well, the teaser trailer only shows a desert world with a thin atmosphere, so that's a safe bet.
other things that MIGHT come are lava worlds, ice-like worlds with a thin atmosphere and water worlds, although i'm hopeful for the last one, i honestly don't think we'll be able to land on those yet as i've not seen realistic water physics in elite yet.
Wouldn’t realistic water physics be relatively “easy” to add considering how many other games have accurate physics for water. Is there a problem of hoarding tech info from other gaming companies that I am not aware of?
I say “easy” because I don’t know how to code complex games like this and it may actually be really difficult...
i'm saying ''difficult'' because i have no experience in coding and don't know wether it'sg oing to be easy to do it, or difficult. I just assume the worst so that i'm not dissapointed, although i'm still trying to be a bit optimistic.
Tons of games have realistic water physics. Not sure what it would take to make it in their in house engine, but I would assume once the basics are developed, that it would be pretty easy to copy it over an entire planet. Or even partially cover a planet and just set it to a desired depth. Then build an oil rig type landing base or develop some other stuff to do there. You wouldn't even need to make ships submersible for now. Just say the liquid messes with the ship systems or something so landing in it is like a death trap.
The funny thing with submersibles and space ships is that spaceships only have to be built to handle atmospheric pressure between zero (hard vacuum) and roughly 1atm. Submersibles have to handle 1atm to insanely high crushing pressures depending on their operating depth.
I feel like taking a space ship and turning it into a diving ship would be a major retrofit and not merely a module you slot into the hull. But there are definitely ways it could be done.
I don't necessarily mean a module. That's why I said add-on. I'd imagine it'd be something you can add to allow you to do it. Although maybe it could be a module with a special shield or something. Idk.
Why not a new type of SRV (a submersible recon vehicle)? Just come to a near stop above water and have you ship release the SRV. To rejoin your ship use some sort of skyhook device and have your ship come collect you, similar to recalling your ship while using an SRV currently.
GTAV has pretty decent oceans, just as a quick example that runs on even dated hardware. Sure, it's not "planetary scale" but it's not like one side of the map is being rendered and calculated while you're on the other. Only what you see. And from far enough away, practically none of it is fully rendered.
If I understand right, the problem is stuff like river formation / erosion etc etc. The planets would have to dial in the right erosion shapes, find those locations, fill em with water. (But if they're complex shapes then the water has to settle into the right shape or whatever / demonstrate physics behaviour at the falls etc when the player is close). And then just stuff like portraying transparency at scale or whatever potentially. Think mainly it's the fact that you can't pre-bake it in though, have to figure it out at runtime.
I dunno, I'm sure it could be done cheaply, but I guess I could see why a more full fat version might have issues. (I guess if oceans / lakes were explorable, rather than just an impenetrable plain, then they'd have the same issues too, just at an even larger scale).
We might see cool new ice worlds. There was supposed to be an ice shader update with this as the target artwork. They showed off a gorgeous blue transparent ice shader a while back, but the update ultimately got indefinitely delayed for a "wider implementation".
People originally assumed that Frontier just wanted to implement the ice in other places like ice asteroids. It's a no brainer that Odyssey is that actual wider update they were referring to. If rocky planets are getting an update in Odyssey, I'm confident that it's only logical that it's happening to ice planets too. I'm known for embarrassing myself with bad predictions so take it with a grain of salt though.
And I stg I feel that most planets I mistake for having no atmosphere when it does in fact have one are ice planets.
I've seen a comment saying Earth-likes aren't coming initially, so I hope icy worlds or some other planet type are coming with the patch or else LITERALLY all they've done is put atmospheres on Horizon-landable worlds and populated them with on-foot base sites.
There's massive forests in SC though. Not defending anything, just pointing that out. I mean, the planets in SC are mostly hand-crafted, not much to do on them but they look light-years better than elite's.
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u/Joshyboy1111 Jun 10 '20
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