On the 27th October Frontier released an initial update patch following the release of The Guardians 2.2. The main change is a 50% cut in the cost of transferring ships and modules. You can read the full patch notes, here.
Month: October 2016
EDDI & Frontier Journal (API)
As announced by Frontier at Lavecon, Horizons 1.7/2.2 will see the introduction of the Commanders Log (aka Players Journal) into the game. The background nuts and bolts works as explained in the Journal Manual (official link here):
Elite:Dangerous writes a network log file primarily to help when investigating problems.
Third-party tools developers have been reading some of the entries in the network log file, mainly in order to track the player’s location.
There is a clear demand from players for third-party tools, and from tools developers for more information from the game and/or server api.
The new Player Journal provides a stream of information about gameplay events which can be used by tools developers to provide richer, more detailed tools to enhance the player experience. The data records written to this journal are much more high-level then that written to the network log.
One piece of software that makes use of this data is EDDI. As explained by it’s author,
“EDDI is a program that enhances your Elite experience by reacting to events within the game. Carrying out actions like jumping to a new system, buying and selling commodities, and many more will trigger voice responses. EDDI uses the Frontier companion API as well as the journal log introduced in 2.2 to obtain information and track your actions.
“EDDI also integrates with third-party systems such as EDDN, EDSM and EDDB. What this means in practice is that you not only contribute data to trade and exploration tools but you benefit from the information provided by them to give you a richer experience.”
The software also allows the use of Voice Attack ‘allowing uses to easily create their own responses to events.’ I had a play with it during the Beta (no voice attack used) and found it easy to set-up, but also lots of fun to have running. If you’re wanting extra immersion and information from the game, this is well worth checking out. You can download it from the thread on the official forum here.
Note: If you’re reading this on Guardians Release day, please note that the Frontier API was not up and running at the time of this post, so EDDI will not yet be working. When the API re-appears, it should be fine. In the meantime, here’s a few videos of it in action.
Guardians 1.7 & 2.2 – Is Live!
As announced by David Braben on the live stream, Guardians 1.7 & 2.2 is now available to download. You can purchase Horizons from the Frontier store or via Steam. Whilst you’re waiting for the download to finish, you can always read the rather extensive patch notes, watch the trailer, or read about the complete list of features here.
Guardians 1.7 & 2.2 – Official Trailer
Guardians 1.7 & 2.2 – Release Day News
Frontier have announced the following for tomorrow’s release of The Guardians.
“With The Guardians 2.2 Update going live tomorrow we will be starting the day with an AMA on the Elite Dangerous subreddit with David Braben at 10:00 BST until noon, followed by a livestream at 13:00 BST all the way through until the update is live! Come join us and get involved with these celebratory activities tomorrow.”
Update: If you want to follow/re-read David Braben’s replies to questions you can do so using the rather splendid Elite Dev Tracker here.
Update 2: If you want to read the patch notes you can find them here.
Guardians 1.7 & 2.2 – Release Date
At 4.42pm on Friday the 21st October Frontier announced that The Guardians 1.7 & 2.2 patch for PC & XBox would be released on Tuesday, 25th October. If you’re unfamiliar with it’s contents, you can read about them in the preview post, here. No doubt there will be a trailer to follow fairly soon and a launch day stream with a variety of Frontier Developers, plus Mr David Braben (with biscuits and possibly his jumper!) to keep Commanders amused whilst the servers are being upgraded.
You can purchase Horizons from the Frontier store or via Steam.
Guardians 2.2 – Disconnection Bug Fix
Some potentially good news from Frontier Towers, in that the server team have hopefully ironed out a bug responsible for most of the server disconnections that have been occurring since 2.1.05. As Ed Lewis explained,
“Hey everyone – just a quick note to let you know we’ve been communicating with our wonderful server wizards, and they told us the following:
“Almost all of these disconnections that some people are experiencing look like a bug that arrived in 2.1.05 and that’s been fixed in 2.2, it would be really great if you let us know if your experience is improved once 2.2 is released. We’re honestly sorry that your experiencing these frustrating issues, and really welcome all of the feedback.
“So there you go! Let us know if 2.2 helps in any way :)”
Guardians 2.2 : Teaser Trailer
On the 14th October at 5:57pm Frontier released “a quick teaser taken from an upcoming trailer!” You can see it here. A couple of screen grabs can be seen below.
Horizons 2.2 – Beta 7
Frontier released the Beta 7 for Horizons 2.2 this afternoon. A much shorter change log on this occasion, perhaps suggesting that the full 2.2 point release is not too far away. Edit: There is a ‘Beta Blow Out’ next weekend (22nd October), so there will be at least another week of Beta. You can read the full log here. Perhaps the most notable of changes is that unless you have performed a basic scan on a planet then its surface details will not be shown in the system map.
Galaxy/System Map
- Fix planet scan logic to ensure that planet terrain is only visible if the planet has had a basic scan performed on it.
Horizons 2.2 – Visited Stars Cache
Howard Chalkley, Senior Programme at Frontier described how 2.2 will store a list of all stars a player has visited, historical data not included. As Howard explained
“Beta 2.2 introduced a new GalaxyMap filter, that indicates which stars you have visited: this is based on a cache file stored locally, but does not include historical data. The file is stored in the Local Appdata path, typically:
c:\\Appdata\Local\FrontierDevelopments\Elite Dangerous\VisitedStarsCache.dat
“I have been asked for information on the format of this file – but the file stores internal star system ID numbers which are not particularly suitable for access by third-party tools. We have instead added a mechanism to allow data to be imported into this cache.
“If you write a file named ImportStars.txt into the same folder, with one star system name per line, then start the game, it will lookup the names and merge them into the cache. (If you have many thousands of star names in the file, it may take a few minutes to process)
“Once it is finished, it will rename the file so it doesn’t re-import them next time. It will report the total number of stars imported, the number of duplicates, and the number that failed lookup, via the message input window. This feature should be available in the next Beta release.”
Elite: Odyssey 