I’ve not followed Elite’s development very closely (mostly watched videos of people I’ve subscribed on YouTube playing it or talking about it) but they seem to have different servers and things like internal servers. Is there any reason that they don’t simply release those things to the public? Essentially allow players to run their own personal servers or maybe just have a small secondary test server that resets every once in a while? Are they just looking for perfection before releasing such a feature?
I remember people bringing up the “obsolete” argument on the ED forums during the offline mode drama, Frontier responded that it will probably never come to that, but if it does, they will release the server software to the public. Also the server is not just a single exe running on AWS, it’s a whole collection of different server programs that are responsible for different aspects of the game.
Have a look at this, if you have some spare time, it explains their server architecture.
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Last video before the Beta is going live…which is in roughly 2 minutes from now according to a post by Michael Brookes on the forum! 
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I’m both a bit sad and relieved that their planets ended up looking like bigger KSP planets.
Sad that they couldn’t make them look better and relieved because Battlescape still has a huge and unique selling point up it’s sleeve.
Buggies look damn fun though and I’ll give them that!
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“Bigger KSP planets”
Ehm…no.
And I’ve seen even better looking ones in game personally. And this is still only roughly one years work. Imagine two years from now when they will have implemented atmospheres and all the other goodies!
Let me guess…the atmospheric scattering in Inovae is “blinding you”… 
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Wow, very nice! I like the surface erosion on the first planet.
With the Steam sales, I jumped on the occasion to buy myself E:D
So far, I like it very much. I find it very immersive, the cockpit is well-fought. The central radar can be tricky to master and I’m sure I’m still missing a lot of information from it, but it gets the job done. The compass on the side is a great help as an extra for the radar.
At first I didn’t like that much the side panels, but I’m getting used to it and I can understand why they choose to display information that way.
There’s one thing for the moment that I’ve hated: the tutorials and the start.
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I really like the sun texture and effect, I hope we can see something like that in IB,
I’d rather it just look like a blinding ball that you just can’t see any detail of because its radiation is melting your fricking eyes out.
And, then they can use the money and time that would have gone into that and put it towards something like clouds, or, nicer clouds after we get clouds.
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Stars only look like that when looking through a telescope with a filter etc, definitely not when using human eyes 
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To be fair, it would be kind of silly to fly that close to the sun and look at it without any sort of filter.
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Can you get into any sort of combat in that surface cruise-mode or is it purely for getting around the slow speed-caps?
The transition from FSD/System to surface is actually pretty well implemented, it’s borders on being seamless, there is no pop and wait for the handshake like when dropping out of FSD normally.
Essentially you just fly towards the planet, once you dip into a suborbital trajectory, you glide towards where you need to go, you can control your ship during the glide. Once you drop below a certain altitude you are in aerial mode and can fly around as you wish, finally landing.
It’s very well implemented, it feels seamless, no popping anywhere and the HUD resembles real world fighter HUDs.
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Well yes, but as an immersive experience it would be great. Plus in space you never see with your naked eye, there is always a HUD or a display help.
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Though I’m fairly sure the ship would either burn up (I’m guessing that if your shields could withstand being so close to the sun for a long time it shouldn’t have any problem tanking any form of weapon) or the crew would be exposed to enormous amounts of radiation and die anywhere from hours to minutes, though I’m not an export so iunno.
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3 more shots. Considering we only have access to the most barren planets so far, they really are fun to find and explore the different planet types and the various terrain features and various gravity strengths.
One world I was on was 6.7g at the surface. The SRV stuck to the ground like glue even on bumpy terrain at speed, and when you do get airborne, it only takes a small fall to damage your SRV. Going up-hill is a nightmare.
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That moon in the distance sure looks a lot like Enceladus.
[quote=“TheCoach, post:648, topic:227, full:true”]
I’m both a bit sad and relieved that their planets ended up looking like bigger KSP planets.
Sad that they couldn’t make them look better and relieved because Battlescape still has a huge and unique selling point up it’s sleeve.[/quote]
The generation of surface details in E:D is unarguably sub par so far. No idea if they’re going to add horizontal displacement to their height maps, but that’s what is missing and what would enable them to have sharp ridges, cliffs overhangs etc… Outerra does it incredibly well and that’s the gold standard for terrain generation on a planetary scale from what I’ve seen. Although there’s still room for improvement. I don’t know whether and how I:B does cliffs/overhangs and what they’re using.
As for I:B’s unique selling point: Come on! It’s a match based PvP game on a dedicated server. Unlike Elite it has no instancing in it’s arena, it will have “hundreds” of players duking it out (according to the kickstarter, though the actual limit is still unknown, isn’t it? Certainly larger than ELite’s 32 though), it will have far larger, directly controlled ships than Elite and - at least within the limits of one level and match - the economy will be a lot more consistent for the player and not spawn around the players in their instances. I’d hardly call the planetary generation its major unique selling point.
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oh my god, the Outerra presentation is outstanding! I:B needs those rocky landscapes as well.