Elite Dangerous
"Elite: Dangerous" is the fourth game in the Elite series of games.
Features
Single player
Multiplayer
You will be able to control who else you might encounter in your game – perhaps limit it to just your friends? Cooperate on adventures or chase your friends down to get that booty.
The game will work in a seamless, lobby-less way, with the ability to rendezvous with friends as you choose. This technology is already working, using a combination of peer-to-peer (to reduce lag) and server connections. Evolving Universe
You simply play the game, and depending on your configuration (your choice) some of the other ships you meet as you travel around are real players as opposed to computer-controlled ships. It may be a friend you have agreed to rendezvous with here, or it may be another real player you have encountered by chance.
All players will be part of a “Pilot’s Federation” – that is how they are distinguished from non-players – so you will be able to tell who is a player and who is a non-player easily.
Procedural Content
Procedural generation of content is a technique where content is generated from rules. It abstracts repetitive or arbitrary elements of content creation in a very efficient way.
Imagine a medieval landscape. Laying out towns, roads, castles, farm land, forests and so on can be done by a system of rules – putting castles widely spaced out on vantage points, towns near rivers but under the protection of such a castle, roads between them, then with farm land to support them all. An artist can still design the castle, the houses in the towns, but this approach greatly magnifies the content that can be created. “Frontier” did this for the star systems, and planets, and with Elite: Dangerous, Frontier Developments will go further.