Would you prefer to have the Elite Dangerous New Era in the current Cobra Engine or pay a bit more (5% - 10%) and have the game in Unreal Engine?
New Era in Unreal Engine or Cobra Engine?
- Thread starter VR SenseiMatty
- Start date
- Status
Robert Maynard
Volunteer Moderator
Given that COBRA has been developed to suit Frontier games for many years, I doubt that using a different game engine would either be an affordable or schedule sensible decision - even if the "new" engine could do everything that COBRA does.
Stick with Cobra. Not only would it cost money, but it could take years to swap game engines.
Not going to happen. Long term plan was said to be to market Cobra to third party devs. The cost and time lost of shifting the whole dev team from Cobra to a third party engine I can imagine being horrendous. Then there would be the additional cost of the licensing. ED's problems are a product of the networking model (peer to peer) and trying to allow for a wide range of specs to play the game and not the engine.
We still have year old bugs in the game, with the FD own COBRA engine in the background....
... a change of engine, surely would add to that pile.
Playing the grind is masochistic enough
... a change of engine, surely would add to that pile.
Playing the grind is masochistic enough
That's independent of Cobra, that's AWS.
I agree, especially after all those years playing the game, the things look "elite",
if you apply a different engine that feeling is gone.
It would never happen, as FDs PR revolves around having a custom in house engine doing everything.
In all likelihood you will probably have to add much more than a year's dev time for that.
Overall though, I don't see the OP's suggestion as being necessarily viable nor justified.
Cobra is amazing have you seen planet coaster? The graphics in that are well above average. Jurassic world evolution they made the lighting worse but what’s amazing is how much detail they can add from zooming in from top down while keeping performance.
Cobra is pretty impressive... if you don’t like the screen tinting in elite that was just a stupid decision.
Cobra is pretty impressive... if you don’t like the screen tinting in elite that was just a stupid decision.
AWS is the hosting platform - the galaxy is a heavy piece of PG coding in Cobra.
Robert Maynard
Volunteer Moderator
... and Planet Zoo looks even better, in my opinion.
Yeah i haven't been blown away by planet zoo hence reserving the mention.. but it should be the same as planet coaster and we've seen only a few things from it so far i don't expect anything less than awesome
EDIT: I think they've just chosen warmer colors to be like stereotypical imagery of africa and india etc.. while very extremely fitting for the zoo theme doesn't send your jaw to the floor with the photorealistic lighting in planet coaster... so far anyway.
Last edited:
ED and Cobra don't have a limitation with that, or it's the same limitations that other game engines have.
Cobra already works with multiple light sources such as ship/SRV lights, ground station/base lights and the local major light source. Is when you include more then one major light source, then add it to all the minor ones and it becomes a serious performance hog.
I would hazard a guess that all game engines would have issues.
Nope. That's just the servers.
On topic: The Unreal Engine doesn't have a toolkit for the generation of an entire galaxy and its star systems. You would end up with integrating parts of the Cobra Engine in the Unreal Engine which is kind of pointless. It would probably have less performance and even more bugs. I don't even know if the Unreal Engine is capable of realising space with the required size.
If in 2020 there won't be any atmospheric planet I don't care waiting one more year. The only thing I want in the game is atmospheric planet.
- Status