- Beyond: The Final Chapter.
- All about going back to the core, “What makes Elite Elite?”
- Sizes of Chapters 2 and 3 allowed the majority of team to work on Chapter 4
- All about shoring up the foundations outside Combat.
- Exploration tools aren’t just for explorers.
- Tonight’s stream will be using a hot-build. By no means final. Beta coming on 30th October
- Lighting improvements will be shown in tonight’s stream. More dynamic lighting and colour grading system which will change near stars, planetary surfaces etc.
- Pitch black planets! We also have different looks for day and night cycles on surfaces.
- We’re shown an montage of star types / black holes and the different colour grading effects.
- When you have a combat breach, the lighting will change in that part of the cockpit.
- Lighting improvements are for everyone, all platforms, doesn’t affect performance.
- Fog & Ring fog effects improved, looks better on high-performance hardware. Some improvements will trickle down to consoles.
- Video shown of ice ring. Volumetric lighting effects within the ring.
- Night vision video! We see a ship over a pitch black planet, but then night vision is turned on and we see the surface as a green, night-vision rendering as the ship flies over the surface.
- New Cockpit UI! 2 reasons for this, one was to make space for more features. Also, to increase usability and remove function tab, options in there now in better areas.
- FD very aware of how players interface with the cockpit.
- On the left panel, navigation, no change, apart from better ‘set filters’ UI.
- Transactions – has filter for missions, passenger missions, claims, combat bonds.
- Contacts – now has docking request button. Also has contextual ignore button here.
- New target tab (replacing sub-targets and inventory).
- In the Comms panel. New tab, contains Social Tab for friends, multicrew, invites etc
- Squadron tab! Not tonight folks.
- On the right panel, loads of changes
- Status tab is now home tab. Elite Ranks, important options, including Engineers, and new options like Codex.
- Firegroups. Groups are now A B C for groups, 1 2 for fire buttons.
- Ship tab. Boot / repair, landing gear. There’s a filter here.
- Also pilot preferences and statistic filters.
- Inventory tab. New icons create more panel space. Refinery is among the filters here.
- New status tab. Loads of info for local system factions. Looks very detailed.
- Playlist tab! All audio logs you’ve collected can be replayed here. Plus knowledge base articles (!) can be played from here too.
- So about exploration…
- …Community Shared Discovery! If you enter a system already scanned by someone else, already-explored bodies will show up on your local system map.
- Already scanned bodies can still be scanned for credits. Those planets will be ‘seen’ on system maps/scanners when you enter the system. Its retroactive.
- Significant changes made to exploration improvements due to Commander feedback.
- For jump-honk-scan players – if you ‘honk’ a system, you will get info on the main star. However, the amount of credits received will be the same as you’d receive now.
- But there are more layers to exploration….we’ll be back after some dev-magic…
- Were in an unexplored system. Going to analysis mode which allows use of certain modules.
- Scanner active. No honk yet. Honk for scanner calibration. We see a spectral analysis. Honk reveals signals detected and number of bodies in the system, along with orbital plane.
- It’s possible to determine what kind of planets are in the system based on the spectral analysis, and how many are in the system.
- The system is learnable. You can honk, look at the spectral analysis and work out if there’s anything you want to look at.
- Moving the scanner around will reveal the likely locations of planets.
- You can ‘tune’ the spectral analysis to focus on what kind of planet you want to locate.
- You can then zoom in and you can see if there’s more then one object there. In this livestream case, zoom in again and you get a view of the planet with related info. This performs a scan of the planet which will reveal if there’s any interesting geological places to find on the surface.
- Scanning planets will reveal orbit lines.
- Hovering over unscanned planet location will play audio which will reveal what kind of planet it is.
- 100-body system was fully scanned within 20-25 minutes, which is a lot quicker than the current system.
- You can also use the system to find USS, and scenarios near system bodies.
- USS are recreated on system entry. They are timed and expire.
- Patterns and scanners can be used to locate mission locations.
- Time to fire some probes. In super cruise. Activate DSS mode!
- Infinite probe ammo! But there’s an efficiency probe bonus target. Beat that target to get credit bonus.
- Probe fired! Part of surface scanned.
- You can slingshot probes behind planets, the DSS will reveal scanned parts behind the planet.
- Engineered probes will give you a large clip size.
- Once 90% of surface scanned, probes will auto-scan the rest.
- Locations of Geological sites on surface revealed on navigation map.
- You can get a credit bonus for ‘First mapped’ for completely mapping a planet.
- What-the…….Orrery Map! For discovered systems!
- Shows planets, asteroid belts, moons, orbits. Looks very nice.
- Existing system map option remains for partially scanned systems.
- VR – FD working on experience for VR.
- Exploration can be done with a wing.
- Multicrew can operate scanners.
- About the Codex…
- View Commander stats. Discoveries. Knowledge base.
- Commander stats. Overview of ranks, ships owned, session log (event log for current playing session).
- Archive. Contains text logs from abandoned outposts etc. Moved out of inbox.
- Session log will go back in time to an extent.
- The galaxy has broken down into 42 regions.
- Each region has certain things to find. These things are divided into three sections - Rumoured, Reported, Discovered. Once a Commander finds something which was previously Rumoured, it will become Reported.
- Each region has been overlay on the galaxy map. There’s an option to turn off the overlay.
- The knowledge base contains the lore and history of powers, aliens, key characters, key places and…..Raxxla is on there. Interesting.
- Articles from knowledge base can be read, or added to playlist and then listened to.
- Loads of things to find. No, they’re not showing us tonight. We have to find it, that’s why were explorers.
More info at:
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...ploration-and-the-Codex?p=7088359#post7088359
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