Offline mode
- Thread starter outrun74
- Start date
Anything is theoretically possible; the last statements Frontier made about the possibility were a very long time ago and can roughly be summarised as:
- not while the online version is running
- it'd be nice to make available after that but no guarantees
- not while the online version is running
- it'd be nice to make available after that but no guarantees
Probably a lot, even when you consider that the vast majority of systems will have no data stored about them!
I would absolutely love an offline version - no stupidly named (and obvious) player factions, a map uncluttered with FCs...
Got a feeling an offline version will never happen. I think was was planned for in the KS development but got abandoned, which upset a lot of the backers who were expecting it.
Got a feeling an offline version will never happen. I think was was planned for in the KS development but got abandoned, which upset a lot of the backers who were expecting it.
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Colossal, this is the main reason Offline mode was shelved IIRC.
An offline mode might be limited to the Bubble.
Nobody is stopping you (flagging to FDEV or a small KS) but realise that the code has not been developed to support offline mode. I cannot recall now but there was a lengthy discussion on it in the early days of E: D development.
Technically, it should be entirely possible. I realise that I'm very much simplifying things here but, like all online games, assets are stored on you HD. The servers primarily handle coordination of positional data to synchronise events.. There may be the occasional small updated sound file or text file, true, along with CG info and new item data. But any other larger asserts will normally be rolled out in updates and patches, not in realtime streaming.
However, allowing for local offline play would at the very least require a local background process to be coded to handle the system interconnections and a local DB that contained system connection data. There maybe other elements involved though. Producing all these additional assets would naturally require some effort on FDevs part.
However, allowing for local offline play would at the very least require a local background process to be coded to handle the system interconnections and a local DB that contained system connection data. There maybe other elements involved though. Producing all these additional assets would naturally require some effort on FDevs part.
Should not be necessary in a 'local' single player mode. The only memory hungry part would be loading assets for the current system, so no different from now. The rest of the 'galaxy' is just static compressed data waiting to be loaded and interpreted by the game engine when required.
Even if it's running some basic BGS, that again should not require anything more than data crunching and coordinated asset loading for the current system.
ed milky way = 400 billions systems, each system has a 64 bit word address, so 3.2 Tera byte to store the galaxy, correct ?
and then we have to store also the aliases of the knowned systems, their population/economy/states, the points of interest, the stations/settlements, the factions, the markets, etc...
so, big drive and fast internet connexion to download
edit : Scam Citizen could run offline, but much more difficult for ED
The servers don't 'primarily' handle coordination of positional data.
There's a massive amount of server-side management of data - player ship modules, station status (trading values re: the BGS etc.) - almost everything except your key bindings, basically. It's all managed server-side WRT the DB data stored. I've brushed a lot under the carpet with that, but there's probably TBs of DB storage happening right there.
The main point of all this is: while it might be technically possible, the code (allegedly) is just not written to do that; so it would require a massive amount of effort to cater for.
Robert Maynard
Volunteer Moderator
An offline mode was added to the 2012 Kickstarter pitch about halfway through. A few weeks before launch Frontier announced that offline mode had been cancelled.
Indeed. Hence the reason I specifically said that I'm very much simplifying things here. However, ships/modules/etc and so on are again, from a server side perspective, just data being organised in a coordinated manner and 'positioned' with the appropriate player. For a local single player mode, all that would naturally be stored on your HD anyway.
Technically, most things are possible. However, whether that 'technically' can be translated into 'practically' is something only FDev can comment on.
If you weren't handling data for more than one player, weren't processing the BGS at all, etc. the "offline" version of the game wouldn't be noticeably bigger on disk than the current online version.
Set your bandwidth monitor on and try doing a 20kLY route plot. The bandwidth use will be in the routine bytes/sec of "just playing the game" (assuming there's no other players about), the route will plot in a matter of seconds having passed through millions of stars worth of space, and you can even do things like apply a star-class filter to it to make it have to generate more than just "a system exists at this position" without really slowing it down.
No data transferred from servers, no gigabytes cached and retrieved from disk, and all with fairly low CPU and memory usage, too. Really impressive.
A complete EDDB data dump for inhabited space - and that's provided in a fairly inefficient uncompressed format for ease of use - takes less than a single gigabyte. Even accounting for various hidden variables and the markets for all the new Odyssey settlements EDDB doesn't know about yet, "non-player" data isn't going to be more than a couple of gigabytes total.
Once you add in players it gets a bit bigger - >12 million accounts potentially generate quite a bit of data, but they'd still be able to have 100kb each before the data got to a terabyte - a very active account probably has something like that or even more from exploration data, but the majority won't. Of course, for an offline version, you only need your own data and a couple of megabytes won't matter much. They might be up to a terabyte or two by now, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was a lot less.
Incorrect - it's much more abstract than that. It would take that much to store the entire galaxy in a conventional database, but they don't - one of the most impressive Frontier achievements is that generation as needed from a tiny amount of "seed" data is fast enough to look like it's all there already.
Set your bandwidth monitor on and try doing a 20kLY route plot. The bandwidth use will be in the routine bytes/sec of "just playing the game" (assuming there's no other players about), the route will plot in a matter of seconds having passed through millions of stars worth of space, and you can even do things like apply a star-class filter to it to make it have to generate more than just "a system exists at this position" without really slowing it down.
No data transferred from servers, no gigabytes cached and retrieved from disk, and all with fairly low CPU and memory usage, too. Really impressive.
Remember that Terabytes are huge. If you're just storing text-style data, mostly numbers, the occasional string of words, even getting into gigabytes is tricky.
A complete EDDB data dump for inhabited space - and that's provided in a fairly inefficient uncompressed format for ease of use - takes less than a single gigabyte. Even accounting for various hidden variables and the markets for all the new Odyssey settlements EDDB doesn't know about yet, "non-player" data isn't going to be more than a couple of gigabytes total.
Once you add in players it gets a bit bigger - >12 million accounts potentially generate quite a bit of data, but they'd still be able to have 100kb each before the data got to a terabyte - a very active account probably has something like that or even more from exploration data, but the majority won't. Of course, for an offline version, you only need your own data and a couple of megabytes won't matter much. They might be up to a terabyte or two by now, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was a lot less.
If they pull the plug, Elite Dangerous will truly be dead. An offline version will never happen, because if they don't even have the time to keep servers running, they certainly don't have it to re-code the system to support offline mode. If anything, they document how the cloud system works and give the server code (or at least the API spec) to the users, so they can replicate the server. But I doubt that this will happen if it really comes to the doom scenario.
So enjoy it while it lasts.