Month: November 2019

January Update: Beta is Live!

Yesterday at 2:28pm Frontier announced the Beta for the January Updates has gone live.

“Greetings Commanders

“The January Update beta begins today at 14:30 UTC!

“Although the beta will run much like the real game, we ask that you focus on testing all the changes, along with your standard gameplay, to ensure the stability of the build. This will help us to identify and find ways to fix as many issues as possible before the update goes live.

As a reminder…

  • The beta runs from the 27 November and will run until the 2 December.
  • The beta will be only be accessible on PC. We are looking into expanding this for console players in the future.
  • To take part in the beta, all you’ll need to do is load up the launcher and select (and update) the following product: Elite Dangerous: January Update (Beta) from the 27 November. Once that has been completed, you’ll then have access to the January Update beta. If this doesn’t appear, please restart your launcher.
  • Please report any issues you encounter (in the beta) in the Issue Tracker here.

“We have created a dedicated beta section as well as some individual threads to give you more information about the beta:

Good luck on your mission, Commanders.”

January Update: Patch Notes

On the 26th November 2019 at 5:23pm Frontier released the initial patch notes for the upcoming Beta and subsequent January update. You can see them below or on the official site here. Note: The final release patch notes will differ from these and will in due course be shown.

Greetings Commanders,

The January Update beta will be going live tomorrow (27 November) at 14:30 (UTC). We will publish more information to a dedicated beta section on how you can participate and specific issues we need your assistance on, when the beta goes live.

Please find the Patch Notes below:

ARX

  • ARX will be disabled for the duration of the open beta – balances will be zeroed, and no ARX will be gained for in game actions. Links to the ARX store (where players purchase packs) will also be disabled. Note: this not affect the live build.

Audio

  • Fixed audio issues with the Generation Ship ‘The Golconda’.
  • Fixed missing audio and text for female crew members.
  • Fixed bug that meant none of the Guardian articles in the Knowledge Base, would play their associated audio.

Crashes/Stability

  • Fixed a crash that could occur when attempting to enter the ‘Network Options’ screen.
  • Fixed a crash that could occur when mining in ice rings.
  • Updated the way we check a players entitlements to fix issues, where the Horizons update is not being recognised as installed.

Background Simulation

  • Fixed issue that meant some deliveries made to repair Thargoid-attacked stations were not being counted.
  • Added new faction states:
    • Factions having trouble with water supplies can now sometimes suffer a Drought, causing an economic cost as they have to import significant amounts of water. This can be countered by selling water and other emergency supplies.
    • Infrastructure Failure disrupts a faction’s operations and reduces both security and economic standards. The increased demands on infrastructure elsewhere in the star system may lead to similar failures for other factions. Food and machinery deliveries can speed up repairs.
    • Terrorism. Terrorists can target prosperous factions, causing a significant security and influence cost. This can be countered by legally selling weapons to the authorities and assisting with bounty hunting efforts, or by the faction entering a Lockdown.
    • Natural Disasters have a significant economic and security cost for a faction. A natural disaster puts extra strain on the star system’s infrastructure, increasing the chance of Drought or Infrastructure Failure for other factions in that system.
    • Public Holidays increase a faction’s influence and standard of living for their duration, however that comes at small economic and security cost.
  • Fixed the icon for a Blight state.
  • Added newer faction states to the Galaxy Map’s list of state filters: Blight, Natural Disaster, Infrastructure Failure, Drought, Terrorist Attack, and Public Holiday.
  • Fixed factions selected for ‘Installation Scenarios’ to be the installation’s owner instead of the system controller.

Conflict Zones

  • Implemented a number of improvements to the Conflict Zones which should improve stability.
    • Entering a Conflict Zone, and it appearing empty.
    • Capital Ships causing issues when they arrive.
  • Fixed issue that caused allied Capital Ships to open fire at friendly ship.

Exploration

  • Implemented a solution to help mitigate the long delay when scanning planets with geological sites:
    • As it currently stands, in order for the geological/biological sites to be placed on the surface, the entire stellar body must be fully generated (we then know the topography and can place sites where they will be accessible). This can take tens of seconds.
    • As part of the January Update, we aim to address this with an alternative process. We have run tests on thousands of in-game planetary bodies and by using this data, we’re able to extrapolate the likelihood of geological/biologic sites being present on similar stellar bodies. We then use this data and indicate if the planet is ‘Unlikely’, ‘Likely’, or ‘Very Likely’ to have a geological/biological sites.
    • It is not 100% guaranteed that there will be a geological/biological site on the planetary body, but does give commanders a much faster indication of probability. This will enable commanders to quickly ascertain if the planet’s worth a visit.
    • As this is an alternative way to display information, we would love to hear your feedback on it to determine whether or not it is better than the current process.
    • Please note: this will not affect Thargoid, Guardian or Human sites, which will show up instantaneously.
  • Fixed an issue that prevented the search function on the Galaxy Map to work correctly.
  • Fixed issue with the Navigation Panel, that was incorrectly displaying if a planet had been mapped or not.
  • Instead of showing a notification for each individual asteroid belt cluster discovered, we now condense as many as we can into one message.

General

  • Added a ‘Help’ section to the main menu and pause menu with links to Issue Tracker and Customer Service sites (both will go through an external web browser).
  • Expanded the faction alignment page in Squadrons to display influence to 1 decimal point, to match how it is displayed in other areas of the game.
  • Fixed issue that meant players couldn’t search for Commander names that include an underscore character.
  • Fixed issue that meant the ‘Data Point’ reset timer didn’t appear on the players screen that initiated the scan, but did appear on others in the wing.
  • Updated the livery icon for ‘The Scourge’ decal to correctly match the decal that’s actually applied to the ship.
  • Fixed an issue occasionally causing some wing invites to not be sent to players in other instances.

Localisation/Text

  • Fixed incorrect system description for ‘Alioth‘.
  • Fixed small typo in the description of ‘HR 7221 Wheat‘.
  • Fixed various typos in the Pilot’s Handbook.
  • Fixed various typos in some of the Challenge Scenarios.

Material Trader

  • Speculative fix for a softlock that could occur when completing trades, at a Material Trader.

Mining

  • Fixed case that could lead to the detonation graph not appearing if deep core mining with a wing.
  • Fixed a disconnection (“Magenta Krait”), that could occur whilst mining.

Missions

  • Updated misleading retreat mission text – it was suggesting that the mission was helping the withdrawal of the faction, when in fact it should aid the faction in staying within the system.
  • Fixed a softlock that could occur when browsing lists of missions.

New Player Experience

  • Fixed issue that meant the player could get ‘stuck’ waiting for zero throttle, when the throttle input is just above zero, in the New Player Experience Tutorial.

Player Journal

  • Fixed missing/blank entries in Player Journal when selling Exploration Data.

Powerplay

  • Fixed the issue where the mouse input didn’t work on the power contact screen.
  • Control systems’ ethos calculations now limit their search for controlling minor factions to star systems within 15 LY, that are exploited by the same power as the control system. Previously, the calculations considered all nearby star systems.
  • Fixed reallocating exploit systems, and recalculating the income for a control system when a revolt system within 15 LY loses control.
  • Recalculated many exploit systems value that did not match their current population.
  • Recalculated many control systems income that was not the sum of their exploit systems, plus their own value.

Rendering

  • Fixed issue that was causing visual artifacts when capturing high-res screenshots.

Ships

  • Increased the Dolphin’s heat dissipation rate, and maximum heat capacity before it begins to take damage. Also increased the rate that it takes damage, to account for the ship now being harder to heat up.
  • Speculative fix for Collector Limpets damaging ships when retrieving mining fragments – this hasn’t been reliably reproduced in the studio, so needs testing during the open beta.
  • Added ability to rescue any crew that where on board the player’s ship when it was destroyed, from the insurance screen.

SRV

  • Fixed control input being lost after interacting with an inbox message.

Thargoid

  • Implemented speculative fixes that should reduce instance splitting when fighting Thargoid Interceptors.
  • Updated Thargoid combat state to ensure it’s correctly replicated over the network to reduce the occurrence of the heart cycles resetting.
  • Fixed issue that caused Thargoid Combat bonds to not be correctly given out to all applicable players in a wing.

Trading

  • Fixed issue that meant players couldn’t sell anything to a market if the buy list was empty.
  • Added supply and demand volumes for certain, high-end minerals. Now, trading goods such as Void Opals is more realistic; markets can still offer a high buy price, but they will offer less as demand is met. As part of this change, these high-end minerals will now be demanded more by specific economy types. This change will affect the following commodities:
    • Alexandrite
    • Benitoite
    • Grandidierite
    • Low Temperature Diamond
    • Monazite
    • Musgravite
    • Painite
    • Rhodplumsite
    • Serendibite
    • Void Opal

Please note that these Patch Notes are for the January Update (Beta), and not reflective of the final January Update Patch Notes.

Announcement: January Update

On the 21st November 2019 Frontier announced that the upcoming January bug update update would first feature a Beta running from the 27th November to the 2nd December 2019. You can read about it below or here on the forum.

Greetings Commanders,

As mentioned in October, our upcoming updates will be almost exclusively focused on addressing recent and longstanding issues and bugs. The next update will be our first step as part of that – and it will be coming towards the end of January.

For this update, our first and foremost priority is to ensure that everyone is able to have a seamless experience when playing Elite Dangerous, so our focus will be on aiming to resolve game breaking bugs and stability issues that cause disconnects, softlocks and crashes. By working internally with Customer Support, QA and Development teams, alongside the feedback you shared with us here and via the Issue Tracker, we’ve identified and are addressing a number of issues in the January Update, which we’ve detailed below.

As with previous betas, we found your feedback and assistance incredibly useful in helping us identify and resolve bugs and issues. The next updates will be coming with their own public beta, the first of which will run on PC from 27 November to 2 December for the January Update. We are also investigating the ability to extend future betas to console players as well, and will announce any developments about this when we have more information.

Due to this update focusing on a number of bug fixes, rather than new content and features, the beta will appear and play very much like the existing live game. However, getting involved and testing provides a huge benefit for all Elite Dangerous players, so we are very grateful for any time that you are able to spend in the beta. Every system, ship, loadout, module, mission, activity, rank or other part of the game played provides opportunities to test and identify issues. With your support, we hope to be able to identify and fix as many as possible before the update goes live, offering a smoother and better experience for all. Thank you to all who are able to get involved.

What we’re addressing in the January Update (and the beta)

We wanted to highlight some of the top voted issues from the Issue Tracker, and what we plan on doing with them moving forward.

Alongside our own internal tests, we’ll need the help of you, our community beta participants, to help us identify if the fixes we’re introducing work as intended in a live, multiplayer environment.

Repairing Thargoid-attacked stations: not all delivery numbers counted

  • We will implement a fix that will correctly account for all deliveries for starports that have been attacked by Thargoids.

High resolution screenshots create tiling artifacts in bright objects

  • We will implement a fix that should prevent tiling artifacts in bright objects when taking a high-resolution screenshot.

Galaxy Map won’t select systems I search for

  • We will implement a fix that should allow you to select a searched system on the Galaxy Map.

Keyboard stops working within game

  • We will implement a fix for this issue to ensure keyboards work in-game as intended.

SLF female npc crew member has no audio and no text in the comms

  • We will implement a fix for this issue.

We wanted to bring your attention to the following issues, as these will need additional information and testing in the beta to ensure the fixes are working as intended:

FSS: Long delay when scanning planets with geological sites

  • As it currently stands, in order for the geological/biological sites to be placed on the surface, the entire stellar body must be fully generated (we then know the topography and can place sites where they will be accessible). This can take tens of seconds.
  • As part of the January Update, we aim to address this with an alternative process. We have run tests on thousands of in-game planetary bodies and by using this data, we’re able to extrapolate the likelihood of geological/biologic sites being present on similar stellar bodies. We then use this data and indicate if the planet is ‘Unlikely’, ‘Likely’, or ‘Very Likely’ to have a geological/biological sites.
  • It is not 100% guaranteed that there will be a geological/biological site on the planetary body, but does give commanders a much faster indication of probability. This will enable commanders to quickly ascertain if the planet’s worth a visit.
  • As this is an alternative way to display information, we would love to hear your feedback on it to determine whether or not it is better than the current process.
  • Please note: this will not affect Thargoid or Guardian sites, which will show up instantaneously.

Conflict Zones have no contents

  • We have identified that the LUA script responsible for populating Conflict Zones can stop running at times, which causes this kind of issue. We will implement a fix, but we’ll need your feedback on whether or not the issue persists.

The Invincible Heart

  • The team have been investigating this issue for some time, however, it has proven difficult to reliably reproduce in-house. As part of the beta, we’ll be adding additional logging information and will need our community beta testers to try to reproduce the issue so we can collect more data to help us resolve it.

Instance splitting when fighting Thargoid Interceptor

  • We’ll be introducing a fix for this, but as it is a network-related issue, we’ll need this to be extensively tested in the beta.

Thargoid Interceptor – Heart cycle reset

  • We will implement a fix to ensure that the Thargoid Interceptor’s combat state does not reset. As with the issue above, we’ll also require commanders to identify if this is still occurring in the beta.

Exiting the Game just hangs, need to force terminate

  • We will need additional feedback in checking if this issue is still occurring in the beta.

Please note that this is not an exhaustive list of all of the fixes coming in the January Update and more will be detailed in the beta patch notes, released next week.

We’ll be investigating the following issues for future updates and will detail any fixes for these when available:

We also wanted to give you an update on the following issue: VR: Double Vision and Incorrect Rendering on HMDs with Non-Parallel Displays (ex. Pimax). At the current time, there are no plans to provide support for new HMDs outside the officially supported systems and platforms. The officially supported platforms are Valve Index, HTC Vive and Oculus.

BETA – how to get involved!

A new beta section forum will be set up with details on how to take part and how to submit bug reports, but here are the main details on how you can help us in the upcoming beta:

  • The beta begins on the 27 November and will run until the 2 December.
  • The beta will be only be accessible on PC. We are looking into expanding this for console players in the future.
  • To take part in the beta, all you’ll need to do is load up the launcher and select (and update) the following product: Elite Dangerous: January Update (Beta) from the 27 November. Once that has been completed, you’ll then have access to the January Update beta. If this doesn’t appear, please restart your launcher.
  • We’ll be updating the Issue Tracker with a January Update (Update 3.6) Beta section, and we encourage all those who are taking part in this beta to report any encountered bugs or issues through it. In addition, we will also be adding links from inside the game that will take you directly to the Issue Tracker site.

We just want to thank you once again for all the passion and involvement you show for Elite Dangerous. With your participation, we know that we can help to make our game more sustainable and beneficial for the future of this amazing galaxy!

Interstellar Initiative #4: The Galconda

On the 8th November 2019 Frontier announced the 4th Interstellar Initiative – The Galconda. You can read about it below or on the offical site here (warning spoilers). Previous ones can be found in the Post Beyond: An Overview section here, or via the link on the main menu.

Greetings Commanders.

The ancient generation ship, The Golconda, has been discovered drifting amidst the stars. Contact with the ship’s living occupants has revealed that their ancestors chose to remain aboard their ship rather than colonise their original destination. The equipment originally intended for setting up a planetary settlement was cannibalised for materials but now… the Golconda’s crew find themselves in need of outside assistance for the first time in a millennia.

Efforts are underway to support the residents of The Golconda, but both the Federation and the Empire look upon this colossal relic with opportunistic eyes. There’s a political play to be made here, and the winner stands to benefit greatly.

For this next Interstellar Initiative, we’ll be detailing what’s at stake over the next few weeks. It’s time to back a side, and win!

If you’d rather learn about what happens to The Golconda as the story unfolds, then stop reading now, and keep your eyes on the GalNet feed.