New and yet very old to Elite - but am genuinely astounded, it's a monumental achievement

Birdseed007

B
I'm an older guy (52) and fell in love with Elite back in 1986 on the Commodore 64, it kept me up night after night during my A-Levels deep into the early hours hunched in my tiny bedroom over my equally tiny black and white 14" portable TV set!! I reached 'Deadly' status but never Elite but when the C64 finally went to the great gig in the sky and I moved over to PC in the mid 1990's I struggled to find any space sims that held my attention quite like Elite did. Mostly I flew flight simulators and eventually I trained as an airline pilot inspired partly by my Father who was cabin crew and partly by games like Elite and old TV series like Space 1999!

Roll forward to a couple of years ago and I discovered Elite in its modern incarnation. On my original Oculus Rift it was pretty astonishing even if my I7-7700 and GTX1080 struggled to run it smoothly. Work and family life issues like dealing with a difficult teenager prevented me having the time to master it though - it is a steep learning curve. I dived back into flight simulators which due to my training were much easier to master and Elite stayed on the shelf. I've just done a heap of upgrades on my gaming rig - 32GB of high speed RAM, an RX6800XT, HP Reverb G2 VR headset, a set of Thrustmaster TPR rudders to go with my Warthog and a dedicated SSD for my simulation games. Tonight I got around to firing up Elite again and I'm genuinely in awe of the VR experience now. The graphical quality and smoothness on my new rig and the G2 is just astonishing!!! I always knew David Braben was a towering genius in computing but frankly this is his masterpiece and most incredible lifetime achievement, even more so than the original 8 bit Elite. I let the game choose the optimum settings based on my hardware and it's running at 90fps with high graphics so beautifully it makes FS2020 look like an amateur effort!!

I'm really hoping that I can continue to explore this beautiful universe with the rest of you and that the learning curve doesn't prove too steep. I'm going to tweak my HOTAS mappings and will work my way through the in game training modules to get going. If anyone can point to any online or printed training manuals that would be very helpful too!

This isn't a game, it's all my childhood fantasies made real - what a truly awe inspiring experience... Arthur C Clarke and Stanley Kubrick would be proud.

Birdseed007
 

Arioch

Arioch
c64??? The Speccy was where it was at!

Ah sweet playground argument nostalgia 😂 Though I did most of my 80’s gaming on a Speccy I eventually bought a c64 (and a ZX Spectrum 128k toast rack version) when Dixon’s were selling off old stock for a tenner each - absolute bargain and games magazines had cover tapes full of games at the time. Fantastic machines both.

Birdseed007 said:
This isn't a game, it's all my childhood fantasies made real - what a truly awe inspiring experience
Click to expand...
Amen to that! Elite VR is something beyond what I dreamed about back then, I don’t think I could’ve conceived of actually being “in” a game just by popping on some magic ski-goggles 😁

I’d suggest having a look at https://elite-dangerous.fandom.com/wiki/Pilots_Guide though playing through the Training modules and Challenge scenarios will help as well - just don’t get hung up on some of the combat ones.

Hopefully Odyssey will one day reach the performance levels of Horizons - flying down on to one of the new tenuous atmosphere planets looks beautiful in VR and I throttle down just so I can have a good stare at the vista. If you experience any bugs while playing, please have a look at my thread and contribute to any issue reports 👍
 

VR Roxydog

V
I started the game with a Reverb G1 and top spec computer and an X55 last year.
It was the first time using HOTAS in my life as well - see if you can find printable diagrams for Elite and your particular controls - there is some for the X55.
Learning basics took a few weeks and getting comfortable with the HOTAS and changing settings. I stayed doing all the tutorials for those weeks repeatedly - didn't enter the game at all so no stress.
Pretty much everything you need for basics is in the tutorials.

Learning to change HOTAS settings quickly is great to know as well.

Good luck
 

Birdseed007

B
Thanks for the warm welcome guys - the pilot's guide looks well worth a good look and also I will take the advice to play through the training missions until it becomes second nature. I'm currently using the default control layout for the Warthog which is a starting point but know already that there are things I will want to customise as they could be better!

Really looking forward to spending some more time in Elite as it will be nice when the controls become second nature. One question I had is that I purchased Elite Dangerous and also the Horizons subscription and I was wondering if there's a way to identify those planets within Horizons which offer the ability to land on them?

Brg,

Birdseed007
 

Arioch

Arioch
Birdseed007 said:
Thanks for the warm welcome guys - the pilot's guide looks well worth a good look and also I will take the advice to play through the training missions until it becomes second nature. I'm currently using the default control layout for the Warthog which is a starting point but know already that there are things I will want to customise as they could be better!

Really looking forward to spending some more time in Elite as it will be nice when the controls become second nature. One question I had is that I purchased Elite Dangerous and also the Horizons subscription and I was wondering if there's a way to identify those planets within Horizons which offer the ability to land on them?

Brg,

Birdseed007
Click to expand...
If there’s a crescent around the world in the System Map, it’s landable - if the crescent has a little nubbin on it, there are bases there.

You can also see a landable icon in the left hand navigation panel.

Hope that helps 👍
 

Derek Speare [VR]

Derek Speare [VR]
I've been gaming since the 80's, now I'm 54...Elite is on the best games to have ever been made. In fact, my personal Top 3 games to have in VR are Elite Dangerous, DCS and iRacing. Once you have your HOTAS all set up, you'll have no trouble. o7!
 

CMDR Von Abrahart

CMDR Von Abrahart
Glad to see I’m not too old for elite. And welcome.

I started on the ZX 81. I’m 59 now and when I look back at playing elite on the Speccy it was so special. It actually got me into coding. I got into visual effects and the games industry and now teach. I still amazed at how far its come.

Im semi retired now and splurged on a RYZEN9 RTX3060 and a Predator X34. Can’t use VR as it just makes feel I’ll.

i hope they keep it going and I look forward to landing on other worlds, interact more with commanders and get to walk up and down the stairs to get in my ship.
 

Dragsham

Dragsham
Yup speccy too. Wow so long ago. Valhalla was a cool game.
Almost 2 years playing elite, never played it before.
And I'm hooked!
3060 oc (afterburner curve) g2 reverb headset. 90% all bells 3k per lense it looks and plays perfectly.
Only some occasional lag on new settlements and older horizons ones too but rare.
Logictech x56 and a fab chair it's mounted on.
I feel for the console players and pc players who have problems too. But it's getting better that's for sure.
 

oblivionmanman 2476

O
been playing since it came out.also played the older version on amiga,once youre hooked you hooked.my third play through,cant fault it.has its probs but they are sorted out,enjoy cmdr welcome to the game
 

OldSchoolPlayer

OldSchoolPlayer
Birdseed007 said:
I'm an older guy (52) and fell in love with Elite back in 1986 on the Commodore 64, it kept me up night after night during my A-Levels deep into the early hours hunched in my tiny bedroom over my equally tiny black and white 14" portable TV set!! I reached 'Deadly' status but never Elite but when the C64 finally went to the great gig in the sky and I moved over to PC in the mid 1990's I struggled to find any space sims that held my attention quite like Elite did. Mostly I flew flight simulators and eventually I trained as an airline pilot inspired partly by my Father who was cabin crew and partly by games like Elite and old TV series like Space 1999!

Roll forward to a couple of years ago and I discovered Elite in its modern incarnation. On my original Oculus Rift it was pretty astonishing even if my I7-7700 and GTX1080 struggled to run it smoothly. Work and family life issues like dealing with a difficult teenager prevented me having the time to master it though - it is a steep learning curve. I dived back into flight simulators which due to my training were much easier to master and Elite stayed on the shelf. I've just done a heap of upgrades on my gaming rig - 32GB of high speed RAM, an RX6800XT, HP Reverb G2 VR headset, a set of Thrustmaster TPR rudders to go with my Warthog and a dedicated SSD for my simulation games. Tonight I got around to firing up Elite again and I'm genuinely in awe of the VR experience now. The graphical quality and smoothness on my new rig and the G2 is just astonishing!!! I always knew David Braben was a towering genius in computing but frankly this is his masterpiece and most incredible lifetime achievement, even more so than the original 8 bit Elite. I let the game choose the optimum settings based on my hardware and it's running at 90fps with high graphics so beautifully it makes FS2020 look like an amateur effort!!

I'm really hoping that I can continue to explore this beautiful universe with the rest of you and that the learning curve doesn't prove too steep. I'm going to tweak my HOTAS mappings and will work my way through the in game training modules to get going. If anyone can point to any online or printed training manuals that would be very helpful too!

This isn't a game, it's all my childhood fantasies made real - what a truly awe inspiring experience... Arthur C Clarke and Stanley Kubrick would be proud.

Birdseed007
Click to expand...
Welcome. I remember when I first heard rumours of "elite 4" coming out, I was very excited. There are still no modern games except this on the market that use "real or semi-close" star catalogue names and data.
 

blastard

blastard
Welcome @Birdseed007
56yrs old here and an original player on a BBC 'B' back in the day. If you like ED in VR (and you like your 'flight sims') - check out some of the vids in my sig. I 'fly' in ED in a 6DOF flight Simulator that I designed and built in my garage (I even wear my original Beaufort Mk14A flight suit when it gets cold in there). The rig is so realistic and great fun I HAVE to play daily for my fix - lol.
Take care,
B
 

Oztig

Oztig
Welcome
54 here - Totally agree, it's a stunning experience in VR. I've just 'upgraded' to a Type 10, and the view from the cockpit is breathtaking.
It steers like a cow currently, so may have to do some engineering, but currently it's the best view I've had of any of the ships in VR.

Have fun.
 

GARTHSCH

G
55 and my son jokes that I am a "Gamer". Got hooked on this a year ago. GTX 1080Ti with i9700KT, NVM2 SSD, 16 GB RAM etc that I slowly built and upgraded myself. I use a Quest 2 for VR which works well. I don't have much to compare it to except the Quest 1. My brother (7 years younger) introduced me to this game. I pulled him back in to play together and we're having loads of fun! Always liked the space genre. Never played the original Elite, but did enjoy the Wing Commander games when they were popular. Nice to see others in our age group.
 

Rochester

Rochester
Welcome Cmdr o7

A very similar story as with myself, I fell into Elite on the BBC, then found it on the Spectrum. The original game manual alone was a dream and I remember the box fondly.

Old time backer here who’s been playing (not grinding) since alpha and hands down this is still my favourite game.

Welcome to the fold.
 

Benjumanji [VR]

Benjumanji [VR]
Me too. Very fond memories of exploring an amazing universe in Elite on my C64, and never dreamed I'd actually be able to experience it like this (in VR) now. I think I was about 10 years old when I got it...

There's a lot of negativity around the forums, especially in relation to Odyssey currently. There's some legitimate concerns there, but I think a lot of it is missing the bigger picture. Elite Dangerous is just a phenomenal achievement, and in VR there is just nothing else quite like it. There's so many different aspects to the game to discover and master, much of it you won't even realise is there until you start trying to play a different role.

I recently went back to a few other similar sorts of games that also support VR (No Mans Sky, Evochron Legacy, Space Engine, Squadrons, etc)... nothing else even comes close to the feeling of actually being in a space ship and exploring a universe that this game gives. If they end up doing nothing further with it, I'll still be happy. It will be years before anything else comes along that can compete as far as I'm concerned, and I don't see anything on the horizon at this stage.

Odyssey is a bit flakey in terms of performance and some other issues, but all it really adds is some planetside on-foot gameplay that's not particularly interesting anyhow in my opinion. But hey, at least it's there and the game is still getting updated after all these years. And worst case, Horizons is still a highly polished gem.

Plus it tickles all those nostalgic buttons from my C64 days.
 

Birdseed007

B
What a fantastic welcome and what a brilliant set of responses and nostalgic reminiscence! It's interesting to see how many of us evidently found our way back here after playing in the 80's on a BBC/C64/Speccy. As you have all said Elite was uniquely wonderful back then and is uniquely wonderful now. There's some fantastically impressive engineering in evidence here in the motion rigs and as others have said this game is incomparable in VR. I noticed that Odyssey seems to come in for some flack but that's inevitable when a game pushes the envelope in terms of technology the way that Elite does. I never seem to get motion sickness in space or when playing flightsims but have occasionally managed to make myself queasy in the SRV and do wonder if playing a first person shooter variant like Odyssey in VR could be a bit of a challenge to one's stomach if it was available! I've never been any good at those first person shooter games anyway so to be honest Odyssey doesn't appeal as much as the base game and Horizons which I already have.

I've been working my way through the training missions and feel I am getting a basic understanding of the game and how to fly from place to place. The biggest help was taking the time to map the controls to my HOTAS but I still need to improve my muscle memory for where the controls are and I'm sure the control scheme will evolve over time. One thing I am struggling with is to understand the elite news channel displayed on the bottom left of the main menu in game. I'm guessing its purpose is to encourage players to head to a particular system and explore the mysteries within!

I'm sctually hoping that when II retire in 6/7 years Elite is going to provide amazing and free opportunity to play
 

VR Roxydog

V
You do get used to the SRV in time - I'd stopped using for about a year until I had to stock up at the crystal shard sites again and it was actually rather pleasant - no queasiness like the first times!

I still have so much to do if I want - have only met a thargoid once - and I don't really feel like shooting them.
 

Arioch

Arioch
@Birdseed007 - are you using the “maintain vehicle horizon” comfort setting? I found it helped immensely when starting out in SRV VR (even though I was using it in Elite prior to getting VR - it gave me a better impression of how steep slopes were) - there are also blackout settings for when you enter a tumble.

As for the news feed - there are plenty of mysteries in Elite, some starting from Galnet stories, some from local news in Stations, and occasionally from things like Unregistered Comms Beacons. Finding these breadcrumb trails can lead to very interesting places 😁
 
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