Elite Dangerous: Horizons and Future Updates
- Thread starter Barking_Mad
- Start date
Yes, you will need a device to get past the current stopping point when you approach an object. Only people with the upgrade will be able to obtain the device*. Anyone without it will not get past the stopping point.
* Of course, FD have to worry about hackers - we know they are out there. I'm sure they will suddenly get more interested in stopping hacking if it stops them from getting revenue.
Based on everything they said (and logic), yes it will.
Good news! i get the feeling you need some kind of commission
"....CMDR. someone left it in the docking bay for you. I never knew you could gift-wrap an Anaconda. Or, that they made ribbons that big....."
Update to 1.4 information:
- Frontier will be "adding legal salvage missions, so you don’t need to be a smuggler to retrieve salvage – although smuggling will still be the more profitable of these type of missions."
- Delivery, courier and smuggling will gain long range variants that can set destinations from tens to hundreds of light years away for long haul missions. A new variant on the massacre mission will have higher numbers and greater time for a more sustained strike against the mission target.
- Also in the 30/07 Dev update they said, "We’ve also heard some players wanting a bit more challenge in their scenarios so an even more hazardous extraction site has been added to provide a more dangerous environment. In dangerous systems the scenarios around the nav beacons can also be a high threat version if it has been compromised."
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"No tiling of structures"
What does that mean? Has anyone talked about this at all? What is the source?
What does that mean? Has anyone talked about this at all? What is the source?
IIRC it was asked during one of the GamesCom Twitch streams (edit) - during a conversation about procedural generation and how much of the terrain was generated by it. The reply was that there were no tiled assets as far as the landscape went.
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Freshly updated as per 20/08 Dev Update and PCGamesN article.
It was during Gamescom and essentially was asking whether the terrain textures would be made up of a set of tiles that fit together like a jigsaw puzzle or whether textures would be created on the fly by the PG engine and therefore essentially unique (not sure if still tiled or some other kind of merge/layering process like CryEngine uses, but I suspect the latter). I think it was Ed Symons who said it would be totally PG generated, but like all PG it will follow rules set by the coders/artists e.g. bring the stark rocky texture to the "front" if the texture is being displayed on a slope that is say greater than 45 degrees from horizontal and use a "soil" type texture for areas where the slope is less than 45 degrees.
You can do this in CryEngine and essentially paint a terrain manually now with fairly decent results (I have a screenshot somewhere of a 2 day exercise I did in CryEngine to match an area of the Adriatic coast) and the results were fairly convincing even with stock assets. FDev will likely have the rules and assets baked into the PG engine and it will get generated as required, probably based on camera/view distance. Would love some more details on this as terrain generation is a pet subject of mine.
My guess is - the easy way to do procedural terrain, is to have a set number of terrain features (a certain number of mountains, a certain number of hills, waterfalls, craters etc., down to even having sets of boulders/rocks) and you use the random number generator to position these to make it seem like natural terrain. It can look great at first, since each feature is hand-crafted, but after exploring for a bit you'd start to notice this mountain here is identical to one I saw on another planet.. Something like this would be the "tiled" approach, I'm guessing.
The harder was to do it is procedurally generate everything. Use the random number generator, and create rules to translate its output into terrain features which look as we expect. Each geological feature should be unique (or else very, very rare, depending on how the rules work), so there's no duplication of features. On the negative side, it does take a bit of work on the devs' side to cater for many possible outputs, they can't hand-cater for every single one which means you might find planets with floating boulders or impractically shaped mountains simply because they couldn't have anticipated that RNG output and their "terrain validation" didn't have any case to cater for it.
Procedural generation = a boring game, lacking in interest and originality, just look at the planets.....! It's like Americans, they all look the same - fat with perfect teeth ..... Sorry guys I don't mean it really some of you look normal like us Brits fat with screwed up teeth ;-)
Boring to you, but unfortunately that's the only way you can simulate the entirety of the Milky Way. And I don't think it's boring at all. In my exploring, I did see a lot of the same things, but I also saw some unique configurations that made me think, "Wow!! That looks cool."
Oh I thought "structures" meant "human-made structures"
And ya, people should check out Space Engine on Youtube to see that very neat landscapes are possible with Procedural Generation.
And ya, people should check out Space Engine on Youtube to see that very neat landscapes are possible with Procedural Generation.
IMHO exploration needs a long overdue injection of development effort.
From simply more procedural dice added to the mix so the Galaxy is more diverse (eg: electrical storms and geysers), to just simple "hard coded" improvement/considerations like a bunch of super remote scientific platforms near/around major galactic locations where players can meet up and maybe obtain some simple exploration missions and maybe even some super valuable rare commodities just to mix things up a bit.
And simple things like making exploring in wings an advantage (like trading) rather than meaningless/a disadvantage.
Update to include latest Concept art from Newsletter #87.
Updated to include information from 27th August Dev Update
If you want to keep track of any new information, please bookmark the page as unfortunately it doesn't look like it can be made a sticky and will generally bob up and down the page list.
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Nice post!
+1 rep to you sir!
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I user 'Page Monitor' for Chrome which monitors pages and reports when they change. Very useful!
+1 rep to you sir!
- - - Updated - - -
I user 'Page Monitor' for Chrome which monitors pages and reports when they change. Very useful!
I'm cross-posting my reference thread of info and avoid duplications.