Could one call the UE5 engine a mile wide and an inch deep?
Nah, the size of the galaxy would work if there were good reasons for it. If jumps were smaller (heheh) and gaps between systems larger some systems would become hubs and strategic. If the economy was better simulated instead of being homogenous and everyone has everything everywhere, distance and places would matter. But none of that matters. I hear we have navies but there are no shipyards, no strategically important systems, no naval academies. We have a lot of PMFs with dumb names though!
I have mixed feelings about that. I know exactly what you're saying, because I have this in X4, yet having this on X4 makes even their small "bubble" feel too big, for the opposite reason, in that there is so much going on that my poor brain (and my computer's brain, too) has a hard time tracking it all. Granted, I can ignore most of the systems and focus on one, which is mostly what I do now, but there are days I wish I disable some of the gates so I can have a smaller sandbox to play in. I can't even imagine X4's level of detail spread across thousands of systems.
On the other hand, I'm all for it - if Elite wants to copy X4's "BGS", go for it! I'll happily fry my brain for a living, breathing, interdependent ED Bubble. I just pity the supercomputer they'll need to run the server on.
When you design a game world you need to account for the pacing and density of "events". Just mimicking a realistic galaxy doesn't make for a good game world. ED is oversized for its pop. There is the bubble and the little colonia. The rest is empty faff for the faff sake.
This game is not about "events" it is about huge space. Events are nice bonus just.
Huge space is pretty much nothing. Not even hot air.
Yep, it is. That is what game about. Possibility to see it, what is not possible in next hundreds years coming in RL.
Shooting / driving can be done RL.
Sounds boring.
Well you are not an educated game developer to judge what an engine can and cannot do. If SC dev says it can, than i tend to believe them. Cause they work in the field.
If it couldn't than UE5 wouldn't even be a topic on SC social media, as Devs would have quickly debunked that idea.
Well ... as freelancer I'm getting TENS of requests each October, then each November. Students ask to solve pretty hard and specific C++/deep OS understanding problems. So I can assume those guys will be programmers. If I solve this and they pass guess what will be next ? - 3-4 years later they may work on SC and propose to use UE5 ... because task explaining why not was done by me
...just example of what COULD happen.
CIG doesn't want to port SC to UE5 because the necessary modifications to the engine would take too much effort with too little gain. The engine wouldn't run it 'out of the box'.
I'm surprised SC hasn't announced a rewrite for UE5 engine, that could excuse another decade of development without betaWell ... as freelancer I'm getting TENS of requests each October, then each November. Students ask to solve pretty hard and specific C++/deep OS understanding problems. So I can assume those guys will be programmers. If I solve this and they pass guess what will be next ? - 3-4 years later they may work on SC and propose to use UE5 ... because task explaining why not was done by me
...just example of what COULD happen.
I've wondered this myself. For example, imagine a very detailed globe on Lara Croft's desk in UE5. It could be incredibly detailed and photorealistic, and she could walk up to it and look at it in a magnifying glass and it would look all big. Now replace her mansion (which I suspect would be millions of polygons) with a simple star skybox, and replace the textures and lighting maps and other tweaks of the globe to look more real. Poof - planets in space, and you just freed up millions of polygons by tossing out the mansion and replacing it with a simple skybox!Isn't that rather the point, you use Stellar Forge (or something similar) to do the space environment stuff and UE5 to do all the standard game stuff (stop me if I'm being too technical
Of course this becomes more complicated when you actually go to land on said planet. UE5 probably would not handle a seamless transition from space to the ground, nor do I suspect it would do so well in "flight simulator mode" as a ship flies over endless terrain at a modest altitude. There might be a way to trick it, akin to tricks used to make side-scrollers back in the day, but in a 3D "swap terrain in at the margins" way.
Obviously I'm just stabbing in the dark, as I have no idea of how UE actually works (always wanted to learn it, but never found the time) or how Cobra engine works for that matter. I just like thinking about these things as a mental exercise. Someone will probably yell at me for that, because you know, thinking is bad.
Also to give an example to people that think Unreal Engine is not suited for Space games: Everspace 2 is built on UE 4. It no where near the level of NMS or ED in terms of vastness of space but it's possible.
I also firm believer that after ED and NMS, no one will try to create a game so big that players will never be able to visit 99% of it. ED will be forever a unique in that feature, cause there is simply no merit in doing it. It's a waste of developers and players time.
I also firm believer that after ED and NMS, no one will try to create a game so big that players will never be able to visit 99% of it. ED will be forever a unique in that feature, cause there is simply no merit in doing it. It's a waste of developers and players time.
We don't need fancy game. We need "simulator". As close as possible to scientific RL knowledge. Everything else is nice addition to it.
UEs are not designed to do scientific simulations.
If you feel this is a waste - don't play. I'm pleased to visit stars I saw in my telescope.
Asking for the same game again? If you are not satisfied with ED simulation, i can't help you, in fact noone can help you. But Elite fanchise is sooo much more than a galaxy simulation you see today. But what you see today has no future beyond it. It's need to change, addapt and expand, else this is the end of it. UE 5 is the future for all games.
That's why I play Elite and not any other of "all games"
And yet this is what make Elite unique, the thing I miss in other games like X4 (though in X4 it's more about the size of the static, never-changing skybox that "looks" like a solar system but never changes that annoys me).
Maybe instead of trying to change Elite into another game, you should just request another game. Not that I don't have my own dreams for Elite, but not at the expense of what it already is. I want it to become more, not less.
When i look at Elite Dangerous today - all i see is Legacy in 2 years. Even todays Thargoid war is a perfect examples. As someone said in another thread: before they had to manualy add thargoids, now they don't have to. It's ideal change for Legacy. And the war can go on for 10 - 20 our years, so it's pefect for Legacy.
When i look at update 15 - " Key feature overhaul ". Before i was excited cause they might have made some features more interesting, now i think they are simply changing them so they work better in Legacy.
Games through out their life, have ups and down. ED in it's early stage went through a massive Boom in the first year: Kickstarter, Release, Lifetime Pass, Horizon - so where did those money go? Where are other games set in Elite Universe or ED2? None, cause they went and use this money for JWE, Planet Zoo, F1 etc - Why, why not expand Elite? Cause they see no future beyond Elite Dangerous.
If Odyssey done better, i might have seen some hope, but not only it done terrible in reviews, it also destroyed entire Console version of this game, and upset a lot of VR users for lack of On-foot VR. It's a kind of a disaster if you ask me.
Look Elite Dangerous is already plenty today, we don't need Habitable Planets, animals, or EVA - but when i see how much hype there is around UE5, i can't help but think, why not give it a shot, expand Elite Universe beyond Elite Dangerous. It could be an RPG like Mass Effect set in Elite Universe, or simply a set of stories set in different times of Elite Dangerous lore - like John Jameson or the very first encounters of Thargoids.
I though this trailer was really good made: