Floating thoughts on David Braben's Elite games
Hype over the new Elite game has made me think about how amazing the older titles were too. I've not got much to say except that it's nice to look back to see how far things have come as well as look forwards and be excited about what's being created. Elite 2 came out in 1993 already then more sophisticated than many modern games. It couldn't even rely on modern standards like hardware rendering to achieve its visual representation. I like to think about the crazy triangulation happening in the background, the very aggressive LOD techniques behind the atmospheres, planets and stars, and the way data is handled at different scales (I've read forum posts which say that you can't have very large scaled games because a floating point variable can be only so big, but that's definitely not true if you have logic contained in different length scales. - This might be a little deeper and worth thinking about). And here is a video of 21 years of progress. Cont