Elite: Dangerous

If you could collect fuel by sun-scooping in the original game I don't see why you couldn't do it with metals. Some kind of unrefined stuff probably, otherwise it'd be pretty easy to get rich kwik.

I bet Mr Braben shops at M&S. Blue Harbour is a bit too Street for him though.

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"Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how the Tatty 100 is done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves." - Brendan Behan

Very fine wrapping Mr T



Haven't got to trial it yet but can see it being intriguing

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Virtual Reality chatter on a movie site? Got endless amounts of it here. Reviews over here

Excellent! I thought I might have jinxed myself when I told you I've never had anything get lost in the post.

The customisation is pretty self explanatory apart from where you can adjust the distance from buttons to thumb - there's a little hole in the front above the trigger for the Allen key. I only found out about it myself when I was packing it.

Mine's a bit of an unwieldy bugger but fortunately I don't use the workstation tray.

Been having fun out at the Beagle 2 extraction sites



Ice rings seem to be a bit more crowded! Very purty in the right light though

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Enjoyed this tour of Azeban City's inner alleys. Good stuff starts around 1.50...



Gets a wee bit Metropolis-like once you go in a layer. Quite tempted to try this when Beta 3 knocks us back to basic Sideys

Also makes me hopeful that planet-side cities will be fun to jaunt through, and that they might even require it... (Seds, if you pass through here, don't look at the fan art ....)

Tried Beta 3 yet? Lots of nice extra touches (and the menu is now super snappy) but online's still not good. Major stutters too.

Yeah looking sleeker in lots of ways. Liking simple things like the smoother hyper jump transition, and the added layers to the audio.

Had loads of issues of course Blowing up on returning to surface at station was a notable one! Also masssssive lag at warzones, although seemed better after the patch - think it might have been because I was right near 2 planets with the new textures etc.

Feeling tempted to leave it until full launch now though. There's less motivation to build stuff up knowing it's going to be wiped - and some of the planned stuff is so tantalising I'd almost rather wait and discover it as a whole. A mining laser would be a lot more fun if knew you could use it on wrecks you find in passing too - or chasing comets etc. And just little things like knowing the distance travel is probably going to change again (they're going to add slingshotting in theory I believe).

Plus I feel like I need a bit of loose story backdrop in there, to start getting my RPG on. In the meantime I'm mainly just kitting a ship out and dogfighting for practice

(Having said all that, I'll doubtless faff with it till launch )

Yep, I'll probably dip in and out of the game before launch but don't really want to put serious time into something only to have my save wiped. I've started a new save 3 or 4 times voluntarily already. The game's had a few updates since BETA 3.0 though - Might give it a play later.

How's the stick going?

I see that people are already making their own button boxes:







They're pretty common for flight and racing sims but I reckon the Razer Orbweaver I have gathering dust on a shelf will do the same job.

Christ, that's all getting a bit Steel Battalion! What's wrong with the keyboard? (Alright, I see how you could get more cosy with a setup like that. The homebrew ones look like they're set to be nailed to an armrest plank at any moment )

Joystick looks like a viper ready to strike, but the right-handy thing is bothering me, so back on the controller at mo. Not sure about deadzone too, and kinda prefer the 'default to optimal turn speed' aspect you can get with no input, which can't replicate with the non-springy accelerator stick. Def gonna keep playing with it tho - much better for immersion

*EDIT* I see we get a 'ticket to Sol' as early adopters - IE access to the protected zone regardless of whether we're in good with the Feds or not. Looking forward to having all that lore playing out a bit more. That and just more options for working your way up, and more semi-emergent '**** I'm banned in zone X now' interplay. Hoping they manage to launch by Xmas so I can spend some cosy winter days star gazing

Yep, the two things I didn't like about that stick were the stiffness (which exaggerated the deadzone) and the throttle. Apparently the FLY5 stick gets a lot more playable with use and I suppose you could adjust the throttle deadzone in the game options to give you more leeway.

The Thrustmaster HOTAS has no discernible deadzone and a nice notch to differentiate between positive and negative thrust on the throttle.

If you're interested it's this model but I got it for £29.99 on the BT Shop site.

EDIT - Actually, you'd probably hate the Thrustmaster stick, Even though you could in theory swap the orientation of the stick and throttle it's built for right handers, even more so than the FLY5.

I'm a co-dominant leftie, by the way. I write left-handed but naturally prefer the right for holding a joystick, tennis bat, golf racquet etc. My brain's probably screwed up.

It's extra tempting, especially given that the guy who did that insane station fly by vid uses two sticks for ultimate control. (Left stick is mainly just for lateral thrusters etc I think).

I had a go at some of that flight-assist-off jinkery, and I'm buggered if I know how he adapted to the station's rotation. (If you wanna have go it's quite fun in the docking tutorial - your Sidey is indestructible. I did spend a lot of time pin-balling around the city-scapes tho )

Yep, I find flying and especially dogfighting much easier with the stick compared to the controller. This stick might be more useful because it looks to have the throttle placed (buttons on the wrong side though) in a neutral position.

I actually owned one of them in the past but sold it because I didn't have anything much to use it with.

This one's fully ambidextrous - Link

Loving this recent 'selfie with comet' by the Rosetta mission. Lander's gonna go take a closer peak in about a week I think



Just some space porn to fill the void Plus I do wonder whether comets are gonna play an active role in the game, rather than just be a bit of vajazzle. Would def be cool if we could mine em while chasing them at top speed...

*EDIT And WTF... the Rosetta mission has a glossy trailer, starring Aidan Gillen... how odd!

I finally got a headset. Currys in Enniskillen had a sale on and I picked up a Turtle Beach Z22 for £29.99 .... drove home and found that it doesn't work on Windows 8.1. With blood suitable risen I got straight back in the car (I put 100 miles on the Tattymobile today for the sake of a headset I could have bought online ) and ended up swapping it for a Corsair HS30.

The Corsair is a pretty basic unit (and the headphone quality is lifeless compared to my music cans) but at least it works.

Cool, comms ahoy

I read some semi-credible musings that suggest comms might even take damage, becoming even more fuzzy & liable to cut out. Which although it might be a fairly annoying, does sound like a cool immersion gimmick too.

Kinda like another suggestion that they should have a ham-radio style band as well, where everyone can just get their trucker on. I can totally imagine the UK-Irish massive loving it *Adopts voice of Brummie engineer* 'That's a 10-4 good buddy, Commander Fuzzychops here, just humping Iridium over the horizon. Lots of smokies out by the twin-stars, you watch out now. Over.' . Could genuinely be good for emergent co-op though, and when out in the wilds

For what it's worth my Turtle Beaches started falling apart in stages from about day 3, so possibly you've dodged a bullet there. Or at least driven a long way round it

I'd heard in the past that Turtle Beach were kinda the Beats By Dre of headsets, with all that entails.

Still, Corsair are legendarily unreliable but they make some lovely stuff. My history with them:

8GB RAM - Going strong for 5 years
8GB RAM - Failed out of the Box
M90 Mouse - Failed after a week
K70 Keyboard - Going strong for a couple of years

That's a 50% failure rate, much like Elite right now. Multiple crashes in online mode and usually right in the middle of courier missions which leads to a restart with the mission wiped from the logs and my hold full of the old cargo, now marked 'stolen' and a bounty from the station where I procured them.

Went into solo mode and the crashes stopped. Still getting performance issues when planets come into view in Super-cruise which I hope they'll iron out.

Yeah I'm permanently playing in solo - the lag on arrival is just too tedious otherwise. Interesting that the private group didn't seem to suffer from the same issues - I guess it's easier to match 2 players up vs juggling instances of 32+ (or whatever the limit is).

Found this old dev diary interesting, mainly just for the way it fleshed out some of the future plans a bit...



The on-foot stuff could be fun if they get it right - seems everything is set up to accommodate it already, IE the ship & base interiors etc, and I presume the pilot body we can see in the seat. Didn't realise you'd be doing things like firefighting on your ship and watching cargo whip out through breaches. That could add another fun layer to combat - IE alarms & sound queues telling you that those things are already happening behind you, and you better flee and deal with them.

Also the idea that you can wander around perusing other people's ships, and even peruse the odd's of stealing them - or just sneak into their cargo bay and squirrel yourself away . If it's not too stilted could all be fun

I imagine these are the things that'll make it in first - way before the randomised cities, generated cloudscapes and animal-realmed worlds he wants to add too.

I can see ship theft being a thing - BETA 3 introduced ship storage and I took advantage of it yesterday. Turns out that your stored ship is left at the station where you bought your new one and the only way of flying it again is going back there. Not as handy is having everything stored in some kind of nebulous 'cloud' but it's realistic, if nothing else.

I left my old Sidewinder in my new favourite system - Wyrd. Everyone there talks like they're in a 90s Hip Hop crew. Probably.

Wyrd up!

The stations do seem to have different accents, so you never know

Freetown seem to talk like an unconvincing Caribbean pirate. I am unconvinced

Just stumbled on this pic called 'Flighsuit combatsketch01', which suggests there will be even more nefarious activities to do on foot. Shoot first Han!



Hard to imagine Elite as an FPS, but this whole station cruising and general skulduggery seems to fit. Can imagine you could defend your craft from cat burglers etc. Maybe lawless regions will be full of bar-room brawl style shoot outs?

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*EDIT* Possible suggestion of zero-G shenanigans in there too. That could be an interesting wrinkle on the shooty-shooty genre. There have also been wishlist thoughts on the the Reddits etc concerning exploring wrecks for data etc. Could imagine some tense moments doing that, especially alien ships. Any scares in that low-lit zero-G environment would certainly make you jump

Ever played Freelancer? Hard game to get hold of seeing as it has never appeared anywhere digitally but I was clearing out some old boxes a while back and found my copy. With a bit of prompting it runs fine on modern systems - The reason I mention it is because it't the best space exploration/combat game I've played that ties you to a story. If Elite's planned faction stuff is half as good then they'll have answered a lot of concerns.

I've got a couple of friends who didn't partake in the Beta because of its open ended story-less nature. Eejits.

In the process of installing the Beta to my SSD, just to see if it makes a difference to the stuttering.

I've heard tell of Freelancer (the precursor to Star Citizen no?). Sounds like one of the few fun space releases in the last few decades. Heard the space combat was one of the let downs tho . Looks like Elite's working from the other direction. Let's hope they can tie it together.

As for actually playing ED I'm hoping to get back on tonight and just nail that cool running tutorial finally!

*EDIT*

Oo, what the crap. I didn't know about 'Google Cardboard'!



It seems I really could cellotape my Android to my face

And by all accounts it works with Elite. This could keep me busy in the interim