What's new in Elite: Dangerous 1.2?
Given that the changelog can be a bit dense, I thought I'd write them up as release notes whilst waiting for the upgrade to complete.
Wings
The feature that gives Elite Dangerous 1.2 its name is "Wings". Wings are groupings of ships working together to achieve a common goal. Wings allow their members to see each others' status, to find each other and travel together easily, and to reap material rewards for helping each other.
Wings in Practice
User interface elements at the top of the screen show the status of other members of your Wing members. Wings are limited to up to four Commanders, although NPC wings may be larger. There is not yet a way to have NPC ships join a player wing, or vice versa. Each wing member is represented by a shape and their name is shown below. Rings around that shape indicate their shield status, and a graduated arc below the symbol represents their hull health. The Wing member's current target, if any, is displayed below their name, and their location (if different from your own) is shown at the bottom of the stack. An animated 'speaking' icon besides their name indicates when a Commander is using voice communications. These Wing UI elements displace the ship warning lights for Proximity, Impact and Flight Assist Off to the top of the communications panel.
Wings in Tactical Situations
Even the most Harmless Commander should realise that Wings give their members a significant tactical advantage. Scan information such as basic Wanted status and Kill Warrant Scan results is immediately shared among all wingmen in the same island. Bounties earned from Wanted vessels are shared between all wing members (see below). To give player Wings a challenge, NPC ships in wings are also created in a variety of contexts.
The HUD and scanner support you in flight by displaying Wing members in cyan. In addition, your fellow Wing members' target ships or other entities are tagged with their ID icon on the HUD. You cannot commit a crime or receive a bounty by firing on a Wing member, either. Three new control bindings allow you to select each Wing member directly, and with the Select Wingman's Target binding you can select the target of your selected wingman. The wing status of scanned ships is shown in the bottom left target info panel.
Wings on the Move
An increase in the wake dropout range from 1000km to 3000km makes it easier to follow Wingmen out of Supercruise to normal space. The main navigational benefit, however, comes from the Wingman Nav-Lock. When you are nav-locked to a Wingman, your ship will automatically follow them into and out of supercruise, and will hyperspace jump along with them - as long as the usual ship conditions for using the Frame Shift Drive are fulfilled. A square indicator around a Wingman UI element indicates your Nav-Lock target. Red signifies that you are too far away for Nav-Lock to work, whereas cyan means that you are within range. You can have only one Nav-Lock target, but Wingmen can nav-lock each other, so that if any one Wing member changes frame of reference, all members will follow them. A control binding allows you to quickly enable and disable Nav-Lock.
Each ship is now equipped with a normal-space beacon that is visible to other wingmen who are in Supercruise. This enables wingmen to quickly locate and assist their fellows, without knowing which Frame Shift energy wake represents their drop into normal space. The 'select wingman' control bindings also select a beacon, where appropriate.
Wings and Money
Wing members benefit mutually from acting together. In combat, all wing members who hit a Wanted target who are present (and not dead) when the target is destroyed will share the bounty equally.
Similarly, Wing members receive a small dividend as a percentage of the profits made by their wingmates in the same system when they sell goods. This applies to each trader's sales, so if everyone trades, everyone profits. The dividend is paid by the trading market from taxes added after the trade, so it does not reduce the profit made by the selling Commander. This applies to mined commodities as well.
Wings specialising in Exploration profit from the shared scan mechanism. All wingmen in a system receive each other's scan results and can all sell them. The first scan bonus can still only be earned once, however, by the first Commander to sell the newly surveyed object's scan results. New discoveries are credited to all Wingmen present.
Wings can already share some types of missions types. In "kill X of ship type Y" missions, any wing member can score the killing blow and it will still count towards the kill target count for the member who took the mission. It seems that mission rewards are not yet shared, so it would make sense for wing members to each take kill missions in the same and let kills count towards two missions. It has also been reported that Assassination missions' NPC targets may be protected by Wings, so you may have to bring friends to complete these.
Wings and Crime
Although you cannot commit a crime against a Wingman, crimes perpetrated against other ships or structures still apply to you. Interestingly, Wingmens' crimes are not shared by their peers. In addition, cargo transferred between wingmen is never tagged as stolen.
Joining or Creating a Wing
To create a new Wing you use the revised Communications panel in the top left of the cockpit to invite local Commanders or friends to join your wing. Friend and Wing invitations are shown in a tab in the Communications panel instead of in the main game menu. After leaving a Wing, there is a brief cooldown period before you can join another Wing.
Wings Video Tutorial
Frontier have produced a tutorial video covering the mechanics of Wing play. Find it on YouTube here:
[video=youtube;Jl6hdeRHdOk]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jl6hdeRHdOk[/video]
External camera view
The other long-awaited feature brought by 1.2 is the unlocking of the external camera view. Elite: Dangerous 1.2 makes no pretence of this being part of the game; activating the camera (by default with Ctrl-Alt-Space) pops up an immersion-breaking dialog that must be acknowledged, and the camera has no inertia or in-game user interface. The camera is pretty close to a debugging tool, and the additional dialog serves to prevent an unfair advantage in combat. When active, the camera can be flown around the ship using the pitch, roll, yaw and thruster controls, and moved a moderate distance away from the ship. The ship's controls are locked while the camera is active, so it will fly in a straight line until leaving camera mode using the same shortcut. is The camera's motion remains relative to the ship, so for fly-by shots, you will still need the help of a friend in a Sidewinder.
Communications changes
To support Wings, the Communications panel in the top left of the cockpit has been revised and expanded. It is now a tabbed interface, like the other UI panels. The first tab is the familiar text chat feed. It is followed by a contact list tab for interacting with Wing members, local Commanders and friend list members, where you can invite Commanders to Wing up with you. The third tab is for managing incoming friend and Wing invitations, and the last tab contains chat and voice settings.
Broadcast local chat was missed by many players and this is now supported in 1.2. While in the text chat tab, <TAB> (not rebindable yet) cycles between broadcast LOCAL chat, DIRECT chat to a targetted ship and WING chat. This effectively changes chat channels. A set of 'slash commands', /t, /r, and /w, allow you to address your target, respond to last speaker, and address your wing respectively, without taking your hands off the keyboard.To differentiate channels, messages are colour coded.
New Ships
Elite: Dangerous will never be complete until the promised number of 30 playable ships is reached, and 1.2 brings us two ships closer to this magical day.
The Vulture is a heavy gunship, a little larger than the Viper but packing two large hardpoints and four auxiliary points. It is maneuverable, tough and quite fast. Feedback from Commanders in the beta test indicates it could be somewhat power constrained, and the large hardpoints underline the absence of large kinetic weapons. Although it has a large, typically Lakon Spaceways canopy, it is said to be better armoured than any other in the game. As part of a pirate Wing, the Vulture will be a ship to be reckoned with. Price is reportedly 20 million credits.
The Fer-de-Lance is another returner from the first Elite game. Whereas in the past it has been a well-defended, poorly armed and slow to turn luxury yacht, it is now a fast combat ship packing a single huge hardpoint and several others. In combat terms it should place somewhere between the Asp and the Python, and it will cost Commanders 102 million credits.
Interface and Game Mechanics
Ship heat management has been streamlined and nuanced. The overall heat scale has been normalised to 100%, whilst maintaining the relative rate at which heat is gained and lost. Before 1.2, 150% heat was the arbitrary point at which a ship would start taking hull damage. Now, 100% is the safety limit. Above that is the unsafe region, and ship modules receive increasing amounts of heat damage. Above 160% and the hull will start to catastrophically fail as it literally melts around you. The heat seepage from weapons when the WEP capacitor charge is low that was introduced in 1.1 will affect ship heat, and may have been strengthened again after having been softened in response to 1.1 beta feedback.
In response to feedback to the experimental heat changes seen in the 1.1 beta, the new heat damage rules are supported by UI improvements in the cockpit and audio alarms; the heat scale is segmented indicating the safety zones, and a series of increasingly strident alarms and voice notifications are issued as heat rises above safe levels. Overheating effects have been enhanced too, with more sparks and steam effects in use as the mercury rises.
As module damage becomes more common than something annoying that happens just before your ship explodes, it was also important to include a way to mitigate modules that have been damaged to 0% health, rendering them inoperable. There is now a way to reboot and reinitialize the ship, and in doing so, low level repair routines will salvage a few percentage points of health for any inoperable modules, at the cost of cannibalising a healthy module by double this amount. The diagnostic reboot leaves a ship dead in the space for several seconds, making it useless in combat, and cannot repair hull or canopy damage. For explorers who carelessly graze a star one time too often and traders immobilised by pirates, this feature will be very helpful. In addition, 1.2 removes the critical flag from docking computer, frame shift drive and frame shift interdictor modules, removing a cheap way to kill a ship.
Self-destructing is the last resort, but to make this event even more poignant, a detailed self-destruct sequence has been added.
To give players more choices in how to configure ships, Shield Booster and Hull Upgrade modules have been added to 1.2. Shield Boosters increase the total strength of a ship's shields. They do not, however, increase its recharge rate, and require power. In RPG terms, if a Shield Cell Bank is a potion of healing, a Shield Booster increases your shield hitpoints. Hull Upgrades passively increase hull hitpoints, at a cost of decreasing maneuverability and jump range by increasing overall mass.
Many small changes increase the game's user friendliness. For example, large ships being denied docking permission will be told if this is due to the lack of a suitable landing pad. If a ship module change will reduce performance, this is shown at purchase confirmation. When a multiple system journey is interrupted, a new keybinding lets you recall the next navigation destination without manually opening the Navigation panel and finding the system with the routing icon next to it.
Content
Signal Sources seen in Supercruise have been expanded with both Strong and Weak variants. The signal level implies the number of ships likely to be present if you drop in one of these. The developers have indicated that the difficulty of a Signal Source is not scaled to your rank or ship, so act cautiously, or bring friends.
Note that mission-related signal sources are still shown as 'Unidentified Signal Sources' but may contain NPC Wings. Assassination missions are therefore much more dangerous than they have been in the past.
AI
Combat AI has been seen several changes, to make NPCs use energy and kinetic weapons appropriately given their target's status as players do; to avoid player's fire arcs, and NPC and player alike benefit from the massively improved and faster docking AI.
Smuggling and Piracy
Whereas before 1.2, trading illegal goods was not a viable full-time career due to the black market prices being lower than on markets where the commodity is legal, 1.2 rebalances the profits, making illegal goods command a premium of up to 25% at stations where they are in demand. It is said that by comparing the system map's Imports and Prohibited goods lists, a canny Commander can detect demand, but you'll still have to know where the black markets are e found. Players carrying illegal cargo are reminded of their status in the right UI panel, and canisters of illegal goods are indicated as such when targeted in the target info panel.
Rare commodities, when scooped, now log how far they are from their origin systems. This makes it more lucrative to steal rare goods at the end of a trade run than at the beginning.
Beta 1.2 proposed a new 'marked cargo' status that would have prevented selling cargo marked after a scan at all, but this change has been reverted in 1.2 final pending improvements. In its place, fines for being caught smuggling have been reduced to a percentage of their total value, and the chance of being fined repeatedly for the same cargo has been removed.
Balance Changes
Repair costs have been massively reduced, and so have hull wear and tear repair costs. The variety of NPCs encountered at resource extraction sites has been increased. Anarchies have been made more dangerous, and destroying NPCs in Anarchies will now affect player reputation, things that many players had requested. Redeeming bounties will also change your reputation with the relevant factions. Likewise, combat bonds, when redeemed, affect faction influence, so missions and trading are not the only ways to effect regime change, and where factions have expanded out of their home system, carrying out missions for that faction will change now influence in the correct,origin system. The state of a system is now taken into account when generating NPC system traffic, which will make systems feel more alive and distinctive. Capital ships' modules' health has been rebalanced, and their guns are no longer spoofed by chaff launchers.
Other Fixes and improvements
Aside from many crash fixes and performance improvements and a barrage of extra audio and fixes there, it is worth mentioning that several mission breakages have been fixed. NPC persistency on travelling between supercruise has been improved.
EDIT #1 11 March: Mention player wing size limit and the inability to have NPC wingmen.
EDIT #2: Bounty hunting now affects reputation
EDIT #3: Include anecdotal evidence that mission USS may contain NPC wings.
EDIT #4: Mention cooperating on kill missions.
Given that the changelog can be a bit dense, I thought I'd write them up as release notes whilst waiting for the upgrade to complete.
Wings
The feature that gives Elite Dangerous 1.2 its name is "Wings". Wings are groupings of ships working together to achieve a common goal. Wings allow their members to see each others' status, to find each other and travel together easily, and to reap material rewards for helping each other.
Wings in Practice
User interface elements at the top of the screen show the status of other members of your Wing members. Wings are limited to up to four Commanders, although NPC wings may be larger. There is not yet a way to have NPC ships join a player wing, or vice versa. Each wing member is represented by a shape and their name is shown below. Rings around that shape indicate their shield status, and a graduated arc below the symbol represents their hull health. The Wing member's current target, if any, is displayed below their name, and their location (if different from your own) is shown at the bottom of the stack. An animated 'speaking' icon besides their name indicates when a Commander is using voice communications. These Wing UI elements displace the ship warning lights for Proximity, Impact and Flight Assist Off to the top of the communications panel.
Wings in Tactical Situations
Even the most Harmless Commander should realise that Wings give their members a significant tactical advantage. Scan information such as basic Wanted status and Kill Warrant Scan results is immediately shared among all wingmen in the same island. Bounties earned from Wanted vessels are shared between all wing members (see below). To give player Wings a challenge, NPC ships in wings are also created in a variety of contexts.
The HUD and scanner support you in flight by displaying Wing members in cyan. In addition, your fellow Wing members' target ships or other entities are tagged with their ID icon on the HUD. You cannot commit a crime or receive a bounty by firing on a Wing member, either. Three new control bindings allow you to select each Wing member directly, and with the Select Wingman's Target binding you can select the target of your selected wingman. The wing status of scanned ships is shown in the bottom left target info panel.
Wings on the Move
An increase in the wake dropout range from 1000km to 3000km makes it easier to follow Wingmen out of Supercruise to normal space. The main navigational benefit, however, comes from the Wingman Nav-Lock. When you are nav-locked to a Wingman, your ship will automatically follow them into and out of supercruise, and will hyperspace jump along with them - as long as the usual ship conditions for using the Frame Shift Drive are fulfilled. A square indicator around a Wingman UI element indicates your Nav-Lock target. Red signifies that you are too far away for Nav-Lock to work, whereas cyan means that you are within range. You can have only one Nav-Lock target, but Wingmen can nav-lock each other, so that if any one Wing member changes frame of reference, all members will follow them. A control binding allows you to quickly enable and disable Nav-Lock.
Each ship is now equipped with a normal-space beacon that is visible to other wingmen who are in Supercruise. This enables wingmen to quickly locate and assist their fellows, without knowing which Frame Shift energy wake represents their drop into normal space. The 'select wingman' control bindings also select a beacon, where appropriate.
Wings and Money
Wing members benefit mutually from acting together. In combat, all wing members who hit a Wanted target who are present (and not dead) when the target is destroyed will share the bounty equally.
Similarly, Wing members receive a small dividend as a percentage of the profits made by their wingmates in the same system when they sell goods. This applies to each trader's sales, so if everyone trades, everyone profits. The dividend is paid by the trading market from taxes added after the trade, so it does not reduce the profit made by the selling Commander. This applies to mined commodities as well.
Wings specialising in Exploration profit from the shared scan mechanism. All wingmen in a system receive each other's scan results and can all sell them. The first scan bonus can still only be earned once, however, by the first Commander to sell the newly surveyed object's scan results. New discoveries are credited to all Wingmen present.
Wings can already share some types of missions types. In "kill X of ship type Y" missions, any wing member can score the killing blow and it will still count towards the kill target count for the member who took the mission. It seems that mission rewards are not yet shared, so it would make sense for wing members to each take kill missions in the same and let kills count towards two missions. It has also been reported that Assassination missions' NPC targets may be protected by Wings, so you may have to bring friends to complete these.
Wings and Crime
Although you cannot commit a crime against a Wingman, crimes perpetrated against other ships or structures still apply to you. Interestingly, Wingmens' crimes are not shared by their peers. In addition, cargo transferred between wingmen is never tagged as stolen.
Joining or Creating a Wing
To create a new Wing you use the revised Communications panel in the top left of the cockpit to invite local Commanders or friends to join your wing. Friend and Wing invitations are shown in a tab in the Communications panel instead of in the main game menu. After leaving a Wing, there is a brief cooldown period before you can join another Wing.
Wings Video Tutorial
Frontier have produced a tutorial video covering the mechanics of Wing play. Find it on YouTube here:
[video=youtube;Jl6hdeRHdOk]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jl6hdeRHdOk[/video]
External camera view
The other long-awaited feature brought by 1.2 is the unlocking of the external camera view. Elite: Dangerous 1.2 makes no pretence of this being part of the game; activating the camera (by default with Ctrl-Alt-Space) pops up an immersion-breaking dialog that must be acknowledged, and the camera has no inertia or in-game user interface. The camera is pretty close to a debugging tool, and the additional dialog serves to prevent an unfair advantage in combat. When active, the camera can be flown around the ship using the pitch, roll, yaw and thruster controls, and moved a moderate distance away from the ship. The ship's controls are locked while the camera is active, so it will fly in a straight line until leaving camera mode using the same shortcut. is The camera's motion remains relative to the ship, so for fly-by shots, you will still need the help of a friend in a Sidewinder.
Communications changes
To support Wings, the Communications panel in the top left of the cockpit has been revised and expanded. It is now a tabbed interface, like the other UI panels. The first tab is the familiar text chat feed. It is followed by a contact list tab for interacting with Wing members, local Commanders and friend list members, where you can invite Commanders to Wing up with you. The third tab is for managing incoming friend and Wing invitations, and the last tab contains chat and voice settings.
Broadcast local chat was missed by many players and this is now supported in 1.2. While in the text chat tab, <TAB> (not rebindable yet) cycles between broadcast LOCAL chat, DIRECT chat to a targetted ship and WING chat. This effectively changes chat channels. A set of 'slash commands', /t, /r, and /w, allow you to address your target, respond to last speaker, and address your wing respectively, without taking your hands off the keyboard.To differentiate channels, messages are colour coded.
New Ships
Elite: Dangerous will never be complete until the promised number of 30 playable ships is reached, and 1.2 brings us two ships closer to this magical day.
The Vulture is a heavy gunship, a little larger than the Viper but packing two large hardpoints and four auxiliary points. It is maneuverable, tough and quite fast. Feedback from Commanders in the beta test indicates it could be somewhat power constrained, and the large hardpoints underline the absence of large kinetic weapons. Although it has a large, typically Lakon Spaceways canopy, it is said to be better armoured than any other in the game. As part of a pirate Wing, the Vulture will be a ship to be reckoned with. Price is reportedly 20 million credits.
The Fer-de-Lance is another returner from the first Elite game. Whereas in the past it has been a well-defended, poorly armed and slow to turn luxury yacht, it is now a fast combat ship packing a single huge hardpoint and several others. In combat terms it should place somewhere between the Asp and the Python, and it will cost Commanders 102 million credits.
Interface and Game Mechanics
Ship heat management has been streamlined and nuanced. The overall heat scale has been normalised to 100%, whilst maintaining the relative rate at which heat is gained and lost. Before 1.2, 150% heat was the arbitrary point at which a ship would start taking hull damage. Now, 100% is the safety limit. Above that is the unsafe region, and ship modules receive increasing amounts of heat damage. Above 160% and the hull will start to catastrophically fail as it literally melts around you. The heat seepage from weapons when the WEP capacitor charge is low that was introduced in 1.1 will affect ship heat, and may have been strengthened again after having been softened in response to 1.1 beta feedback.
In response to feedback to the experimental heat changes seen in the 1.1 beta, the new heat damage rules are supported by UI improvements in the cockpit and audio alarms; the heat scale is segmented indicating the safety zones, and a series of increasingly strident alarms and voice notifications are issued as heat rises above safe levels. Overheating effects have been enhanced too, with more sparks and steam effects in use as the mercury rises.
As module damage becomes more common than something annoying that happens just before your ship explodes, it was also important to include a way to mitigate modules that have been damaged to 0% health, rendering them inoperable. There is now a way to reboot and reinitialize the ship, and in doing so, low level repair routines will salvage a few percentage points of health for any inoperable modules, at the cost of cannibalising a healthy module by double this amount. The diagnostic reboot leaves a ship dead in the space for several seconds, making it useless in combat, and cannot repair hull or canopy damage. For explorers who carelessly graze a star one time too often and traders immobilised by pirates, this feature will be very helpful. In addition, 1.2 removes the critical flag from docking computer, frame shift drive and frame shift interdictor modules, removing a cheap way to kill a ship.
Self-destructing is the last resort, but to make this event even more poignant, a detailed self-destruct sequence has been added.
To give players more choices in how to configure ships, Shield Booster and Hull Upgrade modules have been added to 1.2. Shield Boosters increase the total strength of a ship's shields. They do not, however, increase its recharge rate, and require power. In RPG terms, if a Shield Cell Bank is a potion of healing, a Shield Booster increases your shield hitpoints. Hull Upgrades passively increase hull hitpoints, at a cost of decreasing maneuverability and jump range by increasing overall mass.
Many small changes increase the game's user friendliness. For example, large ships being denied docking permission will be told if this is due to the lack of a suitable landing pad. If a ship module change will reduce performance, this is shown at purchase confirmation. When a multiple system journey is interrupted, a new keybinding lets you recall the next navigation destination without manually opening the Navigation panel and finding the system with the routing icon next to it.
Content
Signal Sources seen in Supercruise have been expanded with both Strong and Weak variants. The signal level implies the number of ships likely to be present if you drop in one of these. The developers have indicated that the difficulty of a Signal Source is not scaled to your rank or ship, so act cautiously, or bring friends.
Note that mission-related signal sources are still shown as 'Unidentified Signal Sources' but may contain NPC Wings. Assassination missions are therefore much more dangerous than they have been in the past.
AI
Combat AI has been seen several changes, to make NPCs use energy and kinetic weapons appropriately given their target's status as players do; to avoid player's fire arcs, and NPC and player alike benefit from the massively improved and faster docking AI.
Smuggling and Piracy
Whereas before 1.2, trading illegal goods was not a viable full-time career due to the black market prices being lower than on markets where the commodity is legal, 1.2 rebalances the profits, making illegal goods command a premium of up to 25% at stations where they are in demand. It is said that by comparing the system map's Imports and Prohibited goods lists, a canny Commander can detect demand, but you'll still have to know where the black markets are e found. Players carrying illegal cargo are reminded of their status in the right UI panel, and canisters of illegal goods are indicated as such when targeted in the target info panel.
Rare commodities, when scooped, now log how far they are from their origin systems. This makes it more lucrative to steal rare goods at the end of a trade run than at the beginning.
Beta 1.2 proposed a new 'marked cargo' status that would have prevented selling cargo marked after a scan at all, but this change has been reverted in 1.2 final pending improvements. In its place, fines for being caught smuggling have been reduced to a percentage of their total value, and the chance of being fined repeatedly for the same cargo has been removed.
Balance Changes
Repair costs have been massively reduced, and so have hull wear and tear repair costs. The variety of NPCs encountered at resource extraction sites has been increased. Anarchies have been made more dangerous, and destroying NPCs in Anarchies will now affect player reputation, things that many players had requested. Redeeming bounties will also change your reputation with the relevant factions. Likewise, combat bonds, when redeemed, affect faction influence, so missions and trading are not the only ways to effect regime change, and where factions have expanded out of their home system, carrying out missions for that faction will change now influence in the correct,origin system. The state of a system is now taken into account when generating NPC system traffic, which will make systems feel more alive and distinctive. Capital ships' modules' health has been rebalanced, and their guns are no longer spoofed by chaff launchers.
Other Fixes and improvements
Aside from many crash fixes and performance improvements and a barrage of extra audio and fixes there, it is worth mentioning that several mission breakages have been fixed. NPC persistency on travelling between supercruise has been improved.
EDIT #1 11 March: Mention player wing size limit and the inability to have NPC wingmen.
EDIT #2: Bounty hunting now affects reputation
EDIT #3: Include anecdotal evidence that mission USS may contain NPC wings.
EDIT #4: Mention cooperating on kill missions.
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