Ohh…what’s this…
Hi All,
This is a quick-and-dirty un-edited capture from Horizons from a debug build on one of our dev machines, using the debug camera on an SRV and zooming out faster and faster from a crash site on the surface of a rocky potato-shaped planetoid, not unlike Vesta in our solar system. There are tons of little details we plan to tweak or fix, but I thought it would be great for you guys to see where we’re up to with this:
That looks seamless to me. 
Might as well put these here too…
Next week (Oct. 14th) there will be a livestream with them talking about these beauties too… 
Wow I have those monitors too. They are at least 6-7 years old 
With the EliteHorizons PlanetReveal video, I think we can expect a lot more Horizons footage coming soon. That’s surely going to impact Infinity’s Kickstarter, as it’s now going to be less unique & novel. In short, Infinity was delayed too long (in search of perfection), and now the competition has caught-up too much 
EDIT: Someone did that video in reverse, and it looks even more awesome:
As I said above in regards to the over the shoulder image…I’m very much looking forward too this coming Wednesday when it comes to seeing what FD has up their sleeve!
From the latest newsletter:
On Wednesday October 14, at 7PM BST, we’ll show you some early development footage of the icy and rocky worlds in motion. This peek behind the scenes will demonstrate the simulation technology that we’ve been working on to create the captivating “Europa lines” for the ice worlds and canyons, and the craters and mountains for the rocky worlds.
Will this affect Inovaes KS…probably…I’ll still help fund it if for no other reason than I want more games to try and build their worlds this way. Imagine a game in a similar vein like Infinity or ED but with the budget and manpower of GTA/Destiny??? 
So far ED is the best bet IMO, but if games like these become more and more successful then maybe the “big boys” will throw a couple of hundred millions at developing something too.
As sad as it is, yes…
But who knows perhaps FD were sitting on this for months.
And this is their attempt to keep folks interested …you know the last resort step.
Sure who can blame them, they just want to continue to improve the ED
However they suffered some bad publicity over the year.
And i don’t mean press but word of mouth.
They need those preorders.
Interesting coincidence is that they published such a info dump (this + character creation and i read some info about mission enhancements) pretty much same week, when we found out it is weeks/days until IB kickstarter.
Anyway vid looks interesting …but the planetoid seems rather small
If you compare it to some KSP planets If Sqad can do it in unity…
And texture is rather bland compared to Inovae tech.
Still not convinced.
I foolishly bought E:D a while ago, I couldn’t get into it. Its terribly boring.
The problem with elite dangerous is the utterly boring gameplay.
I made a thread a while ago promoting the idea of a gameplay concept that avoids destroying the players ship in battle.
(Gameplay Concept - Infinity MMO)
Even though the insurance cost for ships in elite dangerous is pretty low, player vs player battles are virtually non-existant.
(Of course there are also others reasons for this)
There is simply no real reward and battles only last a few seconds, maybe minutes.
This approach of destroyable ships and short battles is simply not appealing to larger audiences.
The devs now resorted to including a shitty arena mode, but this mode is way to arcady and comes much too late.
My prediction is that horizons will not make the situation of ED any better, this game pretty much failed.
This is why they have warzones. Warzones have protracted conflict, and whilst there’s no guarantee of genuine PvP action in a warzone, those encounters will last as long as the zone is active and people are fighting, which can be days or weeks. They’re somewhat difficult to just stumble into though, which I think is the main problem
Most players will take off if they see an other player fighting for the other side. Again, the possibility of exploding makes most players leave the zone immediatly. Players will not risk their ships exploding for maybe two minutes of shitty combat.
Thats the worst thing about ED, most of their trailers advertise awesome space battles, but the reality of the game is pretty lackluster. They should call this game space trucking simulator instead, less people would be dissappointed. 
Personally I like ED for what it is, but the game just isn’t that much fun and the replay incentives are not very good.
The introduction of powerplay also was not enough to revive interest in this game. Powerplay is another thing that is not much fun, its community goals with a twist.
The real problem with ED is that it was released 6-12 months too early, so a lot of stuff is bare bones, and thus it should have been labelled as Early Access. (And then they wasted many months of development resources adding entirely separate game modes (e.g. Power Play & CQC) rather than improving it’s too-basic existing gameplay.)
HOWEVER, with what they have promised for Horizons (over it’s approximately 12 month long “Season”), I am expecting that these issues will be substantially (but maybe not fully) fixed:
Whether this will be soon enough to retain most of the players who bought Elite Dangerous early on, and then got bored of it after a few weeks/months, remains to be seen
as you wish:
Elite is something I backed so I could have a massive sandbox world to come back to every now and then. This new content will certainly bring me back, but naturally there will always be new games that take me away from it.
I like the fact that there will be 3 serious contenders in the “Galactic Sandbox” genre. Infinity, Elite and No Man’s Sky.
ED live-stream on Planet Generation for Horizons is live.
Hmm, those “planets” look tiny, they are not even round. Dissapointing.
The planets are full scale, varied and detailed. Overlapping craters, canyon systems, colors derived from materials, etc. I only watched for about 10 or 20 minutes, but they’re making a lot of progress in a relatively short time.
Another way to put it is that they just blew everything else away!
They are still light years away from what Inovae showed us in the screenshots so far. The lighting is really basic. Looks really good but not nearly infinity-good.
That lighting was from their planet viewer…they said it looks even better in-game.
Unless you are talking about atmospheric scattering which of course won’t be in this release since it is focused on airless worlds.
The detail in the geology (and science behind it) was through the roof though…far beyond any other procedural engine I’ve seen.
