Dev Update (09/07/2015) Full Text

Hi everyone,

For this week's dev update I'll start by wearing my other hat - that of Head of Fiction for Elite: Dangerous. The core tenet of the game is for players to blaze their own trail in the game and the bulk of our development effort has been in support of this. The Elite universe is rich in history and offers huge potential for stories on a galactic scale. There's a good variety of activities for the player to participate in game, but while many are happy to follow their own lead there’s also considerable interest in providing story driven goals and that’s something we want to do more with.

We already have a few story threads in game and they will continue to advance and obviously we have more to come which links in with new content like CQC Championship. There's also interesting puzzles and mysteries like the unknown artefacts that will continue to develop. As well as stories created by us that play out we're keen to involve players so they can share their stories and in particular for player groups to share their activities. When combined with features like Powerplay this provides some obvious possibilities for major events in game!

There is already some support for supporting this type of content in game, we already encourage players to submit news items for local GalNet news (we do promote the more interesting and suitable to global news items) on our forums here: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=101801

With the welcome expansion of our community team and soon for our narrative design as well, we're working on developing the process to enable greater player group participation in the game’s narrative. Naturally I also have a few fun things that I’m looking forward to unleashing on you all! :-)

This week we released the 1.3.07 update which we had to hold off on releasing after an issue was discovered at the last minute. It's fair to say that we have been guilty of being a bit too eager in releasing updates, as we want to get it into to your hands as quickly as possible. This doesn't always work out too well so we're reigning back on this to be less iterative with releases. That helps us with less strain after releases and helps you as well with less, but better spaced updates.

For the Xbox players we're putting the final touches on the next GPP release which as well as a raft of fixes and tweaks adds CQC Championship to the game. We'll announce when we have a firm date for that, but it will be soon. One aspect of the Xbox version that is requiring specific focus is performance and the performance gains that we make putting together that version will come across to PC and Mac where possible.

We have been looking into the cause(s) of the reported occasional stuttering when approaching planets that some people have reported, particularly on specific very high-end machine configurations, which is understandably frustrating for players experiencing it and is proving equally frustrating for us investigating it. We are continuing to dig into the issue and will update when we find a solution.

Thanks!

Michael