David Braben: Odyssey Going Forwards

On the 11th July 2021 at 3:51pm GMT David Braben made a post to the offical forum regarding future plans for Odyseey. You can see this below or here.

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“Greetings Commanders.

“With the release of Update 5 on 1st July plus a few smaller server updates since, and Update 6 currently in development, I wanted to take a moment of your time to talk about the next steps for Elite Dangerous.

“We are aware and fully accept the frustration that many of our players have had with their experience of Elite Dangerous Odyssey. The community have spoken, we have heard the feedback clearly and we will act on that feedback.

“As you may remember in our recent development article, the significant amount of updates and development effort that has been done to fix and improve issues since the launch of Odyssey has meant work on our console release has not progressed as quickly as we had hoped. What’s more, we can see that the strides we have made through the last five major updates are positive, but we must continue on with this progress to give the experience that you and we expect on PC.

“With those things in mind, we have spent a lot of time discussing and re-evaluating our previous plans and we have made the decision to prioritise the core PC experience for Elite Dangerous. Ultimately, we believe it is right to focus our efforts on the core Elite Dangerous Odyssey experience for the platforms that we have released on, before opening up to more. We know that the work that we do to improve players’ experiences of Elite Dangerous Odyssey on PC will benefit other platforms in the future, but the dates and details of the console platforms are going to change. We do not want to rush into confirming any dates or changes this has on our console release, as we must remain fully focused on the core Elite experience. Only when we feel that the foundation of the PC release is solid, will we be able to re-lay our console roadmap on top.

“Elite Dangerous Odyssey is an important step on a complicated journey, and we must get this right, before we can consider moving on to these new platforms.

“So what does this actually mean for Elite Dangerous and Elite Dangerous Odyssey?

“It means that we will see more game updates over the coming months. We will continue to work through Issue Tracker, fix bugs and improve performance, but we will also be able to explore and add additional features, content and improvements into the game.

“We will continue to give open monthly development updates where we discuss WIP content, challenges, the issue tracker and more. We know that the previous levels of detail for the roadmap and developer update have not met expectations, but we are grateful for your patience while we shift and adjust plans, in the face of such clear feedback.

“Please remember that our team here at Frontier are working hard to support the game and our community. Behind every bug fix, design decision and community post is a person who cares a lot about giving our players best possible experience. I would ask that everyone remains calm and respectful when sharing their thoughts and feedback.

“We all have the same goal and we will get there, together. Please bear with us.

“o7 Commanders.”

Odyssey: David Braben #2

At 6:05pm on the 25th May 2021, David Braben posted another message on the official forum regarding the ongoing issues with Odyssey.

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“Greetings CMDRs,

“Here’s a further update on where we are with Odyssey, and to keep you updated on our progress and our investigations, and talk a little about our next steps. This will be a long post, but please bear with me.

“Firstly, once again I apologise for the experience many players have had running Odyssey, particularly the server issues and disconnects. Despite careful server spooling up anticipating significant demand, they were still overloaded. After a good deal of investigation, the main cause of this proved to be to do with Fleet Carriers and the systems they use. I’ll try and explain the gist of what the problem was, how we found it, and why it didn’t show during the public Alpha. The whole team are working incredibly hard to resolve the issues as quickly as possible and improve player’s experiences and this is part of that process.

“As you probably know, we split Horizons and Odyssey into two sets of servers – with the plan to keep it that way until we ship Odyssey on console. Fleet Carriers exist in both ‘worlds’ and when a Fleet Carrier jumps, this (and all the players on board) are kept in sync between the two galaxies. Due to a bug with them, significant amounts of data were going back and forth between the two worlds unnecessarily, and this loop between the sets of servers simply mounted up and started bringing servers down or blocking them (resulting in many players getting disconnect errors). This is why we stopped Fleet Carriers jumping, and immediately we saw a significant improvement overall. There were other issues too with this subsystem, keeping the BGS and other things in sync between the ‘worlds’. Once we had a solid fix for the Fleet Carrier and sync issues we deployed it to the servers, and re-enabled Fleet Carriers jumping. This was compounded by the fact we had a record number of concurrent players, so the servers were already working hard. Initially we thought this was the effect we were seeing – that the high number of players was the main issue – but eventually some very smart people determined what was happening with Fleet Carriers.

“Turning to the subject of performance, first of all I’d like to provide some background. When we first set the min specs for Elite Dangerous (back at the time of the Kickstarter in 2012) we made the assumption that for low-spec machines the game was playable as long as the frame rate was above 30 fps, with 60 fps for higher spec machines. Over the subsequent weeks and months after release in 2014 we optimised the game significantly. We had a similar thought process for Odyssey, especially considering that the lower spec machines will tend to be five years old or more, or be laptops, that 30 fps would be acceptable as a minimum spec performance. Separately, we have heard reports of very high spec machines failing to perform as expected. We believe this is a different issue, possibly CPU-related, and are looking into that too, as we speak.

“We will get to the bottom of the performance issues, particularly with the support of the community who are already providing useful information.

“Elite has always been about scale and ambition. With this latest, and biggest, expansion the team have taken on an amazing challenge. The whole galaxy in 1:1 scale, now down to the millimetre. Millions of players interacting with each other and many millions of AI game characters on billions of worlds, all orbiting around each other in an incredibly rich galaxy-wide ballet. I truly believe the team have created a milestone in modern video game history. This is not a static arena shooter where all the players join at the start, but where players are continually joining, leaving, travelling between servers alone and in groups, and so many other things. It is a real shame this incredible achievement is somewhat overshadowed by the issues we have been seeing. We remain committed to improving everyone’s experience. In the words of JFK: “We choose to go to the moon this decade and do the other things… not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

“So what are we doing to fix the issues?

“As mentioned above, the team have been working incredibly hard to support and fix critical issues. They have already made good progress with three hot fixes and many server tweaks too, but we can see there is still more to come. Disconnects are now greatly reduced, despite record concurrent player numbers.

“As already explained, the performance issues may take a little longer to resolve, and we greatly appreciate your patience.

“Our plan is to publish a road-map by 4th June as we continue to push forward addressing issues, including giving some details on specific improvements, building upon the fixes the team have already made.

“Thank you and my apologies again for the bumpy start to Odyssey.”

Official Forum

Odyssey: David Braben

At 5:38pm on the 22nd May 2021 David Braben commented on the official forum regarding the issues Odyssey has been having.

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“Greetings Commanders,


“With our first hotfix now released and another one arriving very shortly, I wanted to take a moment to address the wider community feedback and reports regarding performance issues, server outages, and bug reports within Elite Dangerous Odyssey.  
 
“First and foremost, I would like to apologise wholeheartedly to those who have been suffering from these problems. I would like to reassure you that we take these issues very seriously and that they are our top priority and focus.  
 
“Our second hotfix will be released very soon, which we hope will address more of the reported bugs and bring further stability improvements into the game.  We will continue to work on updates which will resolve more bugs and improve stability further.
 
“Some of our players are reporting poor performance on machines where we would expect the performance to be good, and others are saying it is fine. We are trying to get to the bottom of this. I have been playing on my old home machine from 2014, which has an Intel i7 Extreme CPU and a GTX 980 GPU, 16 Gb RAM, playing at 1080p full screen at Ultra. I was doing this so I could have a good feel for how the game was playing on older hardware, and I used this same machine during Alpha. I have also been playing on a high spec 2021 dev machine.

“I would like to thank you all for your patience and support. The Elite Dangerous community has always been at the heart of the game. We understand that there are a number of players who have had problems accessing and playing the game and I can assure you that we are focusing fully on improving this for those affected and communicating with you openly and regularly about how these issues are being addressed.  
 
“Thank you all, ”



David