After more than half a year, going down to planets is still one of the most awesome impression, you can get in ED.
The landscapes, the engine produces, those harsh canyons, soft hills, craters, mountain ridges and other features and the way those features are placed on the surface are still by far the best terrains, i have ever seen in a game. In combination with the new surface materials, that were introduced in 2.1, the feeling of being on an alien planet is just incredible.
I have seen many games with heightmap terrain, voxel lanscapes and procedural generated surfaces. I also did a lot of terrain feature construction in Unity 3 and 4 myself, using Modo 3D, zBrush and Substance Painter / Creator, together with some blend shader programming to seemlessly place hand crafted terrain features like spikes, overhangs and mountainsides with caves on Unitys heightmap based terrain, but i never encountered such quality and scale, i am presented with in Elite.
Honestly, i cant really wait to see additional layers of detail added to this awesome piece of procedural generation... Lava seas, volcanos, ice-, steam- and water geysirs, alien foilage, seas of whatever liquid chemical element one can imagine... This system, that already makes landing on dusty balls of rock and ice a moment of awe, almost every time, is a piece of mastery. It truly deserves more appreciation.
I am really looking forward to new terrain feature implementations and to explore them all in VR.
Thank you Frontier for all of this. Keep on doing great things!
The landscapes, the engine produces, those harsh canyons, soft hills, craters, mountain ridges and other features and the way those features are placed on the surface are still by far the best terrains, i have ever seen in a game. In combination with the new surface materials, that were introduced in 2.1, the feeling of being on an alien planet is just incredible.
I have seen many games with heightmap terrain, voxel lanscapes and procedural generated surfaces. I also did a lot of terrain feature construction in Unity 3 and 4 myself, using Modo 3D, zBrush and Substance Painter / Creator, together with some blend shader programming to seemlessly place hand crafted terrain features like spikes, overhangs and mountainsides with caves on Unitys heightmap based terrain, but i never encountered such quality and scale, i am presented with in Elite.
Honestly, i cant really wait to see additional layers of detail added to this awesome piece of procedural generation... Lava seas, volcanos, ice-, steam- and water geysirs, alien foilage, seas of whatever liquid chemical element one can imagine... This system, that already makes landing on dusty balls of rock and ice a moment of awe, almost every time, is a piece of mastery. It truly deserves more appreciation.
I am really looking forward to new terrain feature implementations and to explore them all in VR.
Thank you Frontier for all of this. Keep on doing great things!