Shooting stuff might pay a bit more now.
The latest in a never-ending cascade of pre-release incremental updates to Elite: Dangerous pushes the game to Gamma 2.03, and claims to increase the payments for AI bounty hunting. I’ve not been in to explore just how much they’ve changed yet, but it’s a positive step towards making bounty hunting more of an attractive career option.
To be honest, I’ve mostly been avoiding it. It’s dangerous work and pays a whole lot less (especially after ammo costs and repairs) than doing some basic trading; so upping the incentive with some larger payouts seems wise.
Gamma 2.03 is out now, so you should all be able to upgrade through the Elite: Dangerous launcher (assuming you have Gamma access.) If this one resets all my keybindings for about the third time in as many days, I will not be terribly impressed.
Still, it might be worth it for the apparent improvements to the galaxy map and (if you have it) TrackIR.
In addition to Gamma 2.03, issue 53 of the newsletter has also appeared. It implies that the Voyager 2 secret is not the only Easter Egg out there …
Here are the update notes. Elite: Dangerous will be released on 16 December.
- Seperate ‘UI Back’ into its own bindable input (Note this might affect players with custom bindings!)
- Made backspace the default back button for all control schemes to ensure it’s always at least bound to something. Control pad schemes also have B bound to back too
- Fix repro’d case of spinning ship lock on load
- Fix soft lock when buying data and then going to system view
- Ensure that we do not send a webrequest that will result in a module being attached to a slot that it should not fit on (fixes broken decal save crash)
- Fix for ATI driver crash seen when the Imperial capital ship warps in
- Fix client-side bankruptcy bug – clear player’s fines & bounties from the respawn system, not the one that happened to be selected
- Fixed assert caused by trying to generate planets in a nebula
- Fix for missions not showing up when moving servers
- Fix to cobra’s front hardpoint door animation being swapped
- Reduce memory footprint of route finder to compensate for larger search radius
- Refresh the mission list if we initially fail to accept or update a mission
- Split WearAndTear into visual and gameplay parts, repaired separately
- Prevent dropping out of supercruise into capital ships
- Remove Electosmelters from cargo drop
- A couple of galaxy map trade route improvements:
- Switching on an individual commodity will now automatically toggle on its parent category
- Added buttons for selecting all/none
- Track IR fixes:
- No TrackIR roll in cockpit fixed
- Sluggishness when using TrackIR 5 fixed
- Added some logging for accepting missions failing and updating missions failing
- Fix for plotting jumps in the galaxy map which are too long
- Added support for AV8R01 by adding it as an alternate AV8R03 scheme
- Auto downgrades support added (automatic graphic settings)
- Commodities market UI cargo count doesn’t update when discarding cargo fixed
- Fix the problem where routes plotted with jumps greater then 20LY would not show up on the navigation panel
- Galaxy generation optimisation
- Tweaked shadow setting in the high and medium presets
- Salvage missions now correctly spawn objectives
- Make normal slavery collect missions give cash not just rep
- Fix for galaxy map sometimes showing solid lines on plotted routes when they should have been dotted due to insufficient fuel
- Fixed trade route filters stop working if you use Clear while a heading is expanded
- Upped AI bounties to make bounty hunting more viable as a career
And a server-side update too!
- Prevent paintjobs and decals being applied to unsupported ship slots
- Allow exploration data worth 0 credits to be sold
- Activate the link between commodity markets and faction simulation
- Fix some failing requests for starport news
