Any chance ED will be transfered to DX12?

Considering that they rewrote UI, gal/sys maps, lighting, planet tech, and added a whole new first-person on-legs mechanics, I was surprised they didn't go DX12/Vulcan path. And there are some players noticing a difference in flight mechanics and the thing with how SRVs changed as well. If they changed almost everything anyway, it might have been a good place to change the underlying tech too.
 
If I wanted to pull out an engine in a professional bit of software, it would be a case of matching the interfaces and verifying the tests when dropping a new black box in.
I bet you haven't managed to do it that easily on a large scale system that has had this many people working on it over this amount of time. Nobody is that tidy.
 
Plenty of games have multiple DX rendering paths. They could make a DX12 version. I just don't see why they would at this point. I am not even sure how much we would gain from it. A few FPS here or there? A tiny bit better graphics?
Cheaper maintenance. Whereas not so much with Vulkan, as it is far more low-level from what I understand.
 
I was wondering myself. After all, DX12 / Vulkan would have allowed more breathing room for the new planetary tech and Odyssey stuff. With one condition: to have competent devs/team leaders, able to squeeze every bit of performance from the hardware. Which is not the case, unfortunately - the current state of things is a living proof for that.

With DX12 / Vulkan you get less overhead and better multithreaded performance, even on older hardware. But you have to work for it.
 
Microsoft kinda changed how DX12 is distributed, so who knows. That said, given the state of odyssey, i can see why they didnt.
 
Considering that they rewrote UI, gal/sys maps, lighting, planet tech, and added a whole new first-person on-legs mechanics, I was surprised they didn't go DX12/Vulcan path. And there are some players noticing a difference in flight mechanics and the thing with how SRVs changed as well. If they changed almost everything anyway, it might have been a good place to change the underlying tech too.

I hadn't heard about flight mechanics changing. Is that really true?
 
I hadn't heard about flight mechanics changing. Is that really true?
I saw it somewhere in a thread that the ships behaved a little different. Personally, I haven't noticed it, but it did sound like there had been some small changes. The SRV was changed for sure, and then reversed during alpha, and re-reversed and ... not sure which version we have now of the SRV.

Still, with so many changes in mechanics and graphics, it's almost like everything related to the GPU technology was rewritten, so they could've taken the opportunity and upgraded the graphics API.
 
I saw it somewhere in a thread that the ships behaved a little different. Personally, I haven't noticed it, but it did sound like there had been some small changes. The SRV was changed for sure, and then reversed during alpha, and re-reversed and ... not sure which version we have now of the SRV.

Still, with so many changes in mechanics and graphics, it's almost like everything related to the GPU technology was rewritten, so they could've taken the opportunity and upgraded the graphics API.

Hmm I almost can't imagine em doing that.

The flight model is pretty much the only fthing that works in this game.
 
Hmm I almost can't imagine em doing that.

The flight model is pretty much the only fthing that works in this game.
 
Look, forget DX12. This thing needs to run on 486DX.


ed_vga.png
 
Vulcan is better option, because it would be a common way of programming for PC, XBox and PS.

That is not very true...

XBox is DirectX. It is after all Microsofts console, so why would they use a competing API?
Playstaiton, uses their own API, GNM/GNMX, they have used OpenGL implementations before (PS3), but it was not very used, so it got removed in PS4, why put in the effort for a limited use API on their platform? There are some indication that Playstation 5 might support Vulkan, but that still leaves PS4 out...


So unless you intend to use some kind of wrapper to use Vulkan and then translate to the other "native" API on the consoles, you are going to have to implement
GNM/GNMX and DirectX at minimum regardless

On PC we can use DirectX and OpenGL/Vulkan, but not GNM/GNMX , so it makes sense to reuse the DirectX from XBox on PC, instead of adding a 3rd API to the mix

We used to have OpenGL support in the Mac version of Elite, but since Apple decided to dump OpenGL in favour of its own Metal API, so that was the end for Elite on Mac, to few users to warrant the rewrite.


So on Linux, we have OpenGL/Vulcan, but with Proton/Wine etc we also have DirectX.


So a bit about Elite on Linux, it works with Proton, and the biggest hurdle seems to be to get the launcher running! and this seems to be caused by the use of dotNet... so a new launcher that is much more Linux friendly could be make it alot easier to run on Linux. And if the game would upgrade to use DirectX 12, then any performance difference between native Linux client using Vulkan and Windows client using Vulkan or DX12 should be minimal, and often the Windows client tends to be more optimized than the Linux client, so it has not been unusual that in such situations the Windows client have been faster than the Native Linux client! Where difference start to show in favour for Linux is when we are hitting 200+ FPS using DX, at which point, for a game like Elite, makes very little difference... and if we start to extrapolate how many of the Elite players on Linux using a 200+ FPS capable monitor, and we are talking about a very small subset of the Elite player base...
 
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