Will Elite Dangerous have Atmospheric Landings, Space Legs or Procedural Cities by 2019?

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And why not integrate the GTA V engine the following week too!

Have you tried Space Engine software? It was made by pretty much one guy in his spare time and it looks light years ahead of what ED galaxy can generate at the moment. Visually speaking I would love ED game play in SE engine. :D
 
technology is the same. The only difference is today we have memory and CPU power that is billions of times bigger and faster.

Not even the instruction set is the same as it was back then. What you are assuming is easy, is way more complex than you might imagine.

Have you tried Space Engine software? ...
Yes, but what you are asking is like assuming you can ram a Tesla battery inside a Ferrari and get the best of both :p
 
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This is what I think, and just my personal answer to the topic question.

Elite Dangerous will never get Atmospheric Landings, Space Legs or Procedural Cities.

It will be for the sequel Elite II. Frontier will drop the "Dangerous" moniker and reuse the original name for the sequel Elite II. A sequel will increase interest and sales again, and create the financial backing for doing huge changes to the game engine like what this thread is asking.

That said, Elite II will continue using the same persistent galaxy from Elite Dangerous.

Ouch, that hurt...
 
Have you tried Space Engine software? It was made by pretty much one guy in his spare time and it looks light years ahead of what ED galaxy can generate at the moment. Visually speaking I would love ED game play in SE engine. :D

I know, I was just being sarcastic at how easy you implied it was to bolt in another engine ;)

It it impressive how much some of these engines/games developed by a handful of people seem to offer!
 
A lot can be done with PG if you're good at it, anyone seen limit theory? One guy all PG.

Regarding PG cities, it's not hard to do, the problem is WHAT to do with it. A lot of players still run this game on potato PCs, and just load up GTA and watch your fps is you got cars and NPC running around.

Take FSX we can fly over big cities, they even got traffic, but you can't land nor can you go there, and if you do, they don't look pretty close up.

So the problem is not just how to do it, the problem is why are they there.

I don't mind if they only were pretty backdrops like in FSX, and the way to control it would be a strict ATC assigning you a route to follow to your pad for docking.

If you deviate from it death :D

Then we could have wast cities to fly over but not land or drive in.
 
how can you think SC will put you into an instance when you arrive at destination?
multiplayer instances have to be created even if the engine is seamless.
Courios how the fiew seconds needed by ED to put you into a multiplayer instance is called loading screen and the 8 minutes in which you remain in a straight line in QT waiting to reach you destination isn't.

Do you really think SC won't have instances?

Surprise. It will. All games have them. Way smoke and mirrors work might differ, but end result is the same.

I never said anything about SC. You guys are reading way way more into what I said than what I actually said. I have no idea how SC's instancing works but I do know in ED you can't actually go from station to station or whatever without loading new instances. You can get to the point it's supposed to be at but it's not enough. I've tried.
 
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I never said anything about SC. You guys are reading way way more into what I said than what I actually said. I have no idea how SC's instancing works but I do know in ED you can't actually go from station to station or whatever without loading new instances. You can get to the point it's supposed to be at but it's not enough. I've tried.

Not true, you can, it all depends on how far from each other they are.

I've done it, so the instance is a bubble and within that bubble you can.

You can also travel from one base to another on a planet, they must be in the same instance I guess.
 
I never said anything about SC. You guys are reading way way more into what I said than what I actually said. I have no idea how SC's instancing works but I do know in ED you can't actually go from station to station or whatever without loading new instances. You can get to the point it's supposed to be at but it's not enough. I've tried.

There is a video just two pages ago showing that you are wrong...
 
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I never said anything about SC. You guys are reading way way more into what I said than what I actually said. I have no idea how SC's instancing works but I do know in ED you can't actually go from station to station or whatever without loading new instances. You can get to the point it's supposed to be at but it's not enough. I've tried.

Yes you can. Look 2 pages back for a video that proves otherwise. What you can't do is go from system to system, as the hyperjumps are a loading screen. Instances have nothing to do with it.
 
I never said anything about SC. You guys are reading way way more into what I said than what I actually said. I have no idea how SC's instancing works but I do know in ED you can't actually go from station to station or whatever without loading new instances. You can get to the point it's supposed to be at but it's not enough. I've tried.

You can go from station to station without 'loading' whatever you mean. ED will slowly disolve network sessions and unload graphical assets of one station and when closing to another one it will create another peer to peer session and load it's graphical assets - all invisible to you. Is that loading screen? If it's not, what it is then?

As I explained it is all smoke and mirrors. No one cares what gets loaded and where. If it feels immerse, then it is good enough.

Seriously people, this is worst way to drive development. No one outside hype bubble cares about seamless, and no loading screen nonsense. Either game is slow and loads everything in background (8 mins QD trip), or it uses nice (in my opinion) tricks as supercruise. Stations appears *instantly* as I jump out of supercruise when no one is around. Is that loading screen too? If it's half a second question is - WHO CARES?

What's important is gameplay.
 
Regarding PG cities, it's not hard to do, the problem is WHAT to do with it. A lot of players still run this game on potato PCs, and just load up GTA and watch your fps is you got cars and NPC running around.

Take FSX we can fly over big cities, they even got traffic, but you can't land nor can you go there, and if you do, they don't look pretty close up.

So the problem is not just how to do it, the problem is why are they there.

Exactly. You can have a PG city, but how many building interiors do you have to model? And how far would you go? Make it so you can enter every room? Open every drawer? Move every mug? Press every button?

You can model crowds, but do you model them so you can interact with every person? Get them to react to every conceivable action? Each in their own unique way? With their own unique voice dialogue?

It ain't easy building a world.
 
First off, said space sim that shall not be named has a history of promises and poor delivery. They provide a lot of eye candy on their tech demos (like said cities and atmospheric landing), but are still eons away from actual release. They just show those features off to beg for more money. In other words, it's best to compare Elite to an actual released and fully functioning game as opposed to one with a lot of empty promises, yeh?

That being said, I'm nowhere near as optimistic about ED as I once was. I still love the game, but 2017 was a horrible year for this game. 2.3's signature feature, multicrew, is an unmitigated disaster that was soooooo far below the hype, they may as well not have released it at all. No, seriously ... releasing multicrew in it's current form was an epic fail move on their part, and they should have manned up and delayed 2.3 as long as possible, even if it meant having 2.3 and 2.4 come out at the same time.

As for 2.4 ... aside from some really nice quality of life changes for long range exploration, and the fact that you can shoot at Thargoids now, it brought players *nothing* other than a promise to rework some core mechanics in 2018. Which in itself means no new features either.

It's as if somewhere in 2017, Frontier's upper management decided that ED wasn't worth their time as much as their huge cash cow Planet Coaster, and stripped the development team down to nothing. There's really no reason 2.3 and 2.4 should have been as spectacularly fail as they ended up being.

So I won't say I'm going to be super negative about the future of the game, but I've certainly gone from fanboy optimistic to ... lukewarm neutral.
 
I posted the following in another thread, but its also relevant to this discussion:

"RSI has announced procedurally generated cities in Star Citizen in the 3.0 patch which will probably be released to "backer" community in the next few weeks. Not perfect, but very impressive.

There are two videos. The first is the "showcase" of procedurally generated cities which starts around the 4 minute 15 seconds mark and goes for about 8 minutes. The second is a short video which talks about the software tools used to do the procedural generation of cities (and effects with examples)."

[video=youtube_share;b9RUWxsVmws]https://youtu.be/b9RUWxsVmws?t=4m15s[/video]
[video=youtube_share;_3ax4gu---Y]https://youtu.be/_3ax4gu---Y[/video]

CORRECTION: Apology to all, as andrewq_oz (next post) has pointed out in the next post, procedurally generated cities will NOT be part of the 3.0 patch, but are intended to be added later. No release date has been given as yet. The videos do however show how procedural generation is being used to create cities in SC ATM.
 
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"RSI has announced procedurally generated cities in Star Citizen in the 3.0 patch which will probably be released to "backer" community in the next few weeks. Not perfect, but very impressive.

And you're wrong. Procedural cities will NOT be in 3.0, they will further down the track, months at least, if not years.

Edit: https://youtu.be/mGcG0g7GsOI?t=11m14s "a bit of a preview of what we've been working on beyond 3.0"-CR
 
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That being said, I'm nowhere near as optimistic about ED as I once was. I still love the game, but 2017 was a horrible year for this game. 2.3's signature feature, multicrew, is an unmitigated disaster that was soooooo far below the hype, they may as well not have released it at all. No, seriously ... releasing multicrew in it's current form was an epic fail move on their part, and they should have manned up and delayed 2.3 as long as possible, even if it meant having 2.3 and 2.4 come out at the same time.

As for 2.4 ... aside from some really nice quality of life changes for long range exploration, and the fact that you can shoot at Thargoids now, it brought players *nothing* other than a promise to rework some core mechanics in 2018. Which in itself means no new features either.

It's as if somewhere in 2017, Frontier's upper management decided that ED wasn't worth their time as much as their huge cash cow Planet Coaster, and stripped the development team down to nothing. There's really no reason 2.3 and 2.4 should have been as spectacularly fail as they ended up being.

So I won't say I'm going to be super negative about the future of the game, but I've certainly gone from fanboy optimistic to ... lukewarm neutral.

I think that it has always been quite clear from the start, for both SC and ED, that these games were going to be an experiment in pushing back the boundaries of space sims. The idea was that if people were interested to join this adventure, they could buy in; if not, they could just wait and see from the side lines and either jump in when they felt these projects were going somewhere, or hold off until the finished product. Until then, you're not buying a game as much as a stake in trying to make computer game history.

I for one was an early backer of ED, happy to throw a little money at the Kickstarter just for the good old times, happy to let it be whatever it was going to be. It was not until the first alphas appeared that I realised that this was actually going to be a thing. I'm still happy to just be part of the adventure of trying to build this game, something I have grown up with since 1984. Some bits work well, some bits not so much. Some experiments have failed; some have been a great success. There have been, and will still be, some growing pains. But it has, as promised, pushed back the boundaries of computer gaming and hopefully continues to do so.

ED is not a product; it's an undertaking. It's a journey. Join the pioneers, or wait until the package holiday becomes available.
 
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