Buckle up for the DFM!

[TeaLeaf]

The Pre-PAX VIP event is just two days away and those lucky enough to be in Boston will get a preview of the DFM at the Royale Boston on Thursday 10th April.

The PAX East event itself kicks off on Friday 11th April and runs for three days.   CIG will be on the PAX Expo hall showing the Dog Fighter Module in a booth, thus should be there all 3 days.  

In addition, on Friday, April 11th at 4:30 PM, Chris Roberts will be included in the PC Gamer Panel discussion, "The (Incredible) Future of PC Gaming, hosted by PC Gamer" (this is a PAX event, in ALBATROSS THEATRE).


It is hoped that details of an online stream will be announced immediately prior to the event.

See you in the 'verse!

[TeaLeaf]

Well, the preview showed pretty good progress and you can see that a bunch of work has been done since Christmas on the DFM.    It's still buggy & falling over, BUT  we need to keep perspective here:

We're still at PRE-ALPHA stage. so we should not be expecting perfection or stable at this point.   We also need to remember that the DFM is hugely ambitious and not designed to run well on the average 2014 spec PC, so we should not expect massive local performance at this stage and won't get it until the hardware catches up to the coming 2015-spec.

Remember, Chris Roberts' goal is still to make:

"the best god damn space sim ever!"

...and it looks like we're making good progress towards that goal!

A non-official of last night's stream is below, filled with the usual crashes (of the Chris Roberts' collision kind - don't drink & drive kids), but also with some terrific footage.  

Skip to:
13 minutes to see the opening graphics & single-person DFM
50 minutes to see the multi-person DFM
...but there's a lot of great info throughout the whole presentation.

Did I mention the helmet?

DFM issue date has pushed back a couple of weeks and is now expected at the end of this month or in the first two weeks of May.   But I'll finish with some f-f-f-forum feedback:

Straight up, the graphical detail was astounding! I was literally blown away with how amazing they looked the asteroids, planets, space stations and to think that the detail should get even better with time. The PBR'd hornet also looked amazing with some stunning detail.

The DFM will come out in several bite-sized chunks/versions:

1 - Single crew ships practice against AI (eg Freelancer owners will get to fly the Hornet)
2 - Multi-crew ships (eg Constellation & Freelancer), single ship variants, in-game comms, inc coop AI pilots
3 - More environments (eg Space station), Capture Idris mode, first-person boarding and 'double precision' (the move to 64 bit precision).

Part 2 is the bit I'm looking forward to, we can coop our bigger ships during the DFM which should be AWESOME!

[Gorion]

AFAIK, ppl who own Multi-crews will also be given temporary access to SingleCrew ships to use.

[Gorliath]

From the looks of it this will need to be added to Lan XXVI

[Jamoe]

I'm pretty damn excited right now. I really want to see what sort of stuff we can do with the private 'verse, setting up our machines would be pretty cool, in fact I might pose that as a question for the chairman.

Will try and get to the next LAN if my machine can play the DFM.

[TeaLeaf]

If you've not already been watching....

http://www.twitch.tv/pax2

[Gorion]

I'm pretty damn excited right now. I really want to see what sort of stuff we can do with the private 'verse, setting up our machines would be pretty cool, in fact I might pose that as a question for the chairman.

Will try and get to the next LAN if my machine can play the DFM.

I thought we're going to play on the persistent universe server?

[TeaLeaf]

He's talking about the LAN I think.   We'll be on the PU, but nothing says we can;t have a private verse too.

[Sparko]

wow, I was excited already but after seeing that I want to play now!!!  we are going to have so much fun....Helmet! Helmet! :woot2: