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Byshop Blog

Elite Dangerous 1.2 "Wings" Update Gone Live

In a game that could still benefit from more content, what is probably the single largest update since the game's actual retail release has finally landed. The list is a mile long but some of the highlights include some in-cockpit UI changes as well as the ability to form "Wings" (aka groups) in which players can more easily travel together and share information/communicate.

Here is the complete list leaving out bug fixes from https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=123776:

New Content/Features:

- Wings functionality added

- Added playable ship:Fer-de-Lance

- Added playable ship: Vulture

- Comms interface overhaul

- Added AI Groups

- Added ability to reboot destroyed sub systems (modules)

- Flyable debug camera with limited range added (CTRL+ALT+SPACE)

Tweaks & Fixes:

- Don't create ambient AIs unless there's a player in range to see them

- Added some depth and detail to the engine throats on the station engine module

- Asteroid CPU improvements. Removed unused aabb and its update

- Fix schematic for High Metal Content No Atmosphere planets

- Adjusted the draw distance slightly on the text for station external names so that they don't switch on/off as abruptly

- Make sure that the local polity is updated if a player slow boats between jurisdictions

- Increase distance the system map camera can be zoomed out

- Two new headlook controls added: a sensitivity slider and a "don't centre when I turn headlook off" option

- Brought back fuel usage gauge

- When a large ship tries to dock at a station with no large enough pads, tell the player why they're refused

- Fixed fuel scoop and gauges panel heat level to be in sync

- Fixed: Letters cut off on the right hand side panel under statistics

- Optimise cargo replication

- Better checks for limpets against shield states

- Fix for looping ammo bar if it's initialised to 50%

- Fix decals on Python

- Show docked players on sensors

- When players try to move their ship and the engines are off (/broken/etc) give a warning message

- Fix for AI not scooping up mined chunks if they'd previously been in combat and their combat target was still set

- Interdiction can no longer spam fines if the thing you're interdicting isn't in a state to be interdicted (hyperspacing out for example)

- Galactic map jump data cargo mass slider - uses fractional cargo tonnage fixed

- If you have no cargo racks, you are able to cause your galaxy map jump range to become -1.0 fooling the route planner fixed

- Remove a spurious "Is Critical" flag from docking computer modules, you can no longer kill a ship by tickling one with a laser

- Fix decals from popping when in outfitting menu

- Added new light cone renderer

- Fix paintjobs to apply to cockpit model making them visible from inside the player ship

- Fix for distant rocks being missing from some metallic rings

- The Hull indicators for the French language cockpit is out of alignment compared to other languages fixed

- The characters used for localised 'units' in Russian were missing in our numeral font fixed

- Updated icons for station to be used in SuperCruise

- Self destruct now has a timer, during which your ship will overheat violently and have no power

- Fix FSDInterictor being a critical module

- FrameShiftDrive no longer a critical module as rebooting can repair it

- Turning a powering module off now correctly causes it to produce no power

- Fix non-localised strings in the cartographics window

- Fix the Python HitLayout for modules

- New community Goals Reward tier GUI bar is displaying incorrectly fixed

- Fix the issue of chatter not being called during the abandon branch of collect illegal slave missions

- Add a special text string for stars which are less than 1 million years old, rather than displaying '0 million years'

- Repeating SFX when long distance route planner failed fixed

- Scrolling a in community goal in the transactions tab generates excessive GUI sounds fixed

- Lowered the military interdiction a tiny amount to be the same as the police archetype

- Hide credits balance on galaxy map until we know what the value is

- Fix for the 'hazy' lighting bug in the adder cockpit

- Fix issue with ending interdiction (when immediately being re-interdicted) without enemy

- Reduce amount of system requests for the Cartography store

- Report when a player has not found any bodies in a discovery ping

- Added comms chat lines for transport and VIP scenarios

- Make sure AI pilots maintain their skill levels when their authority is transferred

- Fixed vouchers being styled as community missions in the transactions panel (they were white, when they should have been orange)

- Balance pass on extraction sites, better variety and increased respawn delay

- Tweaks to the nav and target highlights to makes them less pronounced then the nav and target selections

- Balance pass on repair costs

- Tweaked the overheating HUD animations to look less naffy

- HUD Ring weapon indicators will now use an ellipsis character to indicate that a label is being truncated

- Check if player has bought a paintjob while in outfitting and refresh list if needed

- Add mass to point defense turrets

- Changed location schematics to grey/white. Updated the supercruise sensor object target colour to match

- If the player is not wanted, but is carrying illegal cargo we should show the player in the local legal status area of the cockpit GUI

- Fix for planet ring sorting in system map

- Avoid mapping rocky ice worlds as water worlds

- If the collecting the cargo that we have targeted is illegal, say so in the target panel in the cockpit

- Strip out the odd blue colouring of the minor proximity colour on supercruise radar. Colours are now Orange by default, red for danger-close, blue for targeted

- Update to the repair discount based on faction reputation: Now only kicks in at 80% (allied) reputation, Reduced from 40%(ish) to 10%

- Let the player get much closer to the event horizon of a black hole

- Modify the strength multiplier of the black hole effects

- Various text fixes

- Removed the trailing particles from the chaff launcher and optimised FX

- Add system state modifiers to AI ambient traffic generation

- AI capital ships: don't spawn all fighters in response to first threat

- Make sure the cockpit spark effects trigger from module heat damage even when at 100% hull

- Fix the data in the alpha centauri system

- Added some warnings for consequences when changing modules (For example jump range has been massively reduced)

- Increased visibility of lines rendered in Galaxy map - in particular the orange plotted route

- Fixed some missing polys on the undersides of cranes

- Fixed offset mining laser beam

- Show the player a warning if they are changing power distributor and that power distributor does not have an engines capacitor large enough to facilitate boosting

- Fixed 'Activate cargo scanner' message remaining after you've successfully cargo scanned a ship

- Fixed supersampling issues with schematics

- Fixed hardpoint doors on the Python - these now open independently for Outfitting

- Fix incorrect allocation of influence from assasination mission

- Fix some odd NPC behaviour in stations

- Sidewinder seen grinding sideways into an outpost docking pad fixed

- AI should use lasers and projectiles based on target status, not range

- Don't lose the next system in a planned route when not arriving from hyperspace and the jump distance is over 20Ly. Next route destination wiull be reselected on each cruise transition unless the player already has a startup target

- Add a keybinding to select the next route destination

- Fix metal rich and high metal content planet descriptions

- Rename some backer stars and stations

- Added missing string for oxygen atmosphere type

- Fix i'm-inside-a-station schematic not updating colour

- The target name text on the cockpit target panel was getting cut-off in a couple of instances. The textfield now has a second line available

- Typo in the Cemiess system in the galaxy map fixed

- Update to AI ambient traffic, to increase wing chances and make Anarchies more dangerous

- Change WCM Transfer Orbital to Leonard Nimoy Station

- Fix Pantaa prayer sticks description

- Fix formatting in Silver description

- Changed minor faction name to Movement for V1688 Aquilae Independence

- Adjust station orbit for Stone's Legacy so you don't have to chase it to dock

- Fixed a flickering icon can be seen over your target when locking destinations

- Better catching of broken low level network messages

- Flat rate for fines now that cargo marking is in

- Balanced Type 7 schematic texture to make it not so bright

- Reworded text channel options header to be clearer

- Python now has comms panel focus for chat

- Fixed the heatsink material on the large pulse laser to glow, as they were using the incorrect shader type before

- Ensured the empire capital ship's weapons are unaffected by chaff

- Fix ship repair reporting mismatches

- Balance pass on ship repair values

- Fix that stops the small gimballed beam laser from tracking extremely lazily

- Add 'arrival point' line to station pop-up on system map, giving distance (in light-seconds) from the largest star in the system

- Fix slavery missions to have correct text and function correctly

- Fix broken federal assassination mission

- Added icons for 'point defence turret' and 'mining laser'

- Fix influence rewards on some collect missions

- Fix issue where kills against orcas in assassination missions were not counting

- Fix problem of being unable to sell some stolen goods on the black market

- Stop gimbals and other weapons paying any attention to turret mode settings, it causes bad things

- Add friend/wing location markers to System/Galaxy map

- Added friend, wing, mission and stored ship icons to the galaxy map

- Remove limit on number of factions shown on mission summary panel

- Add missing backer station

- Fixed flickering icon can be seen over your target when locking destinations

- Fixed large weapon gimbals being orientated backwards, causing guns to fire offset to their orientation

- Adjusted tri-mesh hitcheck to give more clearance so that the small RailGun can now fire when fitted to a Type6

- Fix NPCs created by following wakes/interdictions not replicating their bounties

- Adding valuable salvage convoys to three permitted systems: LFT 509, Isinor, Witch's Reach

- Fix system schematic showing briefly after collecting cargo

- Fix for incorrect text string on slave missions

Audio Change Log

New

- Fer De Lance Audio.

- Vulture Audio

- Sounds for "masslock", "safe to disengage" and "slowdown" GUI alerts.

- Audio added for "FSD Cool-down" GUI animation.

- Audio for reboot-sequence.

- New heat indicator audio warnings.

- Specific new impact sounds for Cannons, Railguns and PlasmaAccelerator impacts.

- New Ship voice lines for enabling/disabling thrusters, self destruct and ship reboot.

- Upgraded audio engine (Wwise) to the latest version.

Fixes and changes:

- We have spend a lot of our time on performance related fixes and updates for this patch. Thank you commanders for helping us find them and we're still hunting so please keep the feedback coming!

- Added a missing sound to scanners.

- Fixed some missing audio in the station gui.

- Fixed a positional bug that reduced the volume on the docking clamp.

- Rebuilt the station force-field audio from the ground up to minimise the wild inconsistencies caused by speed and ship differences. This also helps with clipping on some set ups.

- Finished transitioning the Docking Bay lifts to the new animation system, which should bring back some of the missing low end layers experienced in 1.1.

- Update to station voice attenuation and reverb which fixes station voice being inaudible at some docking bays. Rebalanced the dry announcer voice and distant echoes so the station feels larger.

- Addressed rogue low frequency drones from the station reverb that was causing clipping sub-bass tones when lots of activity is present.

- Adjusted the reverb/volume balance of super-cruise engines and music, to reduce the sense that music or engines drop out entirely in favour of the other. Some emphasis remains to keep the mix clean.

- D-scanner no longer mutes all audio when used. Instead it dips the volume of other sounds gently and un-dips quicker after use.

- Switching lights on or off sounds less mechanical.

- Supercruise from hyperspace music take lead over fuel scooping ambiences & engine sound.

- Fuel scoop mix improvements.

- Removed high end noise and some (not all) low end tube like distortion from menu's.

- Addressed low end noises in the system map.

- Made voice-comms more intelligible. Lessening of the distortion, and the way the players voice ducks incoming voices.

- Voice-comms volume slider in audio options uses a different curve to be more responsive at lower settings.

- Multi-cannon reloads are more audible.

Performance/Optimisations

- Numerous optimisations to audio systems, to reduce numbers of audio emitters and voice count, especially in busy scenes. Should improve audio engine performance without diminishing quality.

- Optimisations pass for all types of space station modules, Capital Ships, Outpost modules, landing pads, debris, fuel scoop, supercruise, alarms, heat, weapons, ships and frost.

-Byshop

There Came and Echo was released over the weekend to early backers

The game officially comes out tomorrow but early backers have had access to it since Saturday, but under the restriction that nobody post streams or gameplay videos until launch day. For those not aware, There Came and Echo is the latest game from Irridium (one of my favorite indie developers) and is a tactical overhead shooter controlled through voice commands. Cool sci-fi plot with a soundtrack by Ronald Jenkees and some top notch voice talent including Will Wheaton and Ashley Burch.

I'll probably post some gameplay videos once the embargo is lifted.

Yakuza 5 to come to the US in 2015!

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/yakuza-5-gets-western-release-in-2015/1100-6424020/

I know I'm two months late on this. Normally, this is something that would never have slipped my radar but the simple fact of the matter is that two years after the game's initial release I had stopped looking into this a while ago because I gave up on it ever happening in any sort of reasonable timeframe. I'm so freakin' happy that this is finally coming to the US.

I didn't see any word on the HD collection, though, which I would have also loved to see. That one makes no sense to me since it was already localized for the original PS1 releases so that one should be easy to release in the US.

Anyone else here a fan of this series?

Star Citizen's Public Test Universe Now Available for All Backers

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/star-citizen-s-public-test-universe-now-available-/1100-6424776/

OMGWTFBBQ?!?!?

This caught me pretty off-guard. I was just the other day lamenting the recent lack of updates in both Elite and SC recently and then bamm! Persistent Universe! I had no idea this was this close, but perhaps I haven't been keeping up with all the relevant forums enough to know what's coming. I'll be checking this out tonight for sure.

Has anyone tried this yet?

-Byshop

Oculus Rift DK2 - First Impressions

So I just got my Oculus Rift DK2 on Friday and I said I would post a blog review of it. That said, this is going to have to just be the first of what will probably be many because after a weekend of playing with this thing the biggest thing I've learned is that I'm going to have to play with this a -lot- more before I'll have a solid idea.

First of all, the good: This is a pretty cool device. The stereoscopic 3D works well, although that's not exactly new technology. It does head tracking well and the 3D space recognition appears to be dead on. The device does as advertised.

Now the bad: This is not ready for primetime yet. If the DK2 were released as the final retail version, this product would fail miserably for many, many reasons. It's a bit rough and the software support is very spotty right now. You absolutely should not buy this device if you are looking for the next new gaming peripheral. This is a development kit so as such it's more of a technical proof of concept. I can't imagine what the DK1 must have been like if this one is a huge improvement over the previous version.

Now the rest: The device itself functions in one of two modes, "direct" or "extended". Direct means that the software application that you are using is aware of the Oculus and sends video directly to it and understands how to read its inputs. "Extended" means the Oculus shows up as another display device in an extended desktop. Technically, the desktop shows up on the Oculus but you can't really "see" it properly through the display because each half of split between each eye and they overlap (just like turning 3D on a non 3D signal). When you use the Oculus in this mode, you either have to set the Oculus as the primary display (making navigation tricky) or your game has to support running on a secondary display. Direct mode works better with less latency, but unfortunately almost nothing besides a handful of tech demos supports Direct mode. Extended theoretically can work with any game, although sometimes third party utilities are required in order to get the game working properly and not every game will support every feature (i.e. support 3D but not headtracking, etc).

The device itself is interesting. I'm nearsighted (nothing crazy but I wear glasses and contacts to read anything more than a foot or two from my face) and this device absolutely does not work with glasses because it fits like nightvision goggles. However, contacts obviously work and depending on your own vision problems they may not even be necessary because the screens are only inches from your eyes even though they simulate distance viewing. There are two sets of "lenses" included that sit between your eyes and the displays. They are intended for people with different levels of nearsightedness and by using the correct set I'm able to use the Rift without any other corrective lenses which is pretty cool.

The screens on the device are lower resolution than a nice, high end monitor. There's pixelization that's pretty noticeable because you're so close to the displays. This combined with different aspects of the software support can make a game look pretty ugly. Elite Dangerous has native support for the Rift in extended mode, but in its current version it looks horrible. The 3D effect is there but game text is unreadable due to the resolution and relative scale of the heads up displays. The weird thing is that I can read the displays more easily if I lean my head in closer to the virtual display in 3D space, which is a bizarre concept. One of the freakiest things about playing Elite was looking down at my hands and feet and seeing the game pilot's hands mirroring my own movements. The scale was even pretty close to being accurate.

Software support is really rough right now and I've only gotten a handful of games working properly if at all. Star Citizen was next on my list but I haven't had much luck getting that one to work correctly. Over this weekend I've spent more time trying to get games to work than actually playing them. Alien Isolation is out next week and although Ethan Carter came out they cut the VR support for that game just before release.

Another weird thing is that placement of the device on your face has to be dead on accurate. Even a quarter of an inch in any direction will make the display look odd and creates a color bleed effect that looks like a convergence issue. Even when placement on your head is perfect, only the portion of the screen that is directly in front of you is totally clear and aligned. As you get towards the outer edges, the color convergence goes off. When that's your peripheral vision it looks fine, but if point your eyes at the edges they look pretty bad. This means that the ability to turn your perspective or use head tracking is a must and it's another reason why you can't use the Oculus to view your desktop (as there's no tracking). Even when the stereoscopic vision works, if you are in a situation where you can't turn your perspective (like a menu in a game that doesn't have native support) then you might not be able to see what you need. For games that do support the Oculus, the menu exists in 3D space so you can move around it.

As far as how well the device works overall, when it works well it works very well. The 3D works great (although it doesn't fill your entire vision but for glasses wearers this should be less of an adjustment), but what really sells it is the headtracking. Turning your head and having your perspective change 1:1 with your head movement really makes you feel like you are standing in the game. The tech demos are currently the most impressive uses of the tech, and the rollercoaster demos can give you a real sense of vertigo although I didn't find myself flailing like a spaz or falling over but I can see why this messes with people's perception. The biggest issue is just the software support, but that'll only improve over time.

More to come...