Gorgeous.  This has to be the best looking game since EVE, and probably looks even better.  I love that the spaceship designs are not overly aircraft influenced like in Star Citizen.  

It's amazing to think that they use a monte carlo to generate systems which is used by astrophysicists to study planetary formation.  Sometimes I question whether the orbits I see can be stable, but I like to think that I'm wrong, and it is awe-inspiring that many of the sights you see in game are similar to what you can expect to see in the real universe.  It goes without saying how great it is that the systems are therefore to scale, and I am overjoyed that they went with a relatively believable milky way backdrop rather than millions of comically bright nebulae.

I might have been really upset about the flight model when I started playing Elite (and have had a love-hate relationship with it since) but I am absolutely blown away by how it looks.  And they built that engine from scratch, just wow.

Looking forward to pulling thousands more desktop backgrounds off this site, and most of all, I'm looking forward to building a new machine this weekend so I can see Elite in all it's maxed out glory.

yea - totally agree

it's astonishing - how David Braben and his crew try to make a realistic universe based on astrophysical knowledge and manage to make it entertaining and beautiful on the way

and about the milky way backdrop - the great thing is, it's based on the stars within the game - it's not just a static skybox painted by an artist - it's a skybox newly rendered when you enter a system based on your position and the stars around you - WTF! dreams come true 🙂

and the engine is actually the one they developed for their rollercoaster games - seems to do very well hehe

it's fully 64bit ofc to handle the huge distances

now i'm just holding myself back from playing - not to spoil myself before the release

A lot of nice pics on Eite Galaxy, nice colection. Guess I might have to invest in a higher end gfx card for when this is finally released, not sure if my A10-7850k with dual R7 250 will be able to get it done.

Some of the rings on some of those planets didn't look to great and others looked great. The engine that Elite is using is it just computing the realistic look of everything currenly mapped so far or is there any art being used to up the visual look of the planets?

As far as I know there IS a lot of art involved in the look of the planets, but I think it is quite conservative.  How much attention they pay to exact spectrographic details I am not sure, but I have the feeling that the difference between what you see in the game and what you might see in real life wouldn't be noticeable to anyone who is not an expert in planetology.  

One thing I learned from Elite is quite how orange-yellow the vast majority of stars really are.  I have seen the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram a million times, but nothing quite forms the same impression as jumping between a few systems and noticing the hues.

I'm also pretty confident that the densest part of the Milky Way is overlaid with artwork, but again, it's pretty conservative.  Except for color, it looks about like what you can see from earth with no light pollution.  I am extremely impressed that they did not succumb to the temptation to overlay absurdly bright nebulae onto the background.  That has become extremely overused, and even though that sort of thing does appear in some of the best looking games I find it garish and juvenile.  Of course, in real life nebulae would not look anything like what they do in most games, in fact they'd be too dim to see.  Some people find that extremely depressing, but in proper lighting I find the real night sky far more spectacular than most artist drawn nebulae.  

fyi, you can also post Youtube videos now on EliteGalaxy 🙂