No Single Player offline Mode then?

[jamotide]

Intent is different from a promise, and I read the wiki-link. The Wiki-link suggests that forcing a player to have a single-player experience whilst enforcing an "always on" connection, is DRM. And I'd agree with that assessment. Except FD just removed the offline part, and we're in an MMO world where a connection is necessary to interact with other pilots, and a dynamic, changing, universe.

Explain to me again how it is still DRM, I could be a little slow

A persistant connection is always DRM, whether it is necessary or not. It not being necessary just means deception, deception is not required. It is still DRM without deception. That is what you would know by now if you had read the text and understood it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management#Persistent_online_authentication

 

[Sylv3r]

150 pages in less than 24 hours is a vocal minority? lol

Not it isn't but some want to say that is a minority because they think it will avoid the problem. The major problem is hiding. Its people who dont have a regular connexion and havent posted here. Dunno how many they are, but its sure some have backed the game too. I have a friend who has very few connexion time and wanted to test a bit, so he came to my house and see this masterpiece .. i am sure that he will not buy ED at launch now. And think he will not be alone.
What people online defender there dont understand, is for each customer loss you loss some server time connexion. Its simple, servers need money, money give you timeplay (server maintenance and all), you loss a customer, you loss some timeplay.
So saying to customers go away we dont care of your offline view, is cutting the branch where you are sitting.

 

[Shadowma]

Yeah sorry not trying to be funny or anything, just thought offline would be synonymous with solo, but I see what you mean.
My main concern with online open play is the folks using cheats like aim bot & finding ways to hide in stations & open fire without
repercussions of station retaliation (this happened to me twice) barring that I am fine with online play, it would have been nice & I
understand the young lady with the health problems & spending lots of time in the hospital & needing the offline option (I am a vet with non service related disability)
so completely understand. But agree if they promised this then they should either give a refund or come across with what was stated as original options for this game.
Sorry for the confusion.

Shadowma

 

[WeirdWizard]

But simulating the background universe could require a lot more power than your average PC has regardless of the number of players that are active.

Well it depends on what you mean by "simulating the background universe". If your talking about locations of stellar bodies then its trivial. If your talking about economics you don't need to track every individual ship, station, mine, etc. You just need a simplified macro economic model and then do more detailed simulation in a bubble around the player. Likewise for mission generation and so on. Its possible that Frontier are paying for a really powerful server to run the "simulation" but even if they are the effect is unlikely to be much different to a simpler targeted simulation running on a local machine in terms of the actual play experience.

 

[TomFoolious]

It doesn't need to be, though. Single player shouldn't be online, or should have the option not to be. This is the same excuse EA used to justify their SimCity nonsense, so that you could "interact with your neighbours"... if I cared about interacting with my ' neighbours I wouldn't be playing single player in the first place. It's an intentionally broken design.

Why are people bringing SimCity into this? There is no comparison. SimCity was terrible online because the game was broken, online play was broken, servers wouldn't allow players to connect. Ok, ok E doesn't have perfect online play, but it is better than what SimCity was, so there is no comparison between the two...jesus people are really reaching...

 

[Ikari]

Frankly the lack of any actual communication on things has made me start to wonder whether now is the time to ask for refunds looking at the news letter it seemed to imply ships and insurance were going to cost "real cash" not credits.

The news letter appears to be buttering us up to drop a pay to win model over the next few days even the 30 ships is not entirely truthful in fact there wont even be 25 in the initial release.

 

[Titus Balls]

Yeah sorry not trying to be funny or anything, just thought offline would be synonymous with solo, but I see what you mean.
My main concern with online open play is the folks using cheats like aim bot & finding ways to hide in stations & open fire without
repercussions of station retaliation (this happened to me twice) barring that I am fine with online play, it would have been nice & I
understand the young lady with the health problems & spending lots of time in the hospital & needing the offline option (I am a vet with non service related disability)
so completely understand. But agree if they promised this then they should either give a refund or come across with what was stated as original options for this game.
Sorry for the confusion.

Shadowma

Ding ding ding, we eventually hit Titus's Law - I think #2334 must be a record for length of time

 

[Kicks]

A persistant connection is always DRM, whether it is necessary or not. It not being necessary just means deception, deception is not required. It is still DRM without deception. That is what you would know by now if you had read the text and understood it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management#Persistent_online_authentication

Completely agree with the wiki'd questions about titles such as Sim City 3 (or even Diablo 3), but that wasn't my point really - and you do know that My point was about online-multiplayer games, designed to be online and, well, multiplayer... That's not DRM.

I am perfectly capable of reading articles, you know

 

[mnemon]

Yes, yes you were

Originally Posted by mnemon
I'm not aware of any procedural generation engines that can generate even a solar system fast enough using similar methods as stellar forge.

From Wiki:

Frontier: Elite II was published on a single floppy disk. For the Amiga version, this is a single 880 KB disk (disk 2 was only a selection of interesting saved games), and for the PC/DOS platform a 720 KB double density floppy. For the Amiga version, the actual executable file was only around 400 KB (uncompressed), its small size partly due to the entire game being written in assembly language while its universe was mostly procedurally generated.

Can you, Kicks, and other 'experts' stop pretending you know stuff when you clearly don't?

You don't seem understand the difference between generating a solar system from a seed number(where the difficulty/amount of work varies based on the method from trivial to not so much) and simulating how a star and the orbiting bodies form(with some initial seed) over their lifetime which is what stellar forge does according to FD

See: http://us2.campaign-archive2.com/?u...73b1e&id=76df98203b&e=05b2017a0d#StellarForge

http://www.reddit.com/r/spaceengine/top/

Enjoy.

You both seem to be missing the point "... using similar methods as stellar forge", or does the space engine do something similar because afaik it does not?

 

[srinidhalaya]

Well you know what bring on the subscriptions Frontier! I love the game you currently have here and I will be more than willing to pay a subscription for this game. Does that answer your question? I don't even play this game everyday either, 2 or 3 tomes a week, but I'm more than happy with what is here currently.

Good for you. Glad you have that kind of money. The world would be a better place if everyone could afford that. But for those of us who cannot, we would like to know, if the funding model has changed.

 

[mbpoblet]

No, you're right. We don't have the metrics at this juncture, so I can't comment on them.

One thing I could say is, given the amount of people unable to play online, I'd proffer that the amount of people who's PCs could manage the Milky Way in any reliable fashion is even more substantially less than that!

Frontier: Elite 2 managed to do it 20 years ago on the regular PCs of the day (and Amigas), so, even with improved fidelity, once you have the algorithms (which is the hard part), it's pretty trivial (and you're doing it every time you look at the galaxy map).

Networking issues are another matter, and one of the many reasons why multiplayer should be considered a bug and not a feature.

 

[Jorlin]

Ding ding ding, we eventually hit Titus's Law - I think #2334 must be a record for length of time

Grats!

 

[srinidhalaya]

Frankly the lack of any actual communication on things has made me start to wonder whether now is the time to ask for refunds looking at the news letter it seemed to imply ships and insurance were going to cost "real cash" not credits.

The news letter appears to be buttering us up to drop a pay to win model over the next few days even the 30 ships is not entirely truthful in fact there wont even be 25 in the initial release.

Exactly. This is beginning to seem more and more like a much larger intrusion on our wallets, than originally thought. If technical reasons stopped offline mode, technical reasons will most certainly change the funding model.

 

[Titus Balls]

Frontier: Elite 2 managed to do it 20 years ago on the regular PCs of the day (and Amigas), so, even with improved fidelity, once you have the algorithms (which is the hard part), it's pretty trivial (and you're doing it every time you look at the galaxy map).

Networking issues are another matter, and one of the many reasons why multiplayer should be considered a bug and not a feature.

So trivial that NASA hasn't even attempted it except with super computers

 

[Sylv3r]

So trivial that NASA hasn't even attempted it except with super computers

And intel never be able to create a rasperry like ... Think about it.

 

[Greyshadow]

So I want to get this straight. FD is now saying Elite is intended to be an online experience. Okay so answer me this:

How can you promote a game for the Online experience when you are using P2P networking? What is the max amount of people you will ever see in an area at a time because of P2P limits 30 maybe less?

How is constant market purchase time outs (solo mode) or transaction failed issues enjoyable?

How are you going to manage online etiquette. If someone is harassing, exploiting or doing harmful things to the online aspect will you block there access? And if you do how will that affect there solo mode online connection?

If your servers go down you guys gave us hope of an option, play offline until the severs come back. Now if you guys take the servers down we can't play how is that enjoyable?

Now everytime an update is pushed through for online content and live updates I will have to battle with bugs and patches where if there was an offline mode I could play with no updates if i didn't want to and the game should still run how is this enjoyable?

It took over 4 months to get the online component to even work for the majority of players to the point where they could even get into the game and there are what 50 maybe 100 thousand backers most of which may not be playing open play. What are you going to do when this gets to the several hundred thousand players?

You guys say you want a living changing galaxy and for everyone to experience this with the Solo online live update aspect. They only thing I have seen have any impact and the market prices and available system maps and honestly big deal how does this make the game more enjoyable?

With the massive amount of promised content that still has to be even made available when are we actually going to see the solo online mode live changes take affect? A couple of months?

I am in the middle of running missions and all of a sudden the servers go down and I am disconnected from the game, takes 10 minutes or more to log back in and now I have 6 failed missions with stolen cargo and fines. How is this enjoyable?

I am in the middle of a battle with and NPC i have been looking for finally find him almost kill him and then get disconnected from the server. Log back in to find my target is gone and I have to find him again. How is this enjoyable?

The online requirement of elite dangerous is anything but enjoyable because players have absolutely no control over server disconnects ISP issues ECT. No one is going to enjoy losing a couple of 100 thousand credits and maybe a ship because the elite servers go down, the ISP has an outage or there is a power failure.

I really don't thing this has been thought through. If you guys want people to except online required then several things will need to change:

Mission timers: If a player exits the game, the game crashes, loses connection to the server you have to make it so the timer stops. There is no way not changing this will work if players have isp problems or there are server issues if the timer keeps counting down.

Static NPC spawns: If a player gets disconnected after looking for a mission based NPC target for 1 hour and then looses it because they get diconnected this will not work.

Compensation for server lag based ship destruction - There are lots of times where in heavy populated areas the lag is so bad its almost impossible to control the ship especially when docking. If a person loses there ship because of stutter, Non aligned docking pads ect the are fully penalized to replace there ship.

The first t 2 issues happen in Solo mode and Open play and the 3rd point happens mainly in open play. There are a lot more issue I can bring up in both modes but this reply is already long enough.

 

[Tim Wheatley]

So trivial that NASA hasn't even attempted it except with super computers

Of course they have. I've seen their galaxy collision models.

 

[mbpoblet]

But simulating the background universe could require a lot more power than your average PC has regardless of the number of players that are active.

Given a sufficiently bad implementation, maybe.

Frontier's programmers seem more proficient than that, though, unlike their PR team.

The issue really seems to be that they're apparently keeping track of everything every player has affected, which obviously generates exponential amounts of data and will probably cause massive server issues soon after release.

If you only have to manage a single player, though (or a small coop party), the amount of data generated should be much more manageable, and well within the capabilities of a regular PC, even with the client running on top.

 

[zelda_n64]

If you don't have reliable internet access you shouldn't be gaming on a PC anyway. Deal with it. Grow the hell up, move on. .

I think us older generation were playing games on a PC long before decent internet was introduced & probably before some of you were born & we have been playing computer games since the late 70's when there was no internet connection whatsoever.
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Not everyone lives in a city blessed with 4G or a fibre optic service.
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Where I live the surrounding villages do not have broadband, are too far away from the exchange, struggle with dial up (noisy line) & don't even get a mobile signal. If they need to use the internet they go to the public library and yes this is in the UK.

 

[Steve50]

If they can change something so fundamental in the core game plan when we're 3 weeks from launch then I genuinely fear for the future and what will change.