Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore…
Lave. Diso. Leesti. Zaonce. The classic systems in the original Elite game evoke fond memories. Elite was the original ‘open-world’ experience, and one of the very first 3D games. It famously used every byte in the legendary the legendary BBC Micro computer to create 8 ‘galaxies’ using just 22k of program and data memory. Yes, 22 kilobytes – that’s probably smaller than just about any email you’ll get today.
Crucially, though, it used amazing techniques that allowed a generation of gamers to experience something unique as they carved their own path through a dog-eat-dog, go anywhere, do anything galaxy and worked their way to the most iconic rank in gaming history – Elite. Those techniques were further expanded in Frontier a decade later, fitting an even bigger, richer world into 512k.
And of course, as everyone reading this newsletter knows, with Elite: Dangerous we are taking another huge step for today’s hardware. Detail and accuracy has taken another great leap, but, we have a confession to make: Alpha builds 1, 2 and 3 have all used a ‘skydome’ – a static, painted backdrop around a 64 bit play space roughly 1 light year across. Within that all the planets and stars are still modelled, but the galaxy beyond was not. Until now.
Alpha 4 genuinely contains over 400 billion star systems. And they are all moving correctly; spinning, orbiting each other in an incredible astronomical ballet. We are also modelling interstellar molecular clouds, and though some of the detail in these (particularly for nebulae) will come after Alpha 4, wherever you are, the ‘night sky’ is accurate. Beyond our galaxy, perhaps surprisingly we do still have a ‘skydome’ - but it is now a staggering 100,000 light years away, containing all the other galaxies, including the Magellanic Clouds. That’s one heck of a draw distance…
If you go to Earth (not available to travel to in Alpha 4 – but you can see Sol in the galactic map), you’ll see our familiar constellations. In fact over 130,000 objects in the night sky – including all stars visible to the naked eye – are modelled. We can even show those joined-up Solar-centric constellations when viewed from elsewhere – which become stretched and distorted due to parallax. Want to travel to Orion’s belt and see what good old Sol looks like from there? Do it. Or just sit and marvel at the local sunrise (yes all the planets are moving too) over the rings and moons of a gas giant you’ve just found.
To achieve this, we start out with the precise locations all the known stars, exo-planets, celestial bodies and phenomena. Beyond that, procedural techniques are used in conjunction with real, ‘hard’ physics to model the other hundreds of billions of star systems – the star’s location, type, temperature, chemical compositions, what planetary systems there are, etc.
Each individual aspect of the vast galaxy is also represented with unprecedented visual fidelity, making the most of the latest lighting and ‘physically based rendering’ (PBR) pixel-shader techniques along with procedural algorithms that leverage our talented artists’ efforts.
You can seamlessly go from being pressed up close against an asteroid, thermal systems ‘buttoned down’ as you stalk your prey, to super-cruising at super-luminal speeds through a system to travelling through hyperspace across light years of galaxy.
And then there is the networking traffic which communicates the location, velocity and status of your and other players’ ship, bullets, missiles, lasers, heat-sinks, shields, current thermal profile, cargo, and of course all the AIs etc.
The sheer, raw scale of the galaxy means that even being able to accurately represent the position and vast scale of planetary objects, asteroids, ships, missiles and so on is a huge challenge in itself, requiring the use of very high numeric precision. The 32 bit tools and technology of the previous generation of computers and engines is simply not up to the job.
Being able to compute everything we need to, from the motions of those 400 billion star systems worth of stars, planets, moons, rings and asteroid fields, to the lazy whorls in a gas giant’s atmosphere and the precise self-shadowing surface detail of that small asteroid you are currently hiding behind, is a similarly Herculean task. As is fully communicating all the necessary information between players.
Elite: Dangerous has been created using Frontier’s proprietary Cobra software technology (yes, named after the Mk III - check out the snake’s head), which has some unique features that make this all possible. Cobra has been constantly evolved and honed to keep pushing the cutting edge over many game titles and hardware generations. It is fully 64 bit, message based and designed to take full advantage of today’s (and tomorrow’s) multi-core architectures. It has already been used to deliver an extremely wide range of games at Frontier and throughout we have been improving and honing its capabilities – it’s almost as if we have been carefully planning towards Elite: Dangerous for many years... :)
In short, this means that Elite: Dangerous squeezes every last drop of performance out of today’s (and tomorrow’s) cutting edge multi-core CPUs and GPUs from AMD, ARM, Intel and NVidia, all in the service of delivering you an absolutely unique, unforgettable experience.
Just like the original Elite did in its day, in fact.
Peek of the Week
Alpha 4: Boötes Camp
Alpha 4 sets you free in a 200 cubic light year volume of space in the Milky Way galaxy, far from Earth.
In fact, it's centered around the Boötes constellation. Tonight, look up and find Ursa Major / The Great Bear / Big Dipper/ 牧夫座(mù fū zuò) in the night sky. Boötes is just to the ‘left’. In a few weeks you can go there.. No ‘maps’ or ‘levels’ here – in Alpha 4, you’re going into space.
In Elite: Dangerous we use standard stellar classifications, as shown in this Hertzsprung-Russell diagram (reproduced here under a Creative Commons license) which plots absolute magnitude (MV) against spectral type:
Alpha 4 is a fascinating place, and gives a taster of the delights in store in this fantastic galaxy of ours. There are five star systems: Eranin (a K3V main sequence star), Dahan (a K5D star), i Boötis (an amazing quaternary system including a rare contact binary pair and a brown dwarf), Assellus Primus (an F7V star) and LP 98-132 (a diminutive M2V red dwarf). This is just a sample of what’s to come…!
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