In defence of development, Elite, but also of what could be.

[VR Golgot]

It takes about 10 minutes to do.

I may have got that wrong

I'm sure they could do that mate. The fact they haven't is probably more to do with bang-for-buck re the VR population being a small slice of the pie. And it taking more than 10 minutes.

(It's been mentioned that the UI guys are pretty up against it, as it's a UI heavy game. But that's a question of time budgeting, not the engine limiting them etc.)

 

[Ronzer]

I'm sure they could do that mate. The fact they haven't is probably more to do with bang-for-buck re the VR population being a small slice of the pie. And it taking more than 10 minutes.

I'd think the VR population is on the rise, even without the keyboard. It'd be on a faster rise with one, tho.

I dig what they do with UI and things in general, so it's just a matter of wanting more..."moorre" - Kylo Ren

 

[IamMe]

Elite and Star Citizen are the reason i won't participate in any Kickstarter ever again......exploiting gamers hunger with false promises!
Luckly i've spent 50$ on each, not being fool spending hundreds of $ like some did.

 

[VR Mr Teatime]

I'm curious about what corners the OP and his industry contacts think FDev have painted themselves into?

Atmospheres is certainly doable in the engine and weather/clouds is certainly doable using PG - a read of one of the Pooleys Pilot training manuals with its cross section of a cyclonic weather system with associated types, heights and distances of clouds from warm and cold weather fronts. should point the way to being able to propagate moving cyclonic systems. All from a single point on a planet with a few other attributes for bounded variability.

 

[El Grillo]

I also understand a little more that the design decisions taken early on have painted Frontier and Elite into corners they can't get out of, and it shows the limitations of the COBRA engine here. It's also a good indication when comparing Elite to something like Space Engine as to how limiting creating a game on top of a high-grade astrophysics engine can be (they still struggle with planetary clipping for example). You won't get planetary landings because I don't believe the engine can cope with the world sizes, which is why we're restricted to moons. You won't get planetary landings because of the amount of new designs and content needed to make a planet like Lave feel alive and lived on. Creating it for one planet would be bad enough, creating it for the hundreds of occupied worlds across the bubble is insane.

Getting Elite this far is an incredible achievement but it will never be the game each of us want it to be.

This is my fear. There must be some rational reason why they, for example, have failed to implement interesting & varied gameplay scenarios (e.g. missions) like every other game for the past couple decades has... e.g. heist missions/sabotage missions/base attack & defence missions/racing missions/trench run missions/proper assassination missions/convoy escort missions/ wave battle missions...

 

[rhiz]

I was thinking of this the other day, after reading a suggestion to make sending messages easier in VR. My immediate reply would have been to suggest FDev just stick a VR keyboard into the game. But I recall a while ago, someone suggesting this wouldn't be easy for FDev to do. I may have got that wrong, but to me, doing something like putting a VR keyboard into Elite should not be tough. It's in all other VR games. It takes about 10 minutes to do. Unless it'd be tough to do something like this using the Cobra engine. And you see all kinds of suggestions...from making gameplay more personal to just adding more SUV's..and you get the same reply "it's tough to do, FDev should conentrate on other things". If copy-pasting and altering an SRV and calling it a skimmer is tough using the Cobra engine, the real question is should they rebuild the engine. Which may mean restarting the galaxy.

Or make a new engine, called the Black Mamba or something, use the bux you get from JWE etc, and make Elite : Supreme. Set it up for pre-order.

Thats not to say Im not happy with Elite : Dangerous. I play it enough time as it is. But if they were to build/release a new Elite game, Im sure I'd play it even more.

Have you played Subnautica? Now that’s a poor VR implementation. Aside from a few minor irritations like the one that you mentioned, ED is one of the best VR experiences out there in my view. As you say, small things like an in-game keyboard shouldn’t be too difficult to implement though.

 

[krylite]

I'm curious about what corners the OP and his industry contacts think FDev have painted themselves into?

Atmospheres is certainly doable in the engine and weather/clouds is certainly doable using PG -

Perhaps the limitations are bottlenecks that FDev may have got caught up in has more to do with the structure of the networking of ED with its lower sever to instancing ratio instead of Frontier's cobra engine's capabilities which certainly seem excellent when observing PC & the upcoming JWE. (and what's already working well with Horizons on terrain landable worlds) Recalling that during an update transition in the 2.x.x's , upon popping into a system, the textures of suns were deflated and blurred after an update, when before they were consistently higher res. In later updates, FD mitigated the initial blurring of the suns somewhat. So adding the layers of atmospherics assets such as vegation, volumetric clouds etc. currently could be a severe performance strain. And defaulting to much lower expectations such as quality of atmosphere and 2D like clouds like an older Flight Simulator '98 would currently be too much of a disappointment. In FSX today, cloud generation can be limited down to "40 miles", and texture density of the clouds can be chosen between 512kb and 1024kb. Besides weather and scenery autogen limiting framerate in FSX, the other major framerate limiter is traffic density especially with addons like "ultimate traffic" that can simulate real world traffic (or at least a copy of a years worth of flightplans of most flights from most airlines around the world). There is also a traffic slider in FSX and also a slider in UT which limits appearing flightplans (and accompanying "NPC" planes along with their individually optionally high density or low density textures and modeling) with a certain mile radius. But probably concerns about traffic would be more relegated to "cityscapes" which could subsequently follow basic atmospherics in ED.

All speculation but the fact that no other genre project has yet to reach the "holy grail" of a massive space simulation + spacelegs yet either, by contrast imo shows that Frontier is still willing to keep trying to do spacelegs and atmospherics "right" i.e. keep the quality and framerate up vs. the scope. (https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...arly-Updated?p=6714949&viewfull=1#post6714949 )

 

[Genus]

Is there any truth in the notion that it may now be harder for people to get their games funded, due to the way ED was made OP?

I remember it was exciting too, back when we didn't know what it would be. And here we are, having got exactly that...still getting that with every update.

Add the Star Citizen situation to that, and its no small wonder big money doesn't want that kind of risk.

 

[Rakaposhi]

I think it comes down to priorities, and we as the customer don't always understand why simple fixes aren't made.

There are some priorities of course, and one man's bugbear isn't noticed at all by other players. But what's usually happening is that what seems like a "simple fix" to someone who hasn't written the game is often quite a fundamental change, and would break more things than it fixes.
​

That, and the other things, which some people think need fixing, but FDev don't think are broken.

 

[krylite]

Is there any truth in the notion that it may now be harder for people to get their games funded, due to the way ED was made OP?

I remember it was exciting too, back when we didn't know what it would be. And here we are, having got exactly that...still getting that with every update.

Add the Star Citizen situation to that, and its no small wonder big money doesn't want that kind of risk.

I wouldn't think so. If there was any damaged reputation to funding space games through KS , it would mostly if not entirely be due to the bad rap from the SC debacle. (https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...en-Thread-v8?p=6743584&viewfull=1#post6743584) (even game internet media are reluctant to mention SC as an upcoming game now, except to call out its controversy, https://www.pcpowerplay.com.au/feature/the-euphoria-factor,489980 ) By comparison from an outside standpoint apart from differing ED dev history opinions, KS for ED had been an immense success with ED being a knockout financial success propelling Frontier into a rising public company, while it's true that Frontier may have not needed a big windfall of support from KS where they pragmatically ended it after humbler funding goals were reached in 2015. ( http://www.iii.co.uk/stockmarketwir...te-frontier-developments-plc?context=LSE:FDEV )

Spoiler

I'd think it's more likely OP's project did not have a working slice of a game to demonstrate as he stated. Unless OP elaborates more, imo, it could be inferred from the single short sentence, that their "engine" could have just been a plan to license one, instead of a internally developed proprietary engine like Cobra that Frontier created for ED. The big AAA publishers had also already had recent invested genre efforts fraught with mistakes and blunders, i.e. Sony /w NMS's 'lyes' on release debacle, bioware flub with ME: Andromeda which made it a joke, SW: Battlefront lootbox controversy, all of which would probably be more of a set of real consideration factors than anything perceived lacking by some, of ED's dev since KS.

 

[Quantis Trap]

If Frontier / Cobra Engine was half as good as the OPs name dropping ability, we'd already have atmospheric landings!

 

[krylite]

From what's seen in PC and JWE, cobra certainly seems, imo, capable of ELW's and atmospherics with adjustments, but perhaps Beyond is prioritized over the ED cobra refit for now. ( with maybe more needed to improve ED's persistent infrastructure other than the graphical aspects of the engine to accommodate the far greater scope of the galactic verse compared to PC & JWE's few square km.) I'm looking forward to the annoucements after Beyond finishes up for the rest of the year..

 

[tarragon]

A moral of the story is: if you do game, developing your own game engine is a wrong business decision in the harshest sense of business decision making, that will bury your credibility and make your projects stagnate and never live up to the expectation. Why? Because engine dev is completely different beast and it does pay off on just few projects. In the same way that companies do not design their own programming languages (unless you can buy UK all over 3* times, that is).

 

[Quantis Trap]

Talk about Frontier painting Elite Dangerous into corners is silly. That's been said of every game of this size which was ever made.

The fact is that Frontier Elite Dangerous has gone farther faster than many other space games.

Is it anything like Eve really? I don't think so.

Star Citizen started around the same time as Elite Dangerous, had a AAA game level of funding and is still in alpha.

No Man's Sky has yet to see a multi-player mode, but it looks like it's finally coming. Yes, it's still being developed!

Dual Universe, Infinity Battlescape are different and not released.

What MIGHT compete with Elite Dangerous next year? I have cautious hopes for X4 Foundations!

 

[krylite]

There have been plenty of working space genre games created with their own in-house engine. The X-games for one, EvE as mentioned, NMS, to its credit uses in-house engine and still garnered Sony support, and of course ED. Having one's own engine for a project of specific ambition and scope doesn't necessarily absolutely incur a bad rap or a mark of a poor business decision. In OP's case, whether they went for their own engine or not, just didn't seem to have enough to show for the investors, going by the scant details in that part of the post.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

There have been plenty of working space genre games created with their own in-house engine.

I'd expect it to be extremely common for space games to use their own engine, since most commercially-available engines are going to be optimised for rather different purposes, and it's a niche enough genre that no-one's going to be trying to set up as an engine developer for it.

Making an engine which can deal simultaneously with events on sub-metre scales and 1000s of km scales is obviously possible - but 99% of games don't require it, so it's not a useful feature to add to a generic engine, and you can make a lot of optimisations if you assume it won't be necessary.

 

[tomalus]

They sold horizons for full price, and even with all the patches its barely worth the full price if youre a grinder like me. Without the grinding parts of engineers its terrible.
They dont even want to charge money for these updatets because they know not many would buy them.I would because Im stupid and still want to play ED,but when you finish the grinds (ranks,ships,credits,engineers) there isnt much to do.There is a limit how much "imagined" gameplay I can do.If you look hours played its huge,but most of it was traveling in system and grinding materials,money.

 

[OriginalBadBoy]

A moral of the story is: if you do game, developing your own game engine is a wrong business decision in the harshest sense of business decision making, that will bury your credibility and make your projects stagnate and never live up to the expectation. Why? Because engine dev is completely different beast and it does pay off on just few projects. In the same way that companies do not design their own programming languages (unless you can buy UK all over 3* times, that is).

Cobra has been in development for a long time ... Far longer than the likes of UE or Unity. Not sure what point you are trying to make.

I will take Cobra (ED) over say Cryengine (SC) any day of the week.

 

[777Driver]

I was thinking of this the other day, after reading a suggestion to make sending messages easier in VR. My immediate reply would have been to suggest FDev just stick a VR keyboard into the game. But I recall a while ago, someone suggesting this wouldn't be easy for FDev to do. I may have got that wrong, but to me, doing something like putting a VR keyboard into Elite should not be tough. It's in all other VR games. It takes about 10 minutes to do..

We already have a virtual keyboard in Elite dangerous (at least Oculus users do) Dash allows us to place a keyboard or any window inside the ship, I tend to have a keyboard tucked away to the side of my chair in VR, voice attack brings it up when I need it.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

I wouldn't think so. If there was any damaged reputation to funding space games through KS , it would mostly if not entirely be due to the bad rap from the SC debacle. (https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...en-Thread-v8?p=6743584&viewfull=1#post6743584) (even game internet media are reluctant to mention SC as an upcoming game now, except to call out its controversy, https://www.pcpowerplay.com.au/feature/the-euphoria-factor,489980 ) By comparison from an outside standpoint apart from differing ED dev history opinions, KS for ED had been an immense success with ED being a knockout financial success propelling Frontier into a rising public company, while it's true that Frontier may have not needed a big windfall of support from KS where they pragmatically ended it after humbler funding goals were reached in 2015. ( http://www.iii.co.uk/stockmarketwir...te-frontier-developments-plc?context=LSE:FDEV )
I'd think it's more likely OP's project did not have a working slice of a game to demonstrate as he stated. Unless OP elaborates more, imo, it could be inferred from the single short sentence, that their "engine" could have just been a plan to license one, instead of a internally developed proprietary engine like Cobra that Frontier created for ED. The big AAA publishers had also already had recent invested genre efforts fraught with mistakes and blunders, i.e. Sony /w NMS's 'lyes' on release debacle, bioware flub with ME: Andromeda which made it a joke, SW: Battlefront lootbox controversy, all of which would probably be more of a set of real consideration factors than anything perceived lacking by some, of ED's dev since KS.

A correction. Cobra was not designed for ED. Cobra has been used as there main games engine well before ED came out.

And I agree it's more likely SC that is causing the issues. Whether you were happy with the end product or not Fdev delivered a game.