Dr Wookie

It's true that they no longer have the Oculus badge on their advertising, so maybe people were alarmed by that. I know that current players with DK2s felt a little abandoned for a few months after FD stopped supporting new SDKs, but it certainly makes sense not to invest too much effort on such shifting requirements. I'm in no position to do so right now, but I definitely plan on getting at least one of the headsets (and boost my PC again)! Since my current PC has a small form factor I may need to wait until the next generation of GPUs that are expected this year, or buy a whole new PC; I've been looking at ludicrous "VR ready" PC builds that should also play everything else for a long, long time . It might even run star citizen ! However, maybe I'll get a headset and I'll be fine with my current set up; after all it meets the Oculus recommended specs IIRC, just not the Horizons ones. FD have said that their quoted specs are for 90 FPS at 1.4 x super sampling, but people's tolerance for low frame rates vary considerably. I borrowed a DK1 during the early alphas and felt sort of OK with 30-40 FPS, but suddenly really sick when the station dropped it to 15. I certainly don't want that to happen again! Also, something called asynchronous time warp looks like it can soften the blow of reduced frame rates in VR by distorting the image according to the expected changes between frames. Or something!

I've not played more than a couple of hours in early access,mad look forward to going for it in the release version. Props to Eurogamer for their heading:- Eat, pray, Lovecraft

I only play when I am curious about something, or am working towards a specific goal. Right now I am trying to gain imperial ranks, which will take an absolute age; however, I am in no rush and play an hour or so every now and then. Missing a week is not unusual for me, especially when other games come out. When I achieve my goal, I often take a break. After playing with the big ships, I had great fun going back to the smaller ships just to play around in them... taking a viper or DBS to a RES, or interdicting pirates, is tremendous fun when you know that you are not automatically safe and have to work to stay in one piece (with small buy backs if you lose).

BREAKING NEWS: clickbait is saying that ED no longer supports Oculus. Frontier have officially announced that they are currently focusing on supporting the Vive and Steam VR, rather than Oculus. However, they are actively working with Oculus, and have not signed any exclusivity deal. Apparently, steamvr had stable drivers earlier, which makes sense because Horizons launched with Vive support. At least one user on the Elite forums, ghcannon, has access to a CV1 for work, and has played ED on it through steam VR

Materials go with you from ship to ship, and you can have a maximum of 300. I'm pretty sure they stay with you if you lose your ship as well; I think they are relatively small amounts so you could fit them in an escape pod.

This week's Dev Update sheds a bit more light on the Engineers - here is the full thing: https://community.elitedangerous.com/node/371 -There will initially be about 30 Engineers scattered throughout human space, each with their own particular area of expertise - Engineers will offer a range of services depending on their opinion of you; different actions will influence them depending on their own preferences. Some will be impressed by navy ranks, while others will be impressed by mining or smuggling prowess. -Depending on your standing with them (how much they trust you), the Engineer will make available a number of blueprints, telling the materials and items required. They will do the work if you bring the stuff to them. - Not all engineers will be available to every player, you need to pass a threshold before they will deal with you. -They will be spread out over space according to their faction affiliations etc, but many will be secluded on planets... it's not clear to me if Season 1 players will be able to access any. I think it would be a big mistake to cut them off completely, of only because they won't know what they are missing if they don't get a taste of the good stuff. Obviously it's moot if all materials are planet-based, but FD said that materials would be extracted from all kinds of activities.

My python has 2 c3 turret burst lasers, 2 c2 gimballed multicannons and a c3 gimballed cannon . Then again, I had an asp set up with 6 c2 gimballed multicannons to great effect. Destroying the power plant has a small chance of instant destruction, but does cut the power, leaving the ships as sitting ducks. You can bind the cycling through of subsystems in either direction to any button you like.

Congrats on getting the python ! The python is one of the best ships in the game, possibly the best all rounder if you don't want to go long distances really quickly, move lots of cargo, or move lots of cargo really quickly. However, that can make it feel very safe, like the vulture. I've been very successful in my Python, but have had more fun in the smaller ships. Having said that, I did lose one taking on a python and a federal assault ship and third ship while testing the limits of my new loadout, so they are not indestructible:p If you can only just afford the python and a few addons, then it probably won't be as good as the ship you last had. This could make it more interesting as you have to be more careful which fights to pick. I like taking a DBS into a haz res for cheaper thrills. You could try specialising in the kinds of craft you want to take down, maybe going for rail guns or cannons for bigger ships.

Given that they say they will be giving more details in the coming weeks, not for a while.... Judging by previous updates, info started coming out maybe 4-6 weeks before beta testing, IIRC

Oh, this week's newsletter has details on 2.1 . Message board contacts will be getting faces! It looks like each minor faction will finally be getting a set of persistent representatives that is the same for each player, but varies depending on your reputation with that faction. Also, 2.1 will introduce engineers that will be able to tune your modules; each engineer will have a specific skill set.

Hey guys , I've not had much time for these forums or ED of late, but something really cool has happened... after months of teasing in some kind of weird ARG metagame, players have seen first signs of alien life in game! They were very briefly teased in the Horizons launch trailer, but the first player encounter happened on a live Twitch stream, on Merope (?) 5C in the Plaedies cluster, the place singled out by players after months of deciphering the unknown artifacts. There is even more mysterious stuff going on with these structures... well played FD! Also, their recent public financial report shows that they've sold over 1.4 million copies, which is pretty incredible. Since I'm a long way from getting a cutter, I have been expanding my inventory instead; I have a cobra mk iv, a viper mk iv, an asp, a python, and an anaconda, plus my grounded asp that took me to Sag A*. I'm just north of 270 million credits' worth, but this might be inflated due to buying some stock at discounts. I'm odd jobbing in my python, but may well head over to ogle alien strange

The control bindings are all in a folder, and are plain text files called something.binds. I imagine you could just copy whichever binding file you like to the folder and you should be fine. The folder for my steam install is Steam/SteamApps/common/EliteDangerous/Products/FORC-FDEV-D-1010/ControlSchemes although the FORC blah blah directory is likely different to yours since I've not updated steam. it really might be worth futzing around the control menu to see what works, as you can do some pretty sophisticated stuff, including using a button to switch between yaw and roll, and combining buttons to make more options (for example X + d-pad down lowers my gear, B + dpad down engages frameshift drive, Y + dpad down targets hostiles, and A + dpad down decreases radar range in my case. I have been using the gamepad for 2 years now, and it works well with a bit of care. Here's another pic from my fancy views tour Ify you can't get the steam install to load, it might be worth downloading the launcher from the Frontier store; you only need your email and password to log in afer all.

There's a new slider in the graphics options that balances the workload between cpu and gpu for planet stuff; left is cpu, right is gpu. It defaulted to the left for me, so maybe it did for you too, and sliding it all the way to the right might fix it. Then again, there is a known issue with ATI cards which requires a fix from ATI themselves; I don't know the details, and maybe this has already happened.Your spec looks beefier than mine, though I don't know how a 390 compares with a 970, and I get 60 FPS on planet surfaces; there is definitely something going very wrong!

The background is calculated for every star system you jump to; at one point it took account of every star in the Galaxy, but I'm not sure if it's still true... near the centre we can see sudden cut-offs in stars that might be due to the star distribution (possible), but more likely to be a rendering limit. As a really extreme example, here is what the sky was like when I got as far as I could out of the plane of the Galaxy, near the centre: Search and rescue missions appear on the bulletin board with an icon of a ship and a Red Cross style cross. They can either be hostages inside the hold of a particular ship (this sounds hard!) or stranded on the surface (this will be under the available surface missions section). Everyone is in the same boat with the huge new array of mission types, but I try them out and see, and I can't complete them I abandon them. With over 10,000 inhabited systems, you can run away from failure pretty much forever ! If you want to get friendly with a faction, it might be a good idea to try out different missions somewhere else. I did get burned one time, where I could do the first part of a multi-stage mission, but not the second stage as it required more cargo space than I had, and I couldn't buy more. For surface search and rescue, it looks like any occupied escape pod counts; these are found by travelling a few km above the surface of the plane in normal flight mode looking for blue circles that indicate points of interest (they disappear below altitudes of 1.5-2km). Some things you can see from the air, but you need to learn how to use the scanner thing on the buggy, and how to distinguish between rocks, secret bases, and crash sites (check out the youtube tutorial videos on the Elite Dangerous channel). Like many aspects of the game, this can take a few hours to figure out. @Architecture, the minimum specs for Horizons (and 64 bit 1.5 to a somewhat lesser extent) are significantly higher than for the base game: Horizons: OS: Windows 7/8/10 64-bit Processor: Quad Core CPU (4 x 2Ghz) Memory: 6 GB RAM Graphics: Nvidia GTX 470 / ATI 7240HD DirectX: Version 11 Network: Broadband Internet connection Storage: 8 GB available space Elite Dangerous OS: Windows 7, Windows 8 Processor: Quad Core CPU (4 x 2Ghz) Memory: 4 GB RAM Graphics: Nvidia GTX 260 / ATI 4870HD DirectX: Version 11 Network: Broadband Internet connection Storage: 7 GB available space The 64 bit version of 1.5 uses the same planet models as Horizons, and this can hit supercruise performance. You could try fiddling with graphics settings, but it might be worth seeing how the 32 bit version runs first. By the way, Frontier have clarified their pricing structure: anyone paying *full price* can expect to pay $60 for their first season and $45 for each subsequent season; they will make the base game cheaper as time goes on to encourage new players. Of course, the base game has been available for as little as $15 during sales. This seems reasonable to me, but I can understand anyone who balks at full price; they can just wait until it's at a price they want to pay; it is also reasonable to wait to see how the future content is implemented (e.g. custom player avatars, loot and crafting, ship-launched fighters and muliti-crew ships for Horizons)

That sounds vaguely familiar; I upgraded to Win 10 from Win 7 a few months ago and had to do... something to get ED to work (pretty much the first thing I did )! Win 10 has meant that a whole bunch of components in my off the shelf PC behave like they are supposed to now: USB 3 connects at full whack, and my wireless card actually works.I spent a good few hours doing planetary search and rescue for crashed escape pods, getting 90-200 k missions. All salvage on the surface is legal. High gravity worlds have a lot more crash sites than lower gravity worlds, for obvious reasons! The driving feels better on a ~1 g world than a ~0.1 g world, though the scenery is often less spectacular. I lost my first ship in ages thing to land on Achenar 3, which has a surface gravity 6.7 x higher than Earth, and I face planted rally badly. I'm loving the Cobra Mk IV for planetary exploration, and am slowly heading towards the Witch's Head Nebula, getting distracted by honking and exploring landable planets. My ship has a pretty full load out, and gets a 19 ly jump range, not bad, but I think I might take an asp on longer treks

Well, my resolve not to watch any further videos lasted right until the next video, good job brain ! Feb 9 is only a few weeks away now

I'm not at all sure, but some of the blame might be attributed to Valve; I am not aware of any trouble with launching the game from the launcher downloaded from the frontier store

Ok, sone people who had trouble launching from steam found that I worked if they went to the folder containing the launcher, and opened it from there... Maybe that will work. @brkl: missions are the only thing that put time constraints on you, and most of them can be done in 10-20 minutes, apart from searching for particular things or long range missions if you don't have a good jump range. The latest update saw a whole range of mission types added, and they ar improved with every other updat or so, but definitely need it! To access Sol you need to rank up with the Federation by doing missions for after aligned factions ( they appear in thebulletin board with the stars in a circle Fed logo), and doing special missions for the Navy; I think you have to rank up 3 or 4 times, and now there's a handy progress bar for rankings as of 1.5/2.0 . When I'm playing I usually listen to a podcast or music that lasts as long as I want to play for, from 20 minutes to a couple of hours, then stop soon after it finishes. Unless you're in a fight, or possibly in a planetary ring, it's safe to stop pretty much wherever you are.

But have you manually downloaded the new launcher? Also, if you have integrated graphics as well as an nvidia card like me, yo might need to tell nvidia to use the gpu

Sorry to hear that! Have you downloaded the new launcher? Also, you could try the 64 bit and 32 bit versions . EDIT: Frontier said that they had to make Horizons a separate game because of the increased minimum requirements

That 8 GB patch was the 64 bit version of 1.5, which is the same as Horizons, but without permission to land. I reckon that Horizons is a separate install to have the opportunity to get all the revenue from people who bought Season 1 through Steam (Who take 30% of every in game purchase if the account is linked to Steam). By the way, here is my super trippy planet in a nebula around a brown dwarf shot . I am loving it so far, but PSA, if your ship doesn't have cargo space, you can't keep cargo picked up by the buggy- BOOO! And here are a couple of shots from a lovely canyony ice planet I found Also, I'm on the way back to try out a Cobra Mk IV... The speed and stuff aren't too impressive, but it looks tailor made for planetary exploration because it is a small ship with 8 internal slots, more than an Asp Explorer ! It also has some lovely planet-themed paintjobs, which I shall model when I get back (40 or so Fer de Lance jumps to go)

Servers are down for today's launch of 1.5 and 2.0 . They are aiming to have everything up at around 4 pm GMT (11 am EST), but there may well be delays. Here is the launch trailer for the game

Great to hear If you like blowing up stuff, and are getting good at it, then the different Resource Extraction Sites might be worth a look too; they come in Low Intensity, normal, High Intensity, and Hazardous flavours. Or you can choose a side in a civil war and go to combat zones to earn war bonds; these guys are professionals though, so expect harder to kill ships. Also Strong Signal Sources are designed for teams of players, and are often combat focused. It might be worth your while finding a system in lockdown, because there will be a lot of pirate killing missions in nearby systems, and they stack. So if you have missions asking you to kill 2, 5, 9, and 16 pirates in the same system, killing 16 will satisfy all of those missions at once. Trading drastically scales with ship size; once you have a big ship and can afford expensive cargo, you can pretty much print money. My anaconda has 100 times the capacity of the starting sidewinder, for example. Trading rare goods is a popular way to progress once people get into a Cobra class of ships; certain stations sell unique items than increase in value the further you get from that system, so you can often make 16000 credits per ton when 150 light years away; you can find optimised routes on line if that's your thing. It's always worth activitating the discovery scanner every time you visit a new system, especially if you can splash out for an intermediate or advanced scanner. You can make hundreds or thousands of credits for each "discovery" that is new to you, with a bonus if you are the first person to ever scan it. You can sell this data at any station, but they only take info from systems >20 ly away.

Sorry to hear that brkl. If it helps, combat should really be avoided in the early stages, uless that's your specific thing, an if you run and concentrate on escaping, you have a fair chance of succeeding. A big part of this is knowing that if you set your throttle to zero when inerdicted, you take no damage and the FSD cooldown is much shorter. ELITE DANGEROUS: HORIZONS RELEASE DATE! Frontier have announced a release date of 15th December for Horizons and 1.5, if all goes to plan. Given that Planetary Landings is the first of several updates to be included in the Season, they are calling it Early Access. Here is a beautiful trailer: EDIT: Anyone who has preordered Horizons without buying the first season can start to play season 1 content now

Oh no you didn't just call solo offline mode ! For what it's worth, I've been playing for almost 2 years with a gamepad, and that suits me very well. In horizons, the buggy is a joy to drive with a pad, but I'm not sure about other methods. I'm a lefty, so don't play so well with HOTAS, and I always used my right hand for mouse growing up, so mouse and keyboard is never great for me either. The main thing I would like to say is to newcomers is take your time, and enjoy the ship you're in. That way, the grind disappears . I've been playing the same character for almost a year (anniversary next wednesday), and I have about 255,000,000 credits in the bank, am ranked Master / Entrepreneur / Pioneer, am a Baron with the Empire and a Petty Officer with the Federation. I know people who have achieved far far more in much shorter times, but they made it sound like work, going for the highest possible credits per hour. People are even asking why bother going to planets because everything takes longer than visiting space stations! Don't be that guy !