Development Update 1 - June

[Deleted member 182079]

You can disagree, but that's the reality. A SF game today can hardly justify being confined to ships or legs. Even a game like Warframe, which is basically a power fantasy fast paced third person horde shooter, a game for big angry nags, offer ship gameplay

Thing is though, Elite already had ground travel in the form of the (only) SRV. Not that much different to moving across the planetscape on foot (although faster, and with more utility). Again, Frontier should've stuck with what they're good at - both the flying and driving models were good and could've been expanded on, but they decided to start from scratch in an area they have no real experience with and bolted that on a game that 99% of players bought because of flying spaceships. Shame that Frontier didn't seem to have the boldness and confidence about the strengths of their product to go down that route.

I don't think any FPS aficionado will buy Elite because it contains some basic FPS elements.

As for the general master of none approach taken by many high profile games, It might explain why I mostly stick to in-depth simulators nowadays and give the majority of games that try to be everything-to-all-people a miss (Rockstar's games notwithstanding).

 

[Lysette]

I don't think many people in their late 20s, or their 30s, count themslves as middle-aged though (but some seem to be infantile and others old before their time). 60 is the new 40? Or as Georgio Moroder's song puts it, 74 is the new 24...

but there is a difference - I'm 33 and I feel having not much in common with generation Z - this is why I could agree with an assessment of 27-54 being middle aged. Especially as a woman one has to make major decisions when passing 30 - do i want kids or not for example. Given that the best time for having them by biological reasons is over for quite a while already. So in a way I am middle aged, if I want it or not, my biology is telling me this. And when my 40s will be there, my body will start to change in ways, which will not be a pleasant experience as well. But that is how it is and will be. And I bet I will feel old at that point in time - for a woman it might be an even harsher experience than for men.

 

[beatwaster]

you guys read it in a wrong way - I am not bashing elderly - I'm just saying they keep the game in the state in which it is, because they never complain about anything really. This game is lackluster and they are satisfied with it and worship Mr. Braben for what he did nearly 37 years ago - instead to expect more from the game, they are just satisfied,and that is why nothing goes forward - they don't stop playing and move on to something else, they stick to Elite no matter what - that is what I dislike - this glorification of the past, whereas Elite cannot compete with other space games in the future. This being satisfied with what ED currently is, is what brings it down in the end.

I think you are misled. I think among those supporting the game in a similar state, there are equal numbers of oldschool-CMDRs and lil-CMDRs.

Reasons to be dissatisfied and not "praise" FDev for the decisions he made:

oldschool) FDev does not build the gameplay into a set-up, without deepening the areas of the gaming experience and without making more interaction between the player through the universe of the game. (we saw practically the same only in the worst graphics, 20 years ago, and even then the imagination was drawing more than there is in the horizons)

lil) Graphics, behavior of new modes, general aimlessness of the game, optimization, quality of work performed and stability of the game as a whole are much lower than those of the fairly high-quality projects of other large game-building companies that are familiar to a young player.

Reasons to be content and not see evil in what is happening:

oldschool) Deep affection. The absence of major claims for the expansion of functionality from the versions of the last century. A casual style of play that does not push the player to search for complex interactions.

lil) The game is still Elite. With all its game advantages, and one must understand that if a player who has not played before is predisposed to become a CMDR, then the game will hook him so that he literally, mentally moves into the cockpit of his ship. And in this case, first impressions, like first love, will close his eyes even to the nastiest bugs. Such is the poison of the Elite. Sweet and blinding. Some kind of criticism will come at 2-3 thousand hours of play.

Thus, I think that there is no age group in the game that would stand out among those who scold FDev for Odyssey, or defend its interests.

 

[MacIntoc]

Sorry man, the future is already here. Better accept the importance of DLSS and SR.

Not when it comes to make up a disastrous code. And what after ?? Even if they reach 30fps on console by upscaling the game form 960x540 with this trick, what will they do for ELW ? When they will need to display grass, trees, water, clouds and meteo ?? It's just a dead end.

 

[Deleted member 182079]

this and they might have a different approach to it as well and be unhappy having to work with something they deem outdated. This even happens with own projects, if they haven't been touched for a longer time and need to be upgraded - i see this with projects we have done, years later one has a different approach and working with "old stuff" is interesting to see, what i thought about it in the past, but now I'm on a different line of thought and it might be cumbersome to continue with a "project of the past" and it is often better, to create a new virtual machine which can do the job better and suits the current line of thought.

I don't want to bring up Glassdoor again but there are a few interesting statements found there that would explain the mess they're in to some extent at least. We'll never know for certain that's for sure. And honestly if they managed to turn this around I couldn't even care less.

 

[Ian Skippy]

Not when it comes to make up a disastrous code. And what after ?? Even if they reach 30fps on console by upscaling the game form 960x540 with this trick, what will they do for ELV ? When they will need to display grass, trees, water, clouds and meteo ?? It's just a dead end.

I am sorry to report that previous generation consoles are indeed a dead end. If ELWs come it will not be for the next few years, and lol to anyone who expects a 2025 release to run on PS4.

 

[Ian Skippy]

I don't want to bring up Glassdoor again but there are a few interesting statements found there that would explain the mess they're in to some extent at least. We'll never know for certain that's for sure. And honestly if they managed to turn this around I couldn't even care less.

Nah, Glassdoor is interesting for aggregate ststistics, and FD does quite well there. Anecdotes from disgruntled former employees should always be taken with a lunch of salt.

 

[Deleted member 182079]

Sorry man, the future is already here. Better accept the importance of DLSS and SR.

I suppose the question is, does a game with the technical fidelity and visuals of Elite Odyssey require DLSS & co to be able to run adequately?

With Cyberpunk and its inclusion of ray-tracing on current hardware? Absolutely. On a 7 year old game that looks its age at this point (even including EDO specific assets) I would say no.

 

[Deleted member 182079]

Nah, Glassdoor is interesting for aggregate ststistics, and FD does quite well there. Anecdotes from disgruntled former employees should always be taken with a lunch of salt.

I always take whatever I read on the innerwebs with a pinch of salt - as pointed out in its manual

But I have to admit some of the stuff that's written there (and the style it is written in) does seem plausible, even more so in the context of EDO. If it's made up then fair play to whoever wrote it. Maybe Frontier should hire them for their lore/Galnet department

 

[Ian Skippy]

I suppose the question is, does a game with the technical fidelity and visuals of Elite Odyssey require DLSS & co to be able to run adequately?

With Cyberpunk and its inclusion of ray-tracing on current hardware? Absolutely. On a 7 year old game that looks its age at this point (even including EDO specific assets) I would say no.

You could say the same for NMS. Nvidias trailer for it shows it going from 40 to 67 FPS in 4k. Games like cp2077 run on fixed, hardcoded and relatively small maps. That makes it far, far easier to optimize. That's way harder for games like ED and NMS. The "games only need DLSS if they look like cp2077" is a bit simplistic to me.

And personally, if these techniques give me 60 FPS in NMS and ED at 4k I am happy. If macintoc can do better without I am interested in seeing it though.

 

[Deleted member 182079]

You could say the same for NMS. Nvidias trailer for it shows it going from 40 to 67 FPS in 4k. Games like cp2077 run on fixed, hardcoded and relatively small maps. That makes it far, far easier to optimize. That's way harder for games like ED and NMS. The "games only need DLSS if they look like cp2077" is a bit simplistic to me.

And personally, if these techniques give me 60 FPS in NMS and ED at 4k I am happy. If macintoc can do better without I am interested in seeing it though.

I'm not the biggest fan of DLSS (even though the performance boosts it brings are impressive) simply because of the artifacting it creates (like a grain filter with blur added) - I do use it in CP2077 in the 'quality' setting (otherwise my game would slow to a crawl, at least with RTX enabled on my entry level 2060s when it comes to ray-tracing), but Elite doesn't feature such hardware hungry tech, and we do have a benchmark with Horizons which ran perfectly fine in comparison (and in my view still looks better all round even if others disagree) - nothing that got added in EDO justifies the performance hit from an eye candy perspective.

Though if it helps to run better on a sub-par machine or downright potato, by all means, so point taken - my hardware is way above recommended spec though and I would not expect to have to rely on crutches like DLSS to get it to run the same way as Horizons, and I hope Frontier will perform proper optimisation and not just rely mostly on these tools to get the desired result.

 

[Ian Skippy]

I'm not the biggest fan of DLSS (even though the performance boosts it brings are impressive) simply because of the artifacting it creates (like a grain filter with blur added) - I do use it in CP2077 in the 'quality' setting (otherwise my game would slow to a crawl, at least with RTX enabled on my entry level 2060s when it comes to ray-tracing), but Elite doesn't feature such hardware hungry tech, and we do have a benchmark with Horizons which ran perfectly fine in comparison (and in my view still looks better all round even if others disagree) - nothing that got added in EDO justifies the performance hit from an eye candy perspective.

Though if it helps to run better on a sub-par machine or downright potato, by all means, so point taken - my hardware is way above recommended spec though and I would not expect to have to rely on crutches like DLSS to get it to run the same way as Horizons, and I hope Frontier will perform proper optimisation and not just rely mostly on these tools to get the desired result.

Have you tried DLSS on Death Stranding? It improves quality over native while improving FPS slightly at the highest setting.

It really is pretty neat stuff.

 

[Deleted member 182079]

Have you tried DLSS on Death Stranding? It improves quality over native while improving FPS slightly at the highest setting.

It really is pretty neat stuff.

Don't own that, and honestly it doesn't look like my cup of tea Interesting though and encouraging to hear it can improve quality, given my only experience so far is with 2077 I can only judge it based on that.

 

[MacIntoc]

I am sorry to report that previous generation consoles are indeed a dead end. If ELWs come it will not be for the next few years, and lol to anyone who expects a 2025 release to run on PS4.

Currently, Odyssey's graphic level is barely 2010~2012 art requiring a 2024 configuration to run perfectly. The main things that should prevent it from running on 360 and PS3 are high resolution textures, due to low memory, and PBR and tesselation, due to shader support.
There is currently no technical reason that would justify the game not running on One and PS4.

Furthermore, with the loss of console players and PC players using similar configurations, FDev will have fewer resources to invest in ED.

 

[Prof Horatio Hafnaugels]

...Even if they reach 30fps on console by upscaling the game form 960x540 with this trick...

Shh! Don't let them hear you or they may decide that all the optimization needed for consoles is just upscaling, and good riddance.
We're talknig about the same people who had the brillant idea to skip beta just because the game didn't catch fire during alpha.

 

[MacIntoc]

Shh! Don't let them hear you or they may decide that all the optimization needed for consoles is just upscaling, and good riddance.
We're talknig about the same people who had the brillant idea to skip beta just because the game didn't catch fire during alpha.

By including CAS, i'm afraid that's already FDev's plan, unfortunately.

Either that, or a makeshift solution while waiting for the optimizations that the console version should bring.

But the way how FDev seem to work, i wonder if they add CAS to see if the players will accept this lame solution.

 

[Wonko_The_Sane]

Well, he was actually kind of honest, at least in the first part of it, where he says that he would have told us where they were on the development and on future plans, and he kind of did tell us: they are in a huge mess and they still don't know how to get out of it (too bad they were hyping it until at least the week before)

Except for the multiple times he went in to detail about what the Dev streams would be and what they would encompass. And for all of the talk about telling us where things were going, etc. There are a few possible explanations, his bosses are telling him to lie to us, he is just making up what he thinks we want to hear because his bosses are not telling him anything, or his bosses are lying to him. None of them are good.

 

[CodeJunkie]

From your point of view maybe - from my point of view there is not much to play at all. But i see it from the EVE perspective, where I have always something to do and have a hard time logging out - whereas in ED I have a hard time wanting to even stay in the game for longer than 2 hours, because it is so lackluster and repetitive.

It's because ED has not been developed or handled as a proper MMO. I've been saying this for quite some time now.

They don't have a dedicated development staff to this game, which is quite obvious, especially now. All their effort has been on, very likely based on previous posts in this thread and others, figuring out how the game engine worked which was developed by a completely different team while trying to get something out the door. This is the result. Based on the amount of bug regressions, they were also probably working off a code branch either before horizons, or somewhere in the middle of horizons, just depends on when they actually started on Odyssey and how much they were merging in bug fixes as they were applied to Horizons and the base game. The lack of an actual dedicated dev team would also explain the lack of actual bug fixes in general and their obvious lack of interest their issue tracker. Anything added or fixed in horizons was probably someone being pulled off the new dev team slated for Odyssey trying to appease the community.

Along the way it's as if they've never seen how other MMO games are run and developed. The hint is, not like this.

 

[sallymorganmoore]

Things have been strangely quiet (bar @sallymorganmoore , of course) CM-wise since Thursday... Even Sally wasn't as prolific as normal.

Oh man, last Thursday was very intense with the Mauve Adders. I did genuinely feel bad that I couldn't be as chatty but the Mauve Adders and Missions really did need all of our additional support energy behind the scenes. I'll do my best to make up for it this week but can't promise the same level of attention outside of Thursday due to dev side work. The other guys will of course be here. We'll do our very best.

 

[Rat Catcher]

Oh man, last Thursday was very intense with the Mauve Adders. I did genuinely feel bad that I couldn't be as chatty but the Mauve Adders and Missions really did need all of our additional support energy behind the scenes. I'll do my best to make up for it this week but can't promise the same level of attention outside of Thursday due to dev side work. The other guys will of course be here. We'll do our very best.

That was pure respect, Sally... Not criticism, honest!
You normally are prolific on a Thursday, but it was a bit "hot" for a while!