How Many Assets need to be Updated for Space Legs?

The ship interior textures and the polygon count looks nice when viewed from a distance in the cockpit chair. However, when we can walk around we'll see every nook and cranny. So Frontier must make high quality textures and high polygon objects to ensure that the game has current gen graphics.

The landing pads are okay when inside the ship, but if you do a close up with the camera then it looks like a 6 year old game. So I doubt Frontier will let players walk on landing pads.

The planet surface is the easiest environment to increase details by improving the procedural graphics. The base building assets should be custom made for first person view.

Floating in space and around ships in first person requires relatively few graphics upgrades, because space is very dark. Only the ship hull textures need to be updated.

The planetary surface cities weren't designed for first person view. All buildings need a graphical upgrade.

Implementing RTX with real-time ray tracing would make ED a lot prettier.
 
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Robert Maynard

Volunteer Moderator
Implementing RTX with real-time ray tracing would make ED a lot prettier.
I expect Frontier know how few players have an RTX card - and not all of them would choose to take the resolution / framerate hit to enable it - which may make RTX based ray-tracing a difficult sell for development time.

Wargaming, on the other hand, just released a World of Tanks RT demo that utilises Intel's Open Source Embree suite of ray-tracing kernels - which is hardware independent.
 
Paint jobs viewed through the ship's windows will have to be improved (wavy lines, odd patched areas), but they say they are working on that, and newer paint jobs have definitely improved in detail.
 
I wrote a longer post, then realised I was just writing a convoluted version of "we don't know". The level of detail was appropriate for what they created in 2014. What will change will depend on what we get in 2020, if it's space legs then everything internal (ships, stations) might need to change.
 
I expect Frontier know how few players have an RTX card - and not all of them would choose to take the resolution / framerate hit to enable it - which may make RTX based ray-tracing a difficult sell for development time.

Wargaming, on the other hand, just released a World of Tanks RT demo that utilises Intel's Open Source Embree suite of ray-tracing kernels - which is hardware independent.

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All the RTX cards combined make for 4.2% of all current graphic cards on steam. That is not a lot.

BUT, you might notice that a lot of graphic cards are more than 10 years old, many if those cards can't even run Elite vanilla, even less so Horizon. Plenty of room for future upgrades.

As for the frame-rate hit, current RTX cards seem to hold up very well with ray-tracing, with only a small FPS downgrade. And as with everything, its a matter of optimization. :)

 

Robert Maynard

Volunteer Moderator
All the RTX cards combined make for 4.2% of all current graphic cards on steam. That is not a lot.

BUT, you might notice that a lot of graphic cards are more than 10 years old, many if those cards can't even run Elite vanilla, even less so Horizon. Plenty of room for future upgrades.
The Steam hardware survey isn't necessarily relevant to the topic at hand - and, as I said, I expect that Frontier know which hardware players are currently running the game on.
As for the frame-rate hit, current RTX cards seem to hold up very well with ray-tracing, with only a small FPS downgrade. And as with everything, its a matter of optimization. :)
.... and adoption. Developing COBRA for a specific hardware that may not last (the current RTX cards are the first generation of cards with dedicated RT hardware) might not make much financial sense - especially as the next gen consoles will be launched next year with dedicated RT hardware from AMD (according to the rumours I've read, anyway) - and Frontier will, I would expect, update COBRA for them.
 
It's possible they already have high resolution versions for most textures but decided to use a version with lower resolution for increased performance until we can get close enough to appreciate them.
I'm sure they will just add another LOD level. None of the graphics need redoing, they just need adding to, and thats if they haven't already done so.
 
"Implementing RTX with real-time ray tracing would make ED a lot prettier."
of which 0.5% of the player base would benefit cos anything under a 2080Ti is pure filler and sand bag product

I also still very VERY much worry as to how much gameplay will be returned from Space Legs which lets face it requires Mass Effect investment to make work rather than some cursory plunge into "hey I can walk about" and that being cool for all of 5mins.
 
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I wrote a longer post, then realised I was just writing a convoluted version of "we don't know". The level of detail was appropriate for what they created in 2014. What will change will depend on what we get in 2020, if it's space legs then everything internal (ships, stations) might need to change.
If they can't even change HUD colors how will they even conceive of any worthwhile additions. I believe whatever engine they're using is incapable and will probably take a total overhaul to become the vision we want to play.

They don't need to rival star citizen in graphics. However they should imo add spacelegs. Basically no mans sky format with elites dangerous technicals.
 

Moon dog

Banned
Currently the ship interior textures and the polygon count looks nice when viewed from a distance in the cockpit chair. However, when we can walk around we'll see every nook and cranny. So Frontier must make high quality textures and high polygon objects to ensure that the game has current gen graphics.

The landing pads are okay when inside the ship, but if you do a close up with the camera then it looks like a 6 year old game. So I doubt Frontier will let players walk on landing pads.

The planet surface is the easiest environment to increase details by improving the procedural graphics. The base building assets should be custom made for first person view.

Floating in space and around ships in first person requires relatively few graphics upgrades, because space is very dark. Only the ship hull textures need to be updated.

Implementing RTX with real-time ray tracing would make ED a lot prettier.
U really think we won’t be able to walk on landing pads I was hoping for a place cmdr could meet like a lounge
 
If they can't even change HUD colors how will they even conceive of any worthwhile additions. I believe whatever engine they're using is incapable and will probably take a total overhaul to become the vision we want to play.

They don't need to rival star citizen in graphics. However they should imo add spacelegs. Basically no mans sky format with elites dangerous technicals.
They can change the HUD colours. And we can change them as well (on PC). What they said is that giving us an in-game tool to change the HUD colour requires effort that they are currently unwilling to take. That's due to the way they designed and implemented the HUD, not a limitation of the engine (as you can see by the simple fact that we are able to change HUD colours).
 
.... and adoption. Developing COBRA for a specific hardware that may not last (the current RTX cards are the first generation of cards with dedicated RT hardware) might not make much financial sense - especially as the next gen consoles will be launched next year with dedicated RT hardware from AMD (according to the rumours I've read, anyway) - and Frontier will, I would expect, update COBRA for them.

RTX is mostly just NVIDIA's proprietary implementation of DXR. Current RTX cards support hardware accelerated DXR, which is almost certain to become the de facto standard RT API, and what AMD and Intel GPUs will eventually provide hardware support for. So, support wouldn't have to be targeted at NVIDIA, it could simply be targeted at DXR.

DXR doesn't even require special hardware to work. Any DX12 part can use it in a fallback mode, running ray tracing on conventional shaders...though this is very slow on current hardware, in most cases.

That said, I do not think there is any way it makes financial sense to implement ray tracing in ED unless a native version of ED is released on future consoles...and this it self is highly uncertain as those consoles will be backwards compatible and could just run the current version of the engine.
 
Check this channel and view the roomscale ship videos. Then you'll know just how much work there is to be done just for the ships alone. Beyond the things we can see, either in the cockpit or externally, nothing exists yet, simple as that.
 
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