ship interiors - will they happen

[jojon]

Always imagined any manual repair option as a trade-off alternative. You save on AFMU/repair limpet slots, but lose all their convenience and expedience, and can duct-tape things together enough to limp home, but getting back to mint condition takes the expertise and resources of a workshop...

This would go both for own ship, and aided NPCs.

As for availing oneself to... "found" ships, I guess that could upset some things, but maybe if it were only ever possible in specific cases, by which I mean bespoke mission rewards for the completion of one story quest "disk" or other (EDIT: ...or temporary loaners to go with it). :9

 

[thistle]

I don't think the discussion is about evil and bad, not even about shutting up a few vocal individuals..

Evil and bad, the new Haters.

Hyperbole inflation is crazy these days.

 

[thistle]

"Potential-Customerbase" is the keyword here.

That's three words.

 

[PilotB]

can duct-tape things together enough to limp home, but getting back to mint condition takes the expertise and resources of a workshop...

We've got that already. That's what repair reset does so you'd be adding a time consuming manual loop to do what the computer can already do in 5 seconds at the click of a button. You could make it better than automatic but that makes less sense that the space magic auto repair is worse than some guy with a hammer. At the moment interiors are a solution looking for a problem and honestly we should do something useful with station and carrier interiors, add hub and abandonned site interiors before we go try and create a problem for ship interiors to solve. The interiors we do have do not make me desire further interiors.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

At the moment interiors are a solution looking for a problem

Indeed. If FD had factored in the possibility of doing internal repairs from the start then they wouldn't have implemented the AMFU or repair limpets (or at least implemented them with some limitations).

For any interior gameplay it needs to add something new to the game, not replicate existing functionality or add new problems to the game where none existed before.

 

[Cosmo]

At the moment interiors are a solution looking for a problem and honestly we should do something useful with station and carrier interiors, add hub and abandonned site interiors before we go try and create a problem for ship interiors to solve. The interiors we do have do not make me desire further interiors.

Now we have half-baked ships, because the internal compartments are mostly invisible (only exist in menu stats). What should be accessible on-foot?

1. Cargo Racks
2. Fighter Hangar
3. Passenger Cabin
   1. Captain's quarters
4. Planetary Vehicle Hangar
5. Refinery
6. Shield Generator
7. Frame Shift Drive

The core problem / frustration for many players is being stuck in the pilot seat. The solution is to add interiors which gives players the freedom to walk around in their own ship. For functionality, gameplay there's already 100s of suggestions on the forum.

We can walk on planets, in the Concourse and FC. However, when you teleport to the cockpit / deck... the player becomes the ship. You are a vehicle, rather than a person. That's not immersive, because the player should be an autonomous person in a vessel.

 

[PilotB]

The core problem is being stuck in the pilot seat.

That isn't a problem and you're not stuck there. Solution go walk around all the stuff you can already walk around and if that doesn't scratch your walking itch what makes you think a few dead rooms would?

 

[Cosmo]

That isn't a problem

Yes it is a problem, because it's very restrictive, like a prisoner chained to the pilot seat. The vision for Elite is that players are people in this universe. Currently, we're still the vehicle when we get inside the ship.

and you're not stuck there.

When the player teleports to the pilot seat then we are stuck there until we teleport back outside the ship. It's not immersive at all. There's no teleportation tech in Elite lore either.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Reordering your list slightly, I think it includes two pairs of interior spaces where it's absolutely critical for "immersion" to avoid showing the player the contents of both.

The small optional internals

1. Cargo Racks
2. Passenger Cabin

The big optional internals

1. Fighter Hangar
2. Planetary Vehicle Hangar

Anyone who wanted ship interiors for "immersion" would likely not enjoy being able to compare close-up the volumes of a class 7 internal used as a fighter hangar and a class 7 internal used as a cargo bay or passenger cabin. Right now - see all the complaints about the Panther Clipper's "magic" cargo racks - players tend not to do the actual sums that would make them realise that our ships are 90-99% empty space and the scale of the optional internals is extremely arbitrary, and anything which draws that to their attention (even something as easily explicable as a 50% bigger cargo rack usable only in spaces specifically designed for it [1]) is potentially a problem.

A 6D fighter hangar can hold 2 Guardian SLFs ready to launch - which are pretty big. Or it can hold 32 economy class passengers or 64t of cargo, which take up a tiny amount of space.

Best, on the whole, to stick a big "no user-servicable parts inside" label on all the optional spaces and seal them off from the rest of the ship.

[1] The 2A refinery (6t) has always been 50% bigger in terms of carryable cargo than the size 2 cargo rack (4t) and is also able to store those 6t in a mass-isolated pocket where they don't affect the ship's handling. So this is very much about "draws it to players attention" rather than "exists in-game". See also the way all the consequences of there being no artificial gravity in the setting were consistently ignored for years in terms of both game mechanics and visual design, and that was only a problem once players could get out and walk around outposts up close.

 

[Jinx Chrome]

For any interior gameplay it needs to add something new to the game, not replicate existing functionality or add new problems to the game where none existed before.

let me use that argument against:

1. Module engineering
2. Horizons planetary landings
3. everything in Odyssey
4. Colonisation
5. almost any other feature which was added

 

[Agony_Aunt]

let me use that argument against:

1. Module engineering
2. Horizons planetary landings
3. everything in Odyssey
4. Colonisation
5. almost any other feature which was added

LOL, you have a point to some extent.

 

[PilotB]

1. Module engineering
2. Horizons planetary landings
3. everything in Odyssey
4. Colonisation

You picked a list of features that are politely worded less than good. Makes a compelling argument against adding ship interiors when everything on that list requires a serious rework.

 

[Jinx Chrome]

You picked a list of features that are politely worded less than good. Makes a compelling argument against adding ship interiors when everything on that list requires a serious rework.

So, what (major) added features were "good" in your eyes? Asking for a friend.

 

[Cmdr. Numa]

Wouldn't it be fun if the newer ships already had their internals fully modeled, just not accessible yet, while behind the scenes the redesign of the older ships with wrongly scaled entry points is going on ? And then the unannounced feature end of the year are the finished interiors with assigned gameplay for them ? Though I imagine if that was so, the VR players would have told us by now, since they are the only ones already able to move around their cockpits and actually peek behind the doors.

 

[PilotB]

So, what (major) added features were "good" in your eyes? Asking for a friend.

I think a lot of their more narrative content has been good as it can be fun despite the poor underlying mechanics. Guardians, thargoids the abandonned sites all pretty good stuff. Even that lastest thargoid war was mostly fine. Before you go well that's horizons landings so that must be good. They're decent despite the horizons landings not because of it and if they'd have made the sites orbital installations you fly around that would have been better because no SRV to suffer.

Wouldn't it be fun if the newer ships already had their internals fully modeled, just not accessible yet, while behind the scenes the redesign of the older ships with wrongly scaled entry points is going on ?

Since the door on the corsair is scaled strangely. I think you need to drop that dream.

 

[Cmdr. Numa]

Since the door on the corsair is scaled strangely. I think you need to drop that dream.

Oh I did long ago. It's still fun to thing about "what if", but I'm also pretty sure that it's something out of scope for FDEV. If Odyssey had been a smashing success, maybe, that would have been the logical extension of that. But Odyssey bombed. Ship interiors depending how they'd be done would require a lot of basic systems that just aren't there. In the current game as it is, walking around inside the ships restricted to when being landed or at least not moving would be doable. But once you combine a moving object within another moving object, things fall apart. The physics programming for that simply isn't there. This becomes very apparent when trying to fly around in a ship while someone else is standing on top of it or even with an SRV on top of it. Or when trying to jetpack onto a skimmer/goliath to ride that.

 

[Knuttin Atoll]

Oh I did long ago. It's still fun to thing about "what if", but I'm also pretty sure that it's something out of scope for FDEV. If Odyssey had been a smashing success, maybe, that would have been the logical extension of that. But Odyssey bombed. Ship interiors depending how they'd be done would require a lot of basic systems that just aren't there. In the current game as it is, walking around inside the ships restricted to when being landed or at least not moving would be doable. But once you combine a moving object within another moving object, things fall apart. The physics programming for that simply isn't there. This becomes very apparent when trying to fly around in a ship while someone else is standing on top of it or even with an SRV on top of it. Or when trying to jetpack onto a skimmer/goliath to ride that.

Just look at all the Saud Kruger ships. None of them have any visible way of entry (in fact, they didn't even bother implementing working canopies). Unless Frontier were to continue down the path of internal inconsistencies, they'd have to go back to all ships, including the aforementioned worst offenders, and design the necessary models and mechanics (lift? ramp? ladder? "beam-me-up-Scotty?") before we even get into 'meaningful interiors gameplay'.

Meh. If I want reasonably seamless, working interiors, I just play X4 instead.

 

[GraXXoR]

I still miss Dual Universe. It was the main reason I quit Elite for five years.
Fully voxellised personally designed ships. You could dock an XS ship on an S ship and dock the S ship on an M ship and then dock the M ship on either an L core ship or an L core stationary base.

All interiors were planned out and you could walk around fixing parts of your ship after a battle while you were flying between planets.

But holy hell was the fully physicalised ship design great.
Just check out a few of the popular player made ships (click on the "LIKED" tab at the top) on this in game player run marketplace.

And the fact that you could program everything using LUA to autimate security, landing gear, autopilot etc... the game was epic.

Main Problem was they suffered from the "Frontier Elite II Combat Problems" with max speed being about 50,000kph... so fighting was kinda crap...
and there was basically zero PVE which people had demanded since day one.

Nobody ever said ship interiors got old.

DU Creators | DU-C | Ships

DU Creators: Dual Universe's premier ship catalog

du-creators.org

 

[Jinx Chrome]

I think a lot of their more narrative content has been good as it can be fun despite the poor underlying mechanics. Guardians, thargoids the abandonned sites all pretty good stuff. Even that lastest thargoid war was mostly fine. Before you go well that's horizons landings so that must be good. They're decent despite the horizons landings not because of it and if they'd have made the sites orbital installations you fly around that would have been better because no SRV to suffer.

OK, if you don't find anything really 'good' which has been added to ED since release, I am getting your point but I don't share it.

I love the added content, even if I don't play some of it (Colonisation). Every addition makes the ED universe bigger and more attractive to players and adds to the longevity of the game (and no, we don't discuss bug fixing in this thread). If FDev hadn't added content, the game would have been abandoned a long time ago.

Pro tip: I recommend that you play 'classic' base game without Odyssey - that removes most of the content you don't like. It won't ever get interios

 

[Jinx Chrome]

Just look at all the Saud Kruger ships. None of them have any visible way of entry (in fact, they didn't even bother implementing working canopies). Unless Frontier were to continue down the path of internal inconsistencies, they'd have to go back to all ships, including the aforementioned worst offenders, and design the necessary models and mechanics (lift? ramp? ladder? "beam-me-up-Scotty?") before we even get into 'meaningful interiors gameplay'.
[...}

My idea (suggestion) is that if FDev is moving forward with interiors, they would make them only for the new SCO enabled ships (living with the outcry of players who want to fly the classic ships) first.
In a second step, they could rework some parts of the classic ships, if there was enough demand.
Monetization could work as follows: "Interiors DLC, including all new SCO ships", ARX based add-ons per classic ship.