Hello everyone,
We just had our May Bank Holiday weekend, which meant … more time off work ! I spent mine variously looking at the Elite Odyssey Alpha and motor racing. There was nearly a peek at more remote control car models but that can wait a little bit and I don’t think I know enough about them yet. Oh ! I have an eye test booked in for next week, which is massively overdue.
First … thumbnail pic ? Hope it works this time !
It’s one of the Lego VIP models that came with the Space Shuttle. A smart little construction underneath there too. There are another set of cogs underneath, so if you turn the lower cog that’s sticking out, the dancers go around the rink and twirl around.
I did the deed with the Elite Odyssey expansion and bought into the Alpha … I’ve had a little look at it over the weekend but honestly, I don’t see how much is there for me plus it needs a massive amount of work before it can be considered for release. Hopefully that’s already been done because apparently the build we’re playing on is at least a month behind the one the devs have. (They must be testing the netcode out)
The scale of the ships is impressive. This is the latest expansion and the Alpha allows us to walk on planets, space stations, landing pads but not inside the ships yet. The game didn’t let me walk under that landing leg but it was fun seeing that the gap there meant I should have been able to stand under it. The detail is curious. Some of the Alpha stuff has incredible detail, some is …
The quality is still amazing but the ship should be better … and you see the difference in levels of detail when you’re close up. Could be bugs, it’s probably me having special livery items that aren’t properly in the alpha version yet. Like the “TEA-89” identification labels that should be very visible. I tried a couple of missions involving retrieving an item from a base (no screenie apparently, game must have lagged out the pressing of Button.) and getting into a wrecked thingy.
This was me looking to retrieve an item from a crashed satellite and running into one of the issues … Cut off the access panel and the access panel falls into the hole and you can’t get it out. Oops. There’s also terrible performance which is apparently down to the game attempting to render too much, although it felt like that improved when I turned supersampling* down in the second session. Oh, the thing to look for in the detail is the edging between ships surfaces. It looks positively crude compared to what’s in the current state of the game.
*Supersampling – creating the image at a higher resolution than it is displayed at. This leads to better detail at a cost of performance. I play at 2560×1440 pixels. Supersampling at 1.25x means the game creates (renders) the image at 3200×1800 pixels.
So that’s me walking …
One thing that’s caught attention is this fella, dubbed Peter the Sleeper, which makes me a little more relieved again about the choice to move my name on from Sleepypete and make Sleepydwagonman the more consistent online name. (Plus there are a bunch of Sleepypetes and only one Sleepydwagonman).
More stuff that was going on was the return of World Endurance Championship racing. It feels like this series might be dying off, although it was good to see the debut of the hypercars. The race had interest all the way through, although the organisers are probably contributing to the series dying by locking the coverage of it behind paywalls. IMSA provides a superior product with better racing across all classes, better commentary and you can actually watch all of it, rather than the paltry amount that the Eurosp…. people deign to show. It’s sad because it’s selling short the efforts of the people bringing the cars to make the races happen.
Oh and then there’s F1, which had a decent race this weekend too. I’m looking forward to the Nurburgring 24 hour race coming up in a month. That’s always got interest going all the way through the field as cars fall back for repairs and then come back through.
Jumping ? I carried on with the quest to circle the galaxy, today’s trip was a bit more convoluted because it needed a bit of careful navigating and boosted jumps to hop across the gap between spiral arms. Back to the main game !
That’s the Admiral Luperza (named for Maggie Krohn) in the Odyssey shipyard ship selection screen …
If the Odyssey release sees the ships having the detail of the one in the Shipyard picture, instead of the detail that’s in the main game, something will have gone seriously wrong. Still, it’ll be nice to have another dimension to the game and I’m anticipating fun being the getaway pilot with a little ship that’s set up to get into places and then quickly make an escape, while the people keen on the ground stuff have their larcenous fun in bases.
Stopped off and repaired at the DSSA Reginleif carrier today, before heading on to :
That’s where I stopped tonight, a surprise Earthlike planet to check out a couple of jumps away from the carrier.
Hope you all had great weekends !
Stay safe, be well.