I'm wondering: Can we pay FDev for not touching Horizons?

I've asked this several times, but it seems not, unfortunately.

Personally, I'd consider having given them forty quid for Odyssey (which I'm not playing), they could at least keep Horizons (which I still do, when time allows) going

 

[grimreaper]

I mean I absolutely agree, BUT we could also look at it differently, well if we take aside that Fdev is Fdev. Basically you have every "core" mechanic you could want in some form one another. Whats missing is actual content. BUT its generally harder to create these "core" mechanics than content for it. So in the end on foot and therefor the core mechanic on foot was nessecary. Next step would and MUST be adding actual fun content to it and adding variety etc etc.
But then again its Fdev and the only "content" they really add is horrendous grind.

Regarding the render tho. I dont really understand why they redid a big chunk of it at least partially for Odyssey but stuck with Dx11 and didnt switch to Vulkan. Same system compatibilty afaik but vastly VASTLY BETTER performance.

agree on the grind, but look at games like destiny 2 for example... their whole game mechanic is grind, grind harder, grind even more!

 

[CMDR X]

Don't forget the fdev is planning to merge horizions into odyssey, to keep a single codebase. In other words Horizins players would get the new planet tech, but wouldn't be able to get out of their SRV etc. That's how I understand it.
It means that effectively they would be phasing out Odyssey as we know it today altogether.

No, it means effectively we lose all that is great in Horizons and gain all that is crap in Odyssey! Sounds like a bargain to me. Can't wait.

 

[Úlfhéðnar]

agree on the grind, but look at games like destiny 2 for example... their whole game mechanic is grind, grind harder, grind even more!

Well there is a huge price difference between Destiny 2 and ED/EDO
Last time I checked Destiny 2 was free... and even then the grind there feels well more rewarding
In ED especially EDO its like visit 4 settlements maybe you find one of the 20 you need.

Oh and before I forget: Visit means massacre all inhabitants and risk a fine or bounty

 

[Mogen Teras]

But the generation doesn't happen in real time - it happens as you move between systems etc.
So once you're playing, there's really no difference between ED and another FPS where every brick and chair has been lovingly hand crafted.
Yet other games (say Fortnite) can host 100 players in real time, significantly faster than ED can.
For goodness sake, Half Life 2 Death Match was more performant and that was released in 2004.

Thank you.

Getting a bit tired of armchair experts claiming Elite is doing these monumental things that it really isn't.

 

[DøømHåmstër]

Well, if they use subversion (they mentioned a "trunk", however this might not be a definitive indication) i can totally feel their pain (and would actually explain a lot).

I used subversion for over a decade and it is fine as long as you are careful...but if just one dev on the team doesn't do the check-in dance correctly, it can be a royal pain. And don't even get me started on merging large branches shiver. Of course, good unit tests and proper regression testing should catch that kind of problem.

Also, I feel like they could avoid an enormous amount of pain by tightening their release schedule and having shorter sprints with much smaller patches. Especially now that they are mostly in bug fix mode. The longer you go between releases, the higher the chance of introducing new bugs especially (as seems the case) when you have a good number of devs working on overlapping code. Smaller, regular releases also simplifies testing and helps improve overall morale of both devs and customers.

 

[Mogen Teras]

I used subversion for over a decade and it is fine as long as you are careful...but if just one dev on the team doesn't do the check-in dance correctly, it can be a royal pain. And don't even get me started on merging large branches shiver. Of course, good unit tests and proper regression testing should catch that kind of problem.

Also, I feel like they could avoid an enormous amount of pain by tightening their release schedule and having shorter sprints with much smaller patches. Especially now that they are mostly in bug fix mode. The longer you go between releases, the higher the chance of introducing new bugs especially (as seems the case) when you have a good number of devs working on overlapping code. Smaller, regular releases also simplifies testing and helps improve overall morale of both devs and customers.

I wonder what the actual dev staff think when they push each new Update to public and watch as the community reports how utterly broken they always seem to be.