PC Elite Dangerous - First Impressions

[IamNumber6]

Before I begin let me pick my jaw up from the floor...

I've only lightly covered what the beta has to offer as yet but I have to say the soundtrack alone is outstanding, the menu click noise is a little annoying but we can live with that. Word of warning! It appears to be a very heavily driven keyboard controlled game, not a bad thing it'll just take some time to work out what does what.

Visually this game is absolutely stunning, when you first appear in space you are facing one of the many space stations this is not a simple texture covered block, if you are careful enough you can position yourself/fly between the towers and pillions extruding from the structure the same goes when you come across the marauder.

Docking is a lot more fun than the original, still as frustrating at first (took me approx 5 minutes of strafing in all directions to land the bugger on the pad).

You can clearly see when you are in the cockpit 'free view mode' they are gearing this up for VR head tracking technologies, i.e. Oculus Rift (http://www.oculusvr.com/) or TrackIR (http://www.naturalpoint.com/trackir/products/trackir5/).

A flight stick is also recommended as a mouse is not the best flight controller in the world.

Once I've finished flying around the local system I'll eventually start a mission...

 

[NVranya]

A game like this makes me regret not having a game pc anymore.

 

[zoob]

A game like this makes me regret not having a game pc anymore.

I'll be buying a big graphics desktop for work (outside the day job) at some point as my 17" i7 MBP laptop has completely given up the ghost, my regular home insurance won't cover it & having cut down on gigging, I no longer have it covered by musician's insurance.

This thread makes me extremely happy about this fact. Cheers!

 

[IamNumber6]

I've located a cheap Logitech extreme 3D pro flight stick on ebay, once its arrived I'll report if this improves the quality of my colliding into objects

Not rich enough to afford any of the head tracking tech

 

[NVranya]

No personal experience, but if you got a webcam, check out: http://facetracknoir.sourceforge.net/home/default.htm

Free software for headtracking!

 

[IamNumber6]

Thanks, I'll have a play with this in work later.

 

[IamNumber6]

Why can't I be working from home today, this software is cool Kudos +1 @NVranya .

If any one else tries it out I would recommend you sit fairly close to the camera, a relaxed sitting position works to some degree it just seems to have an issue when it comes to recognising the downward pitch of my head.

The big test will be to see how it fairs in Elite later I may also give it ago in Arma at the weekend.

 

[NVranya]

My pleasure, glad it seems to work!
In case it doesn't work well in Elite, I've heard that the developer is very cooperative if you mail him.

 

[IamNumber6]

Found this helpful video on youtube -

 

[IamNumber6]

The overall experience with the tracking software was a little clunky, I'm hoping as pointed out in the video that it should improve with some tweaking.

It is still a very impressive piece of open source software.