What is the graphic capability of the Cobra Engine?

lysan · Jul 22, 2015

Hi FDEV,

I'm trying to put my finger on the Graphic capability of the Cobra Engine. What can it do and what would be considered a hard task for the engine?
When I look at game you made with this engine, they are all made with a cartoon kind of touch. Is it possible to make a graphic environment that are more photographical?

Unreal 4 demo

[video=youtube;y_7awHM-pr0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_7awHM-pr0[/video]

CryEngine

[video=youtube;GyFh0L7efpQ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyFh0L7efpQ[/video]

Top 10 Engines

[video=youtube;I4t43RM5aVc]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4t43RM5aVc[/video]

Is there a demo of the Cobra engine? if so where can I find it?

I really would like to see the possibilities of the Cobra Engine.

Retrograde · Jul 22, 2015

It's not currently licenced, so only FD games use it. Check Elite, Zoo Tycoon, and CoasterPlanet for its capabilities.

And I think it's a huge bonus for Elite that FD has their own engine. I don't think any of the other engines out there can do procedural generation like Cobra. I'd suspect that kind of stuff needs to be built in at a fairly fundamental level. Of course it's also cool that it seems to be really flexible in terms of platforms.

A few details: https://www.frontier.co.uk/our_technology/

Von Shadow · Jul 22, 2015

I'm not bashing star citizen here but using it as a reference on the engine discussion...

I think it helps show that custom dedicated engine is better in certain circumstances than off-the-shelf engine.... A lot of SC's issues have been aimed at its use of the Cryengine .... they're struggling to adapt it to space-sim and have had to re-write the networking stack

Graphics fidelity isn't the be-all and end-all of an engine.... its how adpatable it is to mulitple game-styles..... i think most of the big-name engines like Cry / Unreal are aimed more (or at least stemmed from) the FPS world

Arkantes · Jul 22, 2015

Retrograde said:
I don't think any of the other engines out there can do procedural generation like Cobra.

Did you have a look at Space Engine?

lysan · Jul 22, 2015

Retrograde said:
It's not currently licenced, so only FD games use it. Check Elite, Zoo Tycoon, and CoasterPlanet for its capabilities.

And I think it's a huge bonus for Elite that FD has their own engine. I don't think any of the other engines out there can do procedural generation like Cobra. I'd suspect that kind of stuff needs to be built in at a fairly fundamental level. Of course it's also cool that it seems to be really flexible in terms of platforms.

A few details: https://www.frontier.co.uk/our_technology/

Yes, I've seen that one, however this doesn't really demonstrate the limits or even what is possible with the engine.
As an example when you see the Unreal 4 engine landscape demo, and the demo for the new planet coaster game from FD, you can clearly see one is made with a more cartoonish intension (PC)

Also when we get closer to the stations we do see its very rough in the design and polygon counts, again this doesn't mean that this is the limit. Only that it was designed to be tis way due to reasons.

We know PBR can be used, HDR is as I remember also something that the Cobra engine can use.
My question is more like, can it use voxels? facial expressions? PIP, how natural can you make the vegetation on a planet?

[video]www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0ybCrr8c4g[/video]

Retrograde · Jul 22, 2015

Arkantes said:
Did you have a look at Space Engine?

Sorry, I meant the general purpose licenced engines - Unreal, CryEngine, Unity, Frostbite, etc. I think Space Engine is custom-made for that project, right? There are of course many other engines that support procedural generation, but they tend to be smaller and custom-made for that specific project. I'm sure there are exceptions... Unity has some PG in recent demos.

The Coaster games are very cartoonish, but I think that's artistic choice, not an engine limitation.
Here's FD's The Outsider: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Glr71X-cr84
I think it was cancelled, but the promo stuff shows other engine capabilities.

CMDR Soundwave · Jul 22, 2015

Retrograde said:
It's not currently licenced, so only FD games use it. Check Elite, Zoo Tycoon, and CoasterPlanet for its capabilities.

And I think it's a huge bonus for Elite that FD has their own engine. I don't think any of the other engines out there can do procedural generation like Cobra. I'd suspect that kind of stuff needs to be built in at a fairly fundamental level. Of course it's also cool that it seems to be really flexible in terms of platforms.

A few details: https://www.frontier.co.uk/our_technology/

OP, Basically this. There's no need for FD to make a demo / highlight reel as Cobra Engine is in house, and currently unlicensed. If they were to license it, then yes, we will definitely have some eye candy from the engine.

Until then, no ball.

lysan · Jul 22, 2015

CMDR Soundwave said:
OP, Basically this. There's no need for FD to make a demo / highlight reel as Cobra Engine is in house, and currently unlicensed. If they were to license it, then yes, we will definitely have some eye candy from the engine.

Until then, no ball.

Yup, I know, still it would be great to know what could be done and what we should rule out

Kris · Jul 22, 2015

I don't think we will see CryEngine or Farcry 3 level of details in Elite. But they don't have to.

In my opinion Elite looks amazing, and i think (atleast hope) Cobra engine is good enough. It doesn't have to be super photorealistic in my opinion.

Genar-Hofoen · Jul 22, 2015

Also have a look at the cancelled Frontier game, The Outsider, which I believe was also done with their COBRA engine.

Mu77ley · Jul 22, 2015

Lysander lysan said:
As an example when you see the Unreal 4 engine landscape demo, and the demo for the new planet coaster game from FD, you can clearly see one is made with a more cartoonish intension (PC)

That's down to the artistic style chosen for the game, it's got very little to do with the engine.

GIBSONJR · Jul 22, 2015

The COBRA Engine is not a gfx engine. It is a cross platform development tool like Unity.
As long as I know it doesn´t allow to use DirectX11 or DirectX12 yet but that doesn´t mean much.
Graphically you can do what you want - the programmers are the limiting factor here.

Cheers,
Robin

lysan · Jul 22, 2015

GIBSONJR said:
The COBRA Engine is not a gfx engine. It is a cross platform development tool like Unity.
As long as I know it doesn´t allow to use DirectX11 or DirectX12 yet but that doesn´t mean much.
Graphically you can do what you want - the programmers are the limiting factor here.

Cheers,
Robin

Ah ok, so that is why we need to use a 3rd party sweetFX to get a more juicy game graphics?

Janichsan · Jul 22, 2015

GIBSONJR said:
The COBRA Engine is not a gfx engine. It is a cross platform development tool like Unity.
As long as I know it doesn´t allow to use DirectX11 or DirectX12 yet but that doesn´t mean much.

The graphics are part of the Cobra engine. And ED actually uses DirectX 11 under Windows.

Synthetic Frost · Jul 22, 2015

GIBSONJR said:
The COBRA Engine is not a gfx engine. It is a cross platform development tool like Unity.
As long as I know it doesn´t allow to use DirectX11 or DirectX12 yet but that doesn´t mean much.
Graphically you can do what you want - the programmers are the limiting factor here.

Cheers,
Robin

This is misinformation, just like any other developer toolkit, a game engine is just a suite of packaged tools and already-built resource libraries that a developer can choose to pull from so they don't have to write the code from scratch. But that toolkit is still written in languages that the OS will understand. On Windows, any calls pertaining to the graphics display has to use either the Direct 3D or OpenGL APIs, as those are the two graphics libraries that Windows, and more accurately, your graphics accelerators (video cards) have built into the drivers.

The Cobra Engine is capable of using both. It uses Direct 3D 11 on Windows, and OpenGL on Mac OS X.

Soopyyy · Jul 22, 2015

Highlightshadow said:
I'm not bashing star citizen here but using it as a reference on the engine discussion...

I think it helps show that custom dedicated engine is better in certain circumstances than off-the-shelf engine.... A lot of SC's issues have been aimed at its use of the Cryengine .... they're struggling to adapt it to space-sim and have had to re-write the networking stack

Graphics fidelity isn't the be-all and end-all of an engine.... its how adpatable it is to mulitple game-styles..... i think most of the big-name engines like Cry / Unreal are aimed more (or at least stemmed from) the FPS world

Cry-engine ain't all its cracked up to be. It's wonky at best...

Synthetic Frost · Jul 22, 2015

Just to clear up a bit more of the misinformation I corrected on the first page, there really is no "best" game engine. Each engine out there is specifically designed for a very specific set of requirements. Different engines will benefit different genres of games. You don't need world class physics in a point and click adventure game, for example. Using an engine with support for it would only add bloat to a game that didn't need it.

The popularity of engines like Unreal Engine or Unity has mostly strived from the fact that actually building and maintaining a developer suite of tools, no matter what you intend to use it for, is extremely costly and time consuming. So it's a saving grace of the industry that companies like Epic Games were able to package up their tools and make them universal enough for mass marketing. In fact that's about "all" they've done in recent years. Epic Games used to compete with ID Software for the top arena fps killer. Now they really only work on game engines.

In an ideal world, each and every game ever made would be running on it's own, finely tuned, lean, and super optimized engine designed "only" to process exactly the calls to the system the game would make. The problem is that engines are extremely hard to make. It'd jack up development costs and time spent to insane levels.

shadragon · Jul 22, 2015

Duke Nukem Forever - If you ever need to know what NOT to do with engine swapping.

Iskariot · Jul 22, 2015

Lysander lysan said:
As an example when you see the Unreal 4 engine landscape demo, and the demo for the new planet coaster game from FD, you can clearly see one is made with a more cartoonish intension (PC)

No, no, that is a mistake.
These engines are both capable of supporting a wide variety of styles.
For example this is all Unreal engine 2.5/3:

lysan · Jul 22, 2015

Yeah I was sure it was something like that. It's just difficult to see what could be done and what is totally out of scope.