Elite: Dangerous Kickstarter Launched

Real-life lessons from space.

How mouse-keyboard friendly is this? Joystick required?

From what I’ve seen, lots of pilots are having fun with the keyboard and mouse.

So true, this game really rewards roleplay lite - you carve your own little adventure out of the path you take, and the way your memory starts linking the stars from use creates a lived-in backdrop. Time is compressed where necessary, more verging on 1:1 where necessary, the net result is you feel like you’re a spaceship commander from moment to moment, and your triumphs and tragedies versus the emergent gameplay are the story you make up as you go along.

One really cool thing is that the names for stars are often cool and interesting, much more cool and interesting than the made-up names-for-stars in many an s-f novel or game.

Names for stations are interesting too. And I’m starting to appreciate the level of detail wrt factions and mini-factions - there could be more, much more, but it’s a solid start.

It’s interesting that I’ve often been tempted by the lucrative rewards of slave runs, but after toying with the idea, hovering over the button, as it were, I decided not to get involved in all that. I’m going to stick to my character’s guns.

Ordered some new cables and rearranged my desk. Now I have three monitors, TrackIR, Voice Attack and Saitek X52Pro. I spent some time this weekend going through all the tutorials and starting my commander career! Loving the immersion this game gives, I told myself I have to finish Dragon Age first before I focus on this game, and I am enjoying DAI, but man is this thing the most immersive I have felt in a game since I first started playing Wing Commander.

Oh, and what is with the setup of nvidia surround for multi monitor gaming? I got it to work, but really want to find a way to create a profile back and forth between it. My secondary monitors also host my server PC and my MacBook Air when not being used for gaming.

If anyone is interested in trying out exploration in the game, here are some things I’ve learned:

[ul]
[li]The intermediate discovery scanner is worth grabbing at the earliest opportunity. While its range is only double that of the basic version, this translates to 8x the volume scanned. Ping it, ping it often, ping it when you’re bored, ping it when you’re scanning something else–sometimes you’ll get lucky.
[/li][li]The detailed surface scanner will net you a lot more income in the long run, once you pony up the necessary CR for it. It’s a good investment for if you’ve decided that you enjoy exploring, but otherwise skip it. It gets used automatically when you point your ship at something marked “unexplored” and get close enough to figure out what it is. If all you plan on doing is jumping into a system, pulsing your discovery scanner to mark everything within 500-1000 Ls, and then selling that for some quick, easy CR once you dock somewhere over 20 Ly away, this won’t help with that.
[/li][li]When you’re flying towards something marked “unexplored” trying to get into range to scan it, and you notice something else moving across the background starscape, change direction pronto to fly towards it and don’t stop pinging your discovery scanner until you mark it. You may think you’ll remember roughly where it was, and you may at that, but other times you’ll spend 5-10 minutes trying to find it again, whereas once something is on your contact list, it’s trivial to get back to it again even if you have to turn around and fly all the way back.
[/li][li]Periodically check your system map. Sometimes you’ll find gaps in planetary lists indicating you’ve missed something and more or less how far out you can expect them to be.
[/li][li]Most planets are found within an orbital plane, but not always.
[/li][li]Binary stars can be a total pain. When you jump into a system and scan the star (not just ping it), the system page will indicate its orbital period. If that number is less than about 100,000 days, you can usually get to it in a few (2-5) minutes worth of supercruise. If that number is in the millions of days, you’ll be traveling for a while. Also, when you target the original star, you’ll also get its orbital path. Usually the binary partner will be the brightest object on that path, and should be the same color as on the system map. With trinaries and more, well sometimes you’ll get lucky and have a close-orbiting pair, but if not I just skip 'em. Maybe once I get an advanced discovery scanner…
[/li][li]If you’ve been flying towards what you suspect is the binary partner for a while and start slowing down, then you’re on the right track. Once your speed drops down to 30c, you should be in range of a pulse from the intermediate discovery scanner.
[/li][li]A good fuel scoop is a must. Scoop when the scooping is good, as you might just run into a string of systems that won’t easily give up their hydrogen.
[/li][li]A good shield is helpful. In addition to the obvious reason, it will let you take more excess heat while scooping before a crash-stop.
[/li][li]I’ve posted this upthread, but this is a good video that will teach you how to use parallax to find planets and stars out of range of your scanner. Watch the HD version if you can.
[/li][/ul]

Excellent post conVurt.

Mr. Rubin, keeper of the OP, could I humbly suggest you add this and krazykrok’s Screenshot Enhanced Landing Guide to the list of links. This is paste-able to the Qt3 section:

krazykrok’s guide to landing: http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?71093-Elite-Dangerous-Kickstarter-Launched&p=3691461&viewfull=1#post3691461
conVurt’s guide to exploring: http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?71093-Elite-Dangerous-Kickstarter-Launched&p=3691969&viewfull=1#post3691969

Thanks!

EDIT: You’re fast Brian. Now get back to killing pirates.

Speaking of cool names, I just ran into Richard Feynmann flying a hauler. Even though he had a clean record, I was tempted to blast him out of the sky just to be the monster who killed Feynmann.

E.J. Olmos (aka Cmdr Adama) demanded that I jettison my cargo if I wanted to live.

E.J. Olmos (aka Cmdr Adama) demanded that I jettison my cargo if I wanted to live.

Adama, in a network-dependent game? Heresy!

I think I’ve made a huge BOOBOO. I’ve been up since last night as I slept too late in the afternoon. Trying to reset my schedule and

When I started I had positive influence with the Feds. Then I found this crazy system and had to kill a bunch of pirates, so I spent hours killing anyone with a wanted sign on their ship. Many of them had what appeared to be the Fed symbol but I figured they were fair game since they had a bounty on their heads. Now when I docked at a Fed station I got $80,000 in bounty fees from them, but at the same time my standing with them dropped a ton. I’ve probably killed 20 ships with that symbol today. I am confused. Why would the Feds have a bounty on their citizens, pay you, but hate you for killing them? Or am I missing something?

Whatever it is, it surely ISN’T Federation citizens, right? ;)

That friend/foe system is somehow broken currently. Recently I was peacefully mining, then defended myself against some pesky pirate which clearly attacked me first, when suddenly three red security vipers appeared and shredded first the pirate and then me to death. Neither did I shoot them, nor did I have any bounty or fine against me. They need to fix that.

Were they the same faction as the pirate? I can see that leading to that outcome. Firing on a co-factionite makes the security guys hostile to you, and they kill the pirate because his firing on you made him wanted.

Yea, that’s what’s going on, the faction system seems to have a little bug in it where it checks their faction first to determine if they should go hostile to you or not, before wanted/criminal status. If you get friendly (green) with the faction that owns the system it becomes apparent. Firing on a wanted green target results in KOS by the cops until you supercruise away and come back.

I’m not even sure it’s a bug so much as an annoying feature. It’s space-Rambo.

Well that sounds like a completely broken system.

You know, when you described this method upthread, I tried to do it, but there is no way to look anywhere but straight ahead in this game, so I kind of ignored your method because stopping the ship, and then looking “above” you by turning your ship, then facing the right way again, and then stopping and looking up, makes it impossible to notice parallax movement against a backdrop anyway.

But in that video, he’s totally looking UP AT THE CEILING OF HIS FUCKING COCKPIT! HOLY SHIT! Stop this thread right now. One of you has to tell me what keys I need to bind or what I need to do in order to do this. Please. Please. Please. Please. Please.

Mouselook

I do it with TrackIR, but I think you can bind a hat switch on a joystick to be the headlook key – I am not sure if you can do it with the mouse and keyboard, but I bet you can.