I assume weather would have to be tied to the PG seed as well. That would create a lot of new outlier planets with "tourist locations" like the old faithful storm front arriving every 16 minutes.
What the new secret feature should be
- Thread starter MPL3D
- Start date
New secret feature should be docking and boarding megaships and "dungeon crawling" through them.
Compromised megaships could offer pirates as opposition, infected megaships could offer thargoid opposition. There could be sections of the ship that are on fire, or hull-breached to offer some environmental hazards to spice up the conflicts. Foot-related loot scattered around in lockers, chests, and datapads in the same way you might find in planetary locations.
Missions offered in a procedural way, much like how megaship defense missions are handled, that would pay you rewards for clearing out the threats.
Compromised megaships could offer pirates as opposition, infected megaships could offer thargoid opposition. There could be sections of the ship that are on fire, or hull-breached to offer some environmental hazards to spice up the conflicts. Foot-related loot scattered around in lockers, chests, and datapads in the same way you might find in planetary locations.
Missions offered in a procedural way, much like how megaship defense missions are handled, that would pay you rewards for clearing out the threats.
Emyprion Galactic Survival and Space Engineers are two that immediately come to mind.
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the first one of those is free on epic this week
I'm starting to believe that it could be clouds that are upcoming, would be a natural forerunner to richer atmospheric gameplay.
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Never understood why this wasn't a "thing" right from the start of space legs.
Not sure if it's simply because FDev don't want to create "dungeons" or if there's some limitation with the Cobra engine that prevents it but it seems like all the interior spaces are just "single areas", even if they have stairs and superficially "different" areas.
Don't think we're ever likely to see ELWs developed significantly because it'd just be too hard to create them with the "resolution" players would demand.
It's like, years ago, you'd be playing a flight-sim and the landscape was plausible but then things like roads, airfields, bunkers etc looked so glaringly "stuck on" and just reminded you how barren most of the terrain really was.
Trying to populate an ELW with water, geography, flora and fauna (and, possibly, buildings and technology) to a believable standard - and do it correctly on procedurally-generated planets - would probably be a nightmare.
Not new though, we already have clouds, in space yes, lagrange clouds, so the principal is there, but clouds on planets will need thicker atmospheres, so they won't turn up until they release new planets.
I wouldn't have thought it'd be that difficult to make denser atmospheres believable.
Quick visual inspection of each ship to give them stat's for stuff like aerodynamics, friction, lift, thruster efficiency and then apply those stat's to modify things like speed, agility, heat and how well the thrusters work and players could "feel" like they were flying through an atmosphere.
Course, whether a dev' would want to go to that effort just so they could also add some cosmetic atmospheric effects, rather than doing something more productive, is questionable.
Personally, I'd enjoy flying down through clouds, with rain on my cockpit canopy but, if FDev have got something better planned instead, I can live without it.
Titan Cloud is almost identical to planetary clouds, so this technology has already been implemented in-game. Now we just have to wait.
It's nothing to do with making denser atmosphere believable, that's easy, it's to do with what comes with denser atmosphere, clouds, rain, storms, snow, blizzards, fogs, rivers, oceans, lakes, running water, the entire works for a full planet, the atmosphere is easy, everything that comes with it is much harder. That's why we only have tenuous atmospheres, specifically because they don't support all those extra. And once you have free running water with dense atmosphere, fish, trees, animals the entire ecology. Until they are ready to do that I suspect we won't see much more in the way of new planets with dense atmospheres.
Same here. I also don’t understand why Horizons’ POIs weren’t brought up to Odyssey’s standards, why there’s no new content that features on-foot exploration for Thargoids/Guardian ruins, and why there’s no adventure within station interiors, just human-shared kiosks.
I think it’s more a matter of limited budget, combined with a rushed release date.
I don’t think that’s the problem. It’s having worthwhile gameplay to justify creating that level of detail which is the problem. Gameplay has always been the nightmare to get right. Art assets are fairly easy to do in comparison… they just require a lot more workmeet AAA standards. That’s why indie games typically concentrate on gameplay, rather than art assets.
True. But considering we currently haven't identified any other life in the galaxy, plants or animals, it would make sense to add somewhat more dense atmospheres without needing to bother with the complication of fauna. I think the real complication in expanding to some of the thinner atmospheres that would have weather would be surface lakes and oceans, like those on Titan, methane and hydrocarbons apparently. Then we could get interesting atmospheres, weather, lakes etc, another gradual step.
Hopefully the new planet system Dr Ross etc created in 2021 was intended to allow additions without redoing the whole galaxy again, I seem to remember that was the idea.
True enough.
When I was last here everybody was talking about ship interiors and it was, basically, the same discussion; It'd be a lot of effort just so you could wander around a ship and there'd need to be associated gameplay to make it worthwhile.
Maybe we've all just developed a pavlovian response to possible updates in ED, where we automatically assume they'll be implemented in the most superficial way possible and then use that assumption to decide whether they'll be worthwhile or not?
My personal experience of "stuff" (in life in general) is that you can build things and get the basics right but then you HAVE to start choosing small details and put the required effort into improving them one at a time if you want the thing to truly shine.
There's a specific problem that Elite Dangerous has with that which other games showing dense atmospheres can usually avoid having to deal with.
ED has procedurally-generated planets, multiplayer, seamless planetary landings, and a relatively high level of graphical detail.
So: if we both visit the same planet at the same time, how does the game guarantee that:
- weather systems look consistent at all scales (e.g. you don't dive down through a massive dense cloud visible from orbit, and then it's sunny and clear on the ground)
- we see the same weather as each other (e.g. I'm not trying to shoot at you in this CZ through dense fog while for you it's a nice sunny day)
- ideally this is done without the weather being completely static in either time or space (e.g. "It was raining at Davies Base. But then, it was always raining at Davies Base.") ... though of course for some of the less habitable planets that might be fairly realistic
- for bonus points the weather should be vaguely plausible to at least match a non-expert's expectations from the terrain (e.g. "that's the tenth day in a row it's rained in this desert")
...and all while taking as little power of a consumer-grade PC as possible so this weather sim can actually run
I don't think this is an impossible challenge, but every other game I can think of where you explore somewhere with weather takes some shortcut that ED has already ruled out to avoid the challenge of faking N million planet-wide weather simulations, so I'd be surprised if Frontier went straight for it without trying something simpler first.
(Gas Giant upper atmospheres would be my expectation for the "next planet type" if they do one - upper atmosphere circulation is a lot simpler than lower-atmosphere, there's no terrain interactions to model, and the weather can to some extent be approximated as "cloudy" - so they can get some of the technology needed for ELWs and similar in place without going all the way there, while also bringing in a completely new environment type with its own very different gameplay options)
Good luck with that idea. Since we already have flora spread all across the galaxy I suspect most people are expecting a much more serious go for the next set of planets, specially if they have thicker atmosphere. Would I be willing to put up with essentially barren planets just tp get thicker atmosphere? Maybe not, are a lot of other CMDRS of the same opinion? No idea.
Yeah there's a definitely a level of thought that suggests it should be easy because other games have done it, but ED is still the only game with a fully modeled galaxy with 400b star systems and trillions of planets. Other games have toyed with the idea of procedural generated planets, I say toyed because they are either cartoonish or not serious efforts. NMS are cartoonish, not saying it's a bad game, just not my cup of tea, and SC...yes I know not a game, toyed with it but essentially abandoned it for manual planet sculpting as far as I am aware. There's a lot of manual work that goes into their planets, that simply doesn't work with a setting the scale of ED. Is it in fact impossible to do it effectively? I don't know, not my field, we will just have to wait and see.
See, I'd rather a dev' took a stab at it, made a mess of it and then fine-tuned it until it worked reasonably well instead of avoiding it for fear of failure.
Thing is, as well, it's one of those things where I (personally) wouldn't be fussed about seeing precisely the same weather as somebody else as long as we both experienced the same type of weather.
Obviously, a PvPer, for example, might think it's a serious issue if they were, for example, trying to head into a cloud for cover when they have no way of knowing if their opponent is going to see the same cloud but, meh.
In that case, I guess the answer is to not rely on weather attributes for cover.
Seems like it would be possible to come up with a simplistic model to generate "bubbles" of dynamic weather on a planet's surface based on stuff like temperature and geography.
You fly into, say, a "heavy rain area" and you get droplets on your canopy, there's reduced visibility of distant objects and, perhaps, you get flickering on your HUDs, sensor problems and engines operate at slightly reduced power.
All players would get similar experiences in that area even if they didn't see exactly the same clouds or puddles.
Regarding gas giants, that's another one from my ED wish-list.
It'd be great if we needed to build especially tough ships (armoured hulls and "internal bracing" modules required) in order to get down into the atmosphere of a gas giant in order to carry out some task.
Honestly, I'd take that before surface weather-effects if I had to choose.
To be honest as it is only 3 years since they tried that approach with Odyssey I would much sooner they got it working reasonably well at about the level of detail and realism required then fine tuned it.
If the two of you were in the same place it really needs to be a pretty good match, not getting the same type is an outright fail.
How about explorers working as a team?
That gets us back to the it was raining at 31.903N 164.03E but then it always rained there at local noon. Which used to get laughed at in 1940s pulp SF stories.
Yes but there is plenty of volume to play with in a gas giants atmosphere before you need anything strong enough to resist even 1 atmosphere of pressure.