"A voice in the darkness"
I love ED. Played it on a bbc'B' back in the day and at the time was everything I wanted in a game. Grew up with star wars, star trek and was always into space games. Elite back then was an early 3D game which made it stand out from other space games like asteroids, defender etc. I was hooked and never imagined that in my lifetime I'd be able to actually fly a realistic starship on a pc with near realism.
Now in RL and many years later I'm a lecturer in electrical engineering. Been teaching the 'next generation' about everything technological in electrics, electronics and computing - including the practical parts, for the last 17yrs. Did 20 in electrical engineering in industry before that so I'm pretty hands on.
Out comes Elite Dangerous in 2015. I was straight in there!. With new Pc technology, modern graphics cards and faster Internet the game looked amazing. I was hooked again and built a top spec pc with HOTAS to run it. Wow! I'm flying.
At about the same time the oculus dk2 dropped and I bought into that tech for both ED and other Industry-related applications. It was a game-changer in ED for me. My god! - I was actually flying in a ship that was full-size. When Horizons dropped and I could fly over planets - wow. Near 360 degree vision meant I was 'in my ship'. I was blown away and so was everyone I demo'd it to. How could it get any better.
Step forward a year or so, the cv1 came out and my graphics card got upgraded to suit when I bought one. 3D was now pretty damn good. More fluid-like and better graphics. I was in space-pilot heaven. 'As good as flying the real thing' I'd say and thought back to what it used to be like on the bbc. I've over 1600hrs in ED in VR to date and have never looked back. I'll never use a flat screen again in ED. I'd reached my childhood dream - or so I thought......
I stumbled, by accident, across the xsimulator network. Motion platforms, moving chairs, electrical work, electronics and a bit of coding and maths and a lively forum of folks willing to offer help and advice. All specialist subjects of mine so now to set about making my VR Elite Dangerous experience even better than I ever thought possible.
I spent 6 months researching, designing and building a motion chair to make my ED experience complete, 30 degrees of roll and pitch to start with. Kept a log of the build, learned a hell of a lot along the way thanks to folks like SilentChill (see post above), Noorbeast et al. Shared the build progress on their forum and with the students at college. Used aspects of it in lectures where I could. I'd made my ED experience better than I could ever imagine, with help along the way.
When my seat moves in ED its the best experience in-game ever.period. CQC, exploring, fighting, docking, crashing violently into things by accident and nearly being thrown from the chair or just simply flying around - its total VR for me 100% immersion if you're not careful. Multicrew is a real blast. I sit back and enjoy the ride as someone else flies their ship and my chair moves accordingly. However, the whole motion experience will be short lived and the chair will again fall silent. This will coincide with the next ED game update. Ten's of hours are spent by xsimulator members after every game update trying to almost guess the locations of the movement coordinates memory locations as they are not static. If it wasn't for the goodwill of guru simulator folks finding this data and patching it for us, I'd have 1/3 of my gameroom occupied by short-lived obsolete tech. An average of 2 full days work (5+ so far for 3.2.02) to try and patch ED for motion after every ED update - sheesh. The gurus are getting frustrated as the data memory locations always change. I can't blame them really - its a lot of 'starting from scratch' each time. How can FD provide a win-win alternative.
I know that us 'motion folks' are in a minority, and this may be why 'motion data API' is not a high priority for ED development, but I remind everyone that technology is accelerating (Moores Law). Tomorrows technology today - who'd have thought it. Us simulator building folk move with the times too, using newer motors, drives and microcontrollers to make the impossible, possible, on a limited budget and sharing all this on the web for anyone to have a go at building (as I did). There are also several commercial simulator companies in the market place now with simulators to suit shallow(ish) to deep pockets and the market is growing and prices will drop. The future looks bright for the simulation market, just look at the long growing list of games that support motion sims now. Some are really popular. ED should be on the list (a win).
The lack of motion data from ED is a real killer for us. A bottleneck that stops us dead and it diverts our time from driving the tech forwards each time. ED relies on updates to the game so we'll have this same problem again and again. I love the game and have the enthusiasm and skills to keep pushing the boundaries, and continue sharing the journey with others interested in the same thing. I'm personally asking ED to please not ignore our request. As SilentChill says, 'if we don't ask we don't get'. Please Frontier can we please have a Telemetry data API. I for one don't want to see this new gaming simulation experience in ED end before it really gets off the ground. In my opinion, ED has the best flight mechanics of any flight simulator. Please let it live.
Sorry for the 'wall', I feel quite strongly about our simple request, can we please have a Telemetry data API.
Kev B
