"Not tested". Heh. I think it was tested, reported, and the C-Suits said "push the (deploy) button anyway". I just find the "no plans for anything" a bit weird considering that the trumpets of the new era sung only praises about it, the secret non-alpha build will be glorious and whatnot... I wonder if halfway into odyssey there was a management shift which said "LOL NO" like it was with VR, and they decided to suffocate it and let it die. And the biggest reason I'm weaving doom posts here is "no plans for current-gen consoles" which is and will be a huge market for many years to come.
A Call For Frontier To Put VR Legs On The Upcoming Road Map
- Thread starter VR Jay Le Chardon
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well, this is my opinion, not a certain fact - from my point of view there are no future plans for ED. And with "not tested" I mean that those mishaps of the new planet tech are so obvious, that they should have been found by a single person systematically testing the planet tech for a day - there is absolutely no excuse for it being in that state and so i'm saying it hasn't been tested well enough.
Ouch! Assuming you are right, that would likely mean the end of as if their engine is now that bad, they will the F1 and Warhammer games as well.
I agree with @jojon when he said
BRoohahahahaha! So true! Utterly tragic that it is true, but very drolly delivered sattire, I approve
On a more serious note, your tone has drastically changed in the last week or so, they really have peed in your cornflakes haven't they?
And let that be the end of it.
This is true, as you've said elsewhere, it is beginning to look like they are milking this game for the last ha'penny be fore it dies. What I don't get is this debaccle is going to do the company massive reputational damage, not just this game franchise, so why are the setting themselves on this very destructive course.If history teaches us anything is that words are cheap, it's actions that matter. Unfortunately with is timewall gameplay that matters, and we're probably staring at a few months of "nothing to announce", until console release. We can bicker and argue about who rewrote whobut it won't change the fact that Odyshiy is broken and they have to fix it pronto, otherwise no sweet sweet console money. And I doubt we will see any action in Odyssey either. It is consistent with their previous MVP releases which were always overpriced. Arx store prices are also outrageous tbh, especially considering the shoddy quality of it (clipping, wrong colours etc.).
A long term roadmap (with VR on it, of course) would help us mentally, but doesn't care. That's not what publicly-traded companies do.
Borrowing from another thread, but someone was complaining about the complainbts, and of course we got a mention, so I chimed in, and reading through the replies, I found this little nugget...
Our No_VR_NO_Buy stance seems pretty pragmatic now. I know I've persuaded at least 15 folk NOT to buy EDO, including this forums very own old duck.
Either not tested and released to a surprisingly bad reception or if they knowingly curled out a turd of a release is a good optic for the company. You say damned if they do damned if they don't regarding starting work on the next shiny headline feature, this is a real damned either way scenario.
Going back to James Constantines roadmap for the drowning man, a VR commitment would buy them a lot of good will, and essentially mute one band of critics, so from that point of view acquiescing to us would be a smart move. However, failure to make a commitment to the future of a core feature of the game will in many minds confirm it is indeed as has been said in here, in hospice care now.
So... First - just in case, and for the record: The: "repositioning" thing I wrote was an attempt at a joke. :7
Did they really go for the second option, though? I see nothing to that effect, and the blurb about Cobra, that you linked (...that you linked ...and then chastised; Both it, and the person you linked it to, for their referring right back to it), is the exact sort of thing I recall reading numerous times along the way, ever since the Elite: Dangerous kickstarter. (No, I am not going to go trawl the wayback machine for evidence.)
From your rethoric, I presume you espouse a monolithic kernel type of "philosophy", rather than a microkernel one... :7
Any engine build for any revision of a game based on it, would include whatever modules and custom code it requires, sometimes omitting bits it does not need . These can individually evolve over time, or be swapped out wholesale.
I could pretty easily be convinced we have a situation of the sort where little individual bits of the family heirloom axe have been replaced as they rust or rot, over generations (EDIT2: I am sure there is going to be at least one reader who'll spot that particular reference pertaining to the allegory
). Less so a complete rewrite.Looking at a few randomly picked up things:
- We have, by the looks of things, a whole gut replacement in the realm of shaders, for better and for worse (possibly making everything PBR - no idea how much was before, but even stuff one might think already was, looks differently in Odyssey) -- I am sure the artists can balance their materials, given time... Shaders is something you can add, modify, or remove, like any asset.
- I suspect there are things (planets and asteroids), that previously were rendered separately, in a forward rendering pipeline, which have now been migrated over to the deferred one that was already doing all the "hard objects". One might think such a unification would constitute a simplification, but I guess we are yet to see any fruits of anything of that sort - performance is... not a source of joy... (On a side note: Even with deferred rendering, the pools of light around lamp posts (EDIT: ...when flying over the place - not when landed) at new ground locations look to me more like lightmap decals, than actual dynamic lighting, but I don't know). Some time back, somebody on a dev talk made a shoutout to Ben Parry, who had long since left the company, thanking him for the deferred pipeline, which makes me think Cobra did not have one before Elite: Dangerous. Has that had a complete refactoring now, or is it just that more job has been transferred over to it, as I have been guessing? -Aahdunno...
- We've got new biped action in the game... Here we get into the delineation between what is engine, and what is custom game code. For that matter: What is game engine, and what is graphics engine... Let's say we have a first person doing-stuff-including-shooting-amongst-other-things module; That could be a game engine plugin, or it could be something just for Elite...
- The reworked planet terrain generation subset of the Stellar Forge. Again: Is this really something parcelled with the engine, as such, or something custom for Elite: Dangerous, regardless of whether code is shared with another project or not?
- Aand we have a whole "sibling" of the mission generation system, just for on-foot missions, as well as something that procedurally populates bases, all with their own UIs and mission boards. I have no idea whether things that are similar between Ship gameplay and on-foot gameplay share function libraries - it would make sense to my mind, or have a completely separate and specialised "copy" of the code. Is this engine content? -Custom for the title? -Plug-in modules for the game engine?
- (EDIT3: Heh... It just struck me that I had a quite similar argument with somebody just the other day, about the "loop" type of solar prominences. -He was convinced their being 3D meshes was an entirely new feature, with them having been sprites in Horizons, whereas I was all: "Uuh... No, they have always had the appearence of 3D strips with incrementing UV map offsets". Heck, you can see where texels take a sharp turn between triangles. )
When it comes to Planet Coaster (less so JWE, which I presume has less in the way of customisation), I have assumed it is mainly down to the: "editor" focus of the game.
-When the player can almost unrestricted throw insane amounts of stuff anyhwere, and at any time, it becomes impossible to guarantee nominal frame rates, and the very concept of level optimisation does not even exist in such a scenario - some culling can be automated, but automation can not do what a deliberate designer's hand can.
I'm thinking there the developers have basically started out with having given up: "We're a CAD application - not a game, and we're for bird's eye view; Frame rates will go where they will, and don't matter much".
...one might still think they could none the less have thrown a VR "visitor" mode in there, for use with creations from more restrained builders, if nothing else...
And it's not only related to VR. In @Bigmaec video about on-foot vs ship balance you can clearly see that the effects were thought only to be seen from the ground (explosions are flat and rotating), and not from ship. Spheres of combat my arx
So... It has indeed been a hot needle stuck into my eye, through the existence of ED, that explosions are pre-animated sprites, rather than particle systems - preferrably with some complexity to them.
I am not against sprites as such, though. Everybody still use them to this day, and they are used in particle systems to produce some rater convincing, and sometimes stunning, fire and smoke effects, even with stereo vision.
The illusion just breaks immediately in Elite, though, because their camera tracking behaviour (...and possibly their parenting and/or designated tracking target) is... a little too officious; They really shouldn't match rotation on the roll axis - only the two others.
...and even when it comes to those others, I am pretty sure (...could be wrong) that when I have been amidst a group of geysers, the observed yaw of the particle sprites that make up the plumes, has not been such that each sprite faces toward the camera's observer point, as you would expect, but they have all matched the absolute space yaw of the camera, so that they are all parallel with the viewplane, meaning any plume that is not straight in front of you, does not face you, but effectively some imaginary person standing next to you.
What little hobby "level editing" I have done - long ago now I guess, was on a game that ran on an engine contemporary with Source2, and there, back then, I had a selection of different ways for the sprite to behave, flags to enable rotation for each axis, and could use any object as tracking target.
If I wanted to make a glowy beam, I would simply make one long rectangle with two additively blending texture layers scrolling at different speeds, and set it to only rotate around its lengthwise axis - simple as hell to set up.
I have a hard time imagining Cobra has a more basic sprite "engine", than that old game.
Incidently, there is a whole commentary node in Half Life: Alyx, about having a bit of lag to the camera rotation matching of smoke cloud particle sprites, in order to make them less immediately noticeable.
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![[VR] James Constantine](https://d2aefvhu2f0gi9.cloudfront.net/data/avatars/m/275/275309.jpg?1622437385){kind=avatar}
I don't know if they intend to develop either of those game with Cobra. AFAIK, securing both of those franchises would have predated the engine's creation.
The admission that they were effectively dumping VR moving forward was the last straw. Prior to that point I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, or at least that they acknowledged the relative importance of VR to ED, and that they would implement it in time. This admission brought home that not only would no new game play in Odyssey support VR, but that as it was no longer a priority the quality of in-ship VR would be poor, perhaps even unplayable and because they intend to apply the same tech to Horizons, this meant that ED would cease to be a game I would want to play within the year.
So, yes, that ed me off no end.
I know.
I linked to a press release where FDev was claiming to have a game engine product. They are apparantly employing it in Odyssey which appears to be effectively showcasing it's first implementation. That's the only reason I presented it, as the poster in question wanted proof that this software existed. You're confusing that with his complete lack of understanding of what was actually written in the press release.
Is that another attempt at a joke? Not as sure about this one.
Since 1988? So, what would that look like?
It's quite likely that whatever it is is based in part on existing code and past algorithms. However, unless it has been software that has been in continuous development, then it's probably a relatively recent solution where they at best they took a custom engine tied to a previous project and keeping some core logic decided to rebuild it as a more flexible product. But it's not like they keep 80% of the old code, more at best 30% and certainly nothing older than five or ten years.
You do understand that computer languages and architectures have changed dramatically over time? Software written for an 8-bit computer isn't really replaced so directly for code for a 64-bit one. And what languages would those be? Even with the original Elite, it was ported to multiple computers, each with it's own machine code instructions. Maybe that explains the problems with Cobra - it's written in BASIC!I could pretty easily be convinced we have a situation of the sort where little individual bits of the family heirloom axe have been replaced as they rust or rot, over generations (EDIT2: I am sure there is going to be at least one reader who'll spot that particular reference pertaining to the allegory
That is also a joke. Truth is while there may be something of the old algorithms in Cobra, rewritten for modern platforms and while some code from projects such as ED may have found its way into Cobra, it does appear to be something that they took time to build as a project in itself, something that is further underlined by the technological jump the planetary tech attempted to take. I say this as someone who's been a software engineer for over 20 years. This is not unusual in software, and neither is it a bad idea typically, unless for whatever reasons you lack the resources to meet your deadlines.
Can someone enlighten me what happens to a publicly traded company when they don't hit fiscal year predictions? Because for me this was completely self-imposed, I don't think they are starving per se, in fact it seems to me they're a very healthy business. From my perspective, this deadline was totally unnecessary and only did them harm. Weird, but I know nothing about the elaborate rigged fraud that is the stock market (as the GAMESTONK-gate exposed, but that's another story for another day
)
I don't know the full extent, but bad stuff. I think it's related to their rating, which mean they are safe to invest. They would lose that, which is very bad.Can someone enlighten me what happens to a publicly traded company when they don't hit fiscal year predictions? Because for me this was completely self-imposed, I don't think they are starving per se, in fact it seems to me they're a very healthy business. From my perspective, this deadline was totally unnecessary and only did them harm. Weird, but I know nothing about the elaborate rigged fraud that is the stock market (as the GAMESTONK-gate exposed, but that's another story for another day
I'm not super savvy at all in that kind of stuff, so many will come to enlightened us. But overall, that would be bad.
Press release? Looked like a generic: "Look at our stuff!" page on their corporate website to me, although I would certainly expect it to be appended to every new release using the engine ever.
If it is new, that would only be because the site was redesigned recently - I am pretty sure it says exactly the same as its forebear on the old site.
Both joke and serious. :7
We're talking between Horizons and Odyssey, though, right?
It would affect perception of the company negatively and thus the share price, nothing else.Can someone enlighten me what happens to a publicly traded company when they don't hit fiscal year predictions? Because for me this was completely self-imposed, I don't think they are starving per se, in fact it seems to me they're a very healthy business. From my perspective, this deadline was totally unnecessary and only did them harm. Weird, but I know nothing about the elaborate rigged fraud that is the stock market (as the GAMESTONK-gate exposed, but that's another story for another day
Bad product can do the same or worse, since it affects reputation outside the investing world.
I've no real clue how the decision to release was made or why, but there's plenty of discussion of that already, and FDev can never be transparent about it because it would further reflect on the two bad choices above; so they put on a steely grin and soldier on, paychecks to be earned and all that.
I really hate it for everyone, FD employees and players alike. The way the Kickstarter went and DB's comments about how good the process was, particularly involving the customers, I had hopes it would continue that way and about every 2 years the headline features discussed in the Kickstarter by David Braben himself, would roll-out.
Anyone on here thinking FD want to kill Elite and all that nonsense doesn't understand business for one thing. FDev will continue as long as ED is making money- their own mistakes aside. They obviously have things they want to do with Odyssey to continue to make money and have jobs. The issues I have are that they don't seem to care about player input until things totally blow-up, they seem to be slow-walking the development of the major features everyone wants, and by the looks of things they have community marketers, not community managers (this could change if they open up a bit and do a LOT more Focused Feedback threads and demonstrate bi-directional communication on the Suggestions thread and such).
so, a little offtopic - while we are here mourning VR in ED, other developers are coming out... of Early Access with ship interiors and VR to boot
with ship interiors and VR to boot Game Discussions - What Multicrew could have been if we had ship interiors
Well, sort of :-) Pulsar: Lost Colony is officially out of early access. It has both singleplayer/offline mode and multiplayer 5 ppl coop. And it has a VR version. Worth checking out while we wait for Odyssey to get fixed. Hey @VR Golgot IDK if you reviewed it yet, now's the time probably...
forums.frontier.co.uk
The Frontier website is a wealth of history and information. FDev have a long history making games other than ED. I seriously doubt implementing feet or station interiors required any re-writing of Cobra, since they've been building games with it for over 20 years, including a never-released shooter for past consoles called The Outsider.
Updates to Cobra are regularly made (with an annual investment budget, just like any company with a game engine). The lighting module for ED was updated, but that's just one function in the "engine". It's a bit absurd to think they could re-write all of Cobra from scratch in two years, while also producing multiple games with it. The "reposition the company" train left the station in 2012 with the ED Kickstarter. That was the beginning of a move from mostly work-for-hire to self-publishing owned IP, and that change has only accelerated since then (almost 9 years ago).
FDEV Annual Report-2020
![[PS4] Filthymick420](https://d2aefvhu2f0gi9.cloudfront.net/data/avatars/m/201/201444.jpg?1555738739){kind=avatar}
The fact alone that this has never come out makes me even more mad
The Outsider (video game) - Wikipedia
Fun fact the protagonist in this game was named Jameson
Yep...The fact alone that this has never come out makes me even more mad
The Outsider (video game) - Wikipedia
en.m.wikipedia.org
Fun fact the protagonist in this game was named Jameson
YouTube vid of FDev's The Outsider
[edit; one more with audio and "Jameson" clearly the protagonist!]
The Outsider 2-Jameson audio
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Why they chose to release when they did is frankly a mystery.
It was a pretty generic press release. As I said, I principally cited it simply because the poster in question didn't seem to believe it even existed.
I thought we were talking about Cobra, which is supposedly built on code base harking back from 1988 according to some?
No, but writing an engine that completely updated the graphics in general probably did require a rewrite for the most part. Also, qhat makes you think they've been using Cobra for 20 years. Cobra is allegedly based on what they've been using for 20 years, but that's not the same thing. It's not even very likely given technology has changed so much during that time. There's very few areas in computing where that can happen - typically embedded systems - where the hardware doesn't change.
Can you find any mention of Cobra prior to that press release? People seem to be under the mistaken belief that FDev have been using the same graphics engine since the time of the Etruscans. Is there any evidence of this? Or that is was used for their other projects? I don't mean some code reuse, I mean 'Cobra'.
From what I can make out, 'Cobra' is largely a recent development. Based, no doubt, on what was custom written for ED, and turned into something more portable, so it could be used in other projects. Any other influence from code earlier than circa 2009 was probably the reuse of algorithms, rewritten for in more modern languages. But even if you based something like that based on existing code, it's not an easy case of cut and paste, there's a lot more to it in development terms. And that's before you note that planet surfaces have completely changed, which points to a complete rewrite, rather than tweaking the code and simply adding station interiors.
Of course if they wanted to simply work with what was there and add new planetary tech, it would still be a big undertaking, but what probably increased the complexity substantially was the aim to make the code portable.
Now, people can believe what they want to believe, based upon their clearly non-existent knowledge of software development, but were I to bet on where it all went wrong for FDev, it was that they undertook to rewrite their engine moving forward and got bogged down in that development.
![[VR] Merkir](https://d2aefvhu2f0gi9.cloudfront.net/data/avatars/m/141/141091.jpg?1553527154){kind=avatar}
Many years of "Cobra Game Engine":
I suggest you refrain from the ad hominem attacks. You're doing it to everyone who disagrees with you.
Relatively recent claims of an engine that has been around since 1988 are meaningless. Can you find a reference to 'Cobra' in 1988? Or the 1990's? Early 2000's?
I made no ad hominems. To do that I would have to attack a specific poster. I was stating a fact.
Also, if an unqualified person were to give medical advice, do you really think that crying ad hominem is a valid defense?
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You specifically asked, "Can you find any mention of Cobra prior to that press release?" I gave you some from as far back as 2014, from FDev themselves. Now you're just changing your own goalposts.
Your reply to a specific poster...
It's very obvious that you're just making all this stuff up, saying FDev created a new game engine from scratch for Odyssey, then re-creating all the Horizons functionality within it. You've given no credible evidence for this, but others have shown plenty of evidence to the contrary. The link above is from FDev in 2014 where they outline the Cobra Engine quite clearly. Their current website follows that same thinking. I suggest you read both again, especially the 2014 more detailed explanation of Cobra:
what do I read there in the annual report said by Mr. Braben: "our vision is to be the most respected entertainment company in the world." - well, they missed that by astronomical units. What a joke, they seriously want to be respected by trashing one of their IPs, which is still praised in the annual report, but as they are treating it now, it will be kicked into the dumpster as soon as the console cash grab has happened. Statements like that make me really angry - the most respected entertainment company in the world, well, then start behaving like a respectable company, FDev, so far you failed to do so.
Another thing from the report - they want to do 2 major releases each year instead of 1 every other year - a 4-fold increase in releases - there is no time left for ED anymore.
Another thing from the report - they want to do 2 major releases each year instead of 1 every other year - a 4-fold increase in releases - there is no time left for ED anymore.
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Yeah the engine has been around for a while, and like any engine it simply had to be updated as you go, undergoing many changes in the process. I think I saw cobra logo on planet zoo when my wife was playing it on release. Not so sure though. Anyhow it's frankly meaningless, I'm sure adopting combat dirt boots for Elite wasn't a small task, however the end result is still a buggy mess for... no good reason, because their stock took a massive hit anyway. If they didn't release it, only a few specialised outlets would talk about it (Elite misses the mark, again), and maybe they would have some unpleasant conversation with The Board. Maybe someone's job was on the line, and thanks to this clever ruse someone else got fired? Corporate Court Intrigues, betrayals, alliances... I think Shakespeare would write a gripping book about inside life of corporations
When they pushed this ridiculous deadline on themselves instead of a quiet scowl from The Board, even Yong Yea reported on the bait-and-switch. And that's not the kind of press the PR department wanted for sure...
Also the hype surrounding the Odyshiy release was reflected in the stock price, so even investors believed in "The New Era". I'd say good joob PR Dept, good job. The decision to push consoles back was also questionable, they should have postponed both of them IMHO. But, WTFDev operates in mysterious ways.
I applaud @VR Jay Le Chardon that he valiantly fights for us VR peeps here on the forum, however with no plans for this and no plans for that and no plans for whatever, I don't have a shred of hope left for ED in general. At best we will keep Horizons (which is unlikely because of the alleged separate infrastructure cost) at worst Odyshiy will make Horizons much less playable than it was before (and on my 1080Ti it wasn't exactly stellar either).
Corporate Court Intrigues, betrayals, alliances... I think Shakespeare would write a gripping book about inside life of corporations When they pushed this ridiculous deadline on themselves instead of a quiet scowl from The Board, even Yong Yea reported on the bait-and-switch. And that's not the kind of press the PR department wanted for sure...
Also the hype surrounding the Odyshiy release was reflected in the stock price, so even investors believed in "The New Era". I'd say good joob PR Dept, good job. The decision to push consoles back was also questionable, they should have postponed both of them IMHO. But, WTFDev operates in mysterious ways.
I applaud @VR Jay Le Chardon that he valiantly fights for us VR peeps here on the forum, however with no plans for this and no plans for that and no plans for whatever, I don't have a shred of hope left for ED in general. At best we will keep Horizons (which is unlikely because of the alleged separate infrastructure cost) at worst Odyshiy will make Horizons much less playable than it was before (and on my 1080Ti it wasn't exactly stellar either).
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I'm going to keep fighting, I've probably a couple of months worth of figjht left in me, after that, if we haven't persuaded the company to change it's position on VR, I'm outta here. While I am passionate about Elite and VR, I'm not obsessed by it, and I certainly won't be let the fight chew me up on the inside.
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