Why can we only Land on Barren Planets after almost 5 years?

Elite Dangerous launched in December 2014. It had many major free and paid updates that exponentially improved the base game. However, aside from the desired space legs, there's one aspect that disappoints the most. We can only land on desolate, barren planets. We've waited almost 5 years for more lively planet types.

A certain other game launched 1 1/3rd years after ED and has 10000 times more variety in land-able planets. It has many different kinds of alien creatures, vegetation, you can even travel underwater in a submarine. The procedural generation of planets in ED is very basic comparatively.

We want more than simplistic planets covered with monotonous dirt and rocks! ED's planets have endless sand, dirt and rocks as far as the eye can see. Sometimes, if we're lucky, we find a little primitive flora. We want more natural features, explore alien forests, jungles teeming with life. If Frontier plans to take another 10 years to release more land-able planet types, that's too slow.

So why is ED very primitive with procedural planets? Why aren't there more terrains, creatures, plants etc? It seems that Frontier is focusing too much of their resources on other IPs (Planet Zoo, PC and JWE).
 
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Because they have a decade's worth of things to add into the game, and atmospheric planets are only one of them, and hopefully not the highest priority.
 
I would have been happy with barebones atmospheric planets, am fairly certain the majority of the player base wouldn't. Best to let the devs get it right first time.

DB talked a lot about various types of weather etc, that is not easy to achieve, especially on the lower end rigs. Volumetric clouds can be a killer on systems.
 
cause passenger missions, multicrew, galnenet audio, disappointing paint jobs, unbalanced thargoids, FSS, megaships, space installationals, squadrons, wings, wing missions, SLFs, squadron carriers, and all those other things everybody wanted and were demanding every day took priority over it....not to mention console versions of the game.

also I suspecct the coding of non-baren plamets would be hard.
 
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sollisb

Banned
I would have been happy with barebones atmospheric planets, am fairly certain the majority of the player base wouldn't. Best to let the devs get it right first time.

DB talked a lot about various types of weather etc, that is not easy to achieve, especially on the lower end rigs. Volumetric clouds can be a killer on systems.

The devs in Frontier have never gotten anything right 'first time'... Hence all the bugs and rewrites.

We had volumetric clouds in FlightSim 19 and upwards. That ran on an XT/AT...

Talk is cheap..
 
The devs in Frontier have never gotten anything right 'first time'... Hence all the bugs and rewrites.

We had volumetric clouds in FlightSim 19 and upwards. That ran on an XT/AT...

Talk is cheap..
Another one who got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning..

No idea what flightsim 19 is. I have worked on a few sims over the years (more as a technical advisor) Volumetric clouds are a killer. They haven't even added them to SC yet. You have cmdrs that need to turn off volumetric effects inside stations. Am sure they are working on something efficient, amongst many other things.
 

sollisb

Banned
Another one who got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning..

No idea what flightsim 19 is. I have worked on a few sims over the years (more as a technical advisor) Volumetric clouds are a killer. They haven't even added them to SC yet. You have cmdrs that need to turn off volumetric effects inside stations. Am sure they are working on something efficient, amongst many other things.

Nope, got out of the correct side mate :)

No idea what flight sim is and is a tech advisor to sims... Scarey.

Volumetric clouds are indeed a frame-rate killer, and as we have done for the last 2 decades of flight sims, we have sliders we use to match our rig capabilities. Truth is you have no idea what they're working on, or of the Cobra Engine is even capable of it.

Using 'volumetric clouds' as some pivotal hinge as to why we don't have more populated/vegetated planetary landings is beyond me. Especially since we've had it in other games for years and years and years! X-Plane released in 1995!!

I agree however it is a resource hog, depending on your rig. My main rig runs X-Plane/Prepar3d on maxed setting without performance issues related to 'clouds' and lets be honest here, the OP didn't ask for 'volumetric clouds' he asked for vegetation and land-mass variation.

What we have is a small team versus a huge team. The small team for some unknown reason have the resources and ability to give is lush vegetation amongst a plethora of things, that ELite has none of with their 100+ strong dev team.
 
Nope, got out of the correct side mate :)

No idea what flight sim is and is a tech advisor to sims... Scarey.

.

Can you post a link to Flight sim 19, have genuinely never heard of it. Cheers.

I also said 'Was' a flightsim advisor, for a few developers on A320 projects, also ran the beta test/support team for Airsimmer Advanced (Study sim) that was a few years back.

Never worked on X-Plane, didn't they use sprites? Even DCS couldn't produce realistic weather, no idea if things have changed. Am also not claiming that is the only reason for delays, it is a monumental task for a number of reasons. If they wanted to chuck out an SC version of atmospheric planets, we could have that very quickly, along with a lot of disappointed customers.

Btw I think SC's planet's look amazing, but the weather effects (clouds/storms) are non-existent right now, for a very good reason, it would require heavy optimization. Most of these desktop flightsims only need to draw small areas, max cruise altitudes are between 41,000 - 60,000 ft Dynamic weather is localized, divided up by Metar stations.
 
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Can you post a link to Flight sim 19, have genuinely never heard of it. Cheers.

I also said 'Was' a flightsim advisor, for a few developers on A320 projects, also ran the beta test/support team for Airsimmer Advanced (Study sim) that was a few years back.

It's coming after 18 ... we are currently on 10 (maybe 11, or maybe 12 or greater, depends on whether you include Dovetail and Boeing franchises/offshoots)
 
Elite Dangerous launched in December 2014. It had many major free and paid updates that exponentially improved the base game. However, aside from the desired space legs, there's one aspect that disappoints the most. We can only land on desolate, barren planets. We've waited almost 5 years for more lively planet types.
That's probably because they added major free and paid updates that exponentially improved the base game.

A certain other game launched 1 1/3rd years after ED and has 10000 times more variety in land-able planets. It has many different kinds of alien creatures, vegetation, you can even travel underwater in a submarine. The procedural generation of planets in ED is very basic comparatively.
If Frontier wanted to add colourful procedurally generated planets like NMS they could probably do it in a week. It's more colourful, not necessarily better. I hope they aim for more scientific accuracy than just more different colours and shapes which don't make any sense.

So why is Elite Dangerous very primitive with procedural planets? Why aren't there more terrains, creatures, plants etc? It seems that Frontier is focusing too much of their resources on other IPs (Planet Zoo, PC and JWE).
I'd say that the barren airless rocks in Elite are less primitive than the colourful nonsensical planets in NMS.

We want more than simplistic planets covered with monotonous dirt and rocks! ED's planets have endless sand, dirt and rocks as far as the eye can see. Sometimes, if we're lucky, we find a little primitive flora. We want more natural features, explore alien forests, jungles teeming with life. If Frontier plans to take another 10 years to release more land-able planet types, that's too slow.
Absolutely agree with that!
 
I have worked on a few sims over the years (more as a technical advisor) Volumetric clouds are a killer.
My experience says that it is hard to develop/maintain project with features which will be added later. Because due to various reasons next feature could be incompatible with previous work. Very experienced personnel is required for the job.
This is not about new ships, balance and other things which could be implemented as addons/modules.

Edit: This is kind of breathtaking to see how someone tries to do the things.
 
98 of those people are voice actors for the background chatter (which ironically is one of the best recent additions to the game IMO).
The irony is lost on me because voice acting and implementing it actually takes a considerable amount of time and money. That's why so many games don't have it. That said, I can't really compare the voice acting in The Witcher to the background chatter in Elite... Still, it's more than a few hours work for an intern.
 
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