As I understand it through licensing the Cobra engine was the way they sold their IPO, licensing and selling Elite Dangerous was painted as there two main revenue streams in the ipo documents. So it should be coming Soon™ or they will be getting a slap on the wrist from someone.
Well it isn't a well known engine under gamers. Dev? i don't know. But UE and unity3D are hard to beat in popularity .
Interestly from what I read from the braben and others and some of their online job descriptions is that Cobra development is already handled by a separate team from their main game development team, there probably a lot of cross over but fact they are separate is a good foundation to build on.
Well make sense Frontier is studio who has worked for the last decades or 3 on games spread over many platforms. So there is a code base and long engine family in house. And probaly have worked on few productions in the same periode. So I would expect a crossplatform engine including for Wii.
Having a engine on the market design from the ground up for large procedural worlds and large crowds and that can handle everything from simulating whole galaxies to a small zoo or theme park would make it a unique selling from the likes of Unity and Unreal engine which is primarily targeted it at level type games. Both are capable of doing open world games but you have to fight with it to do that. An you have to buy separate procedural generation tools or build your Own .
I don't expect that so. Elite series as we know now was't dead. But in very long deep freeze stasis cocon for so long all tech back then isn't relevant any more. And the last decade of titels are more conventional production by a decent size team for something like kinectimals etc to the canceled outsider.
My guess is they had a non PCG game engine and the skunkworks might have extend it with the PCG feature as ED is the only current title from them, that demand that feature not the out sider and what went before.
As such with enough time game engine can be refactored and extended to specific feature demands.
There is not much game engine build up from scratch but family lines of game engines.
I bet that just like the IDsoft tech 5 engine have some idtech 3 routines. That ed engine has some code that other frontier games already use. As there console adventure with ED it indirect or a sign of prove that cobra is family of a crossplatform game engine and ED has the newest with extended features for MMO and PCG galacy. That is add on like other dev can also heavy modifi there engine or licenced engine. But didn't because there game don't need that feature.
I could imagine it being a year or so away with them wanting to launch it with built in crowd technology they shown off in there planet coaster video and a procedural city generator.
I did find PCG article about city generation.
I imagine a engine that could create a procedural city from scratch, which allows you edit the city and give it the human factor and then change every building with your own assets could sell well on the open market, or even under a unity type model.
No as DB explained it it build from a seed. And for galacy milkyway side sand box with 10 ^ 14 of star systems, if 1/1000000 has city on a planet or few, you need earth whole work force as content team, to finalize every city. So I expect the need to generate it fuly under runtime. They might need decent size Q&A team to check the result by sample enough results. Also the try out different seeds and adjust the generation algoritme. The more complex it is the more testing and checking the results. Which is big task if the kwantity is extreem.
How ever as the do have a art team the could do a few hand modeled city in it.
My first baby PCG step. Got very recent MSVS 2015 running on W10 and install the UWP DX12 sample.
Did find the Routine with a hardcoded cube with - and + 0.5 floats .
Hacked them to float variable left,right,up,down,close, ver /* far */;
Now I can hardcode it to deform it, rezize, make it thin panel like sheet of metal, or long bar
The next step is generate it by seed and set a min max value,
Then instancing a few but the sample don't support that.
But I could check if it generate the same cube.
Because PCG is new for me. I grasp the idea. But I would start simple. So first thing I would generate bullits from parameter data with casing. First is some research of what variations are there in RL and then figure out a algoritme to get to the result. Then gather the RL bullit data. And hardcode it or put it in a gamedata file. It could be re- usable in the long run.
For FPS game base on modernwarfare it generated from data.
For massdrivers on space ship base theme on gun pouder it could be generated runtime.
How a fictional spacecraft looks like is bit fuzzy. But first I need some rules and limitations .
First simple design where orientation is very noticable and abstract.
Now checking out and searching for DX12 samples and tutorials.
