can it become a single computer game ?

[anumist]

hello yall,

first, its been a long time i havent played elite dangerous...


not because i didnt wanted, but i have to open my gaming desktop, and download the updates, ... and its a 'big game'. it takes will to put time in it , to discover things , explore etc etc


anyways, i sometime look at what is happening, and i feel really good about this game.

despite some features i , for myself, wont use , like multicrew, or maybe things like that.

despite all, from what i remember, the game looked awesome and well.


i was wondering, i know they said offline couldnt be done or whatever,

but it would be neat if 'they' could get the game as a standalone experience ....

what i mean : you install the game from cd, and you can start a new game, the galaxy and all that is generated on your pc only.... meaning single player, ( outside of the online galaxy ).


if this could be done, it would go well with the franchise past games.


also, im sure fun stuffs could be added, such as stations variants ( from what i remember i guess there is already, the 'mini stations ' from what i remember were all variants , but the big stations are less )

maybe more or less a storyline ( a 'main quest' with many many side quests )

anyways, features that would make the singleplayer interesting.



not that i dislike the online play, but maybe im a slow guy too .....

but i guess its more because i find it 'clean' to have a 'complete' game , that you can install on a cd rom , instead of having to followup every update with a download, if not , you cant play .



anyways, its just a small rent, not to be taken too much serious, im just a lil fanboy like all of you maybe LOLD

ty

 

[Belan]

You answered your own question. What you described is basically asking them for an offline mode, which they aren't willing to do in the near or distant future.

 

[[VR] Goooost]

you install the game from cd

Hey, I remember those!

I think that currently, there's a lot of background simulation that has to be done on a cloud based system. But Elite has a 10-year plan, by the end of which computers will be completely different and the whole game, background simulation and all can be injected straight into the bio-neural gel processor on your holo helmet and you'll have full access to the fully immersive space legs of the Elite universe. But it begs the question, with infinite bandwidth quantum pairing being so ubiquitous, why the urge to go offline?

 

[Ignition]

DRM

 

[GraXXoR]

Hey, I remember those!

I think that currently, there's a lot of background simulation that has to be done on a cloud based system. But Elite has a 10-year plan, by the end of which computers will be completely different and the whole game, background simulation and all can be injected straight into the bio-neural gel processor on your holo helmet and you'll have full access to the fully immersive space legs of the Elite universe. But it begs the question, with infinite bandwidth quantum pairing being so ubiquitous, why the urge to go offline?

Tongue in cheek recognised. LOL. But I don't think computers will be completely different beasts in 10 years.

I am sitting here with a bunch of iMacs circa 2007 they have 4GB of RAM 2.6GHz dual core CPU and 500GB HDD (admittedly some upgraded to 128GB SSD last year) and 256 MB dodgy ATI graphics cards.
These were hardly beasts even back then.

Yet my pride and joy "only" has a Quad Core CPU, 1080 GTX, 64GB RAM, 1TB SSD / 2TB HDD.
For 10 years of advancement in computing, I find that a little depressing.

Heck now I've just fired up my 2002 vintage Pentium 4 2.8GHz with 2 GB RAM 64GB SSD 2X1TB raid 0 HDD, 256Mb NVIDIA 7600. Running Windows 7.

Hardly world shattering changes these last 15 years -which incidentally means 10 iterations of Moore's Law- and with flash and RAM prices on the rise, CPU performance stagnating, and not to mention the fact that desktop PCs are becoming more and more niche products year by year, things are going to slow down or even stop; much like the DLSR market these last three years.

Thankfully there are still two competing graphics card companies which is where the action is at. But when the market shrinks to the point where it becomes untenable to continue The massive R&D required, one of the companies will fold and leave the remaining company to itself, ending the era of almost-yearly, consumer-level, high-performance graphics card upgrades we've come to cherish.

P.s. Incidentally 15 years would equate to a 1000fold increase according to Moore's Law since "performance doubles every 18 months"

-- actually Moore stated every two years but some typically managerial type at Intel changed overlooked the data and made the famous 18 months mantra we all know.

 

[Comrade Napoleon]

The last few years has hardly brought about any real improvements in CPU performance. All atention has mostly been on lowering power usage and making even more powerful CPU's obtaiable in lappies and Pad's. GPU's on the other hand have been trying to achive both better performance and power consumption.

Example: My Game rig sports a 2011 Intel i7 2600k Cpu, its performance is absolutely good/adequate for 95 % of purposes.
The original GTX 580 is outclassed by several newer GPU's that treble performance, at least.

I dont think the next massive bump is around the corner i.e the Pentium to Core Duo jump or the Core Duo to the i3,i5 or i7 structure.
But I will rather not predict the future in computers, its very difficult.

Cheers Cmdr's

 

[IamMe]

I think offline mod will be done when game is fully finished with no further updates on horizon and when players number start to drop and paying servers become nonprofitable, so not soon!
I repp you cos i would like the same but it is too early for that.
Cheers!

 

[Alex Brentnall]

It could but a large chunk of the simulation would have to be removed or coded very different. All the mission generation, economy changes and similar.
Hand crafted elements would have to be scripted (CGs, new stations, thargoids etc). In short when starting a new game you could say, 3 days in X will happen, 5 days in Y will happen. Because thats the way it's coded.

In short yes it's technically possible albeit with a few caveats. However, to get it into that state is probably about 2-3 years of development time if I had to guestimate it from my armchair. Perhaps more, It took a long while of tweaking to get missions and everything else working in the current architecture so who knows the challenges of not having it generated by a server.


One thing that may work is locally hosting all the servers on your own server pc in the next room. If you got the files they run and were able to effectively do it in miniature as you know there will only ever be 1 request at a time then it could perhaps be done in as little as 6-12 months just putting the code to link the bits together and creating tools to allow you to add things into the server like CG's etc yourself.


Neither strike me as particularly elegant solutions and neither strike me as anything that Frontier would consider doing. That 2nd option is my hope for the end of days when it shuts down. Like the original World of Warcraft. "Here, host your own servers if you want."
I in a small way am looking forwards to that time as it may open it up a whole load of modding opportunity, however, also dreading it as so many things can go wrong if Cobra engine isn't made public or there's no dev tools or anything. Or if there's not even server run files and it's just a "shut-down date". Anything could happen.

 

[GraXXoR]

The last few years has hardly brought about any real improvements in CPU performance. All atention has mostly been on lowering power usage and making even more powerful CPU's obtaiable in lappies and Pad's. GPU's on the other hand have been trying to achive both better performance and power consumption.

Example: My Game rig sports a 2011 Intel i7 2600k Cpu, its performance is absolutely good/adequate for 95 % of purposes.
The original GTX 580 is outclassed by several newer GPU's that treble performance, at least.

I dont think the next massive bump is around the corner i.e the Pentium to Core Duo jump or the Core Duo to the i3,i5 or i7 structure.
But I will rather not predict the future in computers, its very difficult.

Cheers Cmdr's

There will certainly be higher parallelism but until something remarkable like Quantum computing becomes practical/feasible progression will be slowing down markedly due to...
- Increased difficulty of extracting performance at extremes of specifications. Silicon is (actually, quite literally) being strained to the limits.
- What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away (i.e. each iteration of Windows and Word being slower and fuglier than the last) is no longer entirely true, Win 7 was faster than Vista and Win 10 is apparently a little faster than Win 8 (this is anecdotal, I have no proof). Anyway, software design does seem to finally be addressing the late 90's idea of limitless CPU cycles coming SOON(TM)... So one of the driving motivators for high performance CPUs has gone.
- reduced market for extreme products since mainstream are "more than good enough" for 95% of all purposes (linked to the above)
- Markets are shifting away from desktops and laptops to tablets or even phones, making the traditional desktops rarer and rarer. A reduced market means reduced R&D.

And then there's this:

In this rather poignant episode of Peppa Pig, they recorded the above message for the future generation on a camcorder and buried the tape (note it's 2006 and DVC was still the format of choice back then) in a time capsule ....
Along with it, a CD, a colour comic and a toy rocket.
A little later, a time capsule left by the parents of Peppa and her pals thirty years earlier is dug up and contained a massive VHS cassette which when played back was found to contain exactly the same message recorded by their parents....
A record, a black and white comic and a toy aeroplane.

Changes are mostly incremental rather than Earth shattering.

 

[anumist]

It could but a large chunk of the simulation would have to be removed or coded very different. All the mission generation, economy changes and similar.
Hand crafted elements would have to be scripted (CGs, new stations, thargoids etc). In short when starting a new game you could say, 3 days in X will happen, 5 days in Y will happen. Because thats the way it's coded.

In short yes it's technically possible albeit with a few caveats. However, to get it into that state is probably about 2-3 years of development time if I had to guestimate it from my armchair. Perhaps more, It took a long while of tweaking to get missions and everything else working in the current architecture so who knows the challenges of not having it generated by a server.


One thing that may work is locally hosting all the servers on your own server pc in the next room. If you got the files they run and were able to effectively do it in miniature as you know there will only ever be 1 request at a time then it could perhaps be done in as little as 6-12 months just putting the code to link the bits together and creating tools to allow you to add things into the server like CG's etc yourself.


Neither strike me as particularly elegant solutions and neither strike me as anything that Frontier would consider doing. That 2nd option is my hope for the end of days when it shuts down. Like the original World of Warcraft. "Here, host your own servers if you want."
I in a small way am looking forwards to that time as it may open it up a whole load of modding opportunity, however, also dreading it as so many things can go wrong if Cobra engine isn't made public or there's no dev tools or anything. Or if there's not even server run files and it's just a "shut-down date". Anything could happen.

yeah, i love your reply... thanks.


its just it would go well with the spirit of the 'franchise'. i dont say it doesnt, but if we think games like elder scrolls, and we heared about 'elder scrolls online', people would think the online is less in the storyline maybe because its online.

but if elite dangerous can be the real 4th episode , and things we can do to unfold the story, either with the federation or the empire...