Is FD slowly shifting focus away from ED?

[Sashenka]

"Is FD slowly shifting focus away from ED?"

The short answer: No.

The long answer: No, we're not.

Devs leaving the project: People move around and change teams, this is called career development and growth and should be encouraged. We then bring someone in to replace them! This doesn't affect the development process because no single person informs the development of the game completely. I would say David has the most influence but instead of dictating the course and direction of the game he works alongside (in the literal sense of actually foregoing his own office to be sat with them and get involved in ideation and decision-making processes as a team) the designers, animators, programmers, audio teams, etc. I would say that it's actually the opposite feeling overall. Focus is higher on ED. We have ambitions, we have the beginnings of a roadmap, and the dev/design team are holding more meetings and planning sessions than I've seen previously in my two years here. This is something that the community have asked for and to do right by you we're putting extra time into the planning process.

So... no. We're not shifting focus away.

Let's hope the guys who thought about the Engineers as a mobile game casino level system are part of those who had 'careers developments'.

 

[Vasea Azure]

Its good to have official response, can we all chill out and hang out in Pleiades now?

 

[sidereal6]

Elite is not merely a cash cow to Braben.

Agreed.

I continue to believe that a major factor in every other project that Frontier peruses is the development of technology that can one day be incorporated into Elite. A great example is how planet coaster has procedurally-generated clouds. Check this out. It seems obvious to me that they wrote code to generate clouds not because that was a vital feature for a roller coaster game, but because that code would one day be used on Earth-like planets in Elite. I think the Jurassic park game is the same deal - they're writing code to procedurally generate and animate animals to populate planets in Elite, and in the mean time, they'll sell it as a separate game.

 

[Sir.Tj]

Its good to have official response, can we all chill out and hang out in Pleiades now?

Beers are on Vasea.

But yes I can confirm DBOBE spend most of his time with the devs...well he wasn't in his office when I was "collecting" souvenirs.... ahem...

 

[Moonax IRL]

I think that isn't obvious at all. How can you be 100% sure about it without working at FDEV?

Simple logic would dictate that efforts to produce the game on other platforms would draw dev time from the focus being solely on game play development itself, as they would be the ones most familiar with the workings of the game. Or maybe you believe some of the devs are omnipotent and capable of bilocation, in which case we'll have space legs and atmospheric planets, next week.

Good call Batman.

 

[babelfisch]

Because many of us have worked in/around long development projects, and the signs are all there. Many aspects of the process are common to pretty much all development projects, and I'm still trying to work out why some people on here still don't appear to appreciate the sheer scale of ED.

Seriously...it boggles my mind that folk assumed that rolling out on entirely new platforms wouldn't slow down development. The testing alone would've been massive in terms of resource requirements; it's a bit more involved than what appears to pass for beta testing on this forum

Yes, unless you have separate teams working on it, which they did.

 

[Moonax IRL]

So do you think game designers are working on ports?

Initial porting of the game would have taken some of ED'S dev resources. Which is understandable, as it was an obvious priority to sell as many game units as possible and creating a wider player base. Now its up and running, focus can shift to gameplay.

 

[babelfisch]

Simple logic would dictate that efforts to produce the game on other platforms would draw dev time from the focus being solely on game play development itself, as they would be the ones most familiar with the workings of the game. Or maybe you believe some of the devs are omnipotent and capable of bilocation, in which case we'll have space legs and atmospheric planets, next week.

Good call Batman.

See my reply and Dale's post above.

Initial porting of the game would have taken some of ED'S dev resources. Which is understandable, as it was an obvious priority to sell as many game units as possible and creating a wider player base. No its up and running, focus can shift to gameplay.

Unless they hired new people and used separate teams. Which they did. It's actually the other way around, the new manpower and the performance improvements they applied helped the PC version too.

 

[Moonax IRL]

They most likely did hire new people, but the most experienced heads would be focused on the main target of ports, which were time limited due to contracts etc. My point re the impossibility of dev bilocation atm still stands.

 

[Sir.Tj]

Obviously Dale knows exactly the situation with who works where and on what.

To be honest if you don't actually work at Frontier it's pure speculation.

I've seen 1st hand the setup at FD towers and I can say with all honesty ED is and continues to be a massive part of their future plans, Elite will always be David's baby and after 30+ years of making games in the series I very much doubt he's ready to put it out to pasture any time soon.

 

[Theodrid]

Obviously Dale knows exactly the situation with who works where and on what.

To be honest if you don't actually work at Frontier it's pure speculation.

I've seen 1st hand the setup at FD towers and I can say with all honesty ED is and continues to be a massive part of their future plans, Elite will always be David's baby and after 30+ years of making games in the series I very much doubt he's ready to put it out to pasture any time soon.

Pffft, as if they ever let YOU out of the cave TJ, asking me to take a leap of faith is one thing, asking to believe you are allowed out is entirely another!

 

[[Diplomacy] Carnegie]

Doesn't matter! We'll just ignore everything you say and complain anyway!

Personally, I'm going to complain about you complaining

 

[Dale Emasiri]

Alright, this thread is going around in circles with no further discussion actually taking place aside from pure speculation.

With regards to console ports, please consider that the cobra engine has been used previously to develop console games, PC games, iOS/Android etc. The engine is capable of porting to other platforms natively. If you've ever used other game engines such as Unity, UE, even GameMaker Studio or whatever else, you will know that these third party engines have the ability to deploy to multiple platforms simultaneously. Ours is not so different...

So really the bulk of the work was to make it compatible natively with PS4/XOne as far as UI, control schemes, and work inline with their tech/hardware. It wasn't a case of developing a whole new game... just so we're clear.

Anyways, thread closed! Nothing to see here!