Only one light source at a time?

[Rafe Zetter]

You do know that FDev have been using the Cobra engine for a long time. Why on earth would they get another game engine learn how to use it etc when they have a perfectly adequate one which they know how to use already. Sounds like lunacy to me.

1 - the COBRA engine may have been around for a long time but it's still inferior, this has been proven time and again. Do you know how many games have been made using the COBRA engine? JUST FOUR, THREE by FDev, ONE by an affiliate. As I said, how many have been made using the top three engines? a hundred? more?

2 - you mention "learn how to use it" - chances are, only the core employees who were with FDev BEFORE the KS knew how to use COBRA; you said it yourself it's proprietary. I'd bet EVERY SINGLE ONE of the employees taken on after the successful KS would have had to learn COBRA from scratch - to mean ZERO previous experience or knowledge. Efficiency comes from deep knowledge, don't have it - you won't get it.

Cryengine has allowed 3rd party access for modding almost from the start... guess what? Unreal 4 too.... oh and err yeah, Unity too. If I was a student of graphical modelling and all things like that I'd be dabbling with ALL THREE of those engines to put something on my CV and show deep knowledge, so I can hit the ground running.

3 - "Adequate" - is a relative term. If it was up to the task of supplying the SAME level of graphical performance as the top three this discussion regarding single light sources in space wouldn't even be happening.

We know the COBRA engine in inferior, for a start "Beige planets", how long have they been a thing? Do you REALLY expect me to beleive they have fixed this issue and have just been sitting on the fix for months and months.. "coz reasons?". If they have it's very very foolish. It's an industry standard to roll out stable hotfixes for major issues that have been solved IMMEDIATELY.

Quite some time ago they had to dial back the graphics of asteroid and ice belts, can't remember the reason; could have been something to do with XBONE's across the country setting fire to themselves (metaphorically) trying to run at better than 30 FPS. Framerates are not JUST about how high the graphics settings are but ALSO about how EFFICIENT the modelling has been done. Some of the graphical and texture mods for the Elder Scrolls series of games have all been about INCREASING the levels of realism while REDUCING the poly count to make it more efficient. I know this because I recently spent some time adding a lot of them for replays of all three games, and I can tell you from experience that a great many of them provide TWICE or greater the resolution with file sizes LESS THAN HALF the originals - I know this because I'm the type of geek that doesn't just press "replace all" but does them one at a time and looks for the differences. This circles back to DEEP KNOWLEDGE of a games engine and/or the ability of that games engine to be optimized.

So, yes, I stand by what I said FDev should have used an existing and PROVEN games engine, presumably with support options and advice for previously known issues, they are paying a fee for it's usage after all.

The bottom line underscoring all of this is : The lunacy you mention was digging deeper with an engine that NO OTHER DEV COMPANY IN THE WORLD WANTED TO BUY; and don't kid yourself that if another dev house had asked for a COBRA usage licence, FDev would not have happily sold it to them.

 

[[SI] Bobdelion]

Rafe; There are a myriad of reasons as to why people make decisions regarding which middleware to use for a project and the things you have suggested here are assumptions at best.

In my own experience far more important that any particular feature set of any software package I've had to deal with is how good the documentation is. If Frontier's own tool's are well supported by their own in-house team and their documentation is up-to-date for anyone coming to use it for the first time then there are immediately very good reasons why they would favour them over third party ones. There are many frameworks I've had to use because of legacy support that have been a complete pain in the bum because the documentation was so out of date with the release code. Don't discount how valuable it is to have your own in-house knowledge and support, and code that you _completely_ control.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

1 - the COBRA engine may have been around for a long time but it's still inferior, this has been proven time and again. Do you know how many games have been made using the COBRA engine? JUST FOUR, THREE by FDev, ONE by an affiliate. As I said, how many have been made using the top three engines? a hundred? more?

2 - you mention "learn how to use it" - chances are, only the core employees who were with FDev BEFORE the KS knew how to use COBRA; you said it yourself it's proprietary. I'd bet EVERY SINGLE ONE of the employees taken on after the successful KS would have had to learn COBRA from scratch - to mean ZERO previous experience or knowledge. Efficiency comes from deep knowledge, don't have it - you won't get it.

Cryengine has allowed 3rd party access for modding almost from the start... guess what? Unreal 4 too.... oh and err yeah, Unity too. If I was a student of graphical modelling and all things like that I'd be dabbling with ALL THREE of those engines to put something on my CV and show deep knowledge, so I can hit the ground running.

3 - "Adequate" - is a relative term. If it was up to the task of supplying the SAME level of graphical performance as the top three this discussion regarding single light sources in space wouldn't even be happening.

We know the COBRA engine in inferior, for a start "Beige planets", how long have they been a thing? Do you REALLY expect me to beleive they have fixed this issue and have just been sitting on the fix for months and months.. "coz reasons?". If they have it's very very foolish. It's an industry standard to roll out stable hotfixes for major issues that have been solved IMMEDIATELY.

Quite some time ago they had to dial back the graphics of asteroid and ice belts, can't remember the reason; could have been something to do with XBONE's across the country setting fire to themselves (metaphorically) trying to run at better than 30 FPS. Framerates are not JUST about how high the graphics settings are but ALSO about how EFFICIENT the modelling has been done. Some of the graphical and texture mods for the Elder Scrolls series of games have all been about INCREASING the levels of realism while REDUCING the poly count to make it more efficient. I know this because I recently spent some time adding a lot of them for replays of all three games, and I can tell you from experience that a great many of them provide TWICE or greater the resolution with file sizes LESS THAN HALF the originals - I know this because I'm the type of geek that doesn't just press "replace all" but does them one at a time and looks for the differences. This circles back to DEEP KNOWLEDGE of a games engine and/or the ability of that games engine to be optimized.

So, yes, I stand by what I said FDev should have used an existing and PROVEN games engine, presumably with support options and advice for previously known issues, they are paying a fee for it's usage after all.

The bottom line underscoring all of this is : The lunacy you mention was digging deeper with an engine that NO OTHER DEV COMPANY IN THE WORLD WANTED TO BUY; and don't kid yourself that if another dev house had asked for a COBRA usage licence, FDev would not have happily sold it to them.

Sorry but I really do not see anything inferior. Nothing has been proven and the beige planets has nothing to do with the game engine. It shows your ignorance. Sorry but I look at your post and I see a load of nonsense. Give some actual proof to back up your claims, but at the moment there is none.

None of those engine have created a game like ED.

Look at star citizen and all the issues they have had trying to get it to work. Even after all these years the frame rate is dreadful on hi end machines. Also they have pretty much had to re-write large parts of the cryengine/lumberyard engine to get it to work as the engine isn't designed for such games.

 

[tafkabb]

Two light sources.

Spoiler

 

[ArchEmperor]

Two light sources.

Spoiler

https://i.imgur.com/mGBMeeM.png

Is that on Console or PC?

I think it is 2 LS on PC and 1 LS on Console. Or am I wrong?

 

[CMDR Dreamstate]

There is nothing wrong with developing in-house software - none at all.

I was very, very pleasantly surprised when I first purchased the game in late 2014 (I think? It was 1.1) - I thought the graphics were, and are, extremely very good in terms of textures and attention to detail.

The only gripe I have is with the lighting - I had no idea only 1 light source from the nearest star was being generated until this thread popped up... until now, I assumed it was a lighting bug, not a lighting solution for *whatever reason a, b, c, or d,*

Lighting is EVERYTHING in any game to make the scenes in front of your eyes photo realistic (or just plain real, you know what I mean). Add in some other nice techniques such as distance blur, atmosphere, etc, and everythinig will look so much better.

Unreal4 and Unity look amazing with some of the stuff you can do in it, but whenever I've seen *copies* of Elite ships in those engines, I think they actually look worse from the youtube videos I've seen. All the dimensions of the ships don't look quite right, the lighting if off, and the textures are definitley bland.

Games like Warhammer's 40,000 Eternal Crusade uses the Unreal4 engine, but it that also brings along other problems - the developers are entirely at the mercy of the engine's creators for updates to fix bugs in the engine (and some of these are also sound problems and CPU problems), and they are entirely at the mercy of getting support for their game by the engine's creators - this is time consuming and costly, especially if documentation hasn't kept up with the updates. All in all, this really affected Eternal Crusade's development, and it was released 6 months too early... now it only has a small playerbase when compared to other games.

Yes, people have done amazing things with Unreal4 engine, but it also has its shares of massive drawbacks when designing a game and getting it to actually work. Warhammer 40,000 Eternal Crusade, for example, REALLY struggles with AMD/ATI hardware - simply because both the game and the graphics engine (U4) aren't properly optimized for it - because both the game developer and the graphic's engine developer favour Intel/Nvidia (this is why you will notice your FPS will suck in games if you use AMD/ATI over Intel/Nvidia if you use the Unreal4 engine - simply because of hard-coded optimizations as they are the leading CPU and GPU in the market).

I believe ridding 32bit support will see things speed up a great deal now in the future when it concern's the Cobra engine (which can be improved and optimized all the time and only at the cost of their own man hours) - Frontier can solely focus on optimizing the 64bit client, and this will in turn have a massive impact on calculations you cannot possibly see going on behind your monitor...

For example, ever wondered why you can now plot up to 20,000 light years and have your computer work out the direction much faster than now, say, from the 1,000ly we did have?

It's all mainly to do with the switch from 32bit to 64bit.

For an example, of the above example, I used to work as a Junior IT Technician at a CAD/CAM software company called Radan (part of the Planit group). I was tasked with sending out updates to all companies between late 2007 till somewhen in 2009, and provide licencing support and other stuff on the side (chances are, if you've ever worked as a CAD/CAM sheet metal operator, using Radan software during this time-frame, there's a good chance it was me who sent it to you ). The company and the software that Radan developed was for sheet-metal industries (and more) all over the world - this ranged from plasma cutters, water cutters, laser cutters, etc - the machines it was compatible with was terryfyingly awesome. CAD/CAM software is used to cut out various shapes from sheets of various metal (some machines bend it all etc too) - the program's job was to work out, as fast as it could, how many shapes it could efficiently fit onto a single piece of whatever-sized sheet metal you wanted to cut from...

Ever wondered how your PC case was made? It was made with CAD/CAM software by a sheet metal company!

However, going back on point, there was an update that came out that changed EVERYTHING in 2008 during my update spree (old-fashioned way was to send out new CD's in cases and send renewal licences via email), and the update effectively did this: whereas before on the 32bit version it could take 2 whole days of constant time for a PC to crunch the mathematics to how many thousands of shapes and parts it could cut out of the metal, the new algorythms in the 64bit version of Radan's new software changed this time to a mere couple of hours!

From a couple of days to a couple of hours - and all just by going from 32bit to 64bit - needless to say, companies that owned 64bit machines were going to find themselves being far more productive.

The power of 64bit is under-stated when it comes to calcuation power - it was awesome to behold.

 

[CMDR-AD]

Two light sources.

Spoiler

https://i.imgur.com/mGBMeeM.png

Turn on the ship lights before getting in the SRV, and ye shall have three!

 

[TheSisko]

Quite some time ago they had to dial back the graphics of asteroid and ice belts, can't remember the reason; could have been something to do with XBONE's across the country setting fire to themselves (metaphorically) trying to run at better than 30 FPS.

I see we've got to the 'blame consoles' part of the thread - despite FD stating, on multiple occasions - that the graphics pipeline for PC is different to the console versions.

 

[VR StarLightPL]

despite FD stating, on multiple occasions - that the graphics pipeline for PC is different to the console versions.

Care to source? Didn't see that anywhere, on the contrary, saw an information that all assets are created simultaneously for all platforms, that was told by the PS4 launch manager, can't remember the name in a release interview. The same interview in which he told us there is 100+ people working on Elite right now.

 

[TheSisko]

Care to source? Didn't see that anywhere, on the contrary, saw an information that all assets are created simultaneously for all platforms, that was told by the PS4 launch manager, can't remember the name in a release interview. The same interview in which he told us there is 100+ people working on Elite right now.

Feel free to do a search, one of the devs have said this.

 

[Stachel]

Two light sources.

If you line up two SRVs do you get three light sources? And three sets of shadows?

 

[the100thmonkey]

Care to source? Didn't see that anywhere, on the contrary, saw an information that all assets are created simultaneously for all platforms, that was told by the PS4 launch manager, can't remember the name in a release interview. The same interview in which he told us there is 100+ people working on Elite right now.

Assets and pipeline are different things.

 

[Stachel]

Games like Warhammer's 40,000 Eternal Crusade uses the Unreal4 engine, but it that also brings along other problems - the developers are entirely at the mercy of the engine's creators for updates to fix bugs in the engine

Just. Not. True.

"The entire Unreal Engine source code is available on our GitHub page, ready for you to access!"

 

[VR StarLightPL]

Just. Not. True.

"The entire Unreal Engine source code is available on our GitHub page, ready for you to access!"

While that is true, if the creators don't accept the pull request or you don't want to share your patch with the codebase, you're stuck with maintenance of such modifications everytime new patch comes out.

 

[Zambrick]

Yep, one whole light source is it. Amazing huh? This is the wonderful "Cobra" game engine at work, and it still drops to it's knees on barren featureless roids. It will never handle foliage, dense towns with structures, etc. Looks great especially with multiple stars /sarcasm.





This is not a 32-bit limitation. It's either bad planning/bad decision or lack of experience - take your pick.

And you know what about the Cobra Game engine? O thats right absolutely nothing. The only reason this was done was because they were still catering to people who were trying to run the game on systems created in 2001. Now that support is going away finally. So they can make some changes.


Also raise your hand if you work at FDEV and know anything about the engine. Designed the Engine or were responsible for the creation of a AAA title by yourself.

Otherwise, shut it, you have no idea and your supposed "Coding" skills mean absolutely nothing. The OP was making an observation. It wasnt an invitation for bashing.

 

[Rafe Zetter]

Rafe; There are a myriad of reasons as to why people make decisions regarding which middleware to use for a project and the things you have suggested here are assumptions at best.

In my own experience far more important that any particular feature set of any software package I've had to deal with is how good the documentation is. If Frontier's own tool's are well supported by their own in-house team and their documentation is up-to-date for anyone coming to use it for the first time then there are immediately very good reasons why they would favour them over third party ones. There are many frameworks I've had to use because of legacy support that have been a complete pain in the bum because the documentation was so out of date with the release code. Don't discount how valuable it is to have your own in-house knowledge and support, and code that you _completely_ control.

A good point well made and you are correct that my evaluations are assumptions, but each of the game engines I mentioned are widely used by the games industry (I was sure I'd made that clear), if they had poor support or documentation as to thier usage, how do you explain thier widespread use?

Unreal is on it's 4th iteration having first come out hmm maybe 1998? Cryengine first appeared 2004. Unity 2005.

So even Unity, the most recent of my top picks has had 8 years to wrangle out issues previously found. I don't work in the games industry or write code, but I'd take a leap and say if something doesn't work 8 years down the road (when the KS started), with 2 other extremely viable options available; then I'd say something is very wrong with the industry that would continue to use a games engine that doesn't deliver or otherwise makes the dev time both longer and importantly more expensive.

In an ideal world making your own proprietary engine so you can do with it as you wish is the best choice, but with [other peoples] money and short delivery times being part of the equation I'd say it's a poor choice.

If COBRA is so good, why isn't it on the open market to be licenced out a serious contender alongside the 3 I mentioned before? Why has FDev done another share issue to 3rd party investors in the last 6 months to raise capital?

 

[Stachel]

While that is true, if the creators don't accept the pull request

What, Unreal might not want Frontier code in their project??

or you don't want to share your patch with the codebase,

What, Frontier might refuse to share with others??

you're stuck with maintenance of such modifications everytime new patch comes out.

Hey, you get to fix bugs. If those fixes don't meet the project quality standards or you want want to deprive others of them, then don't complain that the work of reapplying them stays with you.

 

[CMDR Dreamstate]

Just. Not. True.

"The entire Unreal Engine source code is available on our GitHub page, ready for you to access!"

Yes it is, they update the engine every so often with optimisations, and in turn developers can work around bugs and other stuff in the game engine.

 

[Cageman]

Stachel comes across as one of the biggest trolls I've ever met, and also have no clue, at all. *sigh*

With that said, I have to give him/her credits of adding humor and amusment to the thread.

 

[Stachel]

Do you know how many games have been made using the COBRA engine? JUST FOUR, THREE by FDev, ONE by an affiliate.

You won't be surprised to find Frontier has a totally different story. 55+ games developed with Cobra. This story is presumably written for morons, given Frontier hasn't produced anywhere near 55+ games.

If COBRA is so good, why isn't it on the open market to be licenced out a serious contender alongside the 3 I mentioned before?

Frontier are trying to sell Cobra on the open market.

But I can't find any sign that any other company has been bug-hungry enough to try writing a game with it.