So if Elite was single player, their engine could support seamlessly flying around the whole galaxy? I don’t think so.
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I agree that the engine does not do a good job to appear really seamless. But from videos I’ve seen, I think it’s more of a design choice by the Elite devs to not attempt to have it be completely seamless. Mostly taking about how you are in warp and then when you exit warp you have things suddenly popping into existence. And not only things like ships and NPCs, which is understandable since they have to be loaded from the internet. But also things like asteroids, which should be static and common procedurally generated objects. I don’t see why they don’t have them popping into existence sooner, where they would be less immersion breaking, other than that they want them to be that way for some reason. I think that a team with their resources could spare some time to implement something that wouldn’t cause that much of a break, but for some reason they didn’t.
We know Frontier don’t have access to INoavae’s magic loading screen free technology (and it is not really necessary for the gameplay in E:D), but I have to say, their space to ground transition is much smoother, than I had anticipated.
In comparison with a drop from supper cruise to fighting speed, when you arrive in a station or asteroid instance, I like this new transition much better, because with the addition of orbital cruise and glide, there is no sudden shift in scenery and velocity especially not during the disguised loading screen. Their HUD is outstanding as always.
For the part of our community, that does not play E:D, the only change “Horizon” will bring is that you can not as easy explain the fascination of Infinity by simply mentioning “seamless landing” anymore, you may have to show some footage of the INovae Engine. 
Does any other game that we know of? If not, does it matter?
I’m talking about transition from supercruise to normal flight/orbital cruise to normal flight here. They’ve shown seemless in-engine zooms from the surface to orbit, which is exactly what Battlescape is doing (in a solar system, not in a galaxy). Battlescape doesn’t have to generate instanced areas like stations, asteroid rings etc. and match players into instances during the transition though, because its designed around a single solar system on a dedicated server as an instance. It’s pure speculation, but in all likelyhood, Elite wouldn’t have to either if it went for that design.
What’s the point of this particular discussion? The games are hardly comparable due to their different scopes. Otherwise we would have to complain that Battlescape’s scope is limited to PvP matches and a match is limited to a single solar system.
There is no magic. 
Battlescape is a match based game running on a dedicated server with one largely or wholly procedurally generated level and with sparse surface detail. Star Citizen, Elite, Battlescape, they’re all working with more or less the same technical limitations. Players of one game won’t magically have far better internet connections than those of the other games, nor will one game have the option to rent gigantic server clusters to host everything without asking for subscripions. The deciding factor is how they design their game around those limitations. Battlescape has only one solar system with very sparse ground level detail so far and very rudimentary ship modeling by the looks of it. Star Citizen and Elite both are more similar to each other striving to be MMOs with explorable galaxies, with more fine grained detail at stations/on ground level, but without dedicated “live” servers to back instances. As a result, both have more or less obvious instancing and loading to transition between space and ground.
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I was comparing the engines. Not the games.
I believe the I-Novae engine supports entire seamless galaxies.
Yes. People flew to other systems during the Alpha builds, they got there, just that the systems were not implemented.The Cobra engine is fully 64bit, just like INE.
So does Cobra.
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If it is just flying around seamlessly in a true to scale galaxy, I know of a game that fits onto a floppy disk called Noctis. It’s ugly as the night itself (Get it? Night? Noctis?), with a surprisingly interesting background story (albeit short) that you probably will never read (The only bit I know of the potential story is from a youtube video about that game, so I might have listened to some headcanon and consider that now official). Now if you’re talking about seamless transition from space to a planet, I think Noctis doesn’t do it, but I know Evochron Mercenary somewhat does that… However I can’t really tell you if Evochron itself has seamless flying through a galaxy… I only ever played around a single planet ^^’ So I don’t know any game off the top of my mind that offers both seamless galaxy and seamless planetary transition.
I can’t say if elite 1 or 2 were seamless (haven’t had the nerve to play them long enough to test it out - whoopsies)
Also @hrobertson don’t forget how moot your point is, as Elite Dangerous can’t possibly be single player. They need online server to simulate the galaxy’s economy (because no one would possibly want to play in a sandbox that can be reset, making experimenting/fooling around more fun without all the consequences, right? RIGHT?).
Oh is this the offline-mode rant.
Elite Dangerous is basically a MMO, argument for an MMO having an offline mode is somewhat weak.
If you want a rant, I can provide you with one, have fun reading ^^
- ahem *
It was meant less as a rant, and more as a little jab at frontier devs, who initially pitched the game as a game that would have a singleplayer mode that didn’t need a connection to the elite servers, and then (after kickstarter ended, some more development went into the game blablabla) decided to cut out that portion of the game, which pissed off a lot of people for legitimate reason. Don’t believe me? Have a quote from their kickstarter campaign:
Click here for the relevant entry in their kickstarter faq (also good for context). I am not judging them too much (although it certainly made me ditch my plans of having a little bit of piracy fun. I want to be a bad guy in a game every now and then, but not if it botches other peoples experience of the game), but I am also not inclined about letting people forget, that frontier developments objectively made a promise (a non-minor promise if I may add), that they didn’t upheld.
If I may say so, I think this is one darn fine rant, even though it lacks the toxicity and pure hatred for all that is, that you usually find in high profile rants. Oh well, I guess i am just not made for those ^^
I can’t really agree with Elite: Dangerous being a mmo. It sure has all the signs of a mmo and checks most of the boxes that signify a mmo, but it just doesn’t feel like one, maybe due to the amount of systems vs number of players ratio.
Also iirc that economy reason thing was in essence what they brought up as THE reason justifying cutting out the singleplayer mode out of the game, and THAT was a really darn weak reason.
I’m not disagreeing that they broke their kickstarter promise, which they did. But there is a context for everything and this is the end of 2015. A software project that was partly funded using crowdfunding money in 2012 and released at the end of 2014 failed to deliver on one of its promises. There have been instances where people reproachfully complained about about the host of broken Kickstarter promises by Elite, but everytime I inquired (didn’t follow the kickstarter unfortunately ), the offline mode was the only major thing constituting a broken promise. There was a big outcry, people asked for and got refunds iirc and the world kept on turning. As it turns out, the project in question moved on without the initially promised/planned feature, managed to get released and is currently on track to receive its first expansion. Direction changes during the course of software development are not exactly unheard of.
Sure, it’s disappointing for those who absolutely wanted that offline mode - whatever features that would’ve included that you can’t experience in Solo mode today. But there’s a point at which you should stop voicing your indignation and move on, because it makes for a poor basis for constructive discussion. Elite still exists, the world is still turning and neither was changed by the lack of the fabled offline mode.
Maybe it wasn’t such a deciding feature after all?
I wasn’t trying to make a point. I was just talking about the capabilities of the engine.
As I’m sure you are fully aware, an engine being 64 bit native or using 64 bits for coordinates doesn’t mean it can support a seamless galaxy.
It makes it a lot easier to implement such a feature though, also you should be aware that INE was only tested up to ~100AU.
I hate this engine v engine trash talk, I really don’t want to be badmouthing INE because I feel passionate towards another developer and this thread mostly boils down to talking down ED/FD/Cobra.
Nor does an engine that supports a seemless galaxy in theory mean much, when the game using it is designed as a match based PvP battle arena within a single solar system.
If you don’t want to make a point, why do a pointless comparison in the first place?
The seemless surface to orbit zoom has also be done with Elite’s engine, as seen in the sneek peek I linked above. The actual game just has to live with additional limits due to the instancing. And whether Battlescape’s engine would support seemless travel in a whole galaxy if it was used for something like an MMO instead of the game it actually supports now, is mere speculation. Chances are, they would have to find some tradeoff when there suddenly are billions solar systems that any player can access at any time. One dedicated live server per instance and solar system doesn’t sound like a feasible solution then
Stop making assumptions about either engine, development time might solve instancing/seamless travel for ED, Inovae already has it in place right now, both games are awesome.
I was only imagining what could’ve been if e:d used the inovae engine, a massive procedural galaxy without instancing:o
The bolded part contains a whole lot of assumptions. For instance, that the iNovae engine somehow - magically - would allow Elite to have a galaxy without instancing. So long as you have multiplayer with a variable and substantial number of players, you have some form of instancing. The iNovae engine isn’t going to change that. It’s no more the space game engine equivalent to magic fairy dust, than the Cobra engine or Star Citizen’s modified Cryengine. Dev time won’t solve instancing either - it’s a workaround for the limited player (server as well) bandwidth and server’s/player PC’s capacity. Every engine will have to deal with that when you want to implement a multiplayer game.
Things change when you develop a single player game. See Space Engine, if you want to call that a game.
Can Space-Engine load up in real-time yet? It took a couple minutes to draw the mesh of a planet and such in high-quality if you wanted to look at one up-close last time I tried it out. This was a few years back, mind you.
Here’s Scott Manley playing with the latest version back in January. Space Engine’s camera controls are pretty coarse, so getting an Infinity:Battlescape style approach can be a challenge, and Scott approaches too fast to show off the engine in its best light, but it completes the loading of surface details in a few seconds even when handled roughly.
I tried running the latest build on my machine, but it won’t start. Just crashes immediately. I didn’t try loading the latest patch, which would probably have fixed it.
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I thought I was just participating in a civilised conversation about the engines. @Burny is getting unnecessarily defensive about Cobra when no one is down-talking it.
Of course when lots of players are involved one must introduce systems to mitigate the associated issues. As was discussed numerous times on the old forum, this need not result in gameplay-impacting instance transitions.
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your thinking is pointless.
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To be honest, I can’t remember if there were any other promises, as I wasn’t part of the kickstarter campaign ^^
It’s just that cybercritic demanded a rant, and I delivered ^^
However, a promise doesn’t equal a promise. Example given: You promise that in a game you make there will be a cameo of character xyz from game thq. Due to unforeseen reasons however (for example legal stuff), character xyz doesn’t end up in the game. It’s not a big deal, as it was just a character in a flood of many different characters. Then you make the promise that your game will ship with two modes, where each mode has about the same amount of content. If you cut one mode out of it, it may be considered ‘one’ promise, but people will be more inclined to be pissed at you.
The feature that can’t be experienced is easy to pin down: Play while the internet/server is down. If Frontier Developers cease to exist, so will the ability to play the game (apart from one or two training missions which iirc should work offline, but don’t quote me on it). I hope they won’t, I’ve bet a lot of money on them not cancelling the game after 2-3 years (bet as in bought lifetime season pass which is a considerable amount of money).
And as I already stated, I can’t play all the roles I want to play. I am bound to one character, including standing etc. I do want to play as a pirate every now and then, I want to try to throw a sector into chaos. I want to cheat every now and then to gain access to the most expensive stuff possible, just to fly it into the next black hole. I want to try to build an empire with unlimited ressources. But I can’t. Because there is no singleplayer mode that allows me to run wild without screwing other people over.