Elite Horizons beta 2.0

[Sneakytiger]

heres the patch notes

cya in the void commanders.

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=204119

[albert]

Could you get that or the 1.5 64Bit Beta to even download? I kept getting files not available.

[ArithonUK]

Before I get started, I’ve posted an album of screenshots here for you to look at.

So, Horizons.

I thought space was big (not down to the chemists big, but really, really, big) however, planets are bigger.
But I race ahead. First, I started where I’d left off the 1.5 beta in my Imperial Cutter at Founders World. Okay, not the wisest choice for planetary landings, but hey, it’d just been washed and was good to go! I went into Outfitting and selected “Planetary landing suite”. So far so good. No SRV. What else have they got? SRV transport bay. One of them. Ah, but many Classes of bay with different capacity. Mmm. Okay, grab a basic one and equip SRV. Purchase one shiny new Scarab. And I’m off.

Launching from Shinrarta Dezra, I needed to look for a moon or planet to land on. Open the system map and planets now have a blue crescent icon over the ones I can land on. Nice. Shinrarta A1 it is!
As I approached the planet in super-cruise I thought “What do I do now?” when my HUD changed and an altimeter appeared and subtle beeping noises kicked in. Ooh, shiny! So I get closer, and closer and closer. These planet things are friggin’ big! Dipping my nose made the lower part of the altimeter shade in red. Red looks bad. Don’t do that then.

Now the HUD changes again and I have a vertical descent meter with “OC” and “DROP” on it. When I hit the OC level the ship entered Orbital Cruise â€" slowing down and the flight model changing. So far, so good. No super-cruise-style dropout loading screen. Then as I hit DROP level, the sound of massive deceleration and the blue shimmer of super-cruise dropout. BANG. And then… nothing, I continue to fly down to the surface. Seamlessly. No jarring load screen. Awesome. Hats off to FD.

It’s at this point, finally paying attention to the increasing number of panicked beeping that my ship is going down much, much faster than it was going forward. Ah, poop. Gravity has me by the HOTAS.
A word of advice here. Cutting throttle works better than desperately mashing thrusters. Just saying. Also, remembering to deploy landing gear is also a wise move.
It was bumpy. But I was down.

As you approach the surface, the radar become a topographical map and it advises you when your ship is over a viable landing spot. Not easy to find in some rougher areas.
I then selected the new lower middle ship panel and selected Deploy from the SRV menu. A rapid switch to the SRV cockpit with a quick fade-to-back-and-back and I’m lowered all Thunderbirds style to the surface. And go.. nowhere; keys don’t work. Time to map those SRV controls to my stick! That done, I’m off and crikey; the Imperial Cutter is huge from the outside!
Driving the SRV is exactly what you would expect driving a dune buggy around Mars would be like.

Getting back in the ship is a process of driving back to the loading bay and positioning your SRV roughly under the orange hologram and clicking “Board Ship” on the lap menu. I decided to take off and fly to the nearest settlement and see what was occurring there.

I set course for Nixon Outpost and landed practically on top of the place. The second landing was less bumpy. Driving my SRV up to the structure it was little more than a tin hut, patrolled by Terminator-style HK drones. I got a 200CR fine for trespass. Oops.

By this time the BETA was buzzing and by virtue of the fact this was the closest planet to Founders World, ships were landing all over the place at my location. It was like a sci-fi alien invasion film! SRV’s everywhere!
I was joined for a while by CMDR SneakTiger from DeadMenWalking, who landed his Federal Corvette far more gracefully than my rocky first attempt. We proceeded to race around the settlement getting the hang of SRV motoring.

I took the opportunity to try SRV jumping and managed to mount a Viper Mk IV (see screenshots).Damn! This is fun!

At this point I was hailed by Kerrash and after a brief chat, he suggested we try another system where there were rings and other sights to view from a planet. Winged up, I was off again!
Wing beacons work for planets well enough to find your wingmate on the surface and after catching up with Kerrash we landed our craft in a giant crater and went exploring. You can see the breath-taking view in the screenshot that shows the planet’s ring on the horizon, while Kerrash’s SRV races off in the distance. While I was taking photos, Kerrash managed to locate some Materials. As you can see in the cargo-panel screenshot, there are some interesting things you can do with materials, which I hope to try soon.

One thing I did do for the first time was dismiss my ship. As your ship lifts off majestically and tears off into the heavens leaving you behind, you feel very small. And very lonely.
After some exploring for a while, Kerrash suggested finding a station, so we summoned our ships. Again this is a sight to behold, especially with an Imperial Cutter flying itself. First you hear the bang of the ships dropping from super-cruise and then it roars overhead, finding a place to land.

We then took off and headed for a planet-based station â€" Antonelli Vision â€" for a second I thought it was Antonachi Vision! Zac almost had a station there!
The station was located on the dark side of the planet so I attempted a night landing. This was the smoothest by far and the view of space across the horizon as I touched down was truly amazing. It brought to mind scenes of Space 1999 from my childhood, Eagles landing on Moonbase Alpha!

My impression of Horizons is that I’ve stuck my head in the water next to the iceberg and realised just how little I have actually seen. This is going to take days just to explore the basics.

[OldBloke]

Excellent post, Arithon :thumb:

That looks very cool.

[Liberator]

Mine downloaded in about 40 minutes without issue.

I loaded it up but didn't enter the game proper as it was midnight. Will probably have a wander tonight.

[Sneakytiger]

Yeah I see Dmw buggy racing as a lan event.lol

[Liberator]

The buggies are pretty good.

We stuck to Shinrarta A1 and landed pretty easily, lots of tweaking of the buggy controls and eventually myself and Albert were zipping about around Nixon, which just seems to be a shed that had no function except to tell you to stay away.

Albert found the fire button and destroyed the T2 drones, which promptly gave him a "Wanted" status locally.

We sent off out ships into orbit and then did a drive around waiting for the "Recall Ship" button to appear........ It didn't.... So I started looking for maybe a button in the config for it. While doing this Albert decided to shoot me and knock me down to 1% health :eyebrow:, there was nothing in the configs. I saw on a post that it was probably proximity based, we were too close to the building and remembered there was some thing about distance on the holo screen. So I decided to drive away at high speed to check this out, unfortunately I was playing with the jump thrusters of the buggy and when I did a particularly high jump I landed and took off the remaining 1% of my health.

Respawned in ship at last docked port. This is where I found a bit of a bug, there was an option to reload weapons, but I only have energy weapons, I selected it anyway and it was still there although you can hear the cash being taken. So I looked at the holo screen and it said I had a destroyed buggy and my second one still in the ship. I went to outfitting to try and replace the destroyed one but it wouldn't let me get rid of the one in there. Eventually I just sold the SRV hangar module, re-bought it and stuck in two fresh buggies and set back off to meet up with Albert again and try it out.

By this time Sneaky had switched over from the Public servers to the Group and was with Albert, I landed and was just sending off my ship to test the theory when Sneaky came to the same conclusion and proved it before I could. The difference being that I had to go looking for it on the internet and Sneaky just worked it out himself.
:doh:

We only played on there for a while and I went off to Firefall. Need to have more of a play in the other planets worth landing on and see the different ports. We were just on a barren dust bowl of a planet with no features to speak of. Also need to go dock in a proper port and look for land based jobs.

[ArithonUK]

Apologies if I missed you last night. My PC has been playing up. MB complaining of power surges and then rebooting. New PSU on order, but my PC is now fairly unreliable and not safe (for my disks) to use much, if at all.

Rebuild tomorrow. If new PSU doesn't fix it, new MB will be next. Not happy after only building the rig in April. Scan.co.uk didn't even answer my email.

[albert]

That's shocking if they don't even respond. Normally they're pretty good I hear.

It took a bit of time but I think I have the controls of the buggy optimised. Quite happy with the handling and it's certainly an art to get the vertical boost in sync with the pitch to avoid damage to the vehicle.

I quite like it so far. The Imperial Cutter Pulse Laser Turrets is also fun

[Tutonic]

Scan.co.uk didn't even answer my email.

Social media seems to be the way to get things moving these days, the larger the company the quicker the response in my experience.

Get on Facebook/Twitter/Myspace and make a fuss.

[BrotherTobious]

Yup that's what I have found recently

Sent from my Nexus 5

[RogueTaylor]

okay so i finally cam on elite and have traveled to the dmw home base at guest city very surprised to see it was a massive space station, so am just satnding by now unitll i kjnow what i can do to help out and what alliance to join as i left my other one

[albert]

Ah well there you go. You need to accept missions but only those for dMw and you'll become friends with the dMw alliance. dMw will get influence in the area and you become rich!