When Will We Be Able To Land On Planets With Atmospheres??????

[Arioch]

If you want to see a good example of atmospheric planets, check out the four-year-old game Megaton Rainfall:

Source: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XecKu1_O54U

Seamless (and very fast) flying around Earth, and eventually the Solar System and beyond. Populated, destructible cities.

Megaton Rainfall - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

Runs on Switch, PlayStation4 (and PSVR), Xbox One and PC (and PCVR).

Mostly the work of one person.

I hope the clever folk at FDev will be able to do better.

 

[varonica]

If you want to see a good example of atmospheric planets, check out the four-year-old game Megaton Rainfall:

Source: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XecKu1_O54U

Seamless (and very fast) flying around Earth, and eventually the Solar System and beyond. Populated, destructible cities.

Megaton Rainfall - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

Runs on Switch, PlayStation4 (and PSVR), Xbox One and PC (and PCVR).

Mostly the work of one person.

I hope the clever folk at FDev will be able to do better.

I had a look at a youtube video, and no it wasn't that good, plus of course it's a single player game so the need to sync it between thousands of users doesn't exist. At best the planets are average, and procedural cities are relatively easy to create, it's actually them being useful as part of a massive multiplayer game where the issues come in. If all you want is set pieces to destroy fine, but actually useful in terms of game play in ED, not at all.

Still it is a massive achievement for one person but in terms of comparisons to ED, nowhere near as demanding development wise.

 

[Terry Daniels]

and procedural cities are relatively easy to create, it's actually them being useful as part of a massive multiplayer game where the issues come in.

Like the one room and no AI NPCs Fdev use to show the immense bustling size of the space stations. Please!

 

[Arioch]

I had a look at a youtube video, and no it wasn't that good, plus of course it's a single player game so the need to sync it between thousands of users doesn't exist. At best the planets are average, and procedural cities are relatively easy to create, it's actually them being useful as part of a massive multiplayer game where the issues come in. If all you want is set pieces to destroy fine, but actually useful in terms of game play in ED, not at all.

Still it is a massive achievement for one person but in terms of comparisons to ED, nowhere near as demanding development wise.

If the stuff is procedural it’ll be generating the same, client-side, on everyone’s machines. I’ve never been in an Elite instance with thousands of users (only a dozen or so at most), so I don’t know how much extra processing that would require

During Odyssey Alpha in the exobiology testing phase when planets were liberally plastered with scannable objects, I couldn’t help thinking what it would look like if each object was replaced with a tree model. There would’ve been some pretty impressive forests and a pretty decent view distance on them!

I posted Megaton Rainfall as an example of what can be done on present hardware, not that I think Elite should have destructible cities etc. You may have watched a video and thought it wasn’t too good, I’ve played the game in PC VR and I think it looks awesome. First time Superman-ing into space before swooping back down on the opposite side of the planet in just seconds down to street-level with traffic and pedestrians? Or the first time leaving the Milky Way at the opposite end of the scale?

When I see users here saying that doing dense atmospheric worlds on current hardware is impossible, I think of the games I’ve played were it was possible (and looked good to boot) and then think that the clever lot in Cambridge could probably do better. It may not run well at first, but I’m sure they’d eventually get there

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

Well???? I know this has probably been done to death, BUT COME ON DEV's Let us land on planets with atmospheres!!!!!!

Erm, we already can.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

Back in 1994. When Frontier Elite II appeared. On the 16 bit machines made by Atari and Commodore. With only 8 Mhz, 1 Mbyte (not Gbyte!) RAM. The whole game on a 720 K floppy disk containing 100 mio star systems, atmospheric landing included. Great memories. Maybe either todays computers or programmers are too weak. Lets travel back from the future and voila!

View attachment 273855

I'm sure they can get something that looks like that in a couple of weeks. But I don't think that will work for gamers these days.

 

[tomimt]

What comes to detailed planets with thick atmospheres and vegetation, FD has already lost the game. Even not counting that One game in development, we already know that creating planets with more life and different atmospheres is quite a feasible thing to do. Obviously, we can always argue about things like gameplay and art style and so on, but Elite has been an underdog in this aspect for quite a while now.

I do suspect, that Cobra engine is the biggest obstacle for them. Creating dustballs with no to low atmospheres is quite a different ask than doing thick atmosphere planets filled with life.

 

[varonica]

If the stuff is procedural it’ll be generating the same, client-side, on everyone’s machines. I’ve never been in an Elite instance with thousands of users (only a dozen or so at most), so I don’t know how much extra processing that would require

That's not the issue, it's having mutiple players in the same location at the same time. The procedural generation will be the same, the networking makes a big difference. There's none in Megatron Rainfall.

When I see users here saying that doing dense atmospheric worlds on current hardware is impossible

Nope, you must be imagining things because nobody has said that, I would like to see a post from someone saying it's impossible.

It's doing it realistically with weather, plants, animals, people, buildings, fire, the whole lot as a believable world, nothing less will do. The difference between Elite and games NMS, as good as it is, is that a ELW in Elite should look as close to the real thing as possible where NMS uses cartoony style graphics. Why do you think SC is having so many problems, it's the issue of realism, they are trying to create the entire thing in one hit and are still in Alpha after how many years? FDEV are proceeding bit by bit to produce what they can and developing as they go, the full pressure earth like worlds should get here eventually, but trying to do everything at once isn't going to work. it's quite likely if FDEV went ahead to do the entire lot in one go and have everything done including realistic earth like worlds they to would still be in Alpha.

First time Superman-ing into space before swooping back down on the opposite side of the planet in just seconds down to street-level with traffic and pedestrians? Or the first time leaving the Milky Way at the opposite end of the scale?

And that's part of the problem isn't it, physics verses magical superpowers, the Elite Galaxy is an attempt at modeling the galaxy and physics as close as practicable, what you have in Megatron Rainfall is just some sort of magic. Are the solar systems modeled realistically, do they orbit the sun, do they model weather and rainfall and rivers and the ecosystem with any sort of accuracy. There's a huge amount of work under the hood in Elite Dangerous just getting everything to run together in a way that's as realistic as possible in a computer game, Megatron Rainfall just ignores all that and uses magic, so while it's quite an achievement for one person, it's not a galaxy simulator and all that entails.

 

[Arioch]

That's not the issue, it's having mutiple players in the same location at the same time. The procedural generation will be the same, the networking makes a big difference. There's none in Megatron Rainfall.



Nope, you must be imagining things because nobody has said that, I would like to see a post from someone saying it's impossible.

It's doing it realistically with weather, plants, animals, people, buildings, fire, the whole lot as a believable world, nothing less will do. The difference between Elite and games NMS, as good as it is, is that a ELW in Elite should look as close to the real thing as possible where NMS uses cartoony style graphics. Why do you think SC is having so many problems, it's the issue of realism, they are trying to create the entire thing in one hit and are still in Alpha after how many years? FDEV are proceeding bit by bit to produce what they can and developing as they go, the full pressure earth like worlds should get here eventually, but trying to do everything at once isn't going to work. it's quite likely if FDEV went ahead to do the entire lot in one go and have everything done including realistic earth like worlds they to would still be in Alpha.



And that's part of the problem isn't it, physics verses magical superpowers, the Elite Galaxy is an attempt at modeling the galaxy and physics as close as practicable, what you have in Megatron Rainfall is just some sort of magic. Are the solar systems modeled realistically, do they orbit the sun, do they model weather and rainfall and rivers and the ecosystem with any sort of accuracy. There's a huge amount of work under the hood in Elite Dangerous just getting everything to run together in a way that's as realistic as possible in a computer game, Megatron Rainfall just ignores all that and uses magic, so while it's quite an achievement for one person, it's not a galaxy simulator and all that entails.

I must admit the only knowledge of Elite’s networking I have comes from the video that occasionally gets posted, but I can’t remember anything in it saying that having more procedural stuff on-screen would affect the networking performance

If I’m imagining post #14 saying “…Good luck having that planet-wide on any card available in, say, the next decade” or post #16 saying “I suspect the Cobra Engine is already over-stressed and probably cannot cope with detailed atmospherics, weather systems and complex vegetation” then please let me know - while they’re not saying it’s impossible to do dense atmospheric worlds on current hardware, it kinda looks a bit that way to me.

The reason I posted Megaton Rainfall was just to show something a little bit better than the planets in Frontier Elite 2 (which weren’t just plain spheres - they had random surface clutter and clouds (and cloud shadows) but unfortunately it usually didn’t generate until you’d just flown past it ), released 4 years ago and running on even older hardware.

As I’ve said previously, I hope FDev will be able to do better.

 

[Florenus]

I'm having serious doubts we will see another big DLC for Elite. Odyssey didn't exactly become a hit and they've spent lots of time developing that.
I hope I'm wrong, but I'm rather pessimistic about it lately.

 

[varonica]

The reason I posted Megaton Rainfall was just to show something a little bit better than the planets in Frontier Elite 2 (which weren’t just plain spheres - they had random surface clutter and clouds (and cloud shadows) but unfortunately it usually didn’t generate until you’d just flown past it ), released 4 years ago and running on even older hardware.

As I’ve said previously, I hope FDev will be able to do better.

Trying to explain this but you just aren't getting it. It's quite easy to generate random clouds, hill, forests, oceans and etc, after all procedural generation is just a specialised form of random generation, but if you want to create a realistic earth like world with realistic weather and forests and deserts and life forms then you need to model a solar system, you need to model an orbit around a star and you need to model body rotation and axial tilt, cloud cover, albedo and etc because all these things determine how much heat a body receives, how much and where it reflects or absorbs that heat, and that determines where your rain forests will be, whether there will be ice caps and deserts, what direction the winds blow and when and where there are cyclones and other extreme weather events.

I don't know how much of the forums you read or have read, but the long term inhabitants here can argue over whether a gas giant can exist that close to a star, whether the gravity is right on that high G body, and some of them will go off and work out density of the material that makes it up by calculating the radius versus the mass to determine whether there's actually enough metal in it to make that much gravity. While Megaton Rainfall is quite an achievement, from what I saw it certainly wasn't a realistically modeled environment, in fact the hills with a few scattered trees were far worse than our current crop of atmospheric planets.

There's been a huge amount of angst over Odyssey, everything from the lighting to pointy mountains, a half done job like a Megaton Rainfall type ELW would be laughed at. There's a reason I am here playing ED and not over there playing NMS, and that's because, while it may not be perfect, at least FDEV are trying to model a galaxy and not just playing with round balls like NMS. I much prefer they took a bit of time and got it right than just throw them in to satisfy a few complainers.

 

[varonica]

I'm having serious doubts we will see another big DLC for Elite. Odyssey didn't exactly become a hit and they've spent lots of time developing that.
I hope I'm wrong, but I'm rather pessimistic about it lately.

Oh I understand that, I think both SC and Elite set out with huge ambitions and no idea whether or not the desired end result is even possible, but I still haven't seen anything that will draw me away from Elite Dangerous, I don't think SC will ever be released as a finished game. I just hope the devs here can keep it going, maybe we should be throwing money at them?...Nah just joking lol.

 

[Dillon Fallon]

Although when all is said and done, the topic of further DLC and what would be in it isn't going to be answered for some considerable time. Technically, the tenous atmosphere planets and associated gameplay seem to have been a challenge. Adding weather, clouds and worst of all wind (dust storm anyone?) seem like something for way off in the future.

 

[Arioch]

Trying to explain this but you just aren't getting it. It's quite easy to generate random clouds, hill, forests, oceans and etc, after all procedural generation is just a specialised form of random generation, but if you want to create a realistic earth like world with realistic weather and forests and deserts and life forms then you need to model a solar system, you need to model an orbit around a star and you need to model body rotation and axial tilt, cloud cover, albedo and etc because all these things determine how much heat a body receives, how much and where it reflects or absorbs that heat, and that determines where your rain forests will be, whether there will be ice caps and deserts, what direction the winds blow and when and where there are cyclones and other extreme weather events.

I don't know how much of the forums you read or have read, but the long term inhabitants here can argue over whether a gas giant can exist that close to a star, whether the gravity is right on that high G body, and some of them will go off and work out density of the material that makes it up by calculating the radius versus the mass to determine whether there's actually enough metal in it to make that much gravity. While Megaton Rainfall is quite an achievement, from what I saw it certainly wasn't a realistically modeled environment, in fact the hills with a few scattered trees were far worse than our current crop of atmospheric planets.

There's been a huge amount of angst over Odyssey, everything from the lighting to pointy mountains, a half done job like a Megaton Rainfall type ELW would be laughed at. There's a reason I am here playing ED and not over there playing NMS, and that's because, while it may not be perfect, at least FDEV are trying to model a galaxy and not just playing with round balls like NMS. I much prefer they took a bit of time and got it right than just throw them in to satisfy a few complainers.

I suppose it all depends on what the Stellar Forge will take into account (which is already quite a lot) and how much will be “faked” to get stuff looking good (…if, of course, we ever get such an expansion).

I’m well aware of how in-depth some players will go with this game* - but, once again, my reason for posting about M.R. was just to show what polygons old-ish hardware can push around on screen. Maybe I should’ve posted a bit of War Thunder - big maps, big view distance, lots of networked players shooting at each other, gazillions of trees and buildings, fantastic volumetric clouds - and also in VR. It’s one of those games I play and hope to see something similar in Elite one day. I suppose offline MS Flight Simulator might be a better comparison?

*I’ve been on the forums for a while (finally signed up after playing the Premium Beta though I’d been lurking the old forums for years waiting for news of Elite IV) and I’ve read quite a lot of it

 

[MacIntoc]

but if you want to create a realistic earth like world with realistic weather and forests and deserts and life forms then you need to model a solar system, you need to model an orbit around a star and you need to model body rotation and axial tilt, cloud cover, albedo and etc because all these things determine how much heat a body receives, how much and where it reflects or absorbs that heat, and that determines where your rain forests will be, whether there will be ice caps and deserts, what direction the winds blow and when and where there are cyclones and other extreme weather events.

Sound like they'd be better off working at the IPCC

 

[Ted Striker]

Oh gods, I'm not a fan of that man or the game. I realise it needs a beast of a machine to even run it and how it seems to have turned into a ponzi scheme?!? but...
1) Pretty sure they didn't handplace every tree, shrub and cloud on that planet.
2) Isn't one traversable gas giant better than 500 billion static bitmaps?
3) That one planet has a different flight mechanic to space flight, buffeted by winds etc...
4) Every video release shows them moving further ahead of ED.
5) They've still got people throwing money at them for this one project.

I've no idea why it's taking them so long but he is known as someone who can't commit and just follow a set goal so starts to include stuff like Face Over Internet and attempts to create some holy grail of a Mesh Super Server. If he'd put in a games manager right at the start and wasn't allowed to interfere I feel like the game would probably be at 1.0 by now (but would include ship internals, a gas giant, proper atmos planets to land on, no loading screens except when jumping between systems, proper cities to walk and get trains in, FPS, a decent orrery <front and centre> and caves)...

True, no orbital mechanics, slightly smaller planets, no VR but the picture was just to show it could be done on todays machines (the latest ones at least - but maybe once optimised who knows).

EDIT: Look at that picture again and tell me you don't want to see a Krait MkII or Imperial Courier sitting where that ship is.

Yeah but I don't want all atmospheric planets to be different varieties of Earth's trees/shrubs and fauna.

And I don't think my PC could handle even watching a youtube recording of that in ED lol.

 

[Biff Stryker]

I would totally play Megatron Rainfall and part 2

 

[SixthVG]

Oh gods, I'm not a fan of that man or the game. I realise it needs a beast of a machine to even run it and how it seems to have turned into a ponzi scheme?!? but...
1) Pretty sure they didn't handplace every tree, shrub and cloud on that planet.
2) Isn't one traversable gas giant better than 500 billion static bitmaps?
3) That one planet has a different flight mechanic to space flight, buffeted by winds etc...
4) Every video release shows them moving further ahead of ED.
5) They've still got people throwing money at them for this one project.

I've no idea why it's taking them so long but he is known as someone who can't commit and just follow a set goal so starts to include stuff like Face Over Internet and attempts to create some holy grail of a Mesh Super Server. If he'd put in a games manager right at the start and wasn't allowed to interfere I feel like the game would probably be at 1.0 by now (but would include ship internals, a gas giant, proper atmos planets to land on, no loading screens except when jumping between systems, proper cities to walk and get trains in, FPS, a decent orrery <front and centre> and caves)...

True, no orbital mechanics, slightly smaller planets, no VR but the picture was just to show it could be done on todays machines (the latest ones at least - but maybe once optimised who knows).

EDIT: Look at that picture again and tell me you don't want to see a Krait MkII or Imperial Courier sitting where that ship is.

No thanks, I prefer realistic space games.

 

[TNTDany]

We can already, if you're thinking of earth like planets that probably won't come anytime sooner if ever. Would Cobra Engine even be able to handle it?

 

[Sighman]

I'm sure they can get something that looks like that in a couple of weeks. But I don't think that will work for gamers these days.

Agreed. Look at the constant complaints about planet tiling (textures and/or terrain) - neither of which I've noticed in thousands of hours of Odyssey gameplay, hundreds of planets and plants scanned and catalogued,30k + ly of exploring, hundreds of settlement raids and conflict zones, and several hundred Apex trips. I'm not saying it's not there, just that I can ignore something like that to enjoy the actual game.

Now imagine the salt if someone lands on a full-atmo planet and sees two identical trees next to each other, aligned the same way.