Will Elite Dangerous have Atmospheric Landings, Space Legs or Procedural Cities by 2019?

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It is not limitation of engine, but current code. As long there's no space legs, avatar code network wise will be limited and seen as extension to ship. That's why no SRVs at this point.

There are no technical limits for engine, as it is their own engine. They can extend it as they want, and have confirmed that on multiple cases.

Sorry, just a question: if you aren't an Fd's coder how do you know what cobra engine can or not can do?

What do you know about their code? Care to show with us what have you seen?
 
Sorry, just a question: if you aren't an Fd's coder how do you know what cobra engine can or not can do?

What do you know about their code? Care to show with us what have you seen?

'cause with the same engine they have made some FPS games?
 
You are objectively wrong, you couldn’t be more wrong, you could try, but you would fail*.
Elite dangerous is a space / planetary simulator. So far we have plenty of space but very little in the way of planets ( or indeed living breathing spaces ). We need gas giants, thin atmospherics, ammonia worlds, fluffy clouds, coloured skies, weather, NPCs and vehicular movement. Then you can have your space legs, when there’s something in the game world to actually walk around**.

* Badly paraphrased from friends
** Personal opinion only
argument
So a variation of the old 'Elite is a space game, we don't need legs ' argument. Just because, in your words, ED is currently a 'space /planetary simulator' , it doesn't preclude the possibility of ED evolving into something with a wider scope.

We aren't short of landable planets, I haven't counted them personally, but they seem pretty common, so I would guess that we have billions of them in game. What we are short of is things to do on these planets. You've given us a list of planet types and mostly eye candy items, but haven't suggested any gameplay associated with them. Sure fluffy clouds will look cool, but then what?. The only things I've seen people suggest are fuel scooping and Bespin style cloud cities on gas giants. That's not a lot of gameplay, basically a variation on something we already have and a different station type. I'm still waiting for someone to suggest something interesting that we could do on a thin atmosphere or ammonia world that we can't do on the barren rocky and icy worlds. The only thing that atmospheres might bring is weather, which will either be, pretty, but irrelevant eye candy, or horrendously tricky to program.

I don't see why NPCs and vehicular movement would require the different planet types. The best place to start with them is in a relatively controlled environment like a city. These things are more part of space legs than atmospheric landing. Once you've got legs sorted out you can start to consider the possibility of landing on Earth like planets.

As for having nothing to walk around, I'm guessing you haven't thought about the space stations, mega ships and space ports. Admittedly you can't walk around them right now, but a single station has the potential to contain a map as big as the map of many other games
 
Sorry, just a question: if you aren't an Fd's coder how do you know what cobra engine can or not can do?

What do you know about their code? Care to show with us what have you seen?

FD devs have said they can do anything, quite recently in FX chats face to face. The way they design things - and way people complain about FD not taking risks or being revolutionary - is that they don't paint themselves into corner.

So yeah, their engine can actually do all atmosphere stuff and walking around. Of course, current code will need serious padding, but that's nothing close to rewrite if engine would be a problem.

Also for terminology, Cobra is framework. ED has it's own proprietary graphics engine, which I will guess share considerable code between games, but also have game specific stuff. For ED example lot of specific rendering is done due of huge amount of light sources.
 
Sorry, just a question: if you aren't an Fd's coder how do you know what cobra engine can or not can do?

What do you know about their code? Care to show with us what have you seen?
Could you please explain how adding space legs would be a challenge engine wise?!

Space legs just means a free floating camera locked to a height of 1,8m and some collision checks. You can already walk around your ship using VR today. The challenge is to add meaningful interactions and game mechanics, adding the ability to walk around would take less than a few hours.
 
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Could you please explain how adding space legs would be a challenge engine wise?!

Space legs just means a free floating camera locked to a height of 1,8m and some collision checks. You can already walk around your ship using VR today. The challenge is to add meaningful interactions amd game mechanics, adding the ability to walk around would take less than a few hours.

Exactly this. It's the huge amount of assets, design, AI and controls that would take the time. It would basically be a whole new game.

I wonder what people actually want the ability to walk around for. If it's just to shoot things, FPS style, then why not just go and play one of the many hundreds of FPS games out there... rather than try and turn Elite into something it's not?

Short of EVAs to repair ships (already handled with AFM and repair limpets), or a bar in a station (which might be 'fun' for all of 10 minutes), I honestly can't see the point.

But maybe I just lack imagination, or not interested in another way to pew-pew. One or both of those, maybe.
 
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I get your point, but none of those are first person shooters.

ED is already set up as a first person game. All it is, is another form of transport no different to the SRV or even the space ships.

If the engine can do that, plus do 3rd person games which are pretty much the same as a 1st person game, with just t
the camera situated above the head instead of it being the head. I have no doubt that the Cobra engine is very much capable of first person gameplay.
 
ED will have challenge with space legs, but most likely not the way you expect.

First, we know there's weightnesness in Elite universe. Simulating how much gravity/force you get pulled by will take some figuring out - although it is not huge challenge.

Second however will be big one - how to make it playable with VR. I would like to remind that lot of VR games on foot are unplayable by many due of vomit inducing movement while you're sitting. It will take some figuring out with UI too.

Engine wise there's almost close to no challenge - it supports all it needs for first person walking around. Everything else will be.
 
if you think so, why are you still here?
If I don't like a game I stop playing and look for something else.

Wow, your answer is soooo original ;)

I like Elite, what makes you think otherwise? I just believe that pointing the finger to a game because it's a mess of tech demos hastily mishmashed together to defend another mess of tech demos hastily mishmashed together is quite stupid and a little bit hypocritical, that's all.
 
argument
So a variation of the old 'Elite is a space game, we don't need legs ' argument. Just because, in your words, ED is currently a 'space /planetary simulator' , it doesn't preclude the possibility of ED evolving into something with a wider scope.

We aren't short of landable planets, I haven't counted them personally, but they seem pretty common, so I would guess that we have billions of them in game. What we are short of is things to do on these planets ...

I don't see why NPCs and vehicular movement would require the different planet types.

As for having nothing to walk around, I'm guessing you haven't thought about the space stations, mega ships and space ports. Admittedly you can't walk around them right now, but a single station has the potential to contain a map as big as the map of many other games
1) I actually would like space legs, but after more planet types.
2) Planet types: Check out our own solar system - on Mars we have Mons Olympus (tallest mountain in the entire solar system), and valles marineris (bigger than our own grand canyons), the methane oceans of Titan, the volcanic spewing from Enceladus shooting off into space, the volcanic hell hole of Venus perpetually hidden by clouds, the salt flats of Ceres, ice covered Europa with its hidden oceans, tricky attempts at landing on a comet, surviving the giant red eye on Jupiter... and what do we get? billions of mostly gently rolling hills with the same five rock types scattered about the surface and one in every thousand planets might have a tiny grouping of barnacles / tiny vents / crashed thargoids for us to try and spot by eye... Yes, more activities would be good but that's always going to be true, doesn't mean they should hold off introducing more planetary variety.
3) NPCs and vehicles would just bring some life and movement to what feels like a very static galaxy (I know the planets and stuff rotate but without an orrery you'd need to sit there for twenty four hours to see it [slight exaggeration]).

Second however will be big one - how to make it playable with VR. I would like to remind that lot of VR games on foot are unplayable by many due of vomit inducing movement while you're sitting. It will take some figuring out with UI too.
Engine wise there's almost close to no challenge - it supports all it needs for first person walking around. Everything else will be.
It'll be a buyable addon, if you use VR but don't like leg locomotion simply don't buy it. I use VR and am perfectly happy with FPS locomotion and would buy it (and an orrery).
 
And why not integrate the GTA V engine the following week too!

Lol I remember arguing with a guy on here pre-release (during late beta)
He was under the delusion that Frontier could create a GTA5 like city world and should do so for the Fed and Empire capital.
It enraged him when I’d point out the interiors of the luxury stations were the likely limit of what Frontier could do.
He’d post sarcastic replies that I obviously worked for Frontier since I was so sure I knew about their internal development.
Lol good times
 
Once 3.0 gets released, i bet you 80% of Elite players will migrate to Star Citizen.

I want Star Citizen to succeed and will play it when released.
3.0 I will play briefly to see how the tech is progressing and then uninstall until 4.0 is ready. And repeat until the full game comes.
Why would anyone leave a game for a tech demo?
(It’s not even an alpha though they like to use that term, until someone points out its not at which point they say it’s a pre-alpha)
 
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