How do you feel about Elite today?

[Fizzatron]

I haven't played for a bit as I have come to the conclusion that ripping/recording my records will be a lot more efficient if I can also play Elite concurrently, which basically means I've been playing Elite when I should be recording vinyl and then giving myself a hard time about it.. so I've yanked the downstairs PC to use that for recording but now have to reconfigure my studio setup to accommodate, and I hate having to sort out cables.

Anyway, I like the wide-angle approach:

Elite - C64 - 1
Elite - Amiga - 3
Frontier: Elite 2 - Amiga - 1
Elite Dangerous current base game: 3
Odyssey - On average around 2-3 but it has it's 1 moments.

 

[EdzUp]

Yeah... huh, besides also the fact Elite 2 was 1Mb top, and Elite Dangerous is 68.21Gb. And the number of lines of code is so vastly superior it's not even funny.
It's like saying a ferrari is not so different from a horse cart besides the color, because both have wheels and they can carry people on a road.

Listen, I to think ED could be better, and I to know that Braben said/promised MANY thinks and a lot of them are not ingame, and probably never will. But comparing Elite 2 and ED is just wrong.

Art assets are a large part of what eats up dev time (and cost) these days, compare the detail of Frontier: Elite 2 to Odyssey, which was almost entirely overhauled to factor in the up closer onfoot experience. It's more than we give it credit for.

Whilst i do agree the game is more complex from a underlying code base that has to talk to the OS to get what we need the experience is no different except that in Elite 3&4 had much more ( if tou could EDH not odyssey) the games are exactly the same

 

[sinisalo]

Meh, fair to middlin'

 

[Fizzatron]

Whilst i do agree the game is more complex from a underlying code base that has to talk to the OS to get what we need the experience is no different except that in Elite 3&4 had much more ( if tou could EDH not odyssey) the games are exactly the same

I'm not saying it's unfair to compare, but the kind of detail jump from FE2 to EDO can be only be measured by multiple magnitudes of level and quantity. That to me is where the time went. I would imagine that David Braben had already ported a lot of the precursor to the Stellar Forge already so it wouldn't surprise me to see that ED is almost a direct descendent of FE2/FEFE's codebase.

 

[EdzUp]

Yeah the underlying code base would have a huge adjustment if you take the original on MSDOS and this one is Win32/64 and all the other platform it was released on. All of these adjust the codebase as time goes on, i wouldnt be surprised if at some point there is a clean slate and start again approach as patch on patch does make for messy code

 

[Erei]

Yeah the underlying code base would have a huge adjustment if you take the original on MSDOS and this one is Win32/64 and all the other platform it was released on. All of these adjust the codebase as time goes on, i wouldnt be surprised if at some point there is a clean slate and start again approach as patch on patch does make for messy code

It's even simplier : it's not even the same code at all. Sure, you might get some remnant in the RNG calculation algorithm and the like, but that's about it.

 

[EdzUp]

It's even simplier : it's not even the same code at all. Sure, you might get some remnant in the RNG calculation algorithm and the like, but that's about it.

It depends on how much the Cobra engine was used seeing as that has been used in all the Frontier Elite games

 

[Darth Ender]

Yeah the underlying code base would have a huge adjustment if you take the original on MSDOS and this one is Win32/64 and all the other platform it was released on. All of these adjust the codebase as time goes on, i wouldnt be surprised if at some point there is a clean slate and start again approach as patch on patch does make for messy code

patch on patch doesn't make messy code. There are lots of very long lived and huge projects that exist with very well structured and even pretty code that entirely depend on subsequent patches rather than periodic rewrites.

Blindly merging in patches that are made independently of other patches being applied to the same codebase and resolving the conflicts by just picking one or the other without understanding why the conflicts exist in the first place makes for messy code.

 

[Fizzatron]

It's even simplier : it's not even the same code at all. Sure, you might get some remnant in the RNG calculation algorithm and the like, but that's about it.

I was about to say that, it wouldn't surprise me if there's a direct lineage from that. Has anyone compared FE2 and ED's galaxy map?

 

[Darth Ender]

It depends on how much the Cobra engine was used seeing as that has been used in all the Frontier Elite games

the stellar forge is entirely separate from the cobra engine as far as anyone is aware. It was created specifically for elite dangerous and is responsible for all of the galaxy creation. this was extended to surface environment procedural generation later.

These things are really parallel with the cobra engine. It communicates with it by feeding it environments and responding to requests for data and new environments, rather than being actually part of it.

I would not expect it to have any relation to previous elite games and how the galaxy's were created for them. Except in the hand-tuned design to try and spawn a galaxy that reflected the elite lore which comes from those previous game's galaxy's.

edit: i doubt braben had any hand in the code that created the stellar forge's algorithms. they would need to be entirely different from the kind used in the games before. These kind of algorithms were discussed in scientific papers in the years prior to this game and nms would have been designed from the ideals found in those new algorithms and formulas rather than built up from the game's ancient predecessors.

 

[Erei]

It depends on how much the Cobra engine was used seeing as that has been used in all the Frontier Elite games

I don't think you realize how VASTLY different the code for a 1mb game that ran on MSDOS is from a game that started 8years ago and weight 68gb.
There is as much in common between both than between a ford model 1930 and a modern car. Yes, they are both cars, they both have doors, 4wheels and a combustion engine. But they are entirely different, even when it comes to what look similar.

Elite 2 has nothing in common with ED "under the hood". Elite 2 was made in an era where some dude could take notepad, and literally write the game manually on it. Could even be done in a matter of weeks. 2 peoples are credited for writing the code for Elite 2, according to wiki.
Good luck making ED with 2 guys and notepad. GOOD LUCK !

 

[Darth Ender]

I don't think you realize how VASTLY different the code for a 1mb game that ran on MSDOS is from a game that started 8years ago and weight 68gb.
There is as much in common between both than between a ford model 1930 and a modern car. Yes, they are both cars, they both have doors, 4wheels and a combustion engine. But they are entirely different, even when it comes to what look similar.

Elite 2 has nothing in common with ED "under the hood". Elite 2 was made in an era where some dude could take notepad, and literally write the game manually on it. Could even be done in a matter of weeks. 2 peoples are credited for writing the code for Elite 2, according to wiki.
Good luck making ED with 2 guys and notepad. GOOD LUCK !

with enough stock assets and unreal engine (or similar), this is how many games without millions of dollars in startup funds ends up getting made.

that's why there's 2 definitions now for game developer. You get the guy like you noted from ms dos days who writes the code and creates a game. And you can also be referring to the guy who writes engine scripts and modules that get executed by a game engine, but may have little to no experience writing 3d translations to move things around on screen or rendering pipelines etc.

 

[EdzUp]

I don't think you realize how VASTLY different the code for a 1mb game that ran on MSDOS is from a game that started 8years ago and weight 68gb.
There is as much in common between both than between a ford model 1930 and a modern car. Yes, they are both cars, they both have doors, 4wheels and a combustion engine. But they are entirely different, even when it comes to what look similar.

Elite 2 has nothing in common with ED "under the hood". Elite 2 was made in an era where some dude could take notepad, and literally write the game manually on it. Could even be done in a matter of weeks. 2 peoples are credited for writing the code for Elite 2, according to wiki.
Good luck making ED with 2 guys and notepad. GOOD LUCK !

I do understand the underlying game source code is vastly different, what i am saying is the experience in the game for those playing it is not that different and surely if two people wrote Elite 2 then 100 people should be able to get ED finished in a similar time frame

 

[Erei]

I do understand the underlying game source code is vastly different, what i am saying is the experience in the game for those playing it is not that different and surely if two people wrote Elite 2 then 100 people should be able to get ED finished in a similar time frame

Except it's not. Like anything in life, the more complexity you add to a project, the more interactions there is amongst the code and asset, and it becomes even more complex. Essentially, it's more an exponential complexity growth rate than linear.
You are not adding codes on top of each others, you are making the code more and more complex. Think like building a road system for a newly created city. Take cities skyline or sim city. Initially you have a dumb road or 2, make a cross and done, that's your starting city. Easy. So you go from there. And then, down the line, a few hours later you got a megalopolis, and the system of roads is very complex. It's not about duplicating the same crossroad city over and over. While you can do that, it would be the worst way possible you could do it, and you'll end up with a traffic nightmare.

 

[EdzUp]

I get the analogy its just FFE is not that much different from a gameplay perspective than ED:H. Im not talking odyssey here as that is a recent addition, gameplay wise if you play solo they are very similar in experiences.

 

[Erei]

I didn't play the old Elite myself. I mean, I'm born the year of the first one to begin with^^ So I can't tell

 

[Darth Ender]

another important distinction between the two generations of elite is that old elite was built with a galaxy limited not just technically but designed with a size that made sense for the gameplay available. The galaxy was designed to serve the gameplay.

Elite dangerous was built the opposite direction. They first and foremost, wanted to build a full scale galaxy. The gameplay that would utilize that galaxy didn't exist. And arguably still doesn't. Where an old game knows they have limitations and so everything they add has a purpose and a function ...elite dangerous added stuff just because it could and hoped they could make use of it later. I'd expect gaming experiences to be divergent outside of the limited scope of the bubble.

But i didn't play the original elite games either. Wing Commander all the way, and not until the mid to late 90's, but i've played them all. Elite was never really popular in the us like wc was.

 

[Fizzatron]

another important distinction between the two generations of elite is that old elite was built with a galaxy limited not just technically but designed with a size that made sense for the gameplay available. The galaxy was designed to serve the gameplay.

Elite dangerous was built the opposite direction. They first and foremost, wanted to build a full scale galaxy. The gameplay that would utilize that galaxy didn't exist. And arguably still doesn't. Where an old game knows they have limitations and so everything they add has a purpose and a function ...elite dangerous added stuff just because it could and hoped they could make use of it later. I'd expect gaming experiences to be divergent outside of the limited scope of the bubble.

But i didn't play the original elite games either. Wing Commander all the way, and not until the mid to late 90's, but i've played them all. Elite was never really popular in the us like wc was.

You are correct that the original 8bit Elite (later ported to 16bit) was built somewhat like that, though at the time it would have counted as an open world type game where you could go wherever you wanted but was limited to 8 galaxies of 256 stars, each with one planet and station. Frontier: Elite 2 & FFE were the direct predecessors to Elite Dangerous and had the whole galaxy in it, like we see in ED. I don't know how much it correlates with Elite Dangerous but there were aspects that were immediately familiar to me having played FE2 quite a bit back when it was new.

 

[Neilski]

Ah, I have very fond memories of the original game, with its wireframe graphics and fairly basic sound effects (I played on a ZX Spectrum. Quite astonishing how much could be packed into 48 kB.) I found "Frontier: Elite II" much less captivating, but I don't recall why.
For me, photorealistic graphics are OK but I'll take fps over eye candy any day, even if it means wireframe

 

[Erei]

For me, photorealistic graphics are OK but I'll take fps over eye candy any day, even if it means wireframe

Well, good news, it's not 1984 anymore and we can have both nowadays !
Bad news, Fdev doesn't seem to know how to do it.