Will / Can we ever have City Planets and Full Atmospherics?

[dannysquid]

I'd say procedural cities are one of the easier things they have on their to-do list! Although roads would be very tricky.

None of this stuff is tricky if the game has time to go away and think about it but it has to be calculating stuff at 60fps on top of everything else it's doing, so it'll tend be stuff you can create just by saying what_building_is_at(x,y,seed) rather than being something where it works out an elaborate layout taking local factors into consideration. Although what_building_is_at(x,y,seed) could be as clever as you want it to be.

 

[eqinox]

I’m sure it’s technically possible, there’s plenty of tech out there as evidence of that. But based on FDev’s track record on planet tech, it just doesn’t seem likely.

As cool as planets in Odyssey look, it’s underwhelming for 5 years of development since Horizons, especially when compared with certain other space games. Expectations were set when FDev hinted they’d add new landable planets gradually after Horizon’s launch.

 

[LKx]

Instead of creating same looking algorithmic space I think it would be much convenient to implement city planets and full atmospherics on a limited scale by creating terrain constraint spaces. By choosing a descent to a desired port for example Earth like world your flight would be completely automated allowing your to relax and watch the landing process from leaving space void to touchdown. That would be much more resource-wise and time-wise solution from a developer perspective than creating huge and unique worlds in thousands, sorry but on current level of tech we can't have a multitude of Microsoft Flight Sim-like worlds. Choose between hand crafted and vibrant small world vs dull algorithmic space with poi's.

Hand crafted planets would be too few for elite, it needs the procedural to let you land on any planet of the galaxy.
So, while it wouldn't hurt having a few of them, procedural is the way.
About fixed landing windows, well, again, it could be done for a few very specific scenarios, it even might be the only way to visit some planets like Earth, but i don't think it'd be worth it (expecially for Earth, why would anyone want to land on Earth?), and certainly not sufficient for the Elite scope.