Elite: Dangerous pops out a surprise Beta 3.91 update

Surprise! You’re being shot at.

Ahh, it seems like only yesterday when Elite: Dangerous was being updated to Beta 3.90. That’s probably because it was; but the times are changing fast and the game has ticked over another digit to become Beta 3.91.

For the most part this patch is about hotfixing a few bits and pieces wrong with Beta 3.90. Elite: Dangerous’ launcher should give you the option to upgrade to the newest version when you load it up.

Here’s what’s changed:

– Avoid crashing if neither the main texture nor the alt texture are usable, instead fallback to the same behaviour we would use if the main texture did not exist
– Replaced a missing station prototype with one that exists
– Survive the situation where fused text meshes (and other types) have more characters than the maximum. 4 “Paul-Friederichs Expedition Base Camp” station names fused together are too much for the current maximum
– Prevent crash when in a location with no faction
– Improve entry into first location – could help with some peculiar connection issues
– Fix crash opening UI panel using left shift
– Made the the new freetrack protocol cope with missing functions in the dll. This should prevent the crash on startup some users are seeing
– Reload all ammo no longer free
– More consistent, and more frequent USSs
– Don’t allow child stars to be considered for mission variables
– Fix “Missing faction for location polity” error win tutorial stations
– Planet generation: Changed the way that the effects are loaded – prevent connection loss is texture generation takes too long
– Changed the star hotspots calculation to cope with the asynchronous behaviour of the effect loading
– Fix AI ships not being able to fire gimballed multi-cannons
– Fix the difference in repair costs due to not taking into account the faction relationship of the player for that station
– Speculative fix for failure to set up a talk channel
– Fixes for typos in mission branching
– Fixed X55 binding file so it should work correctly
– Focus now passed back to game after alt-tabbing
– Increased the cool down for Frame Shifting to 40 seconds for all ships
– Moved the blast shield animation into the pad raising state (added a delay on the small pad launch state so that the blast shield doesn’t raise again straight away
– Additional telemetry to help understand why some location entries take extended amounts of time
– Fix broken pulse laser audio
– Refactored special treatment of ship rtpcs when arriving from supercruise
– Reduce unnecessary web traffic in interdictions
– Some shadowing fixes
– Remove Russian as a supported language. Because it’s not a supported language yet
– Adding some fixes for malformed newsfeed symbols
– Bail out of application startup if there are no suitable display modes available