Exactly. It would probably take a few years until the engine is outdated anyway and introduce a lot of new bugs without fixing the old ones. The benefit would be a few better effects.
[snark-warning]
Unity can run interstellar space sims, so why are y'all shilling for Unreal?
(Unity as a game engine has its own set of problems, too. I don't believe that there is any single engine that is good at everything. FDev building their own engine was not too bad an idea, in my opinion)
My memory might be a bit foggy, but I'm absolutely certain that DB has covered these exact same problems regarding game engines and stellar/interstellar accuracy somewhere.
Probably... this is why CDProjectRED signed up a development support clause from Epic to smooth this transition...
I guess that wouldn't help much for ED. UE was desigend with Open World RPGs, action adventures, FPS, etc. in mind, it's no surprise that it's suitable for The Witcher. The requirements of Elite are quite unique though.
Egosoft uses their own engine for X as well. NMS?
Exactly.
And how is this related to Frontier's Cobra and Elite?
And no, i'm not talking about the differences between the games' scopes or how UE5 might not be suited for Elite, but more like the financial aspect
Are you somehow suggesting that Witcher 3 and/or CP2077 have the same market share with Elite?
Witcher 3 sold more than 30 millions copies (Elite sold like 4 millions by 2020)
CP2077 had $600 millions in sales by December 2020 (Elite got like 100 millions total income in 6 years)
Point is, CDPR can afford to switch Witcher4 to UE5.
They got the money and They probably got a good deal from Epic considering the success recorded by Witcher3
Elite is a niche game marketed for the geeks and '80s-'90s Elite fans.
And part of the FDev's success is using their own engine - which means they dont have to pay licensing fees nor support fees to a 3rt party engine dev.
As I said earlier, SC did that.
They had unlimited money, time and some of the most talented developers in the industry. They used one of the best engines available and IIRC they made a deal to get support by Crytek.
In the end there still is no game, they had a lawsuit with Crytek and they had to rewrite large parts of the engine because it simply wasn't suited for a space game.
Just imagine they used all that time and money to create their own engine, which does precisely what they want from it?
Picking the right tool for a job is an important decision.
This 5.1 update is mind blowing, it would be so easy to render habitable planets in it now with nanites.
1:1 Galaxy is certiainly exciting on the surface, but shallow in reality. After 8 years players only visited 0.5% of it. So it's just a 99% of wasted space.Luckily most players aren't playing Elite Dangerous.
My favourite things about Elite:
1. 1:1 Galaxy
2. Shared game world / BGS
3. Flight model
Everything else is a long way off. If they reduced scale for more activity I would probably leave immediately. (Which doesn't mean I wouldn't welcome better missions and gameplay!)
I hope in ED2 they will take this in to account, and make a much smaller galaxy, while putting freed resources in enhancing Star Systems experience, like adding Asteroids, Comets and lots of System trafic for starters.
The entire point of ED is that it is a simulated galaxy, that's what makes it different from every other space game out there with 100 or 1000 systems and planets. Without that ED would be just another space game and nothing special in a large group of often better space games. As it is it is unique, while arguably NMS has more systems they don't actually simulate a galaxy, that is what attracts many players to ED rather than any other game. There are plenty of other pace games out there with a limited number of systems and planets and a lot more in development and ED 2.0, if it ever appeared, would be competing in a crowded market.
So, how many space sims have been written in Unreal? Corollary: Ask yourself why buying an eye-candy (for the time) engine didn't help Chris Roberts produce a space game in 10 years.
A wasted space is still a wasted space. Why would it matter if you had 400 billion or 4 Billion, if you are not going to visit 396 billion stars anyway. 396 Billion stars will just become background skybox nothing more.
Whoosh, the sound of a point passing overhead. The entire basis of Elite Dangerous is a simulated galaxy, that's what David wanted to do from the very first release in 1984, it's what he aimed at in every release, it's why people who played the 1984 game still play this version, because of the vision. There are plenty of games around trying to do what you want? May I recommend Star Citizen?
I haven't look deep but i know that Everspace 2 is on Unreal Engine 4:
SC looked like a money scam to me after the first few years of following it's development, and it's still does, so i never plan to buy it. But Braben is gone, Odyssey was a disaster, and you don't need to be a game engineer or programmer to see Cobra Engine is just to hard to work on. They need to look forward beyond ED, is why ED 2 should be different. They can always keep ED as Legacy or just add some Narrative content with minimal maintenance on the game. But they can't get stuck in ED forever.
Well, already it's an offline single player game. Not enough information supplied to say it's a space sim. It looks like an FPS in ship form with limited environments right now. Let's see what they actually deliver next year, if it's even delivered next year.