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. Contrasting these two videos shows really well how graphics has progressed with parallelisation, vertex processing, and shaders, all hardware innovations. I've not yet gotten to play this, but I've picked up this narrative about Frontier Developments working during the mid-late 2000's on a great engine. I imagine some smart people thinking about "one stitch in time saves nine" and getting a solid foundation down for this sleek game they are making. If that's the case I hope these guys make money. I'm less confident about that other space game being made, built on a solid foundation of ATNA.
Both these Elite games excite me in different ways. I haven't played Elite 2 since I was a teenager with a slow machine who during the 00's was playing games from the 90's. Now having had some basic experience with graphics programming I enjoy thinking about the software challenges of the older games in the series. I'm pretty hyped for the new game but still I'm not quite there with my PC hardware (you could say some things don't change). It's still very nice to watch it shaping up.
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. Contrasting these two videos shows really well how graphics has progressed with parallelisation, vertex processing, and shaders, all hardware innovations. I've not yet gotten to play this, but I've picked up this narrative about Frontier Developments working during the mid-late 2000's on a great engine. I imagine some smart people thinking about "one stitch in time saves nine" and getting a solid foundation down for this sleek game they are making. If that's the case I hope these guys make money. I'm less confident about that other space game being made, built on a solid foundation of ATNA.
Both these Elite games excite me in different ways. I haven't played Elite 2 since I was a teenager with a slow machine who during the 00's was playing games from the 90's. Now having had some basic experience with graphics programming I enjoy thinking about the software challenges of the older games in the series. I'm pretty hyped for the new game but still I'm not quite there with my PC hardware (you could say some things don't change). It's still very nice to watch it shaping up.
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