It's beginning to feel like there is some sort of conspiracy to stop the players from solving this mystery - it has been brought up a few times over the years, but never gets much traction and always seems to fade into obscurity. Years ago I posted about this on the Thargoid Anomaly Coalition Discord server... but at some point that server (along with all my research) seems to have disappeared (presumably the server owner closed their account).
I posted it on the Elite Dangerous subreddit a couple of weeks ago after someone reminded me about it, which gained some traction and sparked several lines of investigation... But just over a week later the subreddit moderators deleted the post without providing any notice, explanation or removal reason, then deleted my attempts to direct anyone who appeared to be following any line of investigation to another place where they could continue the investigation, then proceeded to shadow ban me from the entire subreddit, again without providing any sort of notice or explanation (presumably in retaliation for me being critical of their actions, criticism which they have now only reaffirmed was warranted).
Let's see if posting it to lemmy.world fares any better! Here's the original post from Reddit:
I'm sure we've all seen that something appears slightly off in the loading screen (more noticeable in VR since it is pinned to your face Edit: and it seems low graphics quality and messing with gamma can make it easier to see), but most people have just dismissed this as some sort of graphics glitch - however it is very clear to me that it is indeed something hidden there that to the best of my knowledge no one has deciphered. A couple of years ago CMDR Glitterbeard posted this cleaned up version on Twitter (relatively spoiler free. Edit: Apologies to anyone who currently would like nothing to do with X, but consider this link as historical context only which predated all recent controversy):
https://x.com/o7_Glitterbeard/status/1567419597363761152
That perked some interest, but didn't get noticed by enough players and was quickly forgotten.
Some of you may know that I'm one of the main authors of 3DMigoto, a modding tool originally created for adding stereoscopic 3D (not VR) rendering to games, but which has since become a more generally useful DX11 graphics modding tool, and indeed a lot of you will already be using it since it forms the basis of EDHM and CPM. Using this tool I extracted the texture used for this pattern on the loading screen:
CLICK HERE TO REVEAL THE RAW TEXTURE EXTRACTED FROM THE GAME (Canonn members should be aware that using these may be against your player group rules, hence the spoiler tags)
Here's a cleaned up version with the black lines removed:
The raw dds file can also be found here: https://darkstarsword.net/files/elite-dangerous-loading-screen/ .
There is without any question something hidden there - this is not a glitch or an accident, that texture has been very intentionally crafted that way by Frontier. I've extracted the texture, now it's your turn to help decipher it!