Frontier Developments has done a couple of livestreams showing off Horizons, the upcoming expansion for Elite: Dangerous. Horizons will kick off Season Two of Elite: Dangerous content, and comes with landing on airless worlds and exploring them in a surface recon vehicle (SRV). They've mentioned several possible things to do once you've landed on the planet: exploring wrecked ships for loot, assaulting bases both in the SRV and in your ship, and I'm sure there will be plenty of bulletin board missions and trade routes that take you to the surface of one planet or another.
The first livestream was called How to Make a Real World. In it they discussed how their Stellar Forge (the voodoo that creates all of the stellar bodies in the galaxy) goes about forming a planet and how the surface features of that planet come to be. I've pulled a couple of quotes from the video to give you a taste of what they talk about.
"What we’ve got here is we’ve got a nice little screenshot of an element of a planet and you can see we’ve got a tectonic plate so we’re modeling the tectonic plates on the planet. And what that’s doing is describing where the two edges butt up against each other. So you can see in this you’ve got these sort of canyon areas at the bottom where the crust has been weakened and then you’ve got the mountains being pushed up on the other side of the plate. So this is something that all of the planets that we’ve got use to some extent or another. But again the amount of tectonics and the plate activity is all driven from our science data that the game feeds us."
"So what we’ve got here is two craters sat on top of each other. What’s really cool about this is this is a way of sort of describing what happens in real life. Rather than craters just being a texture that we stamp around you can actually see that you’ve got one dominant crater here where an impact has occurred on another crater and it’s eradicated the previous crater.
Well the thing is for this it really gives the planet a sense of history because the Stellar Forge stuff is actually going right the way back to working out exactly what elements and what makes up this particular part of the galaxy and it knows where it is and it puts the right planets in the right place and the right material type. So then when we get to the actual planet surface generation what we really wanted to do is to make if feel like each planet and surface had a history of its own. Things like craters needed to not just be additive all the time, they needed to be so that they actually kind of built on top of each other. You can actually see that one crater has actually destroyed the wall of the other crater and that’s the level of detail that we’ve really been trying to push into all of the planet generation stuff because we want to make sure that everybody can feel like these are very naturalistic worlds and what you’d actually be hoping to see if you were actually down on a real planet."
The second livestream was called Inside the SRV. This was our first chance to see some actual gameplay of the SRV, and it looks really cool. They showed how you could dismiss and recall your ship which allows you to land in one location, go exploring, and get back into your ship without having to drive back to your original landing spot. They explained how the varying gravitational pulls and compositions (rocky, icy, metallic) of the planets will have an effect on the driving characteristics of the SRV (and on the flight model of your ship, btw). And of course there was a lot of driving around, climbing rough terrain, jumping craters, that sort of thing.
I took a few screenshots of this video as well:
Here are the videos if you want to give them a watch.
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