Liquid. Any form of liquid apparently is a challenge for any developement. It's resource unfriendly and usually seperates the good and the bad games. The passionate and the lazy ones. Game or virtual liquid of any sort but usually water comes in all different forms and variations. Sometimes it is simply a stone hard chunk of ground with water textures added on top of it. Sometimes the texture is a somewhat-professional animated GIF. Sometimes you can swim in it ... sometimes you just walk on, depending on your current virtual religion. But then, sometimes the texture moves up and down, sometimes your character even changes the animation and sometimes you just die.
In some rare scenarios and triple A++ games you encounter this:
A real interactable fluid 3D rendering that is influenced by the environment and other factors using somewhat advanced technology.
What has this to do with Elite? Quite obvious atmospheric landings. While flora and fauna are important too and probably just as difficult to master, I feel that liquid or fluid should not be left out. Especially not in case we get access to some kind of submarines (maybe in form of SLFs or SRV types).
Liquid has always been a main factor for me to buy games or to not to. Looks and physics are the main parts I keep an eye on for two reasons: First, it needs to be in line with the other game textures no matter if it has gameplay content or not and secondly, it shows wheather or not the devs work passionate or efficient (while efficient is a negative term here; working with limited resources to accomplish the best possible goal. It's bull, don't do this. Use unlimited resources to accomplish a set goal. The investment will eventuall pay off more).
To give food for discussion I want to bring up a couple of points. One is Space Engineers and planets. Ever since planets have been added all lakes and seas were made up of ice because (AFAIK) the engine isn't suited for liquid (or anything resource unfriendly). Hence they just added another type of rock, called it ice and added some not-so-irrelevant gameplay elements to it. Another point is Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag. You might think water is a main gamepaly element in a world based on ships and pirates ... but no. In order to save resources they only added a set and limited amount of places where you could really dive into the water and look for treasures. There is not really a way to randomly jump off your ship and dive ... even if it would just be plain boring sand and rock ground with a couple types of fish. (I do like this game, tho).
A twisted mirror image would be Silent Hunter III. As a WW2 submarine commander and the free cam mode you could really encourage good water environments (for its time), the physical parts were mostly left out due to limited resources which ultimately is a negative point. The effects were awesome tho.
Now since Elite is mainly based on space simulation I doubt liquid will get any proper attention compared to other stuff like BGS or nebulae effects ... let alone sound effects. However, I fear that (in order to save resources :|) liquid will come too short and we will be presented with average quality liquid which will act like any other obstacle and causes the exact same amount of damage as if we would hit the surface of moons. Pretty-strong-water.
Then we have other liquids like magma or fluid metal that (in theory) should cause alot of heat or other kinds of damage/effects on our ships. Unfortunately we don't even ave different surface temperatures despite BGS data. A moon 0.2ls apart from the parent star is just as hot as a rogue moon somewhere 0.1LY away. Our SRVs never overheat.
Considering the lack of love for details in some (not too many but still recognizeable amount) areas I fear that we will get a really limited version of atmospheric landings right away and get the cool stuff one or two years later.
Now how important should liquid be in the priority? How important is it for the players? Or will we go the SpaceEngineers way and convert all liquid to rocky ice?
In some rare scenarios and triple A++ games you encounter this:
[video=youtube;Jl54WZtm0QE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jl54WZtm0QE[/video]
A real interactable fluid 3D rendering that is influenced by the environment and other factors using somewhat advanced technology.
What has this to do with Elite? Quite obvious atmospheric landings. While flora and fauna are important too and probably just as difficult to master, I feel that liquid or fluid should not be left out. Especially not in case we get access to some kind of submarines (maybe in form of SLFs or SRV types).
Liquid has always been a main factor for me to buy games or to not to. Looks and physics are the main parts I keep an eye on for two reasons: First, it needs to be in line with the other game textures no matter if it has gameplay content or not and secondly, it shows wheather or not the devs work passionate or efficient (while efficient is a negative term here; working with limited resources to accomplish the best possible goal. It's bull, don't do this. Use unlimited resources to accomplish a set goal. The investment will eventuall pay off more).
To give food for discussion I want to bring up a couple of points. One is Space Engineers and planets. Ever since planets have been added all lakes and seas were made up of ice because (AFAIK) the engine isn't suited for liquid (or anything resource unfriendly). Hence they just added another type of rock, called it ice and added some not-so-irrelevant gameplay elements to it. Another point is Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag. You might think water is a main gamepaly element in a world based on ships and pirates ... but no. In order to save resources they only added a set and limited amount of places where you could really dive into the water and look for treasures. There is not really a way to randomly jump off your ship and dive ... even if it would just be plain boring sand and rock ground with a couple types of fish. (I do like this game, tho).
A twisted mirror image would be Silent Hunter III. As a WW2 submarine commander and the free cam mode you could really encourage good water environments (for its time), the physical parts were mostly left out due to limited resources which ultimately is a negative point. The effects were awesome tho.
Now since Elite is mainly based on space simulation I doubt liquid will get any proper attention compared to other stuff like BGS or nebulae effects ... let alone sound effects. However, I fear that (in order to save resources :|) liquid will come too short and we will be presented with average quality liquid which will act like any other obstacle and causes the exact same amount of damage as if we would hit the surface of moons. Pretty-strong-water.
Then we have other liquids like magma or fluid metal that (in theory) should cause alot of heat or other kinds of damage/effects on our ships. Unfortunately we don't even ave different surface temperatures despite BGS data. A moon 0.2ls apart from the parent star is just as hot as a rogue moon somewhere 0.1LY away. Our SRVs never overheat.
Considering the lack of love for details in some (not too many but still recognizeable amount) areas I fear that we will get a really limited version of atmospheric landings right away and get the cool stuff one or two years later.
Now how important should liquid be in the priority? How important is it for the players? Or will we go the SpaceEngineers way and convert all liquid to rocky ice?
