couldn't agree more...after watching the SC re-entry footage reveal at the latest Gamescom, the first thing i thought was how much better Kerbal's looked (and ****loads better at that!). i hope FD are looking at Kerbal when going for inspiration on this.
Atmospheric Landings
- Thread starter ShadowAviator
- Start date
couldn't agree more...after watching the SC re-entry footage reveal at the latest Gamescom, the first thing i thought was how much better Kerbal's looked (and ****loads better at that!). i hope FD are looking at Kerbal when going for inspiration on this.
I'll not talk about business, or cash-flow, other than to agree that to arrive at atmopshered planets, with Earth like Fauna / Flora, and Cities, well, its a LOT of work, and will require a constant stream of £££ to keep the devs in their coke and pizza + nifty cars 
At the ED launch, I recall David Braben talking about multiple alient life forms being something he wanted in ED. People, even back then were talking a LOT about planetary landings, and hey, they delivered next year.
I'm pretty sure that Atmospheric landings is something DB wants, its just a case of delivering it, and doing it well enough. ED can then develop all the various aspects of what that means, as time moves on.
Where are we now?
We have planets, and we can land on them. They seem kind of sophisticated. There is (apparently) some kind of simulation of plate tectonics. This drives the placement of Mountains.
This Planet system is something I think Frontier must be proud of. Its not just Perlin noise mountains. Planets have actual character, with distinct features, canyons and what not.
Vulcanism is due soon, apparently, at least Geysers and Fumarols were displayed at Gamescom. Will we also see actual volcanoes? Super large ones, dorment ones, active, lava, spumes of methane ice etc. Maybe.
The next level is major atmospheres. I'm not talking thin and wispy, like Mars. But rather where pressure is high enough to produce winds, and where dust levels, and moisture provide high levels of distance haze.
High levels of moisture, leads to seas, and oceans. And they are fed by rivers. These may not be rivers of water. But you are still going to see bodies of liquids, and those liquids will come down in rain, and form streams rivers.
Such fluid flows leads to erosion. So now we see Planets where rocks are visibly modified and aged by fluid flow.
These thick atmospheres will have clouds. The seas and oceans will have bergs. In other locations, there might be comparatively high temps, and pools of boilings liquids.
And then we have life. How often? Well, unlike No Mans Sky, I don't think life will be very common. Apart from on Terra-formed worlds. At least there the life-forms can be transplanted from Earth.
But Alien life? Fauna, Flora. Heck, thats a crazy amount of work. So best left to last really?
We don't actually have any people models in ED yet, apart from faceless Commander models.
WHEN?
Im hoping, to see some of these elements come in, in future releases. Not necessarily in distinct Seasons, but rather, in phases, as the technology is "mastered"
And I don't expect each element to be nailed on the first attempt. Modelling things like Vulcanism, Weather, rivers, etc. Its complex.
WORTH IT?
Of course, come on.... you look down on those Earth likes, and the not so Earth likes, and you just itch to be able to fly down there and explore.
Truth is, many planets, at first, will be pretty barren. We might have to wait a couple of years before we actually can fly down onto an Alien nature reserve.
These planets offer a wealth of other game play, and just the fun of exploring VIABLE alien planets, with complex atmopsheres, rivers of fluids, volcanoes, and so on. Well, its VERY appealing to me.
At the ED launch, I recall David Braben talking about multiple alient life forms being something he wanted in ED. People, even back then were talking a LOT about planetary landings, and hey, they delivered next year.
I'm pretty sure that Atmospheric landings is something DB wants, its just a case of delivering it, and doing it well enough. ED can then develop all the various aspects of what that means, as time moves on.
Where are we now?
We have planets, and we can land on them. They seem kind of sophisticated. There is (apparently) some kind of simulation of plate tectonics. This drives the placement of Mountains.
This Planet system is something I think Frontier must be proud of. Its not just Perlin noise mountains. Planets have actual character, with distinct features, canyons and what not.
Vulcanism is due soon, apparently, at least Geysers and Fumarols were displayed at Gamescom. Will we also see actual volcanoes? Super large ones, dorment ones, active, lava, spumes of methane ice etc. Maybe.
The next level is major atmospheres. I'm not talking thin and wispy, like Mars. But rather where pressure is high enough to produce winds, and where dust levels, and moisture provide high levels of distance haze.
High levels of moisture, leads to seas, and oceans. And they are fed by rivers. These may not be rivers of water. But you are still going to see bodies of liquids, and those liquids will come down in rain, and form streams rivers.
Such fluid flows leads to erosion. So now we see Planets where rocks are visibly modified and aged by fluid flow.
These thick atmospheres will have clouds. The seas and oceans will have bergs. In other locations, there might be comparatively high temps, and pools of boilings liquids.
And then we have life. How often? Well, unlike No Mans Sky, I don't think life will be very common. Apart from on Terra-formed worlds. At least there the life-forms can be transplanted from Earth.
But Alien life? Fauna, Flora. Heck, thats a crazy amount of work. So best left to last really?
We don't actually have any people models in ED yet, apart from faceless Commander models.
WHEN?
Im hoping, to see some of these elements come in, in future releases. Not necessarily in distinct Seasons, but rather, in phases, as the technology is "mastered"
And I don't expect each element to be nailed on the first attempt. Modelling things like Vulcanism, Weather, rivers, etc. Its complex.
WORTH IT?
Of course, come on.... you look down on those Earth likes, and the not so Earth likes, and you just itch to be able to fly down there and explore.
Truth is, many planets, at first, will be pretty barren. We might have to wait a couple of years before we actually can fly down onto an Alien nature reserve.
These planets offer a wealth of other game play, and just the fun of exploring VIABLE alien planets, with complex atmopsheres, rivers of fluids, volcanoes, and so on. Well, its VERY appealing to me.
I wonder if this will lead to sticking to a certain planet. Build base. Or develop a current base. Do only quests for that specific base. And even earn more money from it with trade lines. Doing business.
And growing population? Colonize planets? Kill whole planet? Or just drop a Nuke to its core and wipe it from star chart?
And growing population? Colonize planets? Kill whole planet? Or just drop a Nuke to its core and wipe it from star chart?
potentially spectacular...here's hoping
Virtual reality. Only way to play, once one have tried it. :7
Two wide views, at 1080x1200x1.4xoptional_additional_full-screen_supersampling and 90Hz, each.
...on a 3820, which is admittedly long in the tooth, and a 980ti.
I do have to reduce a few settings (AO is first to go), and still see tons of last-minute terrain LOD pop-in and late frames... :7
That: "supersamling at 8x"... Is it DSR ("full screen"), or is it only upping the application's MSAA antialiasing settings (which don't seem to do that much to begin with in ED, due to a majority of things leaning heavily on deferred rendering)? Are you really rendering 16k frame buffers, without performance bogging down?
If it is indeed other reasons than hardware limitations (...and network/instancing matters), that causes the game to chug, then I suppose it has great room for improvement!
You really want more of everything in VR, because it makes everything even more apparent than usual - especially aliasing and things being planar (the new terrain textures are pretty, but could need at minimum parallax mapping, to offer an illusion of volume; Billboards can look and act really strange; Polygon count and texture resolution quickly becomes insufficient, when you can stick your face right up to things, instead of seeing a depitction of them, from a distance). :7
EDIT (forgot.
): Almost everything that comes with additional planet types, comes on top of the base layer used by current types. The amount of things to render, and to generate, grows with every layer.
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I just don't believe what people say anymore. Nothing wrong with being sceptical, low expectations, not jumping on the hype train, etc. But there is nothing wrong with judging AFTER we'll see what happens either.[/QUOTE]
Have some rep CMDR Talby.... sorry CMDR babelfisch...by the way .... do you have a bomb called #20 on your ship?....if you do...please go check it's AI circuit!!!!! ....lol
Have some rep CMDR Talby.... sorry CMDR babelfisch...by the way .... do you have a bomb called #20 on your ship?....if you do...please go check it's AI circuit!!!!! ....lol
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The jerky blue screen is the game transitioning from a super cruise network instance to a normal space one. It's nothing to do with the planet generation as such. People have flown from plant to planet in real space or managed to SC down to the surface (somehow).
The transition one of the downsides of the hybrid networking system they use. It's cheap and scales relatively well though.
It is a shame that it does undermine the landing effect somewhat.
It doesn't pause to load textures.
Nms, on the other hand, does as much as possible to convince you the planet you're approaching isn't the same planet you land on. The texture representing the surface bears only a passing resemblance to the final PG surface that emerges through the haze as your ship somewhat navigates for you on the way down, forcibly preventing you from crashing into the ground.
It would be lovely if ed had no transitional delays, I agree. But a few hours of "flight" in nms, if it should be called that, just made me think how much more I'd be enjoying it if I were playing ED.
It'll not be a tragedy. It's not a tragedy now. But I doubt it'll be anything like nms.
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its funny, right now the Networking aspect of ED is probably my biggest gripe. Its quite reliable now, no hangs dropping from SC. But its still relatively slow, and does break immersion. BUT the biggest place it breaks immersion IMHO, is when selling exploration data, and the KING of grit in eye, is when getting Mission data. For some reason it takes and age sometimes to get, what you would expect in "reality" to be data already present on the station.
I know ED relies on spinning up AWS servers, and whatnot. I just wish the servers were more plentiful, or more powerful per server, whichever is most economic. Because having to wait EACH time I ask for missions (open, close missions repeatedly to see what I mean), feels very clunky. I mean, cache whatever it is that takes the most amount of time to generate, and ONLY request new data when it becomes necessary.
no need to hype things up, we can just look at the facts and take it from there.
Keep expectations low, its going to be a massive undertaking for FDEV.
FD clearly know what they need to do, question is can their cobra tech handle it.
The Zoo Tycoon game clearly show that they can make animals very detailed and since that game was released and until now a lot of development has gone into the Cobra engine I guess.
Keep expectations low, its going to be a massive undertaking for FDEV.
FD clearly know what they need to do, question is can their cobra tech handle it.
The Zoo Tycoon game clearly show that they can make animals very detailed and since that game was released and until now a lot of development has gone into the Cobra engine I guess.
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Ultimately I'll still take the current network model over a financially riskier server model. It's much better for the game long term, especially if the playerbase end up either huge or tiny in 10 years time.
I wonder how they will handle syncing clouds, waves and crowds between players. They could in principle move towards something like Spatial OS from Improbable. I would have thought this would massively increase server costs, but smaller outfits like Bossa are building games around it.
I wonder how they will handle syncing clouds, waves and crowds between players. They could in principle move towards something like Spatial OS from Improbable. I would have thought this would massively increase server costs, but smaller outfits like Bossa are building games around it.
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Nice write-up
Check out Braben's musings on gas giants (listen to that whole bit from 01:49:00 on if you get a chance, his enthusiasm is kinda infectious
I can't actually listen to anything, being that I spend most of my time on the forums while I'm in the office, but I read the transcript. And I wanted to share this:
"Perhaps Jupiter’s most iconic feature is its Great Red Spot. A gigantic storm twice as big as Earth, the spot was first observed 300 years ago – and may have been churning long before that. Like a hurricane on Earth, the center is relatively calm, but farther out, the winds scream at 430 to 680 kilometers per hour (270 to 425 miles per hour)." (source: https://www.missionjuno.swri.edu/jupiter/great-red-spot/)
The key words here are "relatively calm" so what is "relatively calm" compared to 430-680 km/h winds? 215-340 km/h? Our current world-record holder on Earth are gusts of 408 km/h during Hurricane Olivia, meaning the winds of Jupiter's Great Red Spot would suck up Olivia and spit it back out! Trying to fly a craft through that, well, best of luck.
Now this isn't to say I am opposed to having interactions with gas giants - skimming the upper atmosphere for the scenery, scooping materials from the atmosphere, or even dropping specially-designed limpets into the deeper parts of the atmosphere to fetch materials - I'm all for it. But trying to fly a craft into it? Not so much.
Hah, well our craft compensate for various things at the moment, so I'm guessing they could filter those realities down to something that's gameable. I am intrigued to see if they can get windspeed and direction into it as gameplay. Certainly I like the idea of electrical storms juxtaposed with clearer space if they can work it.