Last night the notes of the new Elite: Dangerous beta patch 3.9 were made public on the official Frontier forums, with a lot of fixes and optimizations, as well as a few new features. Among the novelties is the update at last to version 0.4.3 of the Oculus SDK. We hope that this, along with the rest of the optimizations, will bring a performance improvement in our HMDs.
Other changes related to Oculus Rift support are the correction of the problem that caused the ship that rotates during the loading screen to disappear, correction of a bug that prevented putting full screen if we had the Rift in direct mode, correction of the problem that the posters on the galaxy map rotated when using the Rift and finally, the Alt + Enter key combination to switch between full screen and window will no longer work with Oculus.
The main new features are as follows:
- Permissions will be required to access systems within excluded regions, or specific systems that require permissions (such as the Solar system)
- Quests can give permissions as a reward
- Added branching of missions
- Added main faction missions
- Added new mission templates
- System states generate USSs (Unidentified Signal Sources) and missions
- Added multi-user voice communication support
- Added rare goods
- Added fixed event scenarios.
- Added imperial space station variants
- Custom Earth and Mars added to Solar System
- Free data of trade routes of the current system is offered when connecting to the station services
- The player is charged for non-local trade route data, and the galaxy map is guaranteed to be updated when it changes
- Added support for fines and latent loot boxes (we don’t really know what this means)
- Added main faction missions (Empire and Federation)
- Added permissions for systems and regions
- Added support for the free-track protocol in addition to TrackIR. This will allow the FaceTrackNoir to work with the game without additional settings
- Added support for space stations in supercruise
- Cargo drums that are not marked as stolen can be dropped
- Added more variety of Unidentified Signal Sources
The full patch notes can be read here. We warn you that the list is quite long. This patch leaves the game ready for the release of the Gamma version of it, which will take place on November 22, just two days later. The Gamma version will be almost identical to the game that they will officially launch on December 16, and its objective will be to polish the latest bugs that are detected in the face of said launch. Tonight the game data has been reset, and probably on November 22 the same will be done. There is not scheduled to be one on December 16, but it is not ruled out either.
The patch has been put online this morning and you can finally try this version of the game, much closer to the launch version.
