Only one light source at a time?

[-VR- Max Factor]

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.

Yep. The person is clueless but acts like he knows everything. What us funny is the obvious lies he comes out with while thinking he is being clever.

 

[tafkabb]

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

No, but I do get a spaceship and the Milky Way. You have to take the positives with the negatives but I do agree, only having one or two light sources really detracts from this cutting edge miracle of game engineering. [hotas]

 

[Rafe Zetter]

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.

If the beige planets are "nothing to do with the game engine" then what?

I have clearly stated I DON'T WORK IN THE INDUSTRY, and that quite a lot of what I have written is speculation; but speculation based on what I see, industry reporters have written, and quite a large dose of logic.

If most of my post is nonsense then please, honestly, educate me. Tell me where the "beige planet" issue is coming from if not the engine that's rendering it.

As for the rest, the web can prove how many other games have been rendered using the game engines I mentioned, and why the unreal 4 engine has recently gone FREE TO USE - you only have to pay for any profits of sales over $3,000 in any quarter.... WHY? because the Unity engine was becoming so widespread. I think the cryengine has also done something similar.

The claims I made about the COBRA engine only being used in 4 PC games to date (all attributed to FDev) are on the web, hopefully I don't have to tell you what to do to check.

the 55+ games on FDevs site are presumably CobraMOBILE games. I assume you know the difference.

I agree SC has had to do some pretty major under the hood stuff with the cryengine / lumberyard; however even if they end up modifying 90% of it, which is doubtful, they are still 10% ahead of the game. 10% of time not spent re-inventing the wheel. 10% of the dev time not making a game engine that does something another one can already do; and quite probably better, because it's had thousands of other coders work under the hood already.

Chris Roberts and Cloud Imperium games are not idiots - CR has significantly more titles to his name than DB does (CR 23 - DB 11), PLUS they raised a stupid amount of money for developing SC and Sqd 42; and yet they STILL decided to use a 3rd party game engine instead of create thier own proprietary one. Do you think they did it because they had no clue that the cryengine would require so much modification, or because they had the logical belief that modification is still faster and more efficient than re-invention?

There's a reason why so many games companies have used other peoples game engines and it's not because they are free, because until 2015, they weren't.

I re-iterate, why re-invent the wheel?

 

[Rafe Zetter]

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.

Are you kidding me? - is this true?

That FDev were trying to make a "next gen super duper" (according to a great many of the devblogs) game run on systems that even at the date of the KS were over TEN YEARS out of date?

This cannot possibly be true, why on earth would you deliberately hobble yourself like this?

 

[[SI] Bobdelion]

Rafe;the point is that none of us actually know, but I can say with a relative amount of certainty that switching to a different game engine at this point will not improve anything. You can wax lyrical about the features of different game engines and how suited they may or may not be to this specific project but that is just so much noise; when it comes down to it E: D _does_ use COBRA and that's just the way things are. It is a good game engine - not the best, not the worst - and Frontier have done a great job pushing it to meet the specific needs that E: D has. Their engine, alongside all of the games it is being developed alongside, will continue to improve and that is just the natural and expected course of events. We can cry about what could have been but that is to ignore how things actually are, and Frontier are not likely to ditch the huge investment they have already made in their tool set at this stage just because the proverbial girl next door has a fancy dress on today.

More over the OP's point was about the lighting model and as has been pointed out several times now the current implementation has as much to do with optimisation as it does about the potential capabilities of the game engine itself. The truth is that this would apply whether E: D was built on Unreal, Cryengine, Unity, or any other engine. Why? Because the engine is just a tool set, a foundation on which the actual game is built, and there are many other decisions that effect what we actually see on the screen within the published build of the game which have nothing whatsoever to do with the absolute capabilities of this or any game engine.

In addition, whether or not Frontier licence their engine to other parties says _nothing_ about its relative quality. Likewise equating the companies current decisions re. financing to the relative quality of a tool set that has been in development for years is reductive at best.

 

[Rafe Zetter]

Rafe;the point is that none of us actually know, but I can say with a relative amount of certainty that switching to a different game engine at this point will not improve anything. You can wax lyrical about the features of different game engines and how suited they may or may not be to this specific project but that is just so much noise; when it comes down to it E: D _does_ use COBRA and that's just the way things are. It is a good game engine - not the best, not the worst - and Frontier have done a great job pushing it to meet the specific needs that E: D has. Their engine, alongside all of the games it is being developed alongside, will continue to improve and that is just the natural and expected course of events. We can cry about what could have been but that is to ignore how things actually are, and Frontier are not likely to ditch the huge investment they have already made in their tool set at this stage just because the proverbial girl next door has a fancy dress on today.

More over the OP's point was about the lighting model and as has been pointed out several times now the current implementation has as much to do with optimisation as it does about the potential capabilities of the game engine itself. The truth is that this would apply whether E: D was built on Unreal, Cryengine, Unity, or any other engine. Why? Because the engine is just a tool set, a foundation on which the actual game is built, and there are many other decisions that effect what we actually see on the screen within the published build of the game which have nothing whatsoever to do with the absolute capabilities of this or any game engine.

In addition, whether or not Frontier licence their engine to other parties says _nothing_ about its relative quality. Likewise equating the companies current decisions re. financing to the relative quality of a tool set that has been in development for years is reductive at best.

Bob, I'm not saying that they should switch, it's too late now; what I maintain is that they were foolish to use thier proprietary Cobra engine in the first place, because they have to invent everything themselves which will always take longer and cost more money. Before ED Frontier Dev were a middling developer with nothing special under their belts. The KS gave them opportunites they seemingly could not create themselves. Developing ED using the COBRA engine, took more time and money and three years on we still have parts missing from the game promised in the KS.

The financing comment was a sideways remark about the possible current state of the company and how that might affect the games longterm development and all things connected to that.

I know it doesn't make much sense in relation to the thread topic, but I've been forwarded some info that does bear on the company as a whole and the ramifications it may have.

I'd post it if I thought it would get through, or that half the community would even understand what it meant.

I'm almost getting sick of seeing myself post the same stuff - poking FDev to deliver what they said they would. Elite holds a special place in my heart - I've mentioned before it literally saved my life - I WOULD be dead if not for Elite in 1985, of this I have no doubt; but it's becoming clear this investment I have is becoming semi-obsessional.

I'm certain many forum posters are sick of seeing my rants, even if they don't understand the reasons why I keep poking FDev.

 

[Kubicide]

I am laughing my head off. Did you get your refund by the way for no offline mode? Do you own the game at all? Textures haven't been downgraded. Planet surface details are better then they have ever been, yes there is an issue with the colour beige, but that is nothing to do with the textures. Suns haven't changed at all AFAIK.

You litereally are talking from where the sun doesn't shine and have been doing it for years. It is truly sad and funny for us reading it.

You do know that Xbox, PS4 and the PC have different rendering pipelines and the quality that we get on PC has nothing to do with the Xbox. Infact having the Xbox and PS4 on board will help the PC titles as their graphics will need to be more optimised which will then feed down to the PC and then we can up the details to make it look far better, which I am now able to do.

My PC version looks far better then the Xbox and PS4 versions due to those optimisations that have helped me be able to crank up the details. You are talking utter rubbish. But please carry on, I like a good laugh.

Actually you should hold onto your head before laughing it off. The sun is shining quite nicely for many of us. Yes, there is a major bug\bad design decision on the beige roids. Shame on FDev. As a fact the textures were severely downgraded due to consoles. And the rendering pipeline is quite restrictive on both Xbox and PS4. But... what do you know...

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

If the beige planets are "nothing to do with the game engine" then what?

I have clearly stated I DON'T WORK IN THE INDUSTRY, and that quite a lot of what I have written is speculation; but speculation based on what I see, industry reporters have written, and quite a large dose of logic.

If most of my post is nonsense then please, honestly, educate me. Tell me where the "beige planet" issue is coming from if not the engine that's rendering it.

As for the rest, the web can prove how many other games have been rendered using the game engines I mentioned, and why the unreal 4 engine has recently gone FREE TO USE - you only have to pay for any profits of sales over $3,000 in any quarter.... WHY? because the Unity engine was becoming so widespread. I think the cryengine has also done something similar.

The claims I made about the COBRA engine only being used in 4 PC games to date (all attributed to FDev) are on the web, hopefully I don't have to tell you what to do to check.

the 55+ games on FDevs site are presumably CobraMOBILE games. I assume you know the difference.

I agree SC has had to do some pretty major under the hood stuff with the cryengine / lumberyard; however even if they end up modifying 90% of it, which is doubtful, they are still 10% ahead of the game. 10% of time not spent re-inventing the wheel. 10% of the dev time not making a game engine that does something another one can already do; and quite probably better, because it's had thousands of other coders work under the hood already.

Chris Roberts and Cloud Imperium games are not idiots - CR has significantly more titles to his name than DB does (CR 23 - DB 11), PLUS they raised a stupid amount of money for developing SC and Sqd 42; and yet they STILL decided to use a 3rd party game engine instead of create thier own proprietary one. Do you think they did it because they had no clue that the cryengine would require so much modification, or because they had the logical belief that modification is still faster and more efficient than re-invention?

There's a reason why so many games companies have used other peoples game engines and it's not because they are free, because until 2015, they weren't.

I re-iterate, why re-invent the wheel?

Oh my Lord. FDev didn't create the Cobra engine just for ED it was already there. They where already using it. Also they have complete control over it too, they can update, make it better as they go along. It gives them far more freedom.

Why dump something that they already have, they already use, they know is a good engine, they know it is very flexible and can do anything from first person shooters to large open world GTA type games to coaster games and games like elite dangerous for a game engine that would need to be rewritten and hacked up, which would have taken a lot longer (I doubt the game would be out yet) to get it to work. And then they wouldn't be able to use the other games they are creating as a test bed for stuff that could come in ED. FDev know what they are doing. This game isn't a simple shooter game like doom. And even games like that made on "industry standard" game engines can be full of bugs.

You are not in the industry as you say. Don't speculate, look up the facts instead of guessing.

And don't do what statchel does and come out with complete and utter lies to justify his points. He has been doing it for years know. Its pretty sad.

The Cobra engine looks very good to me with what it can do. It's games like ED that are very complex games to make no matter what engine you use.

And when it comes to CR. Don't get me started. I am not his biggest fan and to be honest the only game I liked of his was freelancer. And that wasn't that great. When it comes to game engines a lot of people questioned why they used cryengine as it didn't make sense. I suspect it was the pretty graphics it could do, that most machines can't run. I have Star Citizen but have slowly come to the realisation that I doubt it will ever get released.

 

[Whitehair]

Snip....I re-iterate, why re-invent the wheel?

Elite Dangerous release date: Dec 2014

Star Citizen release date: Still Unknown (originally projected for 2014)

That seems like a good enough reason to use their own methods.

 

[Jack Schitt]

If the beige planets are "nothing to do with the game engine" then what?

Bad data, as I understand it. The planets were more colourful before the Coming Of The Great Beige, so we know the engine can handle it. It does raise the question of why it's taking so long to debeigeify everything, but that's FD's timetables for you. A mystery in and of themselves.

 

[S3B4ST13N]

I re-iterate, why re-invent the wheel?

Plenty of reasons, off the top of my head:

The company already has an established, proprietary engine (which Frontier have, since 2004 when they wrote it for Rollercoaster Tycoon 3).

A company might want more control over the engine they use and feel that an engine belonging to someone else is too limiting.

No other engine is capable of addressing their specific needs. As an example, Unreal Engine does not allow pornographic games (or games with an ESRB of M, or extreme violence) to be built with it's engine .. which is kind of weird given the whole .. uhm .. Unreal Tournament thing.. but okay, no extreme violence.

In the case of the Unreal Engine, a company might not be prepared to hand over 5% of their turnover; after also giving them $3000 per product, per catalogue.

A company might not want to take the risk that an engine cannot support their needs; which they only find out months after development (this is not something you can plan for), or support for that engine ceases, or a recent change to the core engine code introduces a metric hell-ton of issues into your build. You're forced to update if you want to keep your engine relevant, but the changes set your development time back to unacceptable levels (think: months).

Switching engines can be extremely costly; not just financially, but on time and resources. There is also a chance you'd have to redo most, if not all, of the work you've already done.

Star Citizen, for example, got lucky because Lumberyard uses CryEngine architecture; which means the CIG team spent "a day or so of two engineers on the engine team". 1
Another developer ( I can't find their name right now ) made the same call; but they had to scrap months upon months of hard work because switching from Unity to UE made it impossible to migrate with their existing source as most (all) of it was Unity-specific.


In my personal capacity, there are dozens upon dozens of 3rd party component suites out there that can do so much of what I want to do. I don't buy them because they are cost prohibitive, so I simply just write my own in-house variation. I can modify as needed, I don't have to pay anybody for it and it'll always be supported for as long as it's relevant to the company; in addition, it can be written in such a way that it's compatible with several of our applications; win/win.

 

[Shadowdancer]

Star Citizen, for example, got lucky because Lumberyard uses CryEngine architecture; which means the CIG team spent "a day or so of two engineers on the engine team". 1

Which I think is either magically handwaving away a lot of the work to appease their backers, or indicates that the upstream of the engine was already dead by the time CIG started using and customising it (which would be corroborated by them happily poaching the good parts of CryTek), and Amazon much later acquired a version still very close to what CIG had forked off. Seeing the amount of work and thus money that CIG had to put into Cry to make it viable for their needs (including, but not limited to, enabling mathematical precision to the necessary degree by a time when E:⁠D already had people circumnavigating the galaxy in a game even "working" on hardware below what would even run SC's launcher), including spinning up what's pretty much their own engine development branch, I very much doubt they had major savings or advantages from going 3rd party.

 

[Cervantes01]

Bad data, as I understand it. The planets were more colourful before the Coming Of The Great Beige, so we know the engine can handle it. It does raise the question of why it's taking so long to debeigeify everything, but that's FD's timetables for you. A mystery in and of themselves.

It's taking so long because no-one is actively working on it, it's on the back burner of the back burners... The job sheet has been posted in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard."

 

[Shadowdancer]

The job sheet has been posted in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard."

Check again, you'll find it's a panther.

#SaveThePanther

 

[S3B4ST13N]

Which I think is either magically handwaving away a lot of the work to appease their backers, or indicates that the upstream of the engine was already dead by the time CIG started using and customising it (which would be corroborated by them happily poaching the good parts of CryTek), and Amazon much later acquired a version still very close to what CIG had forked off. Seeing the amount of work and thus money that CIG had to put into Cry to make it viable for their needs (including, but not limited to, enabling mathematical precision to the necessary degree by a time when E:⁠D already had people circumnavigating the galaxy in a game even "working" on hardware below what would even run SC's launcher), including spinning up what's pretty much their own engine development branch, I very much doubt they had major savings or advantages from going 3rd party.

Or it genuinely only took them two days to migrate thanks to the fact that Lumberyard is built off CryEngine in the first place, and LY with AWS genuinely caters to CIG's requirements better than CryTek does. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It's taking so long because no-one is actively working on it, it's on the back burner of the back burners... The job sheet has been posted in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard."

I was so confused about whether to rep you or not.
I disagree with your initial statement (I believe someone, at some point in time, recently mentioned that they were still working on it); but, I mean, how could I not rep an Adam's reference?

 

[Shadowdancer]

Or it genuinely only took them two days to migrate thanks to the fact that Lumberyard is built off CryEngine in the first place, and LY with AWS genuinely caters to CIG's requirements better than CryTek does. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Oh I'm not plain out saying that one day is wrong, just that such a statement has an unpleasant smell and IMO allows some reasonable assumptions for any project of a significant size. At least Amazon had some guidance on the networking and general infrastructure part for Lumberyard [big grin]

[video=youtube_share;EvJPyjmfdz0]https://youtu.be/EvJPyjmfdz0[/video]

 

[S3B4ST13N]

Oh I'm not plain out saying that one day is wrong, just that such a statement has an unpleasant smell...

I don't understand why though?
Is it genuine concern, or is it because of SC's constant release screw ups and the like?

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

The financing comment was a sideways remark about the possible current state of the company and how that might affect the games longterm development and all things connected to that.

I know it doesn't make much sense in relation to the thread topic, but I've been forwarded some info that does bear on the company as a whole and the ramifications it may have.

I'd post it if I thought it would get through, or that half the community would even understand what it meant.

Well as a PLC, their financials are pretty transparant. They come on here all the time. The company is in great shape. The only thing that you could be talking about is that it could be sold.

But again that is still speculation. You could send a PM to some of us.

But back on topic. ED does do multiple light sources, one major and a load of minor. I will have to look at the shadows tonight to if there are multiple shadows, but to be honest, it is such a minor concern I am not sure if I want to take off my oculus rift to test it.

I could possible see them update the game to have two major light sources in the future. They couldn't make it unlimited though as some systems have 10 or more stars and our machines just wouldn't be able to cope with that.

 

[Shadowdancer]

I don't understand why though?
Is it genuine concern, or is it because of SC's constant release screw ups and the like?

According to their own statements, CIG had done a lot of work customising the engine, which in itself already is a non-trivial piece of software both in complexity and sheer size. Trying to move that work over to something else, even if it's just a further development of the same base software, would not be a trivial undertaking unless the base had not changed much or both sides were extremely well engineered and modular. Seeing how at least the graphics parts of game engines tend to be piles upon piles of hax'n'cheats for the sake of performance and Crytek was in dire waters for a long time anyway, I'd generally gravitate towards the former.

The constant release screw ups are a completely different beast entirely; IMO, Elite could have used one or two minor instances of those as well earlier in its life But yes, they have incentive to try and sell any such changes as politely as possible, so I don't rule out that they may have done things like shuffling parts of the migration into semi-related bugfix or feature development tasks making those a wee bit more expensive until they had distilled it down to a small set of arcane changes that could indeed be performed by some grey-bearded dude in a dimly lit room over the course of a day.

Either way, best of luck to them.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

It's taking so long because no-one is actively working on it, it's on the back burner of the back burners... The job sheet has been posted in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard."

We do not know whether they are actively working on it. In fact all the evidence that we have suggests that they are, but it isn't a trivial thing to do. I suspect they are working on the new materials system for atmospheric planets, and we will likely see the changes then. But this is me guessing and I don't really know for sure.

I suspect we will find out more in the October Expo event.