Producing such a game for free isn’t really realistic in our money driven society.
I’m just glad that things like kickstarter exists that make it possible for these games to become what their creators envision without a producer breathing in their necks.
Paying to support a games development and getting alpha access as a reward sounds like a pretty fair deal to me. I wouldn’t pay that much for any game either, but it’s nice to be able to see the footage of others that do.
It’s great to see small dev teams push a date and not endlessly delay it.
Erh… who said anything about doing it for free?
Minecraft made millions selling “alpha and all future version” copies for something like £8 each. Same basic thing happened to KSP and DayZ. Sure, there are lots of games that don’t make it, but that’s the case regardless of where the money is coming from.
Minecraft started out pretty much as a one-person project, or at least with a very small team. I don’t think that model scales so well when you need to hire a large development team full-time to work on a “blockbuster” project.
Yep. Funding model/pricing plan depends very much on the sort of development & release process you’re doing.
For ED I bought the £50 tier - “Participate in the second round private beta test”
I assume you’re saying that in comparison to us ? If so then this isn’t a fair comparison. Frontier Developments has many hundreds of developers, while we are a small indy dev team with no funding ( nobody’s getting paid, in fact we’ve probably spent hundreds of thousands of dollars out of our own pocket… ) and only a couple guys working full time…
/shakes head
Alpha is expected to be buggy. If it isn’t then it isn’t really Alpha now is it!
Isn’t this the land of pushing the date back rather then producing something that doesn’t work? 'Been hearing that for five or so years now.
I appreciate that they’re trying to stick with the polyhedral look, and hope they continue to do so, but that station’s layout is more than a little weird.
I wouldn’t want to live in any of the rooms near the corners…
How are they handling Coriolis forces inside the station? Do they have a separate reference frame going on in there, or do you have to lead the landing pad with your ship?
That’s actually supposed to depend on the station in question. Some stations, especially those in wealthy star systems, will assist you by by helping you match rotation with the station once inside, letting you concentrate solely on lining up with your designated landing pad, instead of juggling position and orientation.
Others…won’t.
Or that’s my understanding based on what I’ve read of the Design Discussion Archive. It’s how they intend to keep the element of skill in docking without forcing players to plaster themselves on the docking bay a few dozen times.
I would think that the experience from small projects like DayZ and KSP had more to do with battlescape than major ones like SC and I: D, even if the genre suggests otherwise, but no matter.
I wonder what level of individual thruster control E: D will offer? With a pretending-to-be-in-air control scheme, landing inside a (relatively) rapidly rotating station would seem almost impossible to me, but if you could set your vertical thrusters to work at a continuous 42% (for example), and the resulting force matched the centripetal force that would be applied if you’d already landed, you’d suddenly “only” have to deal with coriolis effects.
Or, failing to provide a %-based setting, just tapping the correct button in a ICP-like control scheme could work.
New video from David demoing the station:
I’d really like to see a station without Coriolis negation.
Edit: Found a video! It seems that once the docking request is retracted, the compensation stops.
That is so awesome. As small as that station parking area is… It already looks so damned cool!
“Small” is probably right. I wouldn’t be surprised if Coriolis stations were on the small end of the scale.
The premium beta backers have now been given access to the original alpha combat prototype. If you’re a premium backer then alpha v1 should be available in your downloadable products at https://store.zaonce.net
I’ve been playing the combat prototype and it’s okay. The sounds and graphics are gorgeous as we’ve already seen from the videos. The flight style has been optimised for joystick flying and it took me a while to get my controls set up so that it worked well with mouse control. Even then everything feels just very slightly mushy and lacking in fine control.
It could be because I’ve spent so many hours on the Infinity Combat Prototype but I found the feeling of flying a spaceship to be inferior in ED. The ICP always felt so simple, intuitive and very easy to control. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to fly an Elite ship down an asteroid tunnel at high speed like I could a Varden.
The flight control system of Elite has been designed to encourage continual forward movement all the time. The main way this is encouraged is by having turn rates only become optimal when at 50% of full speed. The strange thing is though that in my experience so far, which is about four hours of gameplay, the ICP tactics of using forward and backward thrust to maintain range are the most effective.
Another area where the gameplay of the ICP is better is that most weapons in ED seem to be lasers which hit instantly. This means that while in the ICP it was worth strafiing and jigging to avoid incoming fire, there doesn’t seem to be any point in doing that in ED. You can strafe about all you like and the incoming fire will hit you just the same. If you’re head to head with another ship it’s just a case of who can do the most damage before their gun overheats.
In summary I’m a little disappointed that the combat gameplay isn’t up to the standard of the ICP, on the other hand it’s nice to be playing a new version of Elite. If we ever see Infinity Battlescape, maybe that will be the space sim for me.
Edit: By the way, nice to see Infinity getting a little shout out at the end of this article on RockPaperShotgun: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/04/11/elite-dangerous-best-joystick/
Give it a few days, it gets better, and better yet after alpha 2 then some more at 3. Can’t wait for alpha 4. In alpha 1 you have a week of playtime until you start itching for more, I hope they update you guys as alpha progresses.
Nice video from the latest newsletter showing heat/stealth mechanics:
I hope to see some nice stealth mechanic in Battlescape!
that’s some really cool stuff! Is heat the only way you can “detect” someone or are there other signatures?
I’m not sure. As soon as his target engaged silent running mode (which I think just closes down your radiators) he lost lock but there was still a blip on the scanner I think. Not sure though.
Have given it a few weeks now and I still think that the dogfighting experience of the Infinity Combat Prototype was much superior and more intuitive. If it had had Elite’s heat signature dynamics it would have been just about perfect.
It’s a good job that Elite Dangerous is about a lot more then combat otherwise there wouldn’t be enough there to keep my interest. The dynamic economy and procedural galaxy are where it’s at for me.
Their economy prototype looks a lot like what we made back in the day!
Hey Cray
Have you bound a key to 50% throttle? That’s where your ship is most maneuverable, TBH I wouldn’t go back to playing Alpha scenarios after playing with 3.4, the first few builds left me with a bit of a dry mouth. Combat for me feels just fine, yes it’s planes in space, but it’s planes in space done right. They seem to have balanced the combat pretty well, I’m often half into hull, rushing into station for repairs instead of just being killed all the time as is customary for traditional space dogfights. Power distribution, heat signature, throttle boost and many other concepts all seem to be balanced to be used just enough and have a purpose.
Yeah, when I saw that trade prototype I thought about the prototype we made for Infinity, nice flashback. I’m sure that if coded today our prototype would be better then theirs 
Anyway, haven’t seen you in IRC for a while now, pop in so we can have a chat.