Xbox One and the future of Elite Dangerous

Deekin Scalesinger · May 23, 2016

As propably all of you know Frontier have massive plans for ED in the future as seen here.
http://elite-dangerous.wikia.com/wiki/Features_in_the_expansions

There are plans to land, walk and interact on 1 : 1 populated planets, hunting wildlife and so on.

Also with walking around your own ship as well as stations.

As the xbox it pretty good, i'm still worried if the Xbone can keep up with all of this or if FD sees themselves forced to abandon us at some point.

Also it is known that consoles have a average lifespan of approximately 6 years. Maybe we can transfer our save game to the new console?!?!

What are you thoughts on that subject?

tafkabb · May 23, 2016

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=234869&p=3611079&viewfull=1#post3611079

CMDR Nef · May 23, 2016

As I assume that's still a good few years off, (Guessing we'll see Mars like worlds come 3.0, and then maybe ELWs by 4.0 or 5.0) I'm not going to worry about it yet. The Xbox'as got some power left in her yet. If anything, 3 years down the line, I hope to have enough money to no have to worry. If the Xbox doesn't get upgradable hardware/an Xbox 1.5, and they have to abandon the Xbox to keep the quality up, then I'll just head over to PC. Ahhh, VR, custom HUD colors, Hotas... Would be nice. Wish I had that kind of money nowadays.

Lucky to get a 5 pack of Ramen these days.

Tenaar · May 23, 2016

I don't foresee a problem so long as Elite: Dangerous continues to use the supercruise/instancing mechanics it currently uses. Current-gen consoles are capable of a lot more than last-gen consoles, but I think primarily the reason Elite: Dangerous didn't come out for PS3 and 360 is related to rendering capabilities. Last-gen just couldn't render the graphics; it didn't have the API nor hardware support for it.

But Elite: Dangerous runs well even on a PC with 6 GB RAM and a nondescript R7 AMD card (that refuses to identify its specific card model for some reason), and an old processor that doesn't come even near the power of the Xbox 360. The only area in which it trumps the 360 is really in the memory department.

Anyway, my point is the PC version of the game is able to run acceptably on hardware that's weaker than last-gen consoles, so I don't think there is cause for worry. The game engine seems incredibly adaptable, and with supercruise and instancing then there should at no point be more player activity in your vicinity than the consoles are able to handle. And that's the crux of the game; I can have 20 or even 30 (note: I haven't counted, but it's a lot) NPCs within a stone's throw away from me, even in supercruise, without the game starting to hiccup and lag under combat or in other rendering-intensive scenes, but 10-20 players causes serious FPS hiccups on my console.

That's where the crux lies,
Walking around on planets, hunting wildlife, etc..., the entire first-person element should be easy enough to solve with procedural rendering. The whole shtick of that is that once you'd be on the ground, then only what's within your client's range of sight is being rendered, while the rest of the planet remains an idle seed. Think of the way Hello Games is rendering No Man's Sky!
And I'm pretty sure that procedural rendering is going to become more and more used in gaming, we'll continue to see both graphical fidelity and overall performance on consoles rise. And Microsoft isn't going to have any issue transferring our saves to their next iterations of Xbox so long as Frontier gives them a year or so of console exclusivity!

Short version: You don't need to worry unless you're living 4-5 years ago like our Mac-using friends; we'll be fine!

mung0 · May 23, 2016

Bar any unexpected changes to overall organisation / focus, I'd expect quite simply that frontier will support Xbox for as long as we provide an income that makes it worthwhile for them. The fact that horizons has gone ahead shows that we're big enough to be worth porting new content for, no real reason for that to change assuming horizons has good take-up and the player base remains buoyant.

The technology creep aspects can always be worked around, and anyway I'd expect xbone mark 2 sooner you think. Save migration has been done between 360 and the bone in other games (minecraft for example) so it's doable.

It's the mac crowd being snubbed that was sad to see, pretty cynical imo to happily take their cash for the startup fund then ditch them straight after when they're not big enough to warrant further development cost. The whole 'macs can't do the graphics anymore' thing was pure bunk. The full & honest sentence would read 'macs can't do the graphics anymore without a load of extra effort that we can't be bothered with'. But hey ho tis the law of le business. At least Mac users can just use bootcamp as a workaround to play pc version of they want. I wouldn't be happy being asked to pay full whack again though, not sure what the deal is there.

jond76 · May 23, 2016

Phil Spencer has made it pretty clear that the future iterations of Xbox will be forward and backwards compatible. So much so that they are creating magic by having 360 games on Xbox One.

So whatever the next Xbox will be, I'm sure it will have the same architecture to be able to run your Xbox One games.

I'm not worried.

EponymousCowherd · May 23, 2016

mung0 said:
At least Mac users can just use bootcamp as a workaround to play pc version of they want. I wouldn't be happy being asked to pay full whack again though, not sure what the deal is there.

The PC/Mac version is transferrable between the two platforms. If you buy ED on a Mac you can play it on a PC.

Paying for a Windows licence, however, is another issue, and bootcamp has the problem of having to reboot to switch between OSX and Windows.

Anyone know how ED runs under Parallels?

Deekin Scalesinger · May 23, 2016

I am by no means pessimistic about the development plan. Maybe i worry about microsoft not wanting i dunno. I hope everything works out in the end.

iconoclypse · May 23, 2016

Since most of the grunt work is done server-side I'm not worried. Plus, how hard would it be for our pilot details to be retained server-side too. Our Xbone's could very easily work as simple clients. Like I say, I'm not worried.

Crusina Luachra · May 23, 2016

iconoclypse said:
Since most of the grunt work is done server-side I'm not worried. Plus, how hard would it be for our pilot details to be retained server-side too. Our Xbone's could very easily work as simple clients. Like I say, I'm not worried.

Or since our pilots are kept server side. We buy the new Xbox that comes out that is more powerful and then we carry our account over.

Just like getting a new PC and getting your account on that. (Well, not exactly the same but to keep it simple)

Bieltan · May 23, 2016

Deekin Scalesinger said:
As propably all of you know Frontier have massive plans for ED in the future as seen here.
http://elite-dangerous.wikia.com/wiki/Features_in_the_expansions

There are plans to land, walk and interact on 1 : 1 populated planets, hunting wildlife and so on.

Also with walking around your own ship as well as stations.

As the xbox it pretty good, i'm still worried if the Xbone can keep up with all of this or if FD sees themselves forced to abandon us at some point.

Also it is known that consoles have a average lifespan of approximately 6 years. Maybe we can transfer our save game to the new console?!?!

What are you thoughts on that subject?

My thoughts on being able to walk on populated earthlikes? "Tentpole"

I'll stop being vulgar now

WartailSS · May 24, 2016

I am really looking forward to just being able to walk around our ships, What's the point of having these massive ships if we can't get lost inside them for days lol. Maybe even ad An Android, ios mini game much like fallout shelter where you manage the lives of our crews lolz.