How many people own a Mac?
How will Elite Dangerous use 'next-gen' gaming tech?
- Thread starter TheSisko
- Start date
How many people played this game on a Mac?
How many people play it on console? Certainly not 145 million.
No, but I'll bet three Cutters that more people played it on console. I didn't exactly see a massive forum meltdown when Frontier abandoned the Mac, anything but.
The transitions in Solo are virtually instant, they probably only last as long as the minimum length of the blue tunnel animation. Now why there is even a transition in solo? You're still downloading data from the AWS servers regarding the BGS, and I guess because that can in theory take a while if the servers are overloaded, the blue tunnel transition is still there as a visual cue for those occasions.
jump sequences serve the purpose of pulling in all the galaxy data needed for your client to generate the planets and various stations and such in the system you're jumping to. In addition to texture loading times.
There is also a write to the server that needs to complete to acknowledge your player data moving to a given system.
There is also a write to the server that needs to complete to acknowledge your player data moving to a given system.
Sure, the amount of people who still play it in 2 years on the current generation might be just as low though.
Sad to break this to you... that would not solve anything... only increase costs.... as they would STILL NEED DirectX for their XBox version, just like they need to use PSGL on Playstation.... or they would have to introduce the same in-between layers you currently complain about for the running it on Linux....
So using DirectX on Windows is more cost effective, and since Apple decided to drop OpenGL and thus Vulcan support for their own Metal, there is no cost savings in switching over to OpenGL/Vulcan. Then that Linux on the desktop is still a to small platform, so that is a pretty hard sell to justify the costs to rewrite for that reason alone...
I do not see any reason at the moment to drop suppor for the current gen consoles when next generation releaseses, so that means that they still need to support that platform, and that also goes with the current setup with the Windows version, as even if hte next generation consoles gets raytracing support, the majority of pc players would still not have any raytracing capable hardware for many years to come.
We also have the significant performance hit that raytracing creates, I am not hopeful that supposedly raytracing support next gen consoles will get is more efficient than the current raytracing support NVidia has and the simple fact that NVidia still have launched new cards without raytracing support is a bit telling...
If we use Steam hardware survey to get some trends, it is a bit telling that the two most popular GPUs to use is GTX 1060 (20%) and GTX 1050TI (9%), we need to move down the list to #6 to find the first RTX card, RTX 2060 (3%) and then #10 for the second RTX 20709 (1.9%). So with no entry level cards from Nvidia with raytracing support, and we are still waiting for AMD to add raytracing support, we are still several years away from a wide adoption of raytracing.... and then we have the lackluster support by the game developers, as there is very little incentive to add raytracing support, and the current support appears to have been added because NVidia paid for the implementation... do you think NVidia will pay FDev to implement Raytracing?
I'd be happy to have lighting and shadows from more than one star at a time, and throw in some moonshine for good measure.
As for raytracing, the biggest thing this might bring to ED is seeing the reflections of ourselves in our canopy glass, as well as incidental lighting. The immersive factor this would bring to our cockpits / bridges is HUGE, at least for me.
As for raytracing, the biggest thing this might bring to ED is seeing the reflections of ourselves in our canopy glass, as well as incidental lighting. The immersive factor this would bring to our cockpits / bridges is HUGE, at least for me.
Deleted member 38366
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Since "Next-Gen" Consoles are typically just densely packed and cost-effective "Previous-Gen PC" devices more or less, they'll just use what PCs were able to use since years.
In short, the Consoles typically lagging far behind get a refresh to put them a bit closer to current mainstream tech levels for a short period.
If an existing tech wasn't utilized on the PC side for whatever reason though, don't expect it to get used on Consoles either. At least not in any short timeframe.
And for any new tech to be utilized, the dated Cobra Engine would need an overhaul/upgrade just as well.
Should they somehow score any exclusive contract to make ELITE a light tower/demo project to showcase tech though... all bets are off and cool stuff could easily emerge from it.
A tad unlikely though, since it isn't a huge AAA Title drawing alot of attention.
In short, the Consoles typically lagging far behind get a refresh to put them a bit closer to current mainstream tech levels for a short period.
If an existing tech wasn't utilized on the PC side for whatever reason though, don't expect it to get used on Consoles either. At least not in any short timeframe.
And for any new tech to be utilized, the dated Cobra Engine would need an overhaul/upgrade just as well.
Should they somehow score any exclusive contract to make ELITE a light tower/demo project to showcase tech though... all bets are off and cool stuff could easily emerge from it.
A tad unlikely though, since it isn't a huge AAA Title drawing alot of attention.
Elite is one of those games I simply cannot fathom on a Console.
Console simply lack the controller support a PC has to offer, have limited support for multi-display, and having tried playing with a PS-4 controller on a PC, I can say this is only slightly worse than trying to play with Mouse and Keyboard, which was so bad, I had to buy a HOTAS after day 2.
Console simply lack the controller support a PC has to offer, have limited support for multi-display, and having tried playing with a PS-4 controller on a PC, I can say this is only slightly worse than trying to play with Mouse and Keyboard, which was so bad, I had to buy a HOTAS after day 2.
Both Xbox and PlayStation support K+M and HOTAS.
Not with ED. It's a very rare game on PS4 that uses K&M outside of text comms.
It's not a hardware limitation, however.
I dint thinks they will go full ray tracing due to loss in frame rates, as mentioned in this form consoles will have power of current RTX ray tracing.
I hope they utilise DLSS cores for VR, allow the more powerful cores to push supersamlling allowing etc.
At the moment cards are busy using CUDa cores, while Turing cores do very little. I hope they do something with nvidia and amd to push the use of all the GPUs
I hope they utilise DLSS cores for VR, allow the more powerful cores to push supersamlling allowing etc.
At the moment cards are busy using CUDa cores, while Turing cores do very little. I hope they do something with nvidia and amd to push the use of all the GPUs
Yeah, and the HOTAS they support are so painfully limited in terms of the number of buttons and features, they're just not worth it. I know, I own one. The whole "Hold This Button and Press this or this or this" to perform additional functions sucks. Same with "Hold this button to expand a menu of additional functions" - it sucks.
My rig has 14 buttons plus two hat sticks on the flight stick, and 3 buttons and 3 hat sticks on the throttle. I also added a G13 pad with another 24 buttons and a stick - and could still use about 22 more buttons to be efficient.
Consoles simply do not support that level of input, and see above - Mouse and Keyboard for Elite blows. Unless you have at least 3 hands and a tentacle. It's simple too awkward, and most keyboards can only process 3-5 keypresses at a time before overloading the input buffer.
To be fair, forum meltdowns weren't the norm back then.
If Frontier plans to sustain ED for the coming 4 years (10 year roadmap) then they must upgrade the graphics so it meets next-gen fidelity (Playstation 5).
It's less work to improve ED with expansions and free updates. They said the Next Era will be an expansion for ED.
The userbase of PS5 and the new Xbox will be small during the first year. So it's better to wait a while till it's bigger and then release the latest version of ED on those consoles.
ED's graphics are noticeably dated when you look up close at objects and structures. ED was originally designed for the player to view stuff from a distance and inside the cockpit. The current version of ED lacks advanced materials, textures and shaders that are included in Unreal Engine 4. If we get EVA then they must do major graphics and higher polygon upgrades so everything looks good in first person.
It's less work to improve ED with expansions and free updates. They said the Next Era will be an expansion for ED.
The userbase of PS5 and the new Xbox will be small during the first year. So it's better to wait a while till it's bigger and then release the latest version of ED on those consoles.
ED's graphics are noticeably dated when you look up close at objects and structures. ED was originally designed for the player to view stuff from a distance and inside the cockpit. The current version of ED lacks advanced materials, textures and shaders that are included in Unreal Engine 4. If we get EVA then they must do major graphics and higher polygon upgrades so everything looks good in first person.
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I did.
Quite a few threads were started, a number were suppressed by mods, but most knew it was inevitable, so meltdown was muted.
My main push was to give Mac users an offline mode, based on the comment from Sir David Braben:
(link now broken: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=60284&page=14&p=1024593&highlight=#post1024593 )
"We have no intention of taking the servers down, but I understand what you are getting at. We plan to archive the game from time to time (ie matching client and servers and game world state), and would release such an archive if the servers were to come down. That would also address the issue of how you preserve an online game for the future, from the whole 'retro' perspective."
And from a Mac user's point of view the servers were "coming down". Sadly this gained no traction, and no empathy from many other CMDRs. Typical comments were "just bootcamp" or "buy a proper computer", so useful
I'll also add that the minimum PC specs have at times been lower than consoles, so you really need to start blaming min-spec PC players as much as console players.
I am hoping "next-gen" does mean separating the codebase, leave min-spec PCs and PS4/Xbox to one branch, and 2020 as the live branch, with higher spec requirements.
Hopefully they do more with VR.
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Mr. Braben also said that the game is and will be primarily a PC game, and the development and patch deployment for the PC version will not be hindered by the console version.
to bad that this never happened, and since the Console-Release we could constantly see how Patch/Hotfix deployment was hindered by the Console versions...
and yet, we still have no crossplay...
to bad that this never happened, and since the Console-Release we could constantly see how Patch/Hotfix deployment was hindered by the Console versions...
and yet, we still have no crossplay...