State of the Game

[LeoBartlet]

You know its serious when Rabbit isn't meming^^

I also agree and nothing can be achieved by setting your hair on fire and hoping Frontier notices. If I were them I'd be off playing other games and checking in every now and again to see if there is news. Six months whining on a forum and spamming CM's isn't the way to go about it.

 

[PRORABBIT67]

Breakfast.

 

[LeoBartlet]

Oh, thank Brebus it's back to business as usual.

 

[Bottom Hat]

Breakfast.
View attachment 278377

Excellent business resumed!

 

[nemolomen]

I played the alpha too... But it was really only a sampler of a very incomplete expansion, which, apparently, still has bits to be added before being 'feature complete'...

When referring to EDO, the only improtant bit was May 19th, the rest was virtually just a tech demo (with better tech than release!) to try out some features.

Oh, I didn't participate in the Alpha though I did pay for it. I was more referring to the actual decisions to launch EDO in the state it was in at that time. Someone, not sure who or that it even matters, but someone, and probably several of them, was/were nervous about making that leap to launch the steamy pile of EDO.

So an anecdotal, seemingly similar, situation I was involved with many years ago, a very large, for that company, project was running very late, the financial arm of the org was trying to get the product launched, the engineers kept saying it was nowhere near ready (probably around 80 to 85% or so), then money ran out and it very nearly destroyed the company. In the end, that product was never ever released. Millions of dollars down the proverbial. So "maybe" Fdev DID do the best thing here and it just doesn't look that way...

 

[Rat Catcher]

Oh, I didn't participate in the Alpha though I did pay for it. I was more referring to the actual decisions to launch EDO in the state it was in at that time. Someone, not sure who or that it even matters, but someone, and probably several of them, was/were nervous about making that leap to launch the steamy pile of EDO.

The launch I can't explain away, Frontier has already published their end of year report which included a reference to revenue in the year exceeding their projected figures, so it wasn't as if they were pushed to have the revenue from EDO over much.

As it was EDO was released in a state, performance related, worse than the alpha I played, and obviously feature incomplete... I recall Arf spouting on about the release and the things he "wouldn't tell, but wanted to surprise us with", which I assume wasn't supposed to be dismal performance! I'd hoped that the blue cylinder was going to be gone, it wasn't, and everything on release 'felt' incomplete.

Performance has improved, a little - but nowhere near as much as it should have - in the past 7 months, 'new' (yeah, right!) features 'added' (activated?) and we still get the same garbage today, "good stuff, but we won't say what it is"... We're allegedly grown-ups here (apart from the consoliers) and don't need 'sweeties tomorrow', keeping silly secrets is a brilliant insult!

 

[xzanfr]

I feel for the console players having met some really great and enthusiastic players.
FD shot themselves in the foot by saying it'll work on old consoles - i think they overestimated that Odyssey would be good on old pc's and consoles but it's proven to be too much.
It's either going to be dumbed down or old stuff will be ditched - I hope they announce it for new consoles rather than dumbing it down but whatever happens, we won't get any decent additions to the story until they ditch current consoles.

Here's a cat to make up for the seriousness.

I've opened the 9 pint barrel now so no further useful content will be posted.

 

[LeoBartlet]

Safe to say that thread is a lost cause now.

 

[ubermick]

Yep, I give up. There's no reasoning with them. How dare Frontier not keep them constantly informed about as well as delivering support for the... thing... that currently... doesn't actually exist yet.

 

[Rat Catcher]

I feel for the console players having met some really great and enthusiastic players.
FD shot themselves in the foot by saying it'll work on old consoles - i think they overestimated that Odyssey would be good on old pc's and consoles but it's proven to be too much.
It's either going to be dumbed down or old stuff will be ditched - I hope they announce it for new consoles rather than dumbing it down but whatever happens, we won't get any decent additions to the story until they ditch current consoles.

Here's a cat to make up for the seriousness.

I've opened the 9 pint barrel now so no further useful content will be posted.

There is a caveat attached to EDO on consoles that continually gets overlooked, short memories maybe

David Braben, in his first 'not an apology post' said this:

As you may remember in our recent development article, the significant amount of updates and development effort that has been done to fix and improve issues since the launch of Odyssey has meant work on our console release has not progressed as quickly as we had hoped. What’s more, we can see that the strides we have made through the last five major updates are positive, but we must continue on with this progress to give the experience that you and we expect on PC.

With those things in mind, we have spent a lot of time discussing and re-evaluating our previous plans and we have made the decision to prioritise the core PC experience for Elite Dangerous. Ultimately, we believe it is right to focus our efforts on the core Elite Dangerous Odyssey experience for the platforms that we have released on, before opening up to more. We know that the work that we do to improve players’ experiences of Elite Dangerous Odyssey on PC will benefit other platforms in the future, but the dates and details of the console platforms are going to change. We do not want to rush into confirming any dates or changes this has on our console release, as we must remain fully focused on the core Elite experience. Only when we feel that the foundation of the PC release is solid, will we be able to re-lay our console roadmap on top.

Nowhere in his post did he say that EDO would be coming to any particular console, only that once EDO had been fixed could they consider it... (see the orange bits)

We have been told, on several occasions, that current gen consoles were not getting an updated version - if the console roadmap is still in the planning stage, how can a definitive statement be made?

 

[nemolomen]

Oh, its playable. But its still miles away from what I'd expect performance wise. Any other PC game I play, my framerate never ever drops out of triple digits, and those are usually games that are far more graphically demanding/pleasing. Even after all the updates, I'm on anywhere between 40-60 in settlements and that's with me using the bodge job of FSR.

I'm getting better overall results using Nvidia's own FIS (or whatever it is called!) at ultra than FSR in game. Not massively improved, but certainly far better looking - although that may just be eroded a little by text being a little more rounded...

So, since Update 8, I've discovered that my rig (Ryzen 7 3700X, 16GB DDR4 3200, RTX 2060 6GB with slight OC* @ 1440p) can run mostly in Ultra, Normal, x1.0 (Not FSR) and I'm getting frame rates > 100 in space and > 60 on atmospheric planets (been on several lately) but at any Ody settlement, hanger or concourse, I need to go down, at least (depending on the settlement), to High, FSR, x0.75 to get between 40 and 60 fps.

I think this calls for a video so I can demonstrate rather than inadequately describe...

* - Over clocking on the RTX 2060

The fan speed is set to auto and I adjusted the curve to keep the GPU under 60C (I've said all of this before earlier in the thread)

Also, my case has two intake fans in the front with 2 output fans at the top and one out the back. My right knee rests on the upper left corner at the rear of the case while I'm playing and I can tell when the card is heating up too much as it burns my leg.

 

[Darth Ender]

i find fdev's keeping new features and such secret (that aren't related to narrative developments) extremely weird. But i just figured it was some weird directive from Braben that nobody else will ever be able to make sense of. Just like the directive that forces every new feature to be entirely optional and thus the game to never feel like a cohesive whole of interesting interconnects parts ...but instead just a bunch of poorly realized separate games mashed together with a common currency.


as for releasing edo when they did not having to do with their financial numbers, you have to remember at the time, tancent was shopping for a studio and i can't help but think fdev was looking to be potentially purchased and maybe thought the publicity of a release would make them more attractive. They didn't think the release would go over as bad as it did. And tancent eventually purchased another studio instead. i dont see any other reason to force the release besides that or their reality distortion deflectors were at 300% and they were all living in a fake universe nobody else lives in. Even today, when talking to investors or the press, they call odyssey's release a small glitch in server connectivity and some performance issues with a small group of players. Maybe their shields are so strong they actually believed that and still do.

 

[nemolomen]

I do have some sympathy for console players but I still can't play Odyssey on my not top end but not potato pc and paid 40 quid for the privilege.
Every update I download, try, laugh and turn it off again but don't feel the need to cry about it.

What are your non-potato-ey specs?

 

[LeoBartlet]

as for releasing edo when they did not having to do with their financial numbers, you have to remember at the time, tancent was shopping for a studio and i can't help but think fdev was looking to be potentially purchased and maybe thought the publicity of a release would make them more attractive. They didn't think the release would go over as bad as it did. And tancent eventually purchased another studio instead. i dont see any other reason to force the release besides that or their reality distortion deflectors were at 300% and they were all living in a fake universe nobody else lives in. Even today, when talking to investors or the press, they call odyssey's release a small glitch in server connectivity and some performance issues with a small group of players. Maybe their shields are so strong they actually believed that and still do.

What makes you think Frontier was looking for someone to buy them other than random forum rumour?

 

[Darth Ender]

So, since Update 8, I've discovered that my rig (Ryzen 7 3700X, 16GB DDR4 3200, RTX 2060 6GB with slight OC* @ 1440p) can run mostly in Ultra, Normal, x1.0 (Not FSR) and I'm getting frame rates > 100 in space and > 60 on atmospheric planets (been on several lately) but at any Ody settlement, hanger or concourse, I need to go down, at least (depending on the settlement), to High, FSR, x0.75 to get between 40 and 60 fps.

How effective is disabling ambient occlusion for settlement performance? turning it off on barren surfaces if you're in the 70ish range nets you an additional 10% ...but not sure how that scales and if it is even more significant in settlements or if the limiting factor is weighted somewhere else.

for some reason, there are no such features / structures in these 399,999,995,000 or so systems in the game, so i've been unable to test how that's been behaving.

 

[ubermick]

i find fdev's keeping new features and such secret (that aren't related to narrative developments) extremely weird.

I think Ratty is 100% bang on, and that the new features aren't new at all, but are features that were supposed to have been included at launch, but were universally turned off as they frantically tried to sort out why the thing was running like a dog.

With no legs.

Encased in concrete.

Like any problem with a PC - disable absolutely everything non-vital, and turn things on one by one until you come to the one that makes things go pop.

 

[Darth Ender]

What makes you think Frontier was looking for someone to buy them other than random forum rumour?

the fact that they're public. if they didn't want to be bought, they wouldn't be selling themselves. But also, there's not much else to explain releasing odyssey broken other than it was the only new thing somewhat ready and there was a real deadline for making an impression if they wanted to.

 

[LeoBartlet]

the fact that they're public. if they didn't want to be bought, they wouldn't be selling themselves.

But also, there's not much else to explain releasing odyssey broken other than it was the only new thing somewhat ready and there was a real deadline for making an impression if they wanted to.

That makes even less sense. They had to have known that it wasn't ready for release were they hoping no one would notice and it would sell gangbusters then Tencent would pick them to be their one and only.

 

[Bottom Hat]

I feel things are going far too on topic which is okay, but needs more cat pictures.

 

[Darth Ender]

That makes even less sense. They had to have known that it wasn't ready for release were they hoping no one would notice and it would sell gangbusters then Tencent would pick them to be their one and only.

You'd think, but there is also the fact that they seemed to have really convinced themselves that the issues weren't significant. And I think they really thought any problems would be glossed over by the playerbase and not be shown as anything more than background noise among a huge rush to purchase on steam and such. the numbers of which would be all they'd need. It's not like tancent would be looking at the forum.

they did not anticipate the very public steam rating reaction. nor the youtube feedback.