Sorry guys but you ED fans are prolific posters and the occasional lurker like me might get lost. Is Odyssey a new update that builds upon previous editions like Engineers and Commanders or something more? Is it 100% VR ready? Partially ready? Or 2D only?
It’s optional DLC, like Horizons (where we could land on planets). It allows you walk around and fight on foot, to capture/explore around on planets. The planets are being updated, but still just ones without an atmosphere. You’ll also be able to walk around in the space stations, but not within your ship as yet. The on-foot part is not going to be in VR, so 2D only.
(not an expert on this, so if wrong then I’ll put my apologies in up-front)
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Actually all planets with atmosphere are being added
Just starting with those with a thin one.
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Cool, is the plan to have buildings and cities etc like Star Citizen?
Happy Birthday @komemiute - I might have missed it yesterday. I went to bed early like a responsible person for some reason…
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As far as I know not this year.
The first iteration of Odyssey concentrates on low atmosphere planets with the beginning stages of terraforming.
All previous planets and planetoid without atmosphere are walkable and got quite the radical upgrade.
These planets have settlers and little “towns” that are a bit more than Western Frontier towns of the past.
Eventually when big planets with completed terraforming will be released it’s logical to expect proper cities with all bells and whistles.
Like- we’re not talking of anything particularly hard. We’ve had huge cities in videogames for the last decade or so.
The main thing is integrating a City-generating algorithm with the Stellar forge planetary generation system but I wouldn’t say that’s the biggest hurdle in gaming.
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Oh sorry, for a moment I thought this was the SpaceX thread.
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That sounds great. If you or @Navynuke99 are in the Alpha then do post pictures and your thoughts, interesting to see how it shapes up.
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Sure thing! I finally had a chance to play around a bit with it tonight, and I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing. Pictures to come later after I convert and shrink them.
First thing up I took what I thought would be an easy “retrieve item X from outpost Y,” but didn’t realize that Outpost Y was 150,000 light seconds away.
Twelve minutes later, the shuttle dropped me on the pad, and the mission updated with “retrieve item X from locker Z in the med lab,” which led to wandering around until finding the right lab, and finally the right locker…to find it locked, and apparently I needed some hacking tool to open without the combination? Except I didn’t have that hacking tool.
Walked back out of the station, to find I had no clue whatsoever how to call a shuttle to take me anywhere else that might be giving out missions. Trying to find anywhere that might be the shuttle service, and one of the outside guards started shooting at me (they hadn’t been earlier). Promptly died, found myself on another station (after the 500 credit rebuy), and after unsuccessfully trying to find mission givers with the “transport item x to site y” (apparently the easy missions that are meant for players just starting out), decided to call it a night. I’ll try again tomorrow night- apparently there’s an update right now for the alpha being applied as I type this.
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Ok! So… VR is odd but not in a bad way.
Imagine having your monitor’s output projected into your VR headset - like watching the game on a very big movie theater…
It doesn’t register the head movement, you must turn the view with the mouse and move with the WASD keyboard like any other FPS.
That said it’s simple, elegant and functional.
It still conveys enough immersion.
But what does the trick is the Sound engineering
OMFGWTFBBQ!
Music, voices, sound FX. All is mixed to perfection.
Plus when you rent a space-taxi you get to take one lift that in 1 second split brings you to the correct hangar. Automatically.
No hunt for the place.
And the feeling of the lift doors opening into the hangar make a very Star Wars experience - like Skywalker looking at the Millennium Falcon for the first time on Tatooine.
I’ll admit: Yes, boarding and unboarding are a fade-to-black transition.
But there’s the steps sounds and that sells the idea well enough. I’d love to walk up the boarding ladder though.
The trip, across space, per sé is… Boring as you could expect. 
The AI pilot is very careful and relaxed so you keep on thinking “maaaaan, get a move on! I could do this in less than 12 parsecs !”
Speaking with the someone who actually writes code for Elite I’m assured that the taxi ship[ is moving at it’s maximum speed and it doesn’t deliberately slows down.
It’s just that being a passenger sometimes it’s… boring.
The real point here is that the Odyssey Alpha has been laid out exactly like that for a reason.
People in this first phase are planet-bound. Can’t access their ship, can’t buy it - the walking mechanics and missions and all that have to be thoroughly tested.
Then it come the time to go walking the planetary surface of (finally!!!) an atmospheric planet, and THAT is just glorious.
It’s probably the best experience ever so far.
I played No man’s Sky, SC, and space engineers, and yet still the solid feeling of walking the surface of a planet with a thin filmsuit is absolutely perfect. Impressive.
Yes I’m a fanboi but I’m also honest- best feeling of being on a planet. Ever.
Beside that, I’m so f***Ing glad I got the Lifetime Expansion bonus during the Kickstarter.
All things considered, my final reccomendation is still to play the on foot section on a monitor and not in VR. As long as we are forced to play without a ship, a monitor, SO FAR, works better.
And I’m talking performance here.
In VR, performance is… Okay-ish and there’s quite a lot of “rough around the edges”
It’s still day 1 of the alpha
Ah, and I have an HP Reverb and a simple GeForce 980Ti…
Not even a 1080. And I still can play with a lot of bells and whistles and the framerate suffers only in limited situations…
What absolutely surprises me it’s the reactions of the NPC- while some animations (especially when one finishes and another starts) needs a bit of tweaking still, there’s this impressive thing of their Cone-of-View.
I’ll explain: the interactable NPCs, so far, are standing around the station, in waiting areas (and there’s a LOT of good music in those areas! I even heard a piece from Eric Satie’ “Gymnopedie” in the spaceship shop!!! Perfect!) and looking around with a specific cone of view, if you appear in the periphery of said cone of view they’ll actually react to the appearance f the player with a surprised tone and in some cases even a small gasp! Especially those that are in desperate need for any sort of help.
Colour me impressed.
Yes, the stations as of now are a conglomerate of rooms, you can’t really travel the full extent of the establishment BUT that’s not the point of the first day of the first phase of this alpha.
At the end of this first test I’m giving it a 8/10 with a great feeling for the future!
Pictures to come.
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You have just described why I quit ED after a month. I want to love it. I want to come back to it because it is rich and open and ever so lovely. But I am never sure what it is I want to do. And once I get an inkling to get passably good at a task or role, hurdles to success abound.
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I know it’s an alpha right now, so I’m willing to be patient and let things slide- the sound design is gorgeous, and I had no issues with graphics, framerates, or server-side connection. The sense of scale is incredible, and I’m sure as they iron things out it’ll get better. For now it’s just…complicated.
What hurdles are you finding are the biggest to your success? There are a lot of us here who play, who’d be more than happy to help you out if we can.
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In all truth they always lacked a real tutorial and relied on players asking in the forums or looking online for answers.
Good news is that since …uh… last year? they added a very comprehensive Tutorial system that can be accessed at any moment.
All in all even for this alpha all the instructions on how to do stuff are on the forums so- yeah it’s a bit inconvenient when you just want to dive in but it’s there.
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THIS! In VR especially it truly makes you feel tiny…
Walking around the ship is so impressive. You wouldn’t be able to tell how big they are just from the inside. Or without VR. 
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Just learned several things in the Alpha…
1# menu design and implementation needs some work.
2# their definition and my definition of “harmless” seem to be completely different !
3# the starter gun is a airsoft pistol…
4# Space taxis are boring … (at least give us galnet to read)
5# please give us head tracking at least with VR even if its not full VR
6# its pretty good so far… would be fun trying to squad up
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#1- the wheel thingy? I found it quite comfortable, mapped to one of the mouse buttons…
#2 & 3- yeah hahahaha I agree!
#4- Uhm, I didn’t try but I saw the menu to pull up Galnet on the right side, isn’t it there? I have to try…
#5- yeah I’d like to try it. I’m afraid it’d make me puke but it could be interesting to try at least!
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#1, the wheel thing is a bit jumpy with the mouse, but i actually ment the mission terminals, where on the first screen there is no cursor and you have to use the space bar, because the mouse click doesnt work, then you go to the second screen where there IS a mouse cursor and you can click… except for when you go back to the first menu when it seems to be the space bar again.
have to check the galnet thing again … didnt really look at the side screens
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