Not at all, you are probably being too naive!Isn't that rather the point, you use Stellar Forge (or something similar) to do the space environment stuff and UE5 to do all the standard game stuff (stop me if I'm being too technical)?
Send them resume if you know how
(for cheap of coz).Side out jokes ... why do you think there is a slider "Terrain works" ? - it balances how YOUR pc spends GPU between render and generation, now imagine you need MORE things to be done by YOUR PC to match UE5 standards ... Probably, on RTX 6080 or 7080 it will be enough of GPU power for that. So FDevs will have a choice again: set UE 5 quality OR add random animals to planets
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Problem with Elite engine, is that it's extremly hard to add content to it. Which resulted in 8 years just 2 DLC's. While the game is already complete, so you don't need to add mutch, you also won't make much money on it, if you dont release paid content. So it's a dead end.
Just an example their
JWE + JWE2 games had already 13 DLC's in just 4 years.
Planet Zoo had 13 DLC's in 3 years.
So Frontier is not a stanger to DLC and making money, just in Elite Dangerous it's really hard to do it seems.
Is why it needs a new Engine if Elite franchise is to have a future beyond Elite Dangerous.
Except those games run on their engine too....
I have more doubts about the Elite Dangerous 2, than about the new engines. What can new engine bring to current space gameplay (OK, on-foot game there would be more beauty and movement).
Also, many remember the Kickstarter campain. That mad and hopeful time. Relatively succesfull campaign (would it be albeit half year earlier, maybe the long Saga about Star Citizen would be not even born..).
You think Frontier can repeat this campaign? Or it have enough money to beat all these AAA studios, which make nowadays spaceshooters?
IMHO, best way is not think about ED2, but evolve current game, to fulfill most promised things (ok, maybe not all of them).
Yes, this needs additional money, and next to payed DLCs, needs influx of new players. How we can aid in this, is a big question. Seems is needed much broader and living channel to communicate between developers and players, than halfdead suggestion forum.
PS. I guess main competitors to ED could be already mentioned Space Engine, with some kind of spacecraft gameplay and background story (if there will be interested investors), and maybe I-Novae (which suffered then badly and slashed its hopes, after long years of developing of its galaxy).
But then again, is new generation of players keen to these games?
Also, many remember the Kickstarter campain. That mad and hopeful time. Relatively succesfull campaign (would it be albeit half year earlier, maybe the long Saga about Star Citizen would be not even born..).
You think Frontier can repeat this campaign? Or it have enough money to beat all these AAA studios, which make nowadays spaceshooters?
IMHO, best way is not think about ED2, but evolve current game, to fulfill most promised things (ok, maybe not all of them).
Yes, this needs additional money, and next to payed DLCs, needs influx of new players. How we can aid in this, is a big question. Seems is needed much broader and living channel to communicate between developers and players, than halfdead suggestion forum.
PS. I guess main competitors to ED could be already mentioned Space Engine, with some kind of spacecraft gameplay and background story (if there will be interested investors), and maybe I-Novae (which suffered then badly and slashed its hopes, after long years of developing of its galaxy).
But then again, is new generation of players keen to these games?
Yes, that was my main point i was trying to make. They can make money with Cobra engine, they can make lots of DLC, so why we only had 2 DLCs in 8 years? It's a terrible engine for Elite Dangerous. It could take them another 4-5 years to release next DLC. They won't do it, they would rather spend that time on making a new game.
The main problem is, that Elite Franchise will die with Elite Dangerous. They can't make ED2 on Cobra engine, they can't make any spin-off game in Elite Dangerous Universe, cause the engine is the problem.
This is why if Elite wants to survive beyond Braben, beyond Elite Dangerouse, it needs a new engine.
What can ED2 bring?
A lot more warfare to both Space and on the Ground. SC while beeing scammy, it showed just how much Ship interriors are important in Space and on the Ground. It tight the 2 genres, Space and Ground, so good toghether, that it felt like they finnaly broke that barrier between fantasy and realism.
A lot more Exploration, far beyond just honking systems endlessly, for no effect on the game ( Cause that's what Exploration is in Elite Dangerous ).
A lot more realism, where planets and not just some invisible background images, and population matters.
With the right engine one can go far beyond what Elite, SC and NMS have achieved.
This still going, it's based on a false assumption the OP made, that UE5 supports a world map of 88,000,0000klms, everyone is mixing up measurements;
88,000,000km2 does not equate to an area 293ls across, because one is a measurement of area and the other is a measurement of length. The earth is over 500,000,000km2, this is a measurement of area, the diameter of the earth is of course only 12,742klms, which doesn't equate to anything in ls, all the discussions on the official UE5 pages deal with surface area, not volume, it's likely the volume of the area UE5 supports will be microscopic compared to the volume of even a small moon. Everyone need to get away from comparing km2 with linear kms, they are not the same thing!
Has Star Citizen achieved anything bar a half a billion $ sink for money 'pledged' toward development of a perpetual alpha?
When it is a released game it will at least have achieved something beyond being what appears to me, who 'pledged' my money some time ago, a scam.
I didn't say you are missing "my" point, I said you are missing the point of the 1:1 galaxy.
Forget the numbers. You know Star Citizen, right? Well they said they could have switched to UE5, but they would have to redo too much work that they already done. So it's possbile to create space games on UE5, it's not some handicap engine you trying to make it to be.
After 8 years, and only exploring 0.5% of it - there is no point in 1:1 galaxy in a game. It was a good experiment, and a good achievement, but it's terrible for the games.I didn't say you are missing "my" point, I said you are missing the point of the 1:1 galaxy.
Exploration in Elite Dangerous, is just honking from system to system - why, cause the galaxy is so big they can't add much to it anymore. Bigger is not better, Elite is a perfect example of that.
Your point only makes sense if the purpose of the 1:1 galaxy would be a wider variety of gameplay. It isn't. I already told you, why do you want me to repeat myself?
Everyone knew that the galaxy would never be fully explored. Again: That's not the point of it.
The point of the 1:1 galaxy is to give you a true sense of scale and freedom, the illusion of a real galaxy. That feeling wouldn't be there if there were invisible borders around the bubble. It wouldn't be there either if the galaxy would be limited to 10000 stars. It's OK if you don't get that feeling. But many people do and that just means you are disqualified from the discussion. You can't talk about something you don't understand. Well you can, but don't be surpised when people find your thoughts irrelevant.
Illusion at the cost of the comets, real blackholes, asteroid fields, and all the other crazy phenomenas you can find in space. And it gets more, the price is also the emptiness of landble planets, the flatness of surfaces in Odyssey, the tiny new outpost with just few npcs, the 4 repeatble concourses for 15 000 star ports, the inability to build anything, or having a player driven market, i can keep going, but i think you get the point.
That Illusion is what robbed you of have a more realistic exprience of Space. Even the Space flying mechanics are that of a Airplane not a space ship.
Freedom is irrelevant if you are still stuck in your 4x4 basement, cause that's what has happend, when all the players in the game only explored 0.5% of the galaxy. We are still stuck in the basement and will never see the real world.
Are you just randomly imagining things? The 1:1 galaxy is not the reason you can't have more crazy phenomenas.
I think real problem is - low use of it outside Elite so it does not have a lot of skilled personnel. Meaning you cannot use current usual business practices of development.
You must have old programmer there with knowledge who slowly do things.
Because current practices in industry are - do some trash, then wait user response and fix bugs. Guess this fails on Cobra Engine because they cannot replace programmers freely.
JWE, JWE2, Planet Zoo , F1 Manager - i don't think there is a problem with Cobra programmers in Frontier. 1:1 Galaxy is the problem, always was. It's why we can't have nice things i meantioned in my last post.
Space Engine has black holes, asteroid fields, comets, and other crazy phenomena, and it renders multiple 1:1 galaxies, all on the client computer (no server required). As for all those planets being empty, well, that's pretty realistic. Real life isn't Star Wars galaxy, LOL.
Now I will agree with you in regards to the size of the Bubble. I do wish we had a much smaller Bubble with a lot more detail per-system, where each system felt huge and unique and full. By making the Bubble big, it actually feels small, because each solar system has less attractions than my tiny home town in rural America. If the Bubble consisted of say, 12 star systems, each similar to a zone in a typical MMO (Elder Scrolls is my point-of-reference) with tons of unique things to see and do per planet in that system, this would appeal to me much more than the copy-n-paste of thousands of nondescript systems in Elite's Bubble. However, Elite is Elite, going all the way back to 1984, where quantity trumps quality in regards to inhabited systems. This is just the way of things. We'll have to wait for Starfield for the kind of detailed systems I dream of.
Thank you for the invitation!
SC? Every game engine they have used has had to undergo MASSIVE custom alteration to even halfway work, and is SC released yet? Nope, so let's not compare a space game that's been in Alpha for ten years with one star system and a few landable planets and stations with a space ship game that has hundreds of thousands of stations, billions of star systems and trillions of planets. There's no comparison, and to claim they said they could have switched to UE5, that's a just a meritless claim, nothing to back it up, until a proper space game comparable to ED actually uses the UE5 engine it's all just speculation piled on imagination.
Also no one here has claimed UE5 is a handicapped engine, that's you just strawmanning the point, everyone is saying UE5 was never designed to make space games, it's very much an excellent tool for what it does, yes I have read up on it and watched the tech videos, it's an amazing engine, but it's not a space engine, it's a world building engine not a galaxy building engine!