Hello everyone …
I’ve had that strange thing of being out and about around the country again. Around people. Twice ! All with work, so I can’t say very much about it. One trip was bad, with a poor hotel (which I complained about, I never complain about that stuff) and other issues, one trip was good.
Pretty weird being out there again though. And good to see our people as well instead of just interacting with them over the Skype.
Oh I had 2 covid tests too, both came up negative. It’s a necessary evil of being out and about around people again. It’s weird doing the swabs, I gagged each time with the tonsils part of the thing. But there can’t be any exceptions to doing the testing … and it gives a certain amount of confidence in being able to more freely interact with people.
Ok. That’s enough about work related and plague related stuff. On to the spaceships ?
That’s my latest ship, the Manic Minarr, another Krait Mk II that I’ve set up for mining. All my Krait Mk II’s are named for Tashnarr, a lovely lady who streams the games for us and brightens evenings by being an incorrigible chuckler. Oh, the callsign is -IC3Y- or Icey by the way. Must get Murph into a callsign at some point. I went into the new Elite Odyssey expansion after writing last week’s post and I have VERY mixed feelings about the release. It’s basically come out too early and we were given pre-beta level code. That means that all of the advertised features were included but the code wasn’t in a fit state for customers to be given sight of it. Let’s see …
That’s Tea and Medals, a ship I used for speed running to the Core. I brought her out of the hangar again to pull some modified bits off into storage and … also screenshot. The grey glass doming there should be black and you can probably pick out texture and framing corruption riddling the image. Quick edit for an extra picture :
That’s Tea and Medals from before doing another Core speed run, as presented in the Horizons code. You can draw your own opinion from the comparison there. I refused to take a picture of the Admiral Luperza in the state the game was showing me that ship last week because it was just really poor quality. Oh and …
Yep. Those were the hangar lights, through the ship. This one is fixed now but it was just one symptom of how broken the graphics renderer was when this expansion was released. This bug is fixed now and the graphics look awesome again but it’s at a cost of two things :
Apparently the fancy planetary features have been sacrificed in order to get walking and on foot combat into the game. I haven’t seen this yet.
Heartbreakingly poor performance. I was fine doing a bit of mining yesterday but the frame rate dives down to such uncomfortable levels on docking that I was heavily considering putting a docking computer on again. (It costs 1m credits per mining run because the space for the computer takes up space for Stuff to sell). As in, planetary landings looked amazing ….
That’s how I had the game set up on Saturday. I’m still playing with the graphics options and this is mostly medium plus a bit. The frame rate is still disastrously poor. Oh, the dots by the nose is my pilot for scale. Most of the graphical bugs of release seem like they’ve been fixed over the last week but release was disastrous.
You look close and the detailing in some of the non-purple bits is just absent and the crudeness of other textures in there are hidden by the shininess of the purple paint scheme. The Bridge of the ship is apparently absent.
That said though, when I was flying this weekend, I was happily falling in love with the graphics all over again. Just need some actual optimisation in the game and being able to acquire a long awaited graphics card upgrade. I was talking about changing the card this time last year with Deus Ex Mankind Divided … various things (cryptocurrency) mean that you just can’t buy graphics cards at the moment.
Here we go. This is what I mean …
That’s Tea-89 from the Alpha release of the game. I’ll accept a lack of decals, callsign identifiers and ship names in there because those weren’t in the Alpha. The lack of detail is appalling though and made its way into the release version of the game. Here’s the same ship after patching.
What a lot of places doing comparison screenshots are doing is fiddling with the lighting, which to some extent I’ve done there. (Didn’t want to bring that ship out of the hangar this time). The difference after the first week’s patch is incredible, the ships look amazing again. And I did spend a certain amount of time flipping through the ships in the shipyard just to have a look at the increased detail. And there are quite a number of new screenshots of ships on the pad.
That’s the Admiral Luperza again, looking stunning. She’s named for the lovely Margaret Krohn who I must add in a links list at some point. I really must do that before this site hits its first birthday. Maybe something for the list when I get some much required leave in a couple of weeks ! Anyway, the Federal Corvette was descending into a nasty mire of ugh looking before the patch, it’s awesome to see the detail on there again.
That’s our Manic Minarr sitting on the pad at one of the engineering bases, getting some work done on the shields. The paint job is a joke by the way. Another massive issue from the first week was frequent disconnections from the server. I was disconnected 4 times in a couple of hours. The most frequently reported error codes by people were Orange Sidewinder and … Scarlet Krait. So I built a scarlet Krait. It does look rather special though. I didn’t get disconnected over the weekend, so improvements again.
But … while I was quite happily falling in love with the game again, the whole disaster of the release of the expansion means I’m highly unlikely to be giving the developer, Frontier developments, any money or support any time soon. There have been design decisions going in which have broken some elements of the user interface (can’t turn in community goal rewards) or which have made elements worse, like the galaxy map, the mission system, the outfitting system and … the destination star doesn’t appear in the list if it’s too far away any more. (Something I used to use all the time but I have a workaround for it).
To release the game in such a poor broken state is unforgiveable, plus there’s a horrific lack of communication coming from Frontier, outside of them throwing their community managers to the wolves with orders to spam twitter and the other places with shiny happy screenshots. It’s a shoddy attitude that starts at the top of the company with people who have indulged in dodgy dealings in the past. And by that, I’m referring to Frontier Elite 2 where David Braben had a deal with Ian Bell, co-creator of the original Elite, to give royalties for any expansions. There wasn’t an expansion, there was a remodel called Frontier First Encounters badged as a new game, so no royalties. That caused a very acrimonious situation and it’s just one more symptom of how the people at the top of Frontier behave. Except this time, they’re doing it to customers as well.
Nuff said on that I think …
It is rather pretty still is it not ?
I think that’s it from me. New games have arrived ! I ended up buying some end of last week in a sale, plus soundtracks. More about those at some point. I finished the XCom 2 run today, so that’ll clear time and disk space for the new stuff.
Stay safe everyone, be well.