New Era in Unreal Engine or Cobra Engine?

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lenna

lenna
marx said:
Could the Unreal engine even handle systems on the scale of Elite? I've never programmed game engines, so I have no idea.
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Whether it could handle it or not is pretty moot - what is not moot is that there are likely to be issues migrating to a new engine both technical and commercial.
 

lenna

lenna
SenseiMatty said:
Because Unreal Engine can already do that:

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LS5P5AYXT1Y
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You do realise that such graphics are great as show case examples of what an engine might be capable of but rarely do things pan out exactly as the show pieces indicate might be possible.

That example is a classic case of an application for ray tracing techniques and the key point is that the example was NOT real-time, it was pre-computed. For a similar effect in ED it would need to be real time in effect.

I know there is a fair amount of buzz about the Ray-Tracing technology in the current top-end ranges of graphics cards but such technologies still have their limits and not everyone have cards with that capability baked into the hardware.
 

TheSisko

TheSisko
Frontier Dev: I know were busy with Fleet Carriers and New Era stuff, but I think we should switch to Unreal Engine, re-write the majority of our code to use it, do testing and QA on it, pray that it all works with all the new stuff we're working on AND pay Epic Games licence fees. What do you think???

Rest of Frontier Devs: ........................HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAA! ...ok, back to work, lets get this spacewalk thingy working in time for 2020.
 

lenna

lenna
TheSisko said:
Frontier Dev: I know were busy with Fleet Carriers and New Era stuff, but I think we should switch to Unreal Engine, re-write the majority of our code to use it, do testing and QA on it, pray that it all works with all the new stuff we're working on AND pay Epic Games licence fees. What do you think???

Rest of Frontier Devs: ........................HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAA! ...ok, back to work, lets get this spacewalk thingy working in time for 2020.
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I imagined that entire exchange being said by the Sisko character from DS9 - followed by the requisite sarcastic/annoyed look.
 

lenna

lenna
thistle said:
This thread makes zero sense.
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I would agree - the OP (and perhaps some others) obviously saw a show-case piece for the current Unreal engine and made a few (perhaps invalid) assumptions that ED could be re-engineered around the Unreal engine and by doing so address a wish list of desires.

They failed to consider that different engines have different ways of doing things and not everything translates well from one engine to another.
 

thistle

T
SenseiMatty said:
It's mainly based on current limitations and speculations born in this Forum that explain why Cobra Engine would not be able to support Atmospheric Planets and it could also be the reason why they've not been developed yet:

  1. Cobra engine does not support multiple stars as light source (that's what we have in the game right now - Collection of Wonders is a clear example).
  2. Because of the above, the cobra engine would not be able to generate good atmospheric planets. Imagine a planet in a binary system where only one star makes day/night cycles and you have dark night when the other star is up above in the sky.
  3. The star class based color schemes introduced in Beyond are bugged: you see the color filter also inside the stations and the sky box is tinted as well. Speculations say they couldn't fixed it because of the Cobra Engine limitations.
  4. Because of the above the Cobra Engine would not be able to generate correct sky colors on atmospheric planets: imagine a binary system with a white A class star and a Red dwarf star). The sky color would be different depending on which star of the two is creating day light (considering that point 1 and 2 are developed).
  5. Stars flares, night vision, ship smoke and a lot of other "volumetric" effect in the game behave like sprites. In VR this is very clear because when you turn your head the smoke turns around like a 2D texture.
  6. Because of the above it could be very difficult to have good quality procedural generated clouds in gas giants and atmospheric planets.
  7. Cobra engine has just introduced water volumetric fx in Planet Zoo, but the quality seems very far from being able to populate a water world.
I'm quite sure there are others but I don't remember all now.
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Speculation is the word.
1. I believe we know Elite Dangerous doesn't support multiple star light sources currently, not that the engine can't do it. Or can't be changed to do it.
2. See 1.
3. It's not bugged afaik, it's a decision they made. I like it. And more speculation.
4. Speculation.
5. True. Are you speculating it can't be changed?
6. Speculation.
7. Speculation.

Good.
 

StuartGT

StuartGT
SenseiMatty said:
It's mainly based on current limitations and speculations born in this Forum that explain why Cobra Engine would not be able to support Atmospheric Planets and it could also be the reason why they've not been developed yet:

  1. Cobra engine does not support multiple stars as light source (that's what we have in the game right now - Collection of Wonders is a clear example).
  2. Because of the above, the cobra engine would not be able to generate good atmospheric planets. Imagine a planet in a binary system where only one star makes day/night cycles and you have dark night when the other star is up above in the sky.
  3. The star class based color schemes introduced in Beyond are bugged: you see the color filter also inside the stations and the sky box is tinted as well. Speculations say they couldn't fixed it because of the Cobra Engine limitations.
  4. Because of the above the Cobra Engine would not be able to generate correct sky colors on atmospheric planets: imagine a binary system with a white A class star and a Red dwarf star). The sky color would be different depending on which star of the two is creating day light (considering that point 1 and 2 are developed).
  5. Stars flares, night vision, ship smoke and a lot of other "volumetric" effect in the game behave like sprites. In VR this is very clear because when you turn your head the smoke turns around like a 2D texture.
  6. Because of the above it could be very difficult to have good quality procedural generated clouds in gas giants and atmospheric planets.
  7. Cobra engine has just introduced water volumetric fx in Planet Zoo, but the quality seems very far from being able to populate a water world.
I'm quite sure there are others but I don't remember all now.
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I think you should get a job at Cloud Imperium Games. Your knowledge of game & engine development is only rivalled by Chris Roberts :cool:
 

CmdMarty

C
It won't happen but UE probably would be easier to work on and easier to hire people with knowledge, which in turn could mean faster development.
 

lenna

lenna
CmdMarty said:
It won't happen but UE probably would be easier to work on and easier to hire people with knowledge, which in turn could mean faster development.
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Too many cooks spoil the broth and the mythical man month does not pan out in practice.

I don't know what FD's man-power schedule is like for ED but it is a fallacious assumption that more developers automatically means shorter development times and larger teams often introduce cost/schedule inefficiencies.

Further more, knowledge about an existing engine/technology is overrated - any good developer can adapt their existing knowledge and/or learn new tech without too much time and effort.
 
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rhiz

rhiz
As I understand it, when you start creating worlds with the scale and distances of a space simulation you quickly come up against the limitations of floating-point values. I don’t think that any of the major engines support double-precision out-of-the-box, whereas I assume that Cobra does. That said, the Kerbel team came up with some clever methods of solving these limitations in Unity, if I recall.

*edit
Related to SC, but relevant:

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OB_AI9ukSp8
 
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