Elite Dangerous: Anyone watching out for this one?
This is the only project I've ever backed on Kickstarter, mostly due to my extremely fond memories of playing the original Elite on my Sinclair ZX Spectrum way back in the day.
I just read the latest email newsletter and I'm getting pretty excited!
Lave. Diso. Leesti. Zaonce. The classic systems in the original Elite game evoke fond memories. Elite was the original 'open-world' experience, and one of the very first 3D games. It famously used every byte in the legendary the legendary BBC Micro computer to create 8 'galaxies' using just 22k of program and data memory. Yes, 22 kilobytes – that’s probably smaller than just about any email you’ll get today.
Crucially, though, it used amazing techniques that allowed a generation of gamers to experience something unique as they carved their own path through a dog-eat-dog, go anywhere, do anything galaxy and worked their way to the most iconic rank in gaming history – Elite. Those techniques were further expanded in Frontier a decade later, fitting an even bigger, richer world into 512k.
And of course, as everyone reading this newsletter knows, with Elite: Dangerous we are taking another huge step for today's hardware. Detail and accuracy has taken another great leap, but, we have a confession to make: Alpha builds 1, 2 and 3 have all used a 'skydome' – a static, painted backdrop around a 64 bit play space roughly 1 light year across. Within that all the planets and stars are still modelled, but the galaxy beyond was not. Until now.
Alpha 4 genuinely contains over 400 billion star systems. And they are all moving correctly; spinning, orbiting each other in an incredible astronomical ballet. We are also modelling interstellar molecular clouds, and though some of the detail in these (particularly for nebulae) will come after Alpha 4, wherever you are, the 'night sky' is accurate. Beyond our galaxy, perhaps surprisingly we do still have a 'skydome' - but it is now a staggering 100,000 light years away, containing all the other galaxies, including the Magellanic Clouds. That's one heck of a draw distance…
If you go to Earth (not available to travel to in Alpha 4 – but you can see Sol in the galactic map), you'll see our familiar constellations. In fact over 130,000 objects in the night sky – including all stars visible to the naked eye – are modelled. We can even show those joined-up Solar-centric constellations when viewed from elsewhere – which become stretched and distorted due to parallax. Want to travel to Orion's belt and see what good old Sol looks like from there? Do it. Or just sit and marvel at the local sunrise (yes all the planets are moving too) over the rings and moons of a gas giant you've just found.
To achieve this, we start out with the precise locations all the known stars, exo-planets, celestial bodies and phenomena. Beyond that, procedural techniques are used in conjunction with real, 'hard' physics to model the other hundreds of billions of star systems – the star’s location, type, temperature, chemical compositions, what planetary systems there are, etc.
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I saw the docking demo video and was like 
Tore it up on the original Elite on my C64. Then got Frontiers on my Amiga.
Cannot wait.
And it means I'm probably gonna have to get and Oculus Rift, despite their Facebook ownership.
I used to have "Elite" on my C64, but I was too young to really understand how to play the game.
Now I've got an eye on "Elite: Dangerous", but I'll make my buying decision once it's out and I have a better idea of what kind of game it is. I want to see how combat focused it is, because I much prefer trading and avoiding combat whenever possible. In my current "X3: Terran Conflict" game I avoided all combat until I had enough money to buy a big capital ship and put so many guns on it that I can cruise around enemy sectors without too much hassle. I know it's the boring way to play, but, I'm also the kind to get addicted to playing Euro Truck Simulator 2! 
Last edited Tue Sep 2, 2014, 04:38 PM - Edit history (1)
And I think I've spent a good eight hours today playing the Beta.
Holy. Crap.
Combat's insanely hard, but it's freaking gorgeous.
I'll post screenshots as soon as I can upload them.
Screenshots below, but I do not know if you all can see them:
On approach to Azeban City:
Sittin' in my Sidewinder inside Azeban City, docked:
Flying around the I Bootis station:
Aulin Enterprise Station, on approach:
Screens don't do the game justice. The stations themselves are incredibly large, spinning in the dark of space, with small ships constantly on approach, departing, or on patrol. The shadows on the surface of the stations are always in motion, too. Combat is, as I said, incredibly hard right now, but I hope to be able to figure it out.
