Hi everyone,
This weeks dev update sees a new minor release with update 1.1.05 including various fixes and tweaks as part of our ongoing support for the game.
Last weeks newsletter included a statement about support and improving our response. This is important to us not just from a customer support perspective but also from the dev teams point of view. As well as hiring more staff weve also been reviewing procedures so there will be some changes coming in how bugs are reported and tracked. Therell be more information on this once everything is in place, we anticipate this being within the next couple of weeks.
Update 1.2 is one of the major focuses for the team with the headline Wings feature. PC Gamer interviewed Sandy this week and you can read it on their website:
http://www.pcgamer.com/elite-dangero...er-with-wings/
Theres already been a fair amount of discussion on what was revealed in the article. One aspect was the why we selected four pilots as being the wing size. When it came to deciding on a maximum wing size, we decided that four was, in this particular case, the magic number. In addition to the obvious benefits of getting multiple wings into a single session and ensuring that a single wing can always be outnumbered, there was the less sexy, but equally real issue of making sure the feedback for wings integrated well with the HUD.
Interface is always important and with Elite: Dangerous, weve ensured the ships HUD is kept in-world. This improves the player experience, but it also makes it much more challenging to update. With wings, weve kept to the tenet of a clear combat view, updating the Comms and Info panels to allow us to bring in wing elements without compromising canopy visibility.
One of the new additions with Wings is the ability to lock-on to your wing mates. The lock-on is a new feature specifically for wings. It lets you lock the details of a wingmans ship into your nav-computer and soft-slave your frame shift drive to theirs. Even though weve relaxed the limits for using wakes of wingmen (you can be travelling faster and farther away and still drop in/out of super cruise), a wing lock-on automates FSD use all you need to do is fly close enough. You still need to make sure youre eligible to make the jump, but it should dramatically help in time critical situations, such as when your wingman is being interdicted.
The lock-on will also hopefully generate some interesting choices, as each member of the wing can only lock-on to a single target. So you might, as a wing, favour a closed loop array, where each wingman locks on to a different member, ensuring that eventually all of the wing will be able to use the automatic soft-slave effect, or you might decide to protect the weak, where all members lock-on to the same wingman, potentially speeding up process: if the target drops from super cruise, all lock-on member will be able to drop out at the same time, rather than follow each other in sequence.
As well as the multiplayer centric Wings there will be additions that apply to everyone whether you play in multiplayer or in solo. Changes to USSs are being made so you can scan them in advance to gain an impression of the scale of the signal beware the larger scale USSs as they might be too dangerous, especially if youre alone!
The Wings update doesnt just aid players NPCs get the ability to fly in groups of their own, so while flying in supercruise you can encounter flights of authority ships, pirates or a trader groups.
