Frontier's Cobra engine has been upgraded to support volumetric water for Planet Zoo. Perhaps a step towards water-worlds in Elite.

Vardaugas

Vardaugas
Biggest hurdle with atmospheric planets is how to handle precipitation and procedurally generated bodies of water, be it a small stream, rivers, lakes or oceans. The water would need to behave naturally all the way from the spring to the delta. Guess water planets are the easier first step towards that as you don't have complex flowing water. It's just one planet sized body of it.
 

IndigoWyrd

IndigoWyrd
Procedural water has long been the bane of many games, especially those based in Unity. Water is an especially complex system, and that’s just considering the H2O variety. Elite presents a whole new range of potential liquid nightmares, as we have the potential to run into seas of other liquids as well, including ammonia and methane. Given the predisposition of certain elements of the player base to demand nothing short of simulated perfection, lest we have to weather countless threads about how “Frontier doesn’t care”, it comes as little surprise they’ve not been chomping at the bit here.

Personally I’ll accept scientific inaccuracy for the sake of playability. I have better things to worry about than if the Brownian Motion of my thruster particles behave with scientific precision in the methane seas of Titan - I’d be happy just to land on their shores.
 

Darkfyre99

Darkfyre99
IndigoWyrd said:
Personally I’ll accept scientific inaccuracy for the sake of playability. I have better things to worry about than if the Brownian Motion of my thruster particles behave with scientific precision in the methane seas of Titan - I’d be happy just to land on their shores.
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Agreed... but I most certainly wouldn’t say no to as much realism as possible. ;)
 

WR3ND

WR3ND
Darkfyre99 said:
Agreed... but I most certainly wouldn’t say no to as much realism as possible. ;)
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The dust plumes kicked up from SRVs not just plopping back down since there is little to no air to hold them has bothered me a little bit. I understand it's impractical to model physics accurately on this scale and still have a game that can actually be played in real time, but there are some nice tricks and rules that can be implemented to help simulate it here and there. Realistic when able; viable when necessary. (y)
 
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VR Golgot

VR Golgot
Cocalarix said:
Mentioned by a YouTuber that visited Fronter's HQ:

Source: https://youtu.be/2QeNh24aKM4?t=382


Planet Zoo Trailer (4k60fps):
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4NP-tXSwvA

Screenshot with water viewing area:
https://imgur.com/zH7wCU8
Source: https://i.imgur.com/zH7wCU8.jpg


We'll also be getting a proper gameplay video on Friday. Hopefully we can see how the water works.
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Sweet. This is the type of tech addition that does feel a bit more transferable to me.

(Would probably still need to be simplified to work at scale and be 'dialled up' on demand, but you'd think that'd make filling proc gen river beds / oceans with style that bit more possible...)
 

dannysquid

dannysquid
Water is an especially complex system but on the kind of scales Elite deals with they'll have to come up with something enormously clever to do anything like this. The path of a river is a complex thing which will calculate differently depending on the detail of the height information (which changes dynamically in Elite as you get closer). So you'd see the river wiggling around as you approached. I think you'd probably have to start with calculations WITH the river and base the surface detail from that. Gives me nightmares just thinking about it.
 

EUS

EUS
If it's upgraded, why does everything that's not an animal look so terrible?
The ground, the straw, etc.
 

[PS4 Pro - PC] earthtone99

[PS4 Pro - PC] earthtone99
GTAIV and V nailed water.

Best I’ve seen to this day even on console.

But yeah, this is a lot of work. Could be one of the things they need several team members working on for 2020. Physics, scale, refraction, reflectivity, density, motion...complex stuff.
 
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