There's always going to be people carrying water for developers, no matter how botched the release is, or how many broken promises there has been.
ANNOUNCEMENT Elite Dangerous | Odyssey: Roadmap
- Thread starter Arthur Tolmie
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No offense, but the statement that ED is made with VR in mind and using their own 'ad' as proof, is not proof of anything. The only real proof would be to see the vr hooks in the actual code. And taking Mr Braben's word on something isn't proof that something exists in the code.
Did the gimbal --> sensor link get shouted down? I genuinely thought it went through? If I take this game seriously again in the future I'll need to revisit some of my builds...
I can put my hands on a screenshot of the old website expounding Elite's VR pedigree, along with the video clip of David talking about ship and station interiors if you'd like?
There's been a lot of decisions I've seen them make that are questionable at best...
- Push from THAT alpha to release in a couple of weeks?
- To only have one station interior model?
- To still not have NPC SLF pilots on the bridge?
- To go for capture the flag combat?
- The almost complete compartmentalisation of On-Foot from the space ship game.
- To nix VR? (C'mon I did well to make it this far without a VR mention)
- The shallow thargoid pew pew:
- Where are the two dynasties from the lore?
- Or the Oresrians human allies?
- Multi crew - 'nuff said.
- All of humanity only having one planetary vehicle
- that vehicle only being capable of Shoot Scoop & Scan
- The entire game being surmised as Shoot Scoop and Scan
- T7 and Clipper as Large pad ships?
- Powerplay - so much love needed
- Etc...
For the record, here's one such advert as is being referenced by Lysette:
I think the website was pretty unequivocal back in the pre-Odyssey era, wouldn't you say? SO lets take your code hooks point into consideration, EITHER one of these two statement could be true, but only one is true:
- The VR code hooks were blue-tacked on to the game and they lied on their website and other marketing material
- The VR code hools were intertwined with the core functionality of the game at a very deep level and it has been a deliberate effort and a significant undertaking to remove it from Odyssey, which is why we still see VR where there oughtn't to be any through glitchy keystroke combo presses
Foxtrot Foxtrot Sierra! Why did they do that? that was one of the most authentic tweaks on the agenda, one of the few things I've ever seen that benefited from some verisimilitude, and was still gamey....
People were up in arms because it impacted gimbals...well duh!
If gimbals relied on sensor grade (and now engineering) to help with chaff resistance, engagement angle / tracking time it would balance them much better and give sensors a reason to be more than D (A grade is used for PvP to keep instances alive). Gimbal ships would need more considerations, fixed weapon ships would be simpler and lighter (to offset the skill gap) outfitting would be that much more involving- the other issue was that it might be top end sensors improve on aspects of gimbals or even turrets. The possibilities were many and interesting but....nope.
Same with shields- weaker shields would mean less spanner shield tanks and things like armour would matter.
That's where you're wrong. ED had a the largest VR player base of any title that wasn't VR only. Upwards of about 1/3 if statistics are to be believed. FDev did everything they could to retain that player base short of actually delivering a VR implementation. A lot of folks like myself weren't fooled by the promises (fool me once, et al) and did not and will not purchase Odyssey until they earn our money with a full VR implementation.
There is really very few (to none) games like Elite, so a custom engine makes sense. The cobra engine is used on other frontier games its just for ED. However it does mean that if you need to crunch hard you can't just hire a bunch of Unreal3d developers to pickup the slack, you need to train them on your engine and all its "interesting features".
"and their engine is without a doubt properly documented" - laughs hysterically , you might be right - but as a contract developer , projects with any documentation are few and far between projects with good and upto date documentation are like hens teeth.
However I think its faily obvious that Odyssey has seen some major "upgrades/rework" of that engine, which have had "more than the usual amount of teething problems", probably because the whole release was rushed.
Hopefully the kinks will work out and eventually it will all come good. However alot of people have a very critical eye on the planet tech, because if they f*ck that up then for many people the game is ruined in away that no ammount of grinding for groundcombat will compensate for.
I would have been happier if the whole on-feet thing had been exploration only
i haven't said it would - just that FDev isn't going to put real effort into the future development of ED - and this is exactly how it looks like - vital concepts with which they got the money from backers are now just stripped - no plans for implementation of those features. Do you think that is ok?- i don't think so.
The thing is, the community kept going on about space legs and the result is yet another 1st person shooter game, albeit with poor graphic integrations.
I found it disheartening that UE5 is better than Elite Dangerous Odyssey in many aspects such as:
- Terrain
- Overhanging features
- Deformable terrain
- Weather
- Clouds - volumetric and adaptive
- Lighting
- reflective glow
- sunset - daylight - twilight - night
- "Many things and improvements" to paraphrase our "roadmap"
Well, the T7 is only on a large pad due to its height; it could land on a outpost medium pad but it could not enter the hangar, a simple but interesting chnage that could be simply made
The way those rocks bounced about when the meteors hit - vs the cemented down (and sometimes invisible) rocks in Odyssey.
I hate to admit it but I thought the reason for the 3 year delay was for new planet tech that would be more animated, have caves and overhangs, procedural life controlled by the BGS (but not earthlike worlds), clouds and meteors and weather... and virtual NPCs bringing some much needed life to the game world.
Speaking only for myself here, but I always wanted space legs to be done BEFORE atmospheres, because were Atmos to be put before legs, we'd still be playing as a pilots seat zooming around in an SRV looking at the new terrain. However, I anticipated "Legs" being done as a RPG. That didn't go to plan...
Yeah, me too, but we should have known better...
Indeed it was, the video about creating the galaxy is available on the yootoob, it was the first "Discovery Scanner" entitled Creating a Galaxy.
Aye he did the first discovery scanner years ago, with Ed Lewis IRC, who found his information really well presented. More Recently she did an interview with the current CM's about the development of Odyssey's atmospheres.
I almost spit coffee on my keyboard and monitor when I read that quote.
A little background: Not counting my programming of a Navy Octal-based fire control computer, my first real civilian programming job was on a Z8 in '81. I then spent decades writing firmware for computers and storage devices from HDDs to massive storage arrays. I stopped at C, and not C++ because the embedded systems I designed and coded had to be deterministic and could not use constructors and destructors or other 'features' of C++. Didn't need them anyway really as I could do anything I needed to do with C and assembly.
My 'spit coffee' moment was when I read that comment about how "their engine is without a doubt properly documented". I remember the so-called experts telling everyone that C was a self-documenting language.
I put copious comments in my designed RTOSs, and created programmers guide documentation anyway.
I had to retire because kids today all want to work with interpretive languages and except for a very few, are incapable of writing on the metal, nor understanding how operating systems work or are designed.
Progress.
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