Remlok Industries – EN » The Outpost #124

The Outpost #124: Your Elite: Dangerous news recap!
Feel free to share The Outpost to your friends, players groups and/or social networks ♥

I’m creating a few articles, but it will take some time:

[✓] Update of our Roles Guides: Combat, AX Combat, Mining, Trading, Exploration, Passengers Transport, Piracy
[WIP] Update to Mining Guide, how to use the refineries
[WIP] Highlight of a great ED tool of disabled players: EDTaupeEye – Next week, already available in French
How to prepare for Odyssey – End of March
Feel free to leave your comments if you are interested in a new article or an update!

Follow us on Twitter @RemlokEN, and join the community on Discord.
Or you can also directly follow me on Twitter @NicouLenny.

Summary:

Frontier News
Lore & Powerplay
Community Goals
Pictures – In the heart of the action
Videos – The Unmissables

Frontier News

Dev Diary Odyssey

► No time to read: Dev Diary #4 video + a press asset in production. Interesting news on Tuesday, I will Live-translate it in French but you can follow it in English here.

I’ll be Live on Twitch, Tuesday March 2nd at 16:30 UTC to translate in French the next official Supercruise News from Frontier, on Elite: Dangerous. With Arthur Tolmie’s information on producing assets for the Press, I speculate on some new information to be released very soon: Video and/or images for the Press so it means that important information are likely to be released in the foreseable future, like the release date on PC or the upcoming opening of the Alpha phase.

Note that Odyssey will have a PEGI Minimum Age restriction higher than what Horizons currently has. Players who do not have Odyssey will therefore not be able to play in the same instance with players who have Odyssey on the surfaces of planets without atmospheres. More info on this coming soon.
In the meantime, you can find here all the information about Odyssey.

Arthur Tolmie, Community Lead on Elite: Dangerous, recently confirmed that Frontier is currently working on new assets for the future expansion of the game, Odyssey. Assets are media content such as video or images for example.

Haaaa, I’m gonna get in trouble… So, I have been playing Odyssey. To get some capture for an asset (video). Pop in questions if you want, but I’m not gonna answer a lot because I promise you I’ll get shot. But we are working to get information out to you guys and stuff like that. But I don’t want to ruin our own program… But I have been playing Odyssey. It is for a PR (Press Relations) video. Regarding the Dev Diary #4, we are working on it right now.

To begin with, I would like to point out that Arthur has always been extremely motivated by/for the community. I thank him for his positivity and willingness to produce new initiatives for us players. I am sure that when he is allowed to do more with the Odyssey news, great things will come out.
He likes to chat with the players, mingle with them and share information. However, as the months go by, I feel like he grew more reserved and wary.
Working in the video game industry for about ten years now, I can feel from here the frustration and some stress he’s enduring during the recent Live, scratching his beard and neck, rubbing his chest, his eyes: He is not allowed to share information at the moment and it annoys him a lot. Arthur and his team have plenty of projects, and they have already shown creativity on some community initiatives such as the Halloween Broadcast that they were not even allowed to publish, but they did it anyway. Props to the team.

The management team is therefore keeping as much information as possible from being released.
No teasers, the same recycled images at each news-filler, no communication, no new information on the Odyssey Expansion for two and a half months (mid-December 2020).

So, there are a few options to try to understand Frontier’s strategy:

Odyssey is lagging behind in terms of development, and they’re releasing filler news in the meantime
Odyssey is following its development well, but there are currently too many critical bugs
Frontier have a « BIG » announcement to make soon, before the end of fiscal calendar 21 with all the information about the expansion. So they’re keeping the current program light
Odyssey has rather limited content at launch, and Frontier limits the hype so as not to over-promise features, to exceed our expectations at launch.

In their past, Frontier have not been fans of communication campaigns.
While some companies share Roadmaps, weekly Dev Diaries, regular Livestreams with future features and other development programs; we only get « filler » news so far, i.e. « news in between news » from Frontier to keep people waiting. The Supercruise News don’t share ‘a lot’ of information, the Q&As are repeated too often without bringing new things and is only focused on the same combat gameplay, the last Discovery Scanner with developer Kay Ross touched only a few topics only slightly on the surface, images are recycled, …

It’s good to try & communicate, but it’s extremely limited and many more initiatives could be made around Odyssey.
I’d like to hear about the use of Jetpacks, how to navigate on the new bases on the surface, a PoV tour of a Social Hub, possibly a few new ships, some in-game feature updates perhaps, how to use a Laser Cutter, the pros & cons of the new three suits, the two SRVs we can now deploy withing the same ship in Multicrew, the types of grenades in action, behind the curtains with sound design for Odyssey, VFX design for weapons, types of weapons and their uses, Exploration on Odyssey, Trading with the new surface starports, … there is SO much to share… but once again: Management seems to say no.

Finally, even if the production of News is slow, there is nothing we can do at the moment. Grumbling won’t speed things up.
Let’s be patient so we can get a release as clean as possible, there will be some bugs in the Alpha but that’s the purpose of the tests. For these phases of Alpha & Beta, we will be able to give our feedback on the features that will be proposed to us, and at that time it will be up to us to play to make our voices heard. Many things have already been changed in the past thanks to players feedback, so we will definitely be heard during the testing phases.

I haven’t bought Odyssey yet, as I don’t want to encourage Frontier with the little news they provide us with regarding Odyssey.
Of course, I will get it later, but not right now.

What do you think of the marketing campaign for Odyssey?
Leave a comment & join our Remlok Community Discord!

Alpha PC: Early Spring 2021, 20 March to 21 June
- With the Alpha around April, as the leak revealed on Steam for the 21st of April
PC release: End of Spring 2021, this summer
Consoles release: Autumn 2021

Back to Summary

Developers & Community

A dedicated space about Devs’ messages from the forums and social Medias.

~ Recent communications ~

[Odyssey] Actually, I can confirm there are bathroom. I’ve seen toilets. Here we go, confirmed haha! – Source, 45m 20s – Arthur Tolmie, Lead Community
[Odyssey] When I saw the Odyssey trailer, to be honest I thought « No, I don’t believe it. It’s not going to be that good », but frankly yep. You can believe the trailer. It’s not super optimised yet because I have tested a branch of the pre-Alpha so not everything was playable. Also, I saw Pomeche and the old race tracks… obviously the generation has been rebuilt so there is no more race but it’s really beautiful. There are some nice canyons, some really great terrains. I have seen other planets with atmosphere, seeing them from above in orbit and then on the surface after coming down, again the teams did a great job. Also I didn’t have Scatterrock, but the tech is excellent. – Source, end of the video – Arthur Tolmie, Lead Community

Recap interview Planetary Tech with Kay Ross – Source

Too long didn’t read:

The lighting will be totally different on Odyssey
About 20% more planets than Horizons, so ~81% more planets we can land on.
The other planets on which we will not be able to land will not have visual updates.
No climates or atmospheric effects
Dust and other particles & objects that can fly away, yes
No aurora borealis.
The planets will have different geomes (biomes) at the polar regions
Asteroid rings casting a shadow, uncertain
No multi-source lighting system

Full version (Thanks to StuartG) or official Q/A here:

Dr Kay Ross: I’ve been working at Frontier on Elite Dangerous for 8 years, I do a lot of the codey codeys, co-lead of the render programming team. We have a special render team on the Elite Dangerous project, not only is this looking after rendering, shaders, nice effects, but also with my physics background we look after parts of Stellar Forge, i.e. the in-game galaxy.
How’s that journey been from Elite Dangerous’ day-one concept to now? Originally it was a kickstarter for a rebirth of Elite, with now it’s can we keep pushing it, can we keep adding to it, and we can! To see how far the game has come, and what’s coming.
Also on Render Team are (name typos likely!): Arkus Lokakus, Tom Wiggans, Lucy Bugby, Matt Roe, Mark Vince, Hazel Quantock.
I wasn’t always a game programmer, started out as a researcher in particle physics, undergrad masters in astrophysics and cosmology before the swap to particle physics. I did some work at Fermi lab in USA, like what CERN is. Looking into the differences in Matter and Anti-Matter. But then the Kickstarter for Elite Dangerous began and I tried my luck, and they took me on, working on a system to generate the Milky Way.
Stellar Forge is the framework where they input the raw data of mass distribution, age regions of sectors, equations of stellar lifetimes, etc, which then procedurally and deterministically generates the Milky Way galaxy
The best way to generate the galaxy is start big, then get smaller and smaller.
Within a sector define how many of the largest bodies there are, then through 8 layers of concentric cubes generate down the different stellar bodies, orbits, planet classifications, each of which are child objects of the parent cubes
With the 1:1 galaxy representation can you change one « simple » thing? It’s like the butterfly effect, one small change will affect many surrounding areas
Referencing the Hairy Ball Theorem, things can be sensitive to input data – tiny spikes on planetary surfaces can happen
Planets begin not as spheres but as cubes, everything gets spherisised (?), and offsets are applied
For Odyssey the method and offsets are changed.
Lots of data inputs: depth, magma, crust, core; tidally locked; ice caps.
Generate formations, terrain POIs, flats,
30km-60km-120km sections of terrain resources used in sampling the surfaces, blending in the right direction, giving wide variance
Images from Dev Diaries being shown as examples of planet surfaces
How accurate are the planets, as hand-crafting isn’t feasible? Detail all the way down from 120km to 1km to eye level.
As good as Horizons was, it did its job and was very enjoyable to see and play.
But with Odyssey and whatever comes next, wanted to get a new system in place that was robust and expandable enough, with cascading detail
This new tech goes into all landable planets, ones from before (Horizons) and new ones (Odyssey). Larger variety.
The change is night and day. While existing screenshots are incredible, they cannot wait to see the new Odyssey screenshots that will come. It looks like a new game.
You cannot see snapshots as they happen in development, as you see the gradual changes; how do you feel about the improvements? There are a wide range of emotions. We dont see big changes happen in one go, all gradual. I do spend a lot of time looking at the lovely screenshots on Reddit, Twitter, and gaming footage on players’ streams.
Are the changes coming more considerable than with Horizons? Same but different. The second half is lighting changes coming with Odyssey.
Quantifying the change? Horizons was a vast undertaking because full-scale planets are hard. When it comes to Odyssey we have the framework there, the handling of resources, stream in stream out, how they’re combined, it’s a large undertaking – it hasn’t been a weekend or two. We saw it as a great opportunity to see what the different teams could achieve when working together to create these new wonderful visuals.
Now we have per-pixel hardcalls (?), more shadow spotlights working together; physically-based-rendering materials; lighting from atmosphere, star, personal, all working together consistently. We’re able to see that all now.
Roughly how many landable planets in Odyssey? Billions. 20% more landables than in Horizons.
Range of planet/surface classifications that are landable is wider.
In Horizons: rocky, metal rich, high-metal, ice, and rocky ice; but because they somewhat used each others’ resource/material graphs they often looked similar. With Odyssey that has now changed: more distinct look, terrain and materials on them, warms my heart a little. They’ll look more like what they actually are.
What’s the best part of your job? Who else gets to play on something of this scale, like a big tub of lego or mechano, and build something at the leisure of math, building planets.
Will large worlds feature tall mountains, deep craters? There’s a reason why larger planets have flatter, shallower features because of gravitational strain. That’s how the maths work out.
Crustal action (ha!), tectonics become less likely to occur on larger worlds too.
Rock scatter, how will that be different in Odyssey? It has changed quite a bit. In Horizons/Beyond that was random. For Odyssey there is the scatter system, sending data through a noise graph and collection of nodes to decide what goes where.
A wider range of things being put down in different patterns, densities, depending on the materials and resources for each world/surface.
Will atmospheric worlds will we see weather effects, dust patterns? The first ones, coming in Odyssey, we’ll see dust effects visible on the surface.
How will the new planetary tech effect volcanism and volcanic formations? Fumeroles and similar will now placed using the scatter system on tectonic areas.
Planetary bases and installations, how does Stellar Forge place them? Various ways larger and smaller ones are placed on the surface. For larger ones a simple radial flattening of the surface. For Thargoid and Guardian they are stamped using an authored resource tailoring what goes where. Studio anecdotes of Dr Kay putting her face on the surface of worlds during development.
Have you hidden something like that in-game, because I would?! That would be telling.
In Odyssey, the stamp is improved to make placement much more interesting for the artists and CMDRs.
Do bases on ridges come about randomly or are they hand picked? There are various sites in Elite where buildings have been hand-placed. The majority of sites are found procedurally, places that are flat enough. The designers do like to put in some excitement.
Will atmospheric planets have different biomes at polar caps? Yes, but more accurately these are called geomes, and planets will have different geomes on them, especially at the polar caps.
Do you feel more fear about space as you come to learn about it, or less? When at university, as you learn about planets and universe you use more and larger scales and measurements, one can start disassociating with the models, tactile interactions – less scary… indescribable is a bad word to describe something, but that.
Can you give us an idea of how many variables determine a planet? Dozens to hundreds.
Will rings cast shadows on planets that they encircle? I genuinely don’t remember. We were looking at that recently.
Will the changes include a multi-source lighting system to reflect the presence of multiple stars in systems that have them? As we’re aiming for similar specs to base game for Odyssey, we won’t be including a multi-source lighting system, for performance and art reasons.
- I would have loved an option for PC, with a rule to choose light from 1, 2, 3 stars or more.

Recap Q/A about Weapons – Source

▲ Will anti-vehicle weapons be available?
► All weapons can be used against ships, however some are far more effective, such as explosive weapons like rocket launchers and grenades.

▲ Will players be equipped with a weapon immediately upon launch?
► Just as you will always have a Sidewinder available as a ship, all players will have a side arm to help them in combat

▲ Will there be melee weapons?
► Players will be able to attack with melee when close but there are no specific melee weapons.

▲ What kinds of explosives are there?
► Only grenades and rocket launcher are planned for launch

▲ Will the aiming reticule always remain on-screen?
► The reticule is used to interact with objects as well as for combat, so will always be on-screen. Firing from the hip will still use the same reticule for general direction, but will be less accurate.

▲ Which weapons allow you to look down the sights?
► All weapons will have this function, however different scopes are available for each through Engineering.

▲ Could players throw grenades at ships an expect to deal significant damage if it’s unshielded?
► Yes and we look forward to watching it happen!

▲ What types of weapons will there be?
► There’s a wide variety of weapons from pistols, rifles and SMGs, to shotguns and rocket launchers. More details will be revealed on these later.

▲ Will players be able to upgrade their weapons with attachments?
► You can choose from several attachments for your weapons. However, a modified weapon cannot be reverted, so think carefully. You can own multiple copies of a weapon for different situations, but can only carry a limited number of them at a time, depending on your suit type.
→ Note from Nicou: This is a point that has been much discussed recently but after some discussion with my friends, we thought in the end that we don’t know enough about the weapons modding system on Odyssey. Our weapons and suits will have to be treated like our ships in terms of mods & modules. Weapons may only be able to have a single mod OR they may be composed of several sub-modules that can only have one mod each. One mod for the scope, one for the magazine, one for the barrel, one for the stock maybe, etc… It is also possible that the answer from Frontier was badly phrased and that we can interchange our sub-modules freely BUT it will not be possible any more to change them if we mod the weapon.

▲ Can you drop ammo/grenades for your friends?
► Yes – other players can pick up and use your dropped items.

Back to Summary

Xbox Game Pass & Spring Sale

If you’re an Xbox Game Pass subscriber, Elite: Dangerous is now part of the catalogue in the UK, France, Germany, US and other countries, along with many other games.
Note that regional restrictions apply, for example it is not available in Turkey.

Celebrations time, Frontier is also offering a Spring Sale with 25% off many cosmetic items in the shop. Go for it!

Note that an option appeared briefly in the shop yesterday, an image captured by Jurema, suggesting a customisation of our suits on Odyssey:

Back to Summary

Lore & Powerplay

Powerplay, continues to operate in game and the powers compete on a variety of military, economic and political fronts to gain new territory and expand their influence on the human world.

Arissa Lavigny-Duval =
Zachary Hudson =
Edmund Mahon =
Aisling Duval =
Li Yong-Rui =
Yuri Grom +2
Archon Delaine -1
Denton Patreus -1
Felicia Winters +1
Pranav Antal -1
Zemina Torval =

Cycle 299. We begin cycle 300!

The Powers on Reddit

Check out the Powers on Reddit, take part in the strategies and help your Power reach #1!

Alliance

→ Edmund Mahon

Federation

→ Felicia Winters // Zachary Hudson

Empire

→ Arissa Lavigny-Duval // Aisling Duval // Zemina Torval // Denton Patreus

Independents

→ Archon Delaine // Li Yong-Rui // Pranav Antal

The surrounding nebulae are doing well, and no Thargoid activity has been detected.

Witch Head (15 Alliance & 1 Inde lended by the Alliance)
California (7 Alliance & 1 Inde far in the South & 1 Empire far closer to the bubble)
Coalsack (3 Alliance & 1 Inde) is doing well, but the community team said that stories aren’t ended in the area, so we might have more Lore soon on Coalsack

We also note that the Alliance as well as the Federation with Zachary and Winters are expanding.
I’ve investigated the details of why did Felicia lost a HUGE amount of territory on cycle 298 and 299:

A few years ago, Felicia Winters had been attacked by extremely well-organised players, extending Felicia’s borders into bad systems pulling the Power down. These were expensive to maintain, unattractive and kept the Power down for a very long time.
After months of hard work, the players finally managed to complete several Turmoils, periods of trouble for the Power, in order to lose a bunch of systems.
So, Winters’ supporters lost a lot of systems: but it was done on purpose. They cut the dead weight to get back on track soon.
Some great systems were lost, but it was inevitable.
This is a positive action for Winters, which I hope will climb back up the rankings in the future!

Galnet.fr proposes the latest news from the galaxy!

Galnet.fr/en – Galnet News
GalnetAudioFR – Dubbed Galnet, in French. Let me know if you would like to do this in English! Here are the examples in French.

Don’t miss the recent stories about the Imperial Penal Colony, Serene Harbour + Ghost Ship The Adamastor.

26 January 3307

Alliance, Empire and Federation leaders have held their first ever face-to-face discussions at the diplomatic conference in the Sirius system.
Political correspondent Conrad Sterling published this report for Vox Galactica:

“The Galactic Summit has already made history by bringing together many political figureheads within one conference chamber. Optimistic opening statements from Chancellor Anders Blaine and Prime Minister Edmund Mahon gained applause. President Zachary Hudson was more curt, reminding everyone that billions of people would be affected by their efforts. Agendas and debate topics for the next three weeks were formalised. Much of the work will be done behind the scenes by ambassadorial staff, making big decisions in small rooms. The general tone so far has been courteous, although that may not last. Predictably, interactions between the Imperial and Marlinist delegations have been frosty, with Senator Denton Patreus refusing to even acknowledge their presence during discussions. However, First Minister Jenna Fairfax enjoyed a more cordial meeting with Shadow President Felicia Winters. They were joined by Jasmina Halsey, who has accompanied Winters from Mars in an unofficial capacity. One notable absentee was Federal Ambassador Jordan Rochester, whose family is under legal scrutiny following the crimes of his older brother Jupiter Rochester. This at least spared Jordan the awkwardness of having to formally greet his ex-fiancée, Princess Aisling Duval. But it’s likely there will be no shortage of tension between other delegates in the coming weeks.”

Back to Summary

Community Goals

Location: Spirit of Laelaps | Sirius
Objectives: Destroy all the Wanted ships in the system and sell your bounties on Sirius
Rewards: Credits, Free Federal Assault Ship for Top 10 cmdrs, the Viper Mk III Acceleration Gold paint job for Top 25% cmdrs, a permanent Sirius system permit and the Viper Mk III Acceleration White paint job for Top 75% cmdrs.
Progress: 5/8
Until: 4 March

Story:

The Federation is working with Sirius Corporation to offer bounty hunting opportunities to protect the diplomatic conference.

The first Galactic Summit has officially opened at Patterson Enterprise station in the Sirius system. Temporary permits have been issued to all arriving delegates and Commanders for the three weeks of its term, although these do not apply to fleet carriers.

Sirius Corporation’s CEO Li Yong-Rui announced:
“The data supplied to us in January revealed several unanticipated threats, putting additional strain on our navy and security forces. Working with the generous support of the Federation, we have placed bounties on all wanted ships to ensure delegates’ safety. Pilots defending the Sirius system will be rewarded for handing in bounty vouchers at the Spirit of Laelaps.”

The joint initiative will run for one week, after which Sirius Corporation will partner with the Empire to provide for the needs and security of the conference.
In related news, Core Dynamics, Gutamaya and Lakon Spaceways are celebrating the political gathering of all three superpowers with a 10% discount on their ships during the next three weeks.

Delegations have begun to arrive and formal introductions are taking place, with much media attention. This is the first time that universally recognised figures such as President Zachary Hudson, Prime Minister Edmund Mahon and Princess Aisling Duval have been seen side by side.

Back to Summary