Can the Cobra engine handle detailed populated planets with cities?
- Thread starter BlackSpaceCowboy
- Start date
SC would give their left nut to have use of the Cobra Engine.
The populated worlds are so far in the future that even suppositions are kind of hard to make. Guessing games bore me, I'd rather suffer in anticipation and suspense.
The majority of ED owners enjoy the game.
The very vocal group who dislike it are a tiny minority IMO.
No game can please everyone.
I'm sorry you are not satisfied with the game and I wish you the best of luck in your future gaming.
Now go darken some other forum, you tedious person.
o7
I am perfect. Thanks for noticing.
The majority of ED owners enjoy the game.
The very vocal group who dislike it are a tiny minority IMO.
No game can please everyone.
I'm sorry you are not satisfied with the game and I wish you the best of luck in your future gaming.
Now go darken some other forum, you tedious person.
o7
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Post 2.2 I had a RX 480 4GB which had problems like this. Then it died and while awaiting a replacement, a GTX 1060 6GB I borrowed worked as smooth as silk. I sold my replacement Sapphire RX 480 4GB and bought a top notch Asus Strix RX 480 8GB on sale. The game ran super smooth and post 2.3 continued to run super smooth for a couple of weeks. Now I have the stutter on exiting supercruise at stations and exiting at planetery bases return. Loads of other people have the same problem, many more don't and looking at the bug reports it's not confined to AMD, Nividia, a specific card manufacturer, raw gpu power or ram size. I also tried the game on a GTX 960 2GB and despite the obvious need to reduce settings a little, it was also smooth with no frame drops. Strange stuff I can't put my finger on but I don't think it's the engine at fault per se.
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These replies are.....rather odd.
Will it be able to handle it?
In short it is frontier's in house engine, they can make it able to handle it.
Rocks have high impact on performance?
Do you even know what is going on, you do not seem to understand what is going on? your graphic card is working, not directly on graphics but on generating the terrain of a PLANET, yes it doesn't do 'all' of it at once, but it does do it a lot, if your performance is hit by planets a lot, try lowering the terrain work load, this will allow higher fps at the cost of slower generation of terrain, something you might not even notice.
Most of this is down to poor optimisation of the cobra engine?
Or, you know, poorly set up computer on users behalf, this is often the case, and it isn't an insult, many simply do not know enough about their computer to know what or what isn't happening and how to optimise it, and no many 'optimisation' programs do exactly the opposite, take windows 10's new gaming mode, if you have it enabled and you aren't maxing out your computer with other stuff then games at the same time as you are gaming, you will actually lose performance, I'm running a 970 GTX on ultra, and have butter smooth 60 fps at 1080p more or less everywhere except a few network related locations.
So yeah, I think something might be wrong with your computer? is your cpu powerful enough to feed your graphic card?
"My graphic card is such and such top of the line overclocked" really doesn't say much if it is getting limited somewhere else, is your gpu utilisation at 100 when your performance drops? did you even check that before blaming the game?
Yes, in space with just ships, Elite isn't really that demanding, stations are more, planets are most, planetary bases probably the most.
So yeah, Cobra is their home grown engine, they can add or remove or optimise whatever they want and feel like, unlike other games that use commercial engines where they then need to first figure out how it works and how to do something best on that engine, here frontier knows the engine fully. And that said, what Elite is doing is significantly more complicated then most other games out there, but yes, it isn't something that is easily 'visible' to the average gamer.
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![[VR] Marrs](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/79/79007.jpg?1634042868){kind=avatar}
Given that Frontier own the engine, if it can't do what they want it to currently, then presumably they can change it so that it does. It's not like it's an actual engine sat on David Braben's desk with wires coming out of it.
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Considering the work they done in Planet Coaster with the same engine, you can sure bet the engine can handle it. And that game is supposed to be more difficult to handle than ED since there's the unpredictability of how complex players will design their coasters. With ED they can simply put limits on their procedural generation.
I am worried there might be a lack of variation in the assets, though. Sometimes stations and bases feel extremely lacking in variety to me. So it might feel like cities are just differently random placements of the same 10 different buildings.
I am worried there might be a lack of variation in the assets, though. Sometimes stations and bases feel extremely lacking in variety to me. So it might feel like cities are just differently random placements of the same 10 different buildings.
It likely comes down to your in-game settings. Folks like me who are running the most powerful GPU currently available are running all of our games with MAXed settings. I also of course have my NVIDIA control panel set for DSR x 4 and all the usual stuff.
There could be specific assets which are only called if the user is running with all settings at Ultra/High whichever is the highest available. Supersampling also at 2.0, not the usual 1.0 because the difference in clarity of the menu text, especially in 1080p is very noticeably sharper with SS set to 2.0.
I seriously doubt the guy with the 970 is running or even able to run the game at these same settings, including DSR at x 4 with V-sync ON.
Lower settings will allow the engine to spit out lower resolution textures. Textures that may not suffer from the same optimization bug/glitch/whatever issues that the ULTRA or HIGH version of that same asset may have, and thus they see no stutter in these areas.
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Not sure why you'd consider these replies... odd... as they're factual observations based on the game that exists today. The frame rate does drop dramatically on these lifeless rocks, and note how FDev keep futzing with this aspect lowering detail trying to improve performance. The stations were for the longest time terrible FPS hogs, and although FDev finally improved them the FPS still drops quite a lot for what appears to be very basic elements with little complexity. So there's a great deal of evidence to suggest the Cobra engine cannot handle much beyond what is in the game today.
What is odd is declaring the Cobra is fully capable of much greater things without having an ounce of proof. (And sorry but any CGI videos showing "what if's" don't count). Let's see the Cobra engine actually doing something like the OP asked about. There's nothing to show it can do anything like this right now.
Not sure why Planet Coaster comes up as some sort of example for Elite benefitting from it's Cobra engine implementation. Start with the multiplayer parts of PC and handling all the instancing - oh wait, it's a single player game. How about the billions of galaxies, large surface areas required for planets, comm's to servers and P2P, and the background sim - oh wait again, none of this exists in PC. Yeah, PC is quite a different game and likely means nothing significant to the Cobra engine implemented in Elite.
Who knows maybe the fact is PC is also being held back by the Cobra engine. None of us know for sure.
One last point is to remember just how many graphical items have been removed from the game since early beta. Remember the cool freezing windshield effects for one? This and many other elements were removed or reduced due to performance reasons - the Cobra engine couldn't handle these elements. There's been many posts highlighting the downgrades that have occurred since the game first released as well. The game wasn't downgraded to make a better experience for players. That too would be odd.
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Good points made here! Since I don't reply to apologists, I'm glad to see your comments.
For me, the second I saw frame drops with a 1080ti running at the theoretical limit on air, any doubt that these issues are in-game engine related were immediately eliminated. I compare this card's performance on far more demanding new games and laugh that this Cobra Engine is so unoptimized that even a 1080ti running with a 2070mhz boost clock can't bail it out and save it from its lackluster frame delivery speeds.
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Spread the message somewhere else then because your posts in this thread are off-topic. The question is whether, in theory, the Cobra engine can handle cities. Your opinion that the game won't be around for long enough for us to find out doesn't actually address this. Your complaints about engineering and multicrew have nothing do with anything, because that's not the topic at hand. By your logic no one should be able to say anything about the future of this game because in your opinion it has no future. Ridiculous.
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Another in satisfied customer, Out of like thosands of people that like it
I like to think ed as a burger , it's good , but it could always be better and made faster
My question is, can the devs? Can you imagine how much work it is to build one city? Now think of the dozens of cities on any given world. Now think of the many, many inhabited worlds.
These cities are going to need to be procedurally generated to pull this off. Now David Braben has an affinity for procedural generation, so perhaps they can pull it off, but it will be a challenge I'm sure.
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OK well I ignored the rest of your guff. I'm currently powered off looking up from the planet surface at a flower ship with a very frozen windscreen - so no - it hasn't been removed... not at all.
And for the record, I'm playing quite happily on a core2-duo quad q6600 (i think as can't be bothered to look at precise name) which must be 9-10 years old with a 4gb nVidia 750ti card - and high/ultra settings for mostly 30-60fps - so this cobra engine you diss isn't that unforgiving is it?
(yes there are lower fps exception in stations, which i think is perhaps due to ai ship docking and my pc's limited cpu - still 20fps+ tho)
[edit] frosty
before I crashed below the flower - but frozen + shutdown non the less
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Its definitely a challenge. There have been many challenges already overcome, and many yet to follow. They may not overcome all. Some folks here just dont grasp that just because one would like something doesnt mean it is easy to do, or one is entitled to get it. In that sense spacegame communities often have the mental approach of toddlers.
Dont make the mistake of assuming that the chronic complainers here have even the most rudimentary understanding of what an engine is or does.
What's the rest of you system like? I have a non ti, in 2D I can run at ultra, with no stutter and I turn SS up. I'm not being forgiving of a game and accepting standards others might not - I spent hours getting it running at its best for VR, using all manner of monitoring and OC tools;
Before I upgraded my MB/CPU/RAM I would get stutter, occasionally. BUS speeds, HDD load times, etc, were restricting my video cards full potential.
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