What is FDEV doing and what happened to Brabens dreams?

Agony_Aunt

Agony_Aunt
Dartay said:
It is however pretty easy to see that this may be one of the worst PR disasters Frontier has ever dealt with and there seems to be a very limited amount of outreach from them.
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Possibly so. There have been others.

I would say it is the first update where i've been totally turned off from even trying though. But that's due to performance. The actual content i'd like to give a try. The servers overloaded is just par for the course in the days and weeks following a major update, i'm pretty inured to that by now. The bizarre changes to the UI... well, i guess i will have to get used to, because I don't expect FD to change those significantly.
 

Dartay

D
robbyp said:
Point proven
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Friend, doing anything in Horizons took 5x as long as usual last time I tried.

If you look very, very carefully, you may also be able to notice that people that bought Odyssey are having trouble playing that as well. That "point" is about as sharp as a satsuma.

So again, are you joking? Or have you seriously not noticed that people have having trouble playing the game?
 
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Thatchinho

Thatchinho
Dartay said:
But didn't they explicitly state they were moving away from that method of releasing content?
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No. This is just a symptom of people using the word 'content' very ambiguously.

What they've moved away from is a pay-in-advance form of development where the major new mechanics are developed and released over a set of major releases over a 'season', which everyone pays for in advance at the start of the season.

So in that sense of the word 'content', yes, they have absolutely moved away from that method.

In the other senses of the word 'content', no they haven't. To take an example, Galnet articles are not going to be released en-masse now, they will be released on a daily(ish) basis.

You can extrapolate between those two extremes to get the picture when it comes to other forms of content.

(And none of this means they can't add more mechanics if they want to. It just means that it shouldn't be expected that they will. Putting the current situation to one side, they've got some stuff they still need to do for Odyssey - the console release, the rolldown of some stuff to Horizons, and I'd like to think they'll still be working on getting VR properly done. Other than that though, the next major set of new mechanics should be expected to come in the next paid expansion.)
 

Lysette

Lysette
Lone_star said:
This thread is super interesting (and kind of terrifying). I really wonder if its true that all the people who built the Cobra engine have left - it would certainly explain a lot.

https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/nj1f5x Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/nj1f5x/odyssey_renderer_is_broken_details/
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As far as the referenced article mentions DX12, I can understand why they did NOT go to DX12 - this would have excluded all the windows 7 and windows 8 people from using it, DX12 is windows 10 exclusive. I use windows 8.1 still as well and couldn't use it, if it would go to DX12 and I'm not upgrading to windows 10 before I will have to buy a new machine anyway. And given that there are a lot of players, who played Elite in the 80s and 90s, there might be more than enough, who don't use windows 10 yet. I guess that FDev didn't want to force these long-term customers to upgrade or even buy a new machine for it.

Otherwise the lack of culling - as in brute force rendering - is unacceptable with many or more complex objects and especially with dynamic objects like NPCs. But I assume, that there was just not enough time to do that properly, so they haven't done it at all to avoid problems there. I hope this will change in the coming months.
 

Demascus

Demascus
The exactly same thing happened with horizons. Released with barely any new content and a bunch of half finished ideas will be added over the next few years. Why are people surprised by this?
 

umbabrahattasil

U
Demascus said:
The exactly same thing happened with horizons. Released with barely any new content and a bunch of half finished ideas will be added over the next few years. Why are people surprised by this?
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Because FDev specifically told us, the release will be more optimized than the Alpha. The Alpha is a 5 week old build. Yet the planet tech has been rolled back even worse than what was in Alpha. I saw a video where someone had the exact recommended specs with a better CPU, and with LOW settings, got around 30 fps. It's not the half-brained ideas. It's lying about optimization and releasing something in 2021 that you hype up, which is this poorly architected.
 

Leadfoot

Leadfoot
DrewCarnegie said:
Since they didn't spend Odyssey development time 'perfecting' Odyssey, it seems a trifle optimistic to assume they've been 'perfecting' something else.

#potential
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While you may be correct, having enjoyed this game for longer than I've played Skyrim, I remain hopeful. I took into consideration that the possibility that Odyssey was delayed while Planet Zoo was developed was for them to learn how to create animals for us to be hunted by once we get thicker atmospheric planets. Lagrange clouds were (I felt) developed so they could figure out thicker clouds, etc.

I wanted to mention that one other poster pointed out that they should have concentrated on either atmospheric planets OR space legs, and instead tried both at once and both came out somewhat lacking. I believe biting off more than one can chew would be a correct analysis.

Still, the potential is there. I'm just disappointed in the number of glitches, bugs and other issues people are experiencing at the moment.

robbyp said:
The alpha/beta process is imperfect, its only going to find out a subset of the issues.
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Concerning this release, the "alpha process" did exactly what it was supposed to do: show FD several issues that needed to be address before release. I'm not a software engineer but I believe the "beta process" is supposed to polish off those things that were addressed and ensure everything is working fine before actual sales take place. Odyssey never had a beta. I believe everyone that's complaining about Odyssey is implying that the beta testing never took place, i.e., those who purchased Odyssey ARE doing the beta test, but they paid for it as if it was a finished product.

robbyp said:
Just hold your horses and let the problems be fixed.
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I'm not holding my horses. I'm holding my money until it's ready for release. "No sane person ever buys 1.0 software." I state that as a sort of joke but anyone that's had experiences with MS Windows (any version), or ANY software for that matter, knows what that implies.

I know it'll all get fixed. I can wait until it is.
 

Zinegata

Z
Agony_Aunt said:
You're really showing no willingness to engage and instead are twisting my words to suit your own purposes. Sorry, i'm not playing your game.
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No, this is just you coming fact to face with a genuinely honest man.

It is 100% accurate of me to say that tech support allocates staff to periods of high usage. For games, that means weekends. This is why reputable gaming companies increase staffing during weekends, and typically ask their customer-facing employees to have a day off mid-week instead.

You claimed to be in tech support. You should know this.

And yet you bizarrely played the "Fdev employees should have the weekend off" card. That's not industry standard. At all.

Indeed, the fact that you can't even accept that CM can make simple "We are aware of this problem, here are some suggestions to fix it" which would literally address the main concerns of 15-20 of the threads in the front page is literally the kind of ostrich-head-in-the-sand behavior that typifies actual Fdev CM. You're completely in denial of these problems, which is why you refuse to even consider the simplest measures to start addressing them.

So stop pretending I'm not the one not engaging here. You are. Deliberately. Because everything I noted could be implemented very easily.
 
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Dartay

D
Demascus said:
The exactly same thing happened with horizons. Released with barely any new content and a bunch of half finished ideas will be added over the next few years. Why are people surprised by this?
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Except with Horizons didn't they come out and actually say it was going to be like that?

Contrary to Odyssey which – AFAIK – was presented as a 'what you see is what you get' type of deal.
 

Leadfoot

Leadfoot
Lone_star said:
This thread is super interesting (and kind of terrifying). I really wonder if its true that all the people who built the Cobra engine have left - it would certainly explain a lot.

https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/nj1f5x Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/nj1f5x/odyssey_renderer_is_broken_details/
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InFlickWeTrust said:
Let´s hope that this is not true
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Yeah, I'm not a software engineer in any sense of the word but that list of how things were coded, written, and then poorly done, well, it looks like it was stuff slapped together at the last minute. Something like that poster's explaining about his actual analysis shows why people are complaining about frame rates on gaming rigs dropping down to the low 30's. I get the fact that lots of people were working from home but...wow.
 

Demascus

Demascus
Dartay said:
Except with Horizons didn't they come out and actually say it was going to be like that?

Contrary to Odyssey which – AFAIK – was presented as a 'what you see is what you get' type of deal.
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I honestly can't remember. I think it was back when they were trying to push that "season pass" nonsense.
 

Ghost1

Ghost1
Cosmo said:
That's your opinion and they're probably saving content for in-game events later this year.
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Thats the truth, not an opinion. The community has been demanding new ground vehicles for ever and we've gotten nothing.

They litterally took the weapons from space ships, and turned them into fire arms....that is insanely lazy. And they also said there are things we havent seen yet......well like what?
 
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NeilF

NeilF
From an exploration point of view...

The fact plants at this stage of the game - SEVEN year in and after the BIGGEST development effort ever - are just a dozen or so hard coded assets, speaks loudly to me. Surely they should be generated by an impressive bar raising procedural engine to give them diversity with a perceived nod to science, and hence give exploration more payback?

And the fact a whole new elite rank was introduced just to play a lock picking game around those handful of assets, which was then deemed to poorly conceived and designed, it was pulled, speaks loudly to me.

The game continues to look more and more confused in where it's going... Sadly... Seven years in and we're getting this sort of stuff!
 
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