Elite Dangerous Catch-All

Athros, that is detailed and beautiful and wonderful. Thank you.

Would you mind if I linked to it via Twitter and the like?

Someone over at reddit was also in the crowd. He posted his album. Link to reddit

Ok, back on the hobby horse now that I've had a beer. This conference was a frickin logistical nightmare.

Boss Challenge 4:
IMAGE(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/31816623/FDev%20talk/2015-10-08%2011.39.35.jpg)

Factions. How the data is stored, generated, and where the background processor gets (and puts) the data.
IMAGE(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/31816623/FDev%20talk/2015-10-08%2011.42.41.jpg)

Community Goals need a different model. Redis for the fast moving data like leaderboards, and player position on the leader boards. MySQL for the rest for consistency. Why are there so few CG's? If too many, it would BURN CLUSTERS TO THE GROUND apparently. Also: wanted to make CG's somewhat special.
IMAGE(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/31816623/FDev%20talk/2015-10-08%2011.44.43.jpg)

MySQL is used for the backend of Powerplay as well since it involves Player Progression, they want consistency above all else. Turns take 20 minutes to run Thursday mornings.

Store and distribution methods. (Boss Challenge 5 - I missed the slide)
IMAGE(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/31816623/FDev%20talk/2015-10-08%2011.48.07.jpg)

Boss Challenge 6:
IMAGE(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/31816623/FDev%20talk/2015-10-08%2011.48.35.jpg)

CQC stuff. Redis Joining Lobbies (Blocking List Pop?). Redis then pushes that to the background sim for processing, and then you end up in a match.

IMAGE(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/31816623/FDev%20talk/2015-10-08%2011.50.44.jpg)
IMAGE(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/31816623/FDev%20talk/2015-10-08%2011.51.36.jpg)

They then had a brief Q&A - They're working on APIs for AppDev (like eddb but without player input). No ETA. No further comment (the guy tried to rephrase the question to get a better answer out of them. It failed. Lots of grumbling)

There was a question on why both Dynamo and Mongo . "Honestly? Mongo was there first." Dynamo is for the constantly growing datasets (Player Navigation Computer) but needs the PHP WebAPI to make it work. Mongo is more for the consistent datasets.

Stellar Forge is high performance C++ code. Bunch of physicists wrote it with programmers. Large team (20+ most likely).

That was the last question because of the first guy.

Yes, the dev got cornered. Lots of "No comment".

I shook their hands and said "Thank you for the game, I really enjoy it" which got a smile out of both of them.

Gremlin wrote:
athros wrote:

Making a second post. I need a beer :)

I think I owe you one. Very informative. Says more about the backend architecture than the gameplay, but that's what I expected. (And it's the bit I'm curious about that they don't talk about on the forums much.)

It's funny. They would touch on the gameplay implications, but nothing too overt. The closest they got was to the Powerplay stuff. Merit decay, some of the minor faction influence.

When the talk goes live after re:Invent is over, I'll pull the vid and link it up.

Veloxi wrote:

Athros, that is detailed and beautiful and wonderful. Thank you.

Would you mind if I linked to it via Twitter and the like?

You're welcome! I don't mind at all It's off of my notes and memory, so I might have missed a bit here and there, but that's the bulk of it. Check the link to the reddit post.

If there are more questions, I have some voice memos I need to go over (one on the UDP stuff in particular) so there might be more transcribing coming. Honestly, it was amazing to see how they used the AWS services to put the pieces together.

Fascinating stuff, Athros. Thanks!

Rezzy wrote:

If you don't need Steam, opening the game without the overlay enabled should sidestep this issue entirely.

Oddly enough I didn't have this problem when Elite was a non steam game and I was just using it with the overlay. Either that protected me from the issue, or it was introduced in an Elite/Steam patch in the last two months or so.

I submitted a request to join Veloxi's private group. Don't reject me, Veloxi. I'm friendly and mostly harmless!

Tamren wrote:

Oddly enough I didn't have this problem when Elite was a non steam game and I was just using it with the overlay. Either that protected me from the issue, or it was introduced in an Elite/Steam patch in the last two months or so.

It is a new thing that started just a few days ago. I have started just shift tabbing twice whenever I pull up the map.

TYVM athros!! Updated OP with your post just because it was so darn interesting.

athros wrote:
Gremlin wrote:
athros wrote:

Making a second post. I need a beer :)

I think I owe you one. Very informative. Says more about the backend architecture than the gameplay, but that's what I expected. (And it's the bit I'm curious about that they don't talk about on the forums much.)

It's funny. They would touch on the gameplay implications, but nothing too overt. The closest they got was to the Powerplay stuff. Merit decay, some of the minor faction influence.

When the talk goes live after re:Invent is over, I'll pull the vid and link it up.

Yeah, that doesn't surprise me too much. If it was me, I wouldn't talk much about gameplay stuff either. I was really interested in how they pull off managing all that data behind the scenes, though.

I do want to get an up-close look at Stellar Forge someday, so I hope that talk about that more at some future point.

David Braben wrote:

This is a quick-and-dirty un-edited capture from Horizons from a debug build on one of our dev machines, using the debug camera on an SRV and just zooming out ever faster from a crash site on the surface of a rocky potato-shaped planetoid, not unlike Vesta in our solar system. There are tons of little details we plan to tweak or fix, but I thought it would be great for you guys to see where we’re up to with this.

EDIT:

I know it's not indicative of what gameplay will be like or anything, and I know it's still just rocky, non atmospheric planets, but holy hell does this make me excited.

EDIT 2:

Reddit seems to agree. People are calling for Frontier to produce a David Braben mic drop gif to accompany this.

Holy hellfire.

I'm a fan of the mission tweaks. I've been consistently getting smuggling missions for well over 200K now on the bulletin boards. I had one mission to take 3 combat stabilizers about 40ly away for 700K credits. Combine with moving imperial slaves to the black market, made for over 1MM trip one way. Awesome that the missions now realize that ships can go further than one hop!

Carlbear95 wrote:

I'm a fan of the mission tweaks. I've been consistently getting smuggling missions for well over 200K now on the bulletin boards. I had one mission to take 3 combat stabilizers about 40ly away for 700K credits. Combine with moving imperial slaves to the black market, made for over 1MM trip one way. Awesome that the missions now realize that ships can go further than one hop!

Yeah, I very much appreciate that too. Of course, you need to have a decent trade/combat/exploration rank to get access to the big profit missions, but with the addition of more big ticket missions it's now totally possible to make decent amounts of money while trying to gain reputation or interact with the background sim in a meaningful way.

Last night I fired up the game to find that Aymifa was now generating fewer charity missions, but tons of big ticket missions -- not sure if it was a server update or just that the system's status changed vs earlier in the week, but I decided to actually fly some of those 400k to 500k smuggling missions instead of just endlessly giving away my credits. In about an hour or two I made maybe 3 million credits (which was NOT a thing I'd ever done before from missions) and finally got my naval progression mission for Earl.

Anyway, that's a pretty great change if you ask me. I'm sure just pure, focused trade or bounty grinding is still a ton more profitable, but having the bulletin boards actually feel like a way to make money encourages you to mix things up -- and that does wonders for making the game feel more varied an interesting.

Combine with my trade database its pretty easy to fill your hull with something the other station wants to maximize profit. The only problem with adding all of these cool features is it makes me want to contribute to powerplay less given my playtime constratints. I know its easy to just stop doing it, but at this point I still feel loyalty to trying to scratch and claw our way every week with Zemina Torval. This week we're Hudson's primary target so we're getting pummeled with undermining, so i want to get to work fortifying.

Out of curiosity, what trade tools are you using these days? I've been out of it for a few months and I see a ton of new stuff on the ED Codex, so I'm not sure what the current gold standard is now

Depends what I'm doing.

I personally use (and very highly endorse), Trade Computer Extension (TCE). Unlike the other web based sources this is basically an EMPTY database with an incredible UI that you fill yourself. As most people will say, its the trading tool Elite should have shipped with. Basically it replaces the spreadsheet or copious notes you would be taking, calculates great trade routes, etc. The catch again is that its empty. I think there are like 20K stations in the DB but no data, and of course you can add anything that isn't in the DB. There is no crowdsourced data, so you are spending time getting data into the system (you can attach eliteOCR so at least you dont' ahve to manually type in that stuff). You can actually take it to the next level (i just started this this week), and actually record all your actions to keep a true ships log of your activity. Its pretty awesome. You must have some version of MS Excel on your computer because the whole thing runs on VB, and you need to be able to run in full screen windowed mode. I am more than happy to walk through anyone who is interested on setup and usage.

If I'm in a pinch there's always the old standby Thrudds. I may use this if I'm in a different part of the galaxy and have no reference to whats around me. I'm not sure its as updated as it used to be though.

Similar to thrudds, and probably replacing it soon, is eddb.io. Unlike Thrudds, its backend takes feeds off of EDDN which is one of the more popular market data aggregation systems.

If you want to rely on EDDN or other crowdsourced feeds but want a standalone tool, I've heard Regulated Noise is one of the best. Its not a very user friendly UI (at least to me), but I think if you get it working right, its a pretty incredible tool.

Personally, I love the idea of going through space, logging and recording data myself with TCE. Its very rewarding to watch your data grow and expand, and it doesn't feel as "cheating" as just going to a webpage to find the answer to "where can I find Progenitor Cells for my mission".

Carlbear95 wrote:

Depends what I'm doing.

I personally use (and very highly endorse), Trade Computer Extension (TCE).
...

You must have some version of MS Excel on your computer because the whole thing runs on VB, and you need to be able to run in full screen windowed mode. I am more than happy to walk through anyone who is interested on setup and usage.

Damn, yeah, that one looked promising when I was browsing the ED Codex -- the combo of a personal data log and a really nice looking UI is definitely what I'm interested in finding -- but that Excel requirement killed it for me.

Maybe I'll take a look at Regulated Noise, though. Also, I've seen a few people talking about using Market Connector instead of OCR solutions, but I'm not sure how that works out either.

EDDN still requires OCR data. The difference is that if you connect to EDDN backend, you are relying on other peoples OCR EDDN is only as good as other players uploading data, and that generally means scanning and uploading data from OCR.. Most of these front ends have some sort of automated tool that does the screencapture and load, but you still have to scroll the trade window to capture all of the goods, and you almost always have to check the data.. 6s turn into 8s quite often with EliteOCR, so you have to worry about bad data, unless EDDN has some way of cleaning it up.

So if you want to build the market data, you'll want to do some of your own scanning and uploading as well, especially if you end up in less frequently visited places.

Yeah, I played around using EliteOCR and Slopey's when the concept was pretty new -- it was far less automated than it now seems to be in most of these tools. The difference that Market Connector seems to advertise is that it uses the barely touched App API to fetch station data and prepare it in the way the tools use, rather than requiring the OCR step, presumably to do the job a bit quicker and cleaner.

But yeah, reading more on TCE, it sounds like what I want -- except, again, that I'd have to have Excel. :\

I do really like the feature of small scale crowdsourcing by setting up an FTP server to share data with trusted friends, though.

zeroKFE wrote:

I do really like the feature of small scale crowdsourcing by setting up an FTP server to share data with trusted friends, though.

Well if you manage to get it up and running (or anyone else here) let me know. I have quite a few systems already in there. Honestly, if not for TCE there's a good chance I woudln't be playing right now. Its almost a meta game in itself to try to build as big a database as possible, and with these longer courrier missions, I'm adding even more systems than I was before.

I guess that mobile API is supposed to replace the need to do OCR, but it sounds like Frontier is still undecided on whether or not 3rd party folks should have access to it.

Carlbear95 wrote:

EDDN still requires OCR data. The difference is that if you connect to EDDN backend, you are relying on other peoples OCR EDDN is only as good as other players uploading data, and that generally means scanning and uploading data from OCR.. Most of these front ends have some sort of automated tool that does the screencapture and load, but you still have to scroll the trade window to capture all of the goods, and you almost always have to check the data.. 6s turn into 8s quite often with EliteOCR, so you have to worry about bad data, unless EDDN has some way of cleaning it up.

So if you want to build the market data, you'll want to do some of your own scanning and uploading as well, especially if you end up in less frequently visited places.

Actually the majority of tools reporting to EDDN now are mobile API tools (including mine). OCR seems to be dying.

All you have to do is watch the ROSS EDDN feed to see: http://ross.eddb.io/eddn/log

It's also really easy to just filter out the messages originating from OCR clients in the EDDN feed if you don't want them.

Tools like Trade Dangerous are really good at filtering out the remaining OCR derp. Combine that with ignoring anything older than say a day or two and you get really high quality data.

Looks like it.. I wish TCE used it then.. but oh well.

So we're in phase two of the groups to be added guys, which should be soon. Yay!

WOOT!

Orphu wrote:

Actually the majority of tools reporting to EDDN now are mobile API tools (including mine). OCR seems to be dying.

What tool is yours? Or did you just write one for yourself?

Somebody needs to come up with a smartphone app for Elite trading.

With in-app purchases that add more data.

zeroKFE wrote:
Wayfarer wrote:

CQC is....humbling

CQC is awesome. :D

finally tried it out since day one of the beta... nicer!... but yeah I had two great rounds with two MVP awards!—— and also two lowly bottom feeder rounds were I was a laser magnet

. So yeah- humbling but also pretty good. Should be more fun with GWJers and screaming and yelling at each other.

Carlbear95 wrote:
Orphu wrote:

Actually the majority of tools reporting to EDDN now are mobile API tools (including mine). OCR seems to be dying.

What tool is yours? Or did you just write one for yourself?

I wrote the EDAPI a plugin for Trade Dangerous that pulls prices from the API and imports it into your local TD database. It also publishes prices, shipyards, and ship modules to the EDDN.

https://bitbucket.org/orphu/edapi

https://bitbucket.org/kfsone/tradeda...

If anybody is still struggling with the Steam overlay bug where your mouse cursor is frozen when in certain parts, like the galaxy map, Steam has released a patch for it today.
"We have just published a hotfix for all users that should correct this issue. Please go to the Steam menu in the client, and choose Check For Steam Client Updates.
If you go to About Steam (in the Help menu), the package version will end in ...3308 if you have received the fix."

I had another interesting experience tonight with changes in the mission system.

I took a Black Box mission. First, they are now found in Salvageable Wreckage rather than signal sources.

The wreckage I found had four of them, so I planned to grab them all and sell the extras. As soon as I scooped the first one, a System Authority Ship jumped in and said he was going to scan me because he heard that I was carrying illegal goods. Funny thing is that the Black Boxes were illegal at my destination, but not where I was. In fact, the only thing in that system was a star. The scan of the Authority ship showed him as "Lawless" and "No Faction". I thought about just attacking him, but decided he might be from a faction I liked.

Instead, I went Silent, which apparently kept the scan from completing. I boosted away a few times, then turned off Silent and went to SC. I would have gone straight to hyper but my destination was behind a planet.

While in SC, waiting for the FSD to cool, the bugger interdicted me. I tried to evade because my shields were still down due to Silent Running. That wasn't going well, so I submitted, boosted, then jumped out of system.

All in all it was a neat little bit of gameplay, even if I don't understand why a System Authority ship was tracking me in a system with no planets!