The Elite Dangerous team are working very hard getting ready for the Horizons beta next week. I have been impressed at what I’ve seen, it’s looking really beautiful; they are doing amazing things.
As always we’ve come across and solved quite a few issues. Our game is already using 64 bit data structures internally, and has been since the Kickstarter, but we’ve had to make a late decision to move to 64 bit OS support only (for Horizons), as some of the things we are doing with compute shaders have proved unreliable on Windows 32, especially with certain graphics cards even with the latest drivers.
So 2.0 and the Planetary Landings beta will be Win64 only. Season one will remain supported on 32 bit as well as 64 bit, until sometime next year at least. The good news is this doesn’t affect the majority of players; over 99% of our existing players are already running a 64 bit OS, but I’m afraid the roughly 0.5% on our last hardware survey who were still running a 32 bit OS will have to upgrade to run Horizons (most of these people may have upgraded anyway as they were still on DX10).
The team are working very hard, including this weekend to get the beta ready. The compute shader issues have caused us some delays, but it is well worth it. We are pushing this technology harder than we think anyone else has pushed it, and the results are great – the quality has continued to get better than those shown in my sneak peeks so far.
It will be tight for Tuesday but hopefully we can still achieve this date. It is looking and feeling really good, but if we find another major issue before Tuesday, we’ll let you know.
I will remain on this thread answering questions for the next hour, and will try to do a ‘sneak peek’ tomorrow too.
Right on Commander!
As always we’ve come across and solved quite a few issues. Our game is already using 64 bit data structures internally, and has been since the Kickstarter, but we’ve had to make a late decision to move to 64 bit OS support only (for Horizons), as some of the things we are doing with compute shaders have proved unreliable on Windows 32, especially with certain graphics cards even with the latest drivers.
So 2.0 and the Planetary Landings beta will be Win64 only. Season one will remain supported on 32 bit as well as 64 bit, until sometime next year at least. The good news is this doesn’t affect the majority of players; over 99% of our existing players are already running a 64 bit OS, but I’m afraid the roughly 0.5% on our last hardware survey who were still running a 32 bit OS will have to upgrade to run Horizons (most of these people may have upgraded anyway as they were still on DX10).
The team are working very hard, including this weekend to get the beta ready. The compute shader issues have caused us some delays, but it is well worth it. We are pushing this technology harder than we think anyone else has pushed it, and the results are great – the quality has continued to get better than those shown in my sneak peeks so far.
It will be tight for Tuesday but hopefully we can still achieve this date. It is looking and feeling really good, but if we find another major issue before Tuesday, we’ll let you know.
I will remain on this thread answering questions for the next hour, and will try to do a ‘sneak peek’ tomorrow too.
Right on Commander!
