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Comparing the stunning space vistas of Elite: Dangerous, No Man's Sky and Space Engin

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  • Comparing the stunning space vistas of Elite: Dangerous, No Man's Sky and Space Engin

    He has seen things you wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser gate. Roy Batty's dying monologue is a key scene of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, its pathos buttressed by a sense of wonder in the face of things no ordinary human being will ever see.
    As I'm writing this, the Cassini space probe, which left Earth in 1997 and arrived at Saturn and its moon in 2004, is about to end its mission by plunging into Saturn's atmosphere. Unlike Batty's experiences, what Cassini 'saw' about 1.2 billion kilometres away from Earth will not be lost like "tears in the rain". Despite their beauty, the images captured by probes such as Cassini are small consolation for those of us who fantasise about visiting other planets. Roy Batty's last words and Cassini's images tickle the imagination and create an itch that is impossible to scratch, a longing for out-of-reach places. It doesn't help that what humanity has explored so far of the universe, even with the help of robot eyes, is a fraction of a drop in the cosmic ocean.
    Thanks to an inundation of sci-fi stories, the fantasy of space travel is more relatable than it has any right to be, and no medium is better suited to indulge that fantasy than games and simulated worlds. Computers have always been adept at simulating basic physics, and modern graphics and the procedural generation used to create near-infinite worlds has come along far enough to create planets with striking geological features and landscapes.
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