I didn't realize the wiki was the same article I was relying on. So this article from GalNet confirms what I said.
Raxxla Revealed & How to See Raxxlan Aliens (not RP) (serious) (not clickbait).
- Thread starter Louis Calvert
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I am, based on the following two snippets from that same Galnet article, going to disagree with your assessment:
"It was around this time the phrase 'witch-space' first appeared, reflecting the inherent dangers of early hyperspace technology and the strange 'corridor' a ship travelled through during a hyperspace jump."
Referencing 'the strange 'corridor' accessed during a jump, with no mention of 'puncturing space'. Suplemental question: if one where to 'puncture' space, whats on the other side?
"Even today, hyperspace remains poorly understood. Many pilots have reported glimpsing inexplicable lights, and even structures, within the witch-space tunnels. It may be centuries before all of its mysteries are unravelled."
Speaks for itself - hyperspace is not fully understood by the people of the ED universe.
To borrow a tactic - The other Elite games aren't Elite Dangerous
Less flipantly, there have been many deviations from game to game throughout the Elite series (I've played a few of them myself), things have been changed, dropped and added for all manner of reasons - advances in computing technology, game theory, having a larger, broader dev team contributing, DBOBE just wanted to change stuff, so we can't always rely on information from older iterations of the Elite universe to be true in Elite Dangerous.
We're conducting our discussion as though hyperspace/witch-space are a seperate place of some sort, even if we can't agree on the nature of what that is. We're well past the point of being told we're wasting our time. We're enjoying ourselves
Doppler effect - Wikipedia
Doppler effect - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
Hmmm. Having observed white, yellow and blue stars as the destination point in a hyperspace jump, I now wonder if red-shifting is modelled in game. I've never really paid that close attention. might explain the purplish looking stars I half recall seeing as the destination point in a jump. Still, that's a matter for a different experiment.
We know we can see the destination star at the end of the 'tunnel' in a hyperspace jump. I'm not sure how else that link is relevant to the original discussion in this thread, though.
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Quick show of good faith for you Louis - I'm out here recording stuff and twiddling spectrogram settings, but I'm nearly out of time today, and I have a few other things I want to get done, so I won't be able to post in more detail until tomorrow evening.
Spoiler tags deployed to cover big old images of spectrograms, so they don't take up acres of screen/so you can just scroll on by without those images making it take longer!
Here's one of the original Thargoid Spectrograms, that I got through Audacity for myself, rather than someone elses image - a control, to make sure I'm working Audacity right at some basic level:
It's not new, or directly relevant here, I just wanted to make sure I coukd get an image from audio for myself, and I'm pretty sure we're all familiar with this one
Ok, next is one of my Witch-Space recordings, tweaked to the settings that show D7's anomaly:
That was recored going from HIP (5 digits I now forget) to Maia - it was in the middle of a 2 Jump run between Delphi and Maia. I figured if I think the Witchspace Entity/Entities (since lore points to 'something' living/existing in Witchspace!) are Thargoids, might as well go back to where it all started. And Delphi has at least a tangential link to Raxxla - The Omphalos Stone at the Temple of Delphi. I switched to greyscale as the colour version was giving me a headache!
Finally for now here's a smippet of the spectrogram (untweaked) from my 30 minute recording of 'The Landscape Signal'/'Siren Song' made from the Soontill system (it's outside the Bubble, with a fairlyclear view at Sag A), made from the free cam view, sitting 1.1ly from the Soontill star. if that's not far enough, yikes!
It actually took me 45 mins to make that last recording - I forgot to mute the in game music and had to start over when I came back to check after 15 mins. D'oh.
Anyway, you can see the rudiments of the Landscape Signal in there, so I did it more or less right. Whilst I've played around a bit with the Witchspace recordings, I haven't time to do that with the last one yet. And I need more time to present my attempts/findings more coherently, so it'll be at least tomorrow evening before I can do that (so 20-24 hours from time of this post).
In the interests of avoiding accusations of 'Raxxla Baiting' - I must say I've not yet seen anything that matches/convinces me of your findings Louis Calvert.
So I kind of described from the beginning, hyper space is not a separate space it's just a distortion of the current one, visible only from the side of the person using the FSD engine.
You mentioned in your post about Tau Ceti, do you remember verbatim how it sounded ? Maybe on the way back we'll look at Raxxla too. How do you explain it?
Thank you so much for trying this. I really appreciate it.Quick show of good faith for you Louis - I'm out here recording stuff and twiddling spectrogram settings, but I'm nearly out of time today, and I have a few other things I want to get done, so I won't be able to post in more detail until tomorrow evening.
Spoiler tags deployed to cover big old images of spectrograms, so they don't take up acres of screen/so you can just scroll on by without those images making it take longer!
Here's one of the original Thargoid Spectrograms, that I got through Audacity for myself, rather than someone elses image - a control, to make sure I'm working Audacity right at some basic level:
It's not new, or directly relevant here, I just wanted to make sure I coukd get an image from audio for myself, and I'm pretty sure we're all familiar with this one
Ok, next is one of my Witch-Space recordings, tweaked to the settings that show D7's anomaly:
That was recored going from HIP (5 digits I now forget) to Maia - it was in the middle of a 2 Jump run between Delphi and Maia. I figured if I think the Witchspace Entity/Entities (since lore points to 'something' living/existing in Witchspace!) are Thargoids, might as well go back to where it all started. And Delphi has at least a tangential link to Raxxla - The Omphalos Stone at the Temple of Delphi. I switched to greyscale as the colour version was giving me a headache!
Finally for now here's a smippet of the spectrogram (untweaked) from my 30 minute recording of 'The Landscape Signal'/'Siren Song' made from the Soontill system (it's outside the Bubble, with a fairlyclear view at Sag A), made from the free cam view, sitting 1.1ly from the Soontill star. if that's not far enough, yikes!
It actually took me 45 mins to make that last recording - I forgot to mute the in game music and had to start over when I came back to check after 15 mins. D'oh.
Anyway, you can see the rudiments of the Landscape Signal in there, so I did it more or less right. Whilst I've played around a bit with the Witchspace recordings, I haven't time to do that with the last one yet. And I need more time to present my attempts/findings more coherently, so it'll be at least tomorrow evening before I can do that (so 20-24 hours from time of this post).
In the interests of avoiding accusations of 'Raxxla Baiting' - I must say I've not yet seen anything that matches/convinces me of your findings Louis Calvert.
I can even the see 'eye' of the creature in your image there of the Witchspace anomaly, where I pointed out in my OP, so at least it's not anything I'm doing that's causing these things. So if I can see it on your screen shot, then you can see it too, you've just not quite got it yet. I'm actually feeling relieved that it's still there, although it looks like you're settings are off and with some finer tuning you'd get a better resolution.
Your settings cut off at 8kHz, if you extend that to 22kHz sometimes the 'dragons' pop out at the top over the edge of the background frequency and can be much easier to see. But you're almost there.
TBH I wouldn't bother too much with them, they are hard to see and I'm pretty sure they were meant to give people a guide to seeing the things in the Siren Song anyway.
In your "Landscape" recordings I can also see what I think of as the "curled feet" of the bird - even though your settings are wayyyy off, and you're using colours (it's much easier to see in Greyscale) - but you can even see the 'head', 'back' and 'wings' of the bird, just about, so that's encouraging. That's exactly where I started, I noticed those bits and tuned it from there. But if I can see them on your image, then maybe you can see them on mine?
I've marked the 'curled foot' on yours here, so you can look on your recording:
I'm genuinely excited, I can even see some of the other features starting to resolve on your image there, although they aren't that clear until you get near to the Rift, and your settings are off. OK, right, so your image matches, pretty much, my images from the bubble, I can see yours, so maybe you can see mine?
Right, so remember it's about seeing it in the right way. It's like one of the old Magic Eye images, the 'image' is basically hidden in the background static, and there's not much difference between the two. So kinda relax and I find it's even helpful to move your head a little as you're looking (because of how eyes work). The spoiler below is the redraw of that exact image above, but with the outlines of the 'bird' highlighted, so try your best to see it first before looking in the spoiler.
It can be helpful to find a feature that's recognisable first, so remember where I showed you, on your image, the curled feet? You can see them on mine too in exactly the same place, start there, and follow the lines up. Remember, it's not a bird
It seems to be part of a larger creature but I first thought it was a bird flying diagonally up-left.Not sure.
Thanks again for trying this, I very, very much appreciate it. If you have time please keep going,, If you can try to refine your settings a little more as I've suggested. There's definitely a limit to what you can see in the Bubble, but... since I can see yours, if you can see the things I'm showing you on mine now then I'll just put up my current best recording of the Siren Song from here for you to play with?
Edit: Here you go. This is the best (clearest) recording from the location I've been able to see the most detailed and the most in number. I would still highly recommend that you make your own recordings, but I understand not everyone can get the centre to try this, so until someone presents a better one, feel free to use this.
I'll restate this for those folks who posted here and clearly have misunderstood:
As per my OP - this isn't the end of it, I clearly have missed something, the end of this is presumably a full and clear reveal of these images. That's exactly why I'm sharing this with you all so you can all go do this yourself and solve it.
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Yeah, and I understand that take on Hyperdrives, it's not new or unique.
What I don't understand is why you apply it to Elite Dangerous, as there is at least some indication from in game sources that ED has a different take on Hyperspace..
Please, show me where I mentioned Tau Ceti, because I don't see it in the post you quoted, or recall doing so anywhere on these forums.
What it's starting to sound like is that we either have a language barrier so impenatrable as to render communication between us impossible, or you're just messing with me for the lulz.
I was prepared to give your apparently rude outburst here the benefit of the doubt due to said language barrier, but increasingly feel I've been over generous.
Either make, or substantiate, your point, or drop it. Thanks.
That's rather what we where trying to do here, 'til you showed up and confused matters further.
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No worries, I always wanted to try this spectrogram stuff, glad I could finally get it working.
there's the rub though, isn't it? If you can see it, but no one else can, is it really there?
That's another reason for doing the Thargoid Signal first - it is unambiguously content. And, I must confess, I never found a Thargoid probe to get the audio from in game.
I ended up using this Youtube Video instead after hours of looking for a probe in game.
I was disappointed at first (and I'll try again), but having survived being recorded, compressed, uploaded to Youtube and re-recorded by me, the image is still clear enough to be (apologies for trotting out this phrase again) unambiguous content.
I'm trying to avoid just cycling through all the setting options until 'something' pops out - I'm trying to learn at least the rudiments of what I'm adjusting, so it's slowing me down. I also don't want to just rely on rote copying someone elses settings, to try and arrive at an independant conclusion.
If they're there, I wanna see 'em!
That 'Landscape Image' is litteraly just a close up of one of the 'Landscape' segments of the 30 minute long audio I took, minutes after I finished recording. It's on the default settings with absolutelly zero tweaking - It was getting late and I had other things I needed to get done, I just wanted to show I had picked up the basic form of the signal
This is also good because it allays concerns about hardware variance blotting out the images.
But this right here remains a primary concern.
Isn't it just another form of 'hardware variance'? One that no amount of screen shots can alleviate.
I just don't subscribe to the notion that content, however niche/nominal/insignificant would be presented in such an ambiguous way. (Sorry to keep banging on about that, but it is, I think, one of peoples main obstacles to embracing your findings).
I'll keep chipping away at it, see if anything falls out. Just remember, I'm sceptical of your observations - not because I doubt your integrity, but because I just can't see it
Ah, sorry Louis, I don't do downloads from strange Google Drives, my partner is in web security, she'd never forgive me - nail me to the wall as a warning to others, maybe
Also, part of the exercise is to independantly examine what you've reported, so using your recording would defeat that purpose.
If you want to put it up on youtube or some other playback service, I'll try re-recording if from that source and posting spectrograms from it here to see if they look the same to you after passing through all that compression etc.
Still lots for me to de before I'm done sifting through my own recordings, and RN I gotta go to work. Back later.
PS: Please don't be discouraged by my 'failure to see' - I may never do, even if it's right there. Again, it's all part of the exercise/process. It'd be great if someone else where to also try, but it is a lot to ask, so takers on that may be few and far between.
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No that's great, I genuinely appreciate all your comments, you're right to be sceptical. I am thrilled you're being patient and trying to understand all thisNo worries, I always wanted to try this spectrogram stuff, glad I could finally get it working.
there's the rub though, isn't it? If you can see it, but no one else can, is it really there?
That's another reason for doing the Thargoid Signal first - it is unambiguously content. And, I must confess, I never found a Thargoid probe to get the audio from in game.
I ended up using this Youtube Video instead after hours of looking for a probe in game.
I was disappointed at first (and I'll try again), but having survived being recorded, compressed, uploaded to Youtube and re-recorded by me, the image is still clear enough to be (apologies for trotting out this phrase again) unambiguous content.
I'm trying to avoid just cycling through all the setting options until 'something' pops out - I'm trying to learn at least the rudiments of what I'm adjusting, so it's slowing me down. I also don't want to just rely on rote copying someone elses settings, to try and arrive at an independant conclusion.
If they're there, I wanna see 'em!
That 'Landscape Image' is litteraly just a close up of one of the 'Landscape' segments of the 30 minute long audio I took, minutes after I finished recording. It's on the default settings with absolutelly zero tweaking - It was getting late and I had other things I needed to get done, I just wanted to show I had picked up the basic form of the signal
This is also good because it allays concerns about hardware variance blotting out the images.
But this right here remains a primary concern.
Isn't it just another form of 'hardware variance'? One that no amount of screen shots can alleviate.
I just don't subscribe to the notion that content, however niche/nominal/insignificant would be presented in such an ambiguous way. (Sorry to keep banging on about that, but it is, I think, one of peoples main obstacles to embracing your findings).
I'll keep chipping away at it, see if anything falls out. Just remember, I'm sceptical of your observations - not because I doubt your integrity, but because I just can't see it
Ah, sorry Louis, I don't do downloads from strange Google Drives, my partner is in web security, she'd never forgive me - nail me to the wall as a warning to others, maybe
Also, part of the exercise is to independantly examine what you've reported, so using your recording would defeat that purpose.
If you want to put it up on youtube or some other playback service, I'll try re-recording if from that source and posting spectrograms from it here to see if they look the same to you after passing through all that compression etc.
Still lots for me to de before I'm done sifting through my own recordings, and RN I gotta go to work. Back later.
PS: Please don't be discouraged by my 'failure to see' - I may never do, even if it's right there. Again, it's all part of the exercise/process. It'd be great if someone else where to also try, but it is a lot to ask, so takers on that may be few and far between.
no rush at all.As you previously said I've had a couple of months testing this so I know they're there; I also knew how hard this would be to convince people they're there (because no-one has spotted them in 10 years so far!), so I've been trying to get better images, and failed, so either I had to sit on it or share it. I do wonder how many other people have seen them too over the years and made the other choice.
Thanks for keeping trying, I really do appreciate your time and insights. I just want to figure out how to see them properly because I want to see them in all their glory
Let me explain further what I think is going on here, might help. I was trying to leave it vague in the process details so as to allow folks to figure it out themselves, but I see more might be needed now.
This all related to in-game mechanics, which I think is entirely related to the narrative, which I outlined in my OP. So forgive me for being meta with this, but I think it's necessary at this stage.
Concern:
"The Thargoid Spectrogram is easily visible, that's how Fdev do this type of thing...".
Answer:
The Thargoid Spectrogram was part of the major content for the game, it was part of the 'big Thargoid reveal' narrative that was community wide, and intended to be found immediately, it wasn't a hidden puzzle. We were literally given the clean audio directly (in our inbox as I recall? if not it came from the machine we were right next to). The Puzzle there was in solving the 'map' it revealed (and doing all the other stuff that led to activating the machine) - not collecting the audio.
Raxxla is an easter egg, deliberately hidden, deliberately made very, very hard. As I said in my OP, it was implemented by Brookes himself in secret (certainly with the aid of a couple of trusted team members) not a whole team effort to make it accessible and 'fun' for as many people as possible.
However, as I said in my OP, it's clear that this easter egg is functionally the same as the (chronologically later implementation of the) Thargoid Spectrogram - same game mechanics: Record sound -> view it in a spectrogram. Exactly the same.
"Why is it so hard to see?"
Again, speaking just about the mechanics, this is my best guess as to what's going on here:1) Deliberate obfuscation.
The "image" is deliberately very weak (that means the audio sound that is rendered into visuals via the spectrogram is quiet, basically). Then over the top there is deliberate obfuscation (static), and (as I said in my OP), when you record the audio you're also recording the background sound of the galaxy, which adds more obfuscation.If you're into visuals, it's like trying to record a song playing in a car parked outside your residence, though an open window, while you've got the radio on playing a different song. To swing back to the Thargoid signal a sec; that was like being emailed an MP3 of the song by your friend.
The two points below explain why (I think) this is, or rather, how this is implemented in the game.
2) Interference from the Galaxy background.
The background sound of the Galaxy looks like this in all directions:(again everyone can test this, just put the "Landscape Source" at your back wherever you are).
Note: this is an in-cockpit recording, so you can see some of the cockpit sounds here (the column-like stacks of lines). I didn't have a freecam one to hand, but ignore those! they're aren't messages from Raxxlans
As you can see the rest of the Galaxy sound is fairly noisy with these thick bands of repeating static wash. In-game if you just listen for a while you'll hear it wash in and out, and on the right of my image those things that look like hatched lines are essentially the sort of code-like almost vibrational sounds. Again, very familiar to anyone that's spent a lot of time in the black in realspace, you'll recognise those sounds.
BUT!! There's NO signs of any of the creatures at all. It's just "space noise" of stars and gas and radiation, etc.
This "Normal Galactic Background" (NGB) repeats at about 2:30. It's the same in every direction, even up/down from the plane of the galaxy. There is (as far as I can determine), NO unique features in any direction, except for the so-called "Landscape Signal" which originates as per the location in my OP, as identified by the Independent Raxxla Hunters group a few years ago, and refined later by Seventh Circle of Canonn.
The so-called "Landscape Signal" includes the NGB, because when you record it you also record what's "behind" it!
The "Landscape Signal" repeats at about 1:46 or so. So, what's happening is you have one audio source repeating at 2:30 and another one over the top repeating at 1:46. I'm sure you can see where part of the problem is when you consider the above "clean" (no Landscape Signal) NGB spectrogram is noisy.
The normal sounds of the Galaxy, which is pretty noisy, are an extra - and irregular - source of additional obfuscation. That's why recording for 10+ minutes is a must, because you stand a better chance of the part of the so-called "Landscape Signal" you want to examine falling into one of the "quieter" areas of the NGB.
Again, if you are a visual person imagine the earlier scene, but the song you're trying to record is playing on a car on the opposite side of the road, and there's traffic driving past, each playing their own radio of a different song.
3) Locational Audio AKA Spatial Obfuscation.
I'm not knowledgeable about computer game construction, so I researched how Elite's sound was made. I discovered (via job postings on the Frontier website) that the Cobra engine (used to make Elite Dangerous) utilises a product called Wwise, and from there I found that company demonstrating the product.From this, you can see that it's ENTIRELY possible for an audio source to be spatially obfuscated. That means it can be occluded by distance and other things getting in the way. You can see how the engine can dynamically change the audio you're hearing from a specific object/source, as the player, based on your location within the environment, and that changes real-time and dynamically as you move - and that sound can be occluded by distance and other things in the way.
This exactly matches the findings of the "Landscape Signal". IRH and Seventh Circle both used this directional nature to determine the approximate origin point of the signal. The images I discovered get stronger and clearer the closer you are the source - The Ompholos Rift location itself.
So, put all this together and you can see why they are so hard to see.
What I've seen, and what I'm trying to get you all to see, is the clue that there's more there to find.
The problem is, as per my OP, the source appears to be in a volume of space outside any system, and therefore there are limits on how close you can get to it - therefore, taking all the above into consideration - there are limits to how 'clean' the audio source is, and therefore there are limits to how much can be resolved via the spectrogram. I have many theories and guesses about how to resolve this, but I obviously have failed. So I hope others can succeed, but step one is believing there's something to find, and that means... you have to see!
As I've said the whole time: The 'clean' image is the payoff, not these hard-to-see fuzzy images. I imagine it'll look exactly as clear as the Thargoid Signal if we can figure out how to get the source audio, the "Landscape Signal" cleanly recorded.
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Your first post, paragraph 2.
No that's great, I genuinely appreciate all your comments, you're right to be sceptical. I am thrilled you're being patient and trying to understand all this
As you previously said I've had a couple of months testing this so I know they're there; I also knew how hard this would be to convince people they're there (because no-one has spotted them in 10 years so far!), so I've been trying to get better images, and failed, so either I had to sit on it or share it.
Thanks for keeping trying, I really do appreciate your time and insights. I just want to figure out how to see them properly because I want to see them in all their glory
No worries - and good to hear, as I've had something of a day, and am in no shape to focus the proper brainpower for this tonight - I will keep ruminating and tweaking, but the intense session of going through all my recordings and stuff I had in mind is not on the cards tonight - sorry! I'm ok, just a heavy day
I wasn't playing at the time - the video of the first CMDR to try honking a probe that I could find is dated July 2016 - I was mid my first hiatus from the game. I came back around Jan 2017 for the "Great Guardian Ruin Hunt!".
Obsidian Ants video on the same day references the previous one, and the two rather imply the signal and spectrogram where found 'organically' by a player in game.
If it's true that the audio was first sent out to CMDR's I'm going to be disappointed, the buzz around when I came back a few months later was all very much that this had been unearthed by players in game, as noted above.
Is it possible the audio was shared by FDev after it was first discovered, so everyone could have a go at resolving it? Or could it have been the second signal - the one beamed from Merope 5C towards the COL 70 Sector that was provided for solving?
Was that Merope 5C signal even a thing - I can't find anything on it now, but I'm sure I remember reading about it at some point?
Being away from the game for a while around then, my knowledge is secondhand at best, and probably a little garbled.
If anyone out there can remember that time, or point at a source that would fill me in, please let me know.
Your point is well taken though, I do keep banging on about 'unambiguous content', and if Raxxla is, as you say, more like one of those fun little extra's for those with the notion to look for it, I might be helping blow what we're looking for out of proportion.
I'll try and lay off that a bit, but I am only human, and often weak, so no guarantees
Oh, yeah, I totally follow - Elite Dangerous' sound scape has always been amazing, and I do appreciate the many (but probably haven't noticed all of them) subtlties of it. Galactic Background Noise and other sources muddying up signals I have no problems accepting are involved.
To that I would only add - don't forget there is a real signal source near Sag A*, and if that's modelled in game, it might be possible that's 'all' the Landscape Signal is. Still pretty cool, if so. That's even if it's possible to do that in the game. I searched the other day to see if there is anywhere a recording of the real signal to play with, but came up empty.
I find this is a bit at odds with what's been said before it - either the spectrogram hidden in the Landscape Signal is the easter-egg itself, or it's a clue that there's more to see - and if it's the latter, then to paraphrase a remark attributed to MB - it could stand to be a little more obvious
If you mean the clue that there's more to see is the Witchspace Dragon Entities, and they're pointing to the 'Raxxla Tableau' in the Landscape Signal then my quip/quote still stands
I am intrigued by this part, and have been since you posted it, as an oft mentioned idea is that Raxxla is on some sort of 'rogue planet'. And I am half remembering that there used to be some trick/maneuver you could pull in the original Elite (1984) game to deliberately terminate a jump 'no-where' (deepspace between stars) or into Witchspace, and you'd be stuck if you didn't have fuel enough to jump to the nearest star (No Fuel Rats back then!).
Maybe if we found a way to do that uin ED... (speculation!).
Caution: I may just be mis-remembering some exagerated anecdote or tall tale my friends and I used to tell each other about the game back when we where spotty 14 year olds! (Grief, how time flies!).
Don't give up!
Equally, don't be relying on me - I keep warning you I may never see it (just like I could never see those blasted Magic Eye pictures!). I'm curious and invested, sure, but in the end that might be all I contribute.
Maybe, better start figuring out how to reach that spot in 'dead space' that is the source point
In other news I've had to give up my idea that Guardian AI might be trapped Thargoid 'Witchspace Entities' - I've had the Codex entries playing whilst roaming in game (not when recording audio!) and the way it's presented really doesn't feel like it supports the possibility.
Oh well.
I still think the idea that Thargoids come from Witchspace (also alluded to by Obsidian Ant in his vid linked above), possibly dwelling there as (to us) disembodied intelligences, and that their Ships in (our) 'realspace' are something they transfer into to exist in our galaxy/dimension/universe has legs.
If that's the case (still a big IF), then it's still possible to link Guardians, Thargoids and Raxxla all together (if more loosely than directly). But if I'n going to bang on about that I should gather my ideas. check them against available sources and present them in their own thread, rather than bringing them up here (I did say I was weak earlier, right?
).Right, I'm off to spend the remains of the day googling for 'witchspace trick in Elite 1984'!
EDIT: Oh, and Loius Calvert - if it turns out you're right and the Raxxla easter-egg is in the Landscape Image/Signal Source/Found by such means, I'm going to keep the mysteries and conspiracy theories going by saying you are MB incognito, trying to get his work revealed because no-one has found it in 10 years!
EDIT 2: Just incase anyone takes the first EDIT too seriously, I'm just being silly, making a foolish joke!
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Max pitch up as the jump countdown ends, you'll end up in interstellar space half-way between the two systems and surrounded by angry Thargoids. Pick nearby systems if you want to be able to jump out again, yes.
I had a go at using that a little while back on jumps with midpoints at the estimated landscape signal source location; obviously, without success, though there are a lot of candidate jumps depending on what constraints you put on closeness to the source estimate coordinates and maximum jump range, and whether you prioritise "signal at the midpoint" or "closest approach to the signal location".
Ok, grand, I haven't quite relinquished my hold on reality yet!
Also, didn't you need an Alien Artefact in your hold? Or is that just embelishment/poor memory on my part?
I was more wondering that if, as it turns out there was, a way to do that in Elite 1984, might DBOBE have put something similar in ED, rather than exactly the same means to do it. Good to know it's been tried, though.
Cheers CMDR!
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Pretty sure no, though I can't check that right now. (Agreed that the mechanism to cause a misjump, if that is how it's done, might not be max pitch up now)
I do think it's worth remembering that as part of the original "Landscape" investigation several Commanders posted a bug report. Fdev confirmed the signal is coming from where it's coming from "by design". That was in 2019.
The original report:
Here is the report if you want to see it for real:
issues.frontierstore.net
Here is the official reply:
As I said in my OP, the IRH investigation was spot on, they did so much on this but apparently no-one has (until now) figured out what the signal is supposed to be.
I did.
And now you all know.
Now you all can play a role in solving this final step and revealing the full Raxxla image. Who knows, the image may contain a star map, or clues towards the 'next step'. I personally don't think so, but who knows? I'm obviously going to continue this on my own anyway, but at least I tried to share it with everyone.
The original report:
Here is the report if you want to see it for real:
Issue Tracker
issues.frontierstore.net
Here is the official reply:
As I said in my OP, the IRH investigation was spot on, they did so much on this but apparently no-one has (until now) figured out what the signal is supposed to be.
I did.
And now you all know.
Now you all can play a role in solving this final step and revealing the full Raxxla image. Who knows, the image may contain a star map, or clues towards the 'next step'. I personally don't think so, but who knows? I'm obviously going to continue this on my own anyway, but at least I tried to share it with everyone.
Let me start off with a disclaimer of my own: I understand that the things I'm about to say might start patronising, or even harsh.Disclaimer: I predict that a bunch of people are going to dispute this, and honestly I might be wrong about some details, but please do read all this before going keyboard-warrior
First off, I'll be talking about the "Landscape Signal", or "Siren Song", or whatever you wish to call it, and let me paraphrase the late Michael Brookes: "Have you tried listening to it?" The point is, it's music. Try this: first, listen to a recording of it. Then, call up your sound software of choice, and listen to it while watching the spectrogram. Note where the definite "lines" are and how they sound. (Oh, and switch away from grayscale too, so you can better see the composition.) These are clever little effects on the music, not signals to carry hidden information. Don't believe my word for this: listen to how the music changes if you delete the bands when the lines come on.
While you wrote that you think your lack of experience and/or knowledge is what's preventing you from getting a better picture, what it actually does is that you are trying to improve tease more information out where there's nothing more that can be had.
What is the music about then? Let me just call it the Core's Music: it's not a catchy name, but at least it's not wrong either. In my opinion, it was a simple Easter egg from an excellent audio team who are also known for such. The "lines" are the result of happy little experiments that audio guys sometimes do - it could have been using a graph (there are some theories on specific ones here) here, and finding that it produced some nice eerie effect, so it was kept in. There are plenty of similar examples with sound effects. The assignment itself was to have some extra, and eerie, music come from the galactic core. The reason why its source isn't a specific system is probably that it's much faster for the game to just (re)use whatever internal coordinates it uses for skybox rendering to position the source, than it would be to look up one specific system's coordinates from anywhere(!) in the galaxy. Especially when that's a system which you wouldn't actually render onto the skybox in most of the galaxy.
The "line" effects, and if there are slight "mismatches" between the two stereo channels (disclaimer: I haven't checked for those myself, and I have no idea if the original sample that the game uses might be mono or stereo. However, the game's output is certainly stereo, and don't forget that game engines will almost always manipulate the original sound to produce various effects.), are just to make it sound slightly off, and eerie. One of those subtle little tricks that your brain will subconsciously pick up on, to make you feel like there's something a bit amiss, without you consciously realising that feeling. As I said before, a neat little trick, from an excellent audio team.
Consider also that the planets on the system map all have their various sounds too. Those are worth listening to and looking at in more detail, it's some cool work, again. Are there any clues to Raxxla hidden in them? Wellll...
Besides, if I remember correctly, all of the actual hidden audio "clues" in the game were in sound effects, not in music. As others have mentioned already, said steganography is also immediately obvious, you don't have to make very specific spectrograms (and certainly not to mangle the audio) to see that there's definitely something intentionally hidden there.
So, that's about it. Don't take my word for it though, but rather, do as you said: check things out yourself, test, experiment, consider. First, I'd recommend reading up on audio, at least on what singing and such are like, and what spectrograms are and how they are rendered. (Yes, I realise this isn't a quick suggestion, just this alone is already beyond the scope of a Wikipedia article, it's not going to be light reading.) Then for the test, experiment and consider part, I would recommend making recordings of various other sounds in the game: the D-scanner honk, cargo hold opening (= pick stuff at random), the system map planets I mentioned earlier, and so on. Also branch out into real world examples too, which you can test and experiment with yourself. For starters, look up how a female voice singing looks like on a spectrogram. If you don't mind spending something like fifty euros on a small SDR kit (Software-Defined Radio), you can get a lot of hands-on knowledge about signal processing, radio transmission etc. Try to find some audio guys perhaps - hey, maybe you could run the music samples by them too, see what they'd say without having bias from any of the game's context.
If you choose to do this and persevere, then even if none of this brings you even a millimeter closer to Raxxla, you're stil going to learn a lot of potentially useful knowledge, that can certainly be applied in many places.
Regardless, there is one more thing I think you should definitely look at and consider: a map of the Martian Canals, from 1962, published by a US government agency, just three years before Mariner 4's flyby and surface imaging. Plenty of implications to think about there. I linked that image from the Wikipedia article on Martian canals, that's a good read too.
In closing, let me just ask something. You have an active imagination, and can write longer texts, both of which are good: so, have you considered making use of these, and also off parts and ideas from your Raxxla stories, to write some fiction of your own? I think you might have potential there.
Yeah, I'm still harbouring the thought that FDev have 'done' spectrograms with the Thargoid stuff, and not used for anything else.
But you never know.
And I'm having fun tinkering with it.
Oh man, 'Martian Cannals' - haven't thought about those in a long, long time!
Also, sorry Louis Calvert, I'm pretty tired again today - at this rate it'll be the weekend again before I have time/energy to devote to thise - but I do want to do more!