COBRA v2

shadragon

shadragon
With all of the livestream Q+A's, we keep hearing how certain features, well a lot of them really, are hard to change because of limits in the COBRA development engine. I went looking for info and found this on the Frontier web site:

COBRA Development Technology & Tools

Our development pipeline includes both industry standard packages and our own state-of-the-art in-house COBRA tools and technology.

COBRA has been carefully planned, developed and evolved since 1988. (emphasis mine)

We implement our own cutting-edge techniques and tools, and supplement this with licensed middleware for 'commodity' uses as appropriate.

This offers a stimulating development environment that allows us to maximise the performance we extract from hardware platforms and fully leverage the efforts and talents of our people.

Cobra allows us to deliver industry-leading gameplay innovations and efficient multi-platform development.*
Click to expand...

If accurate, COBRA will be thirty years old next year.

Even with regular refreshes in code, this is still a dated engine. COBRA is doing amazing things with Elite and several other products, but is COBRA restricting development because of age and inflexibility? Is it time to get a new modular engine that can be added to or amended so we can have additional features in missions, on the fly HUD color changes, and the several dozen others things everyone says would be great, but they can't be handled under current technology?

Very little has been released about COBRA and its capabilities (or weaknesses), but I need to ask the question regardless. Is it time for COBRA v2 to take Elite: Dangerous the rest of the way?

VALVe went from Source to Source 2 for similar reasons and Source isn't as old as COBRA, originally coming out in 2004.

I know it's unlikely that the devs can comment in detail, but I invite them to do so, at least in broad strokes.

Cheers.

* - Source: https://www.frontier.co.uk/our_technology/
 

Marc_Hicks

Marc_Hicks
Now, I am no computer expert, but I suspect the next big leap forward for COBRA is when they can shift to 64 bit processing.....something which I believe is meant to happen after the launch of the 2.3 update.
 

imski

imski
We already have 64 bit clients for E: D and Horizons.

The next step is dropping the 32 bit clients which should happen around end of Q2 this year, if what the Brabs said last year holds true.
 
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Retrograde

Retrograde
It's a remarkably versatile engine - supporting both 32 and 64 bit windows, mac, and both consoles. Earlier I was a bit worried that it might not be too strong on animation (skinning, morphing), but Planet Coaster and the holo-me avatars have put that concern to rest. Cobra even supports deformable terrain and massive NPC AI numbers in Planet Coaster, so that's very promising for Elite. They might consider a middleware solution for lipsync animations.

With the engineer bases, FD added the ability to manually place models on planet surfaces. So I'm guessing that the back end toolkit has seen as much development as the front end that we see when we play the game. I'd love to see a video on back end development. The one they did on planet tectonics is still one of my favourites. :)
 
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Ian Skippy

Ian Skippy
Retrograde said:
It's a remarkably versatile engine - supporting both 32 and 64 bit windows, mac, and both consoles. Earlier I was a bit worried that it might not be too strong on animation (skinning, morphing), but Planet Coaster and the holo-me avatars have put that concern to rest. Cobra even supports deformable terrain and massive NPC AI numbers in Planet Coaster, so that's very promising for Elite. They might consider a middleware solution for lipsync animations. )
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I dont understand much of it, but apparantly the way it works the number of people is irrelevant for the computation demands, as they explained in one of the PC dev vids. Something about flow modeling or whatever magic.
 

Yaffle

Volunteer Moderator
Yaffle
picommander said:
Funny enough, my second thought right after posting, was Linux. ;)
So you're right, UNIX would have been the better answer as it's older and Linux is based on it after all, but both are not exactly game engines, aren't they?
Though you CAN play games on both as one of the first "graphical" games were played on UNIX - in ASCII mode.
I actually played such a game for many years, even in this mode but on a Linux system.
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I was being flippant, I confess. In essence Unix is the engine of many OS, so it's kind of the same. Unreal is quite old, 1998 there is gamebryo from 1991. Of course, neither is the same.

There was an interview with David I can't find where he was asked if any of his code was still in there, and he didn't think so, but the odd line may have survived all this time. It's a bit Theseus' Warship, or Cromwell's Hammer, or Trigger's Broom depending on your choice of metaphor.

Somewhere in the dark recesses of the SC thread (don't go there if you like your sanity) Ben Parry, an ex FD graphics dude commented that Frontier was fanatical about documenting everything, which while tedious beyond belief is incredibly helpful for them.
 

Marc_Hicks

Marc_Hicks
imski said:
We already have 64 bit clients for E: D and Horizons.

The next step is dropping the 32 bit clients which should happen around end of Q2 this year, if what the Brabs said last year holds true.
Click to expand...

Sorry, yes, this is what I was referring to.
 
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