Pues como algunos ya sabreis se ha celebrado este fin de semana la
LaveCon 2015 en el Reino Unido, es un evento organizado por fans de Elite (principalmente el equipo de Lave Radio) que se esta celebrando anualmente y a donde siempre van algunos de los miembros de FDEV. Este año se han pasado por allí Michael Brookes, Sandro Sammarco y alguno más y además de una ronda de peguntas y respuestas han aprovechado para sacar alguna primicia pequeñita, como esta captura del nuevo Eagle Imperial!
La transcripcion de la ronda de preguntas y posiblemente el video del mismo saldrán en breve imagino (disculpas por la calidad, es una captura de teléfono móvil en la pantalla de LaveCon):
EDITO: Ya hay algo de información de la ronda aqui:
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=165775] , entre otras cosas parece que FDEV confirma que tienen un plan de actividad de por lo menos 10 años y que las mecánicas de misiones van a seguir recibiendo mucho más detalle, leed los extractos en inglés debajo de la captura. Además comentan que los grupos dentro del juego van a tener ciertas mejoras en cuanto a comunicación (me da a mi que esto va a ser en cuanto a lo de que jugadores d euna misma Potencia en Powerplay puedan coordinarse mejor dentro dle juego etc).
Me da a mi que dos de las monturas, en vez de estar debajo como en el Eagle normal, van a estar en las puntas de las alas.
Sandro has the same hat....
Zac is as enthusiastic and helpful in person as he appears to be on the forums.
SJA is an evil genius and gave a number of small groups of us an insight into AI behaviour, how the npc rankings are being tweaked and improved and exactly how to beat reverse flight combat.
They are liking the idea of ship variants... especially when they help bridge gaps in their internal ship 'backbone'. More on that later.
There is a 10 year plan.
The UA thing isn't a wild goose chase, we are apparently 'close' and there is more awaiting us as and when we work it out.
Imperial Eagle concept artwork shown... may well change over time.
More support for player groups 'Soon'. Watch the gamescom news.
There is a plan to use the upgraded missions system to give us more depth. The upgrade was 'under the hood' to extend capability to do missions conditional upon statuses of all sorts.... Longer range and more complex missions were a 'yes' and got a 'very soon'.
The PC release of cqc from what we could tell will be hot on the heels of the proper xbone release.
I did ask about missions, particularly about how many of the missions are of the kill 10 rats, err pirates type and how very few people actually read the mission text. Sandro mentioned that the mission system isn't anywhere near done, and (with a glint in his eye) said that they were thinking of ways to make missions a lot more than just reading text, find pirate, kill pirate type.
Michael doesn't want to inject hand crafted missions for non 'main arc' activities. They are looking at procedural generation for your own small mission arcs and working out how to make it rich and engaging.... or so he said. The mechanisms for delivering the missions and context related to rank, standing etc are in place... all they need to add is the auto creation of the content in enough variety.
... my opinion (from translating what was said) is that they aren't improving it piecemeal, there is quite a significant mission improvement coming in the near/mid future.
SJA DID mention 1.4 but nothing about when, or anything other than the AI content stuff. It was interesting hearing about how the team split up high level and low level AI tasks between them - how the NPC behaviour used to be in mini "black boxes" of code and is now more integrated. Bugs have been discovered and fixed - not least of which that the NPC's aren't paying attention to our rankings and loadouts properly sometimes and after they do, there will be more intelligence in how they respond to your loadouts (after a scan) and when they do interdictions based on the difference in your and their rank (amongst other things). All very well thought out stuff.
There is a weather eye on not making it too hard, by making Harmless ships fly like a muppet. Also asked whether NPC ships fly co-operatively in anything other than "all respond to incoming fire" and it appears that in their own wings, there is no co-ordination of what they're up to in terms of combat tactics or flight tactics.
All sorts of little bits from the whole team. Frontier really are still passionate about the game, they DO still play it personally in their free time (Michael plays both XBone and PC - it allows him to tool around in combat and dip in for a laugh without messing with his primary account).
There was a message from DB recorded just for Lavecon where he apologised for not coming in person and introducing a few of the sneak peeks. The usual "thanks, we love you" that we know and expect from him - genuine and heartfelt.
