The Planetary landing and planetside missions discussion Thread

[GuiLo]

For built up planets I can see it similar to air-flights now, where we can look out the window, but we are limited to the confines of the airports. I think we will be given a flight path and any deviation will be met with a heavy fine or destruction. So no city flybys or chasing animals across the savanna.

On some uninhabited planets and moons they will be protected by droids and therefore deemed off limits by the local system. We have islands here on Earth whose ownership is in dispute by local governments.

There will only be a fraction of planets and moons that can be explored freely.
Even then we can only land on a small fraction since the gravity, density or even chemical make up of the body/atmosphere may make doing so impossible.

So realistically there may only be a dozen or so type of planets that we can explore. Hopefully these will have lovely procedural and fractal textures.

 

[Trueno33]

I'm hoping to see something like this..

Lets hope





http://forums.introversion.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=41634

Wow, and that's from 2009! So definitely it it possible

 

[Greyhawk]

I dont think planetary landings will be anything to do with trading, cities or suchlike. Planetary Landings will be done to perform level 3 detailed surveys of terraformable planets, resource gathering such as rare plants and animals. Possibly rescue missions for crashed ships, ferrying supplies to scientific outposts, assisting terraforming ops with missions etc.

If you have a refinery onboard you could maybe land on a sulphur dioxide atmosphere world and use the refinery to generate some product from it you can sell later. As for walking around stations, you at least have one example of how NOT to do it in X-Rebirth. One of the worst games ever released.

 

[Amos]

I love E: D as much as the next person and have had a world of fun in the last few months (in fact it has gotten me through a very tough time in my life), but I am beginning to be concerned about how Planetary landing will be achieved.
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This stems from the way that the stations have been handled in the game, and the lack of variation thereof. The outpusts have about 6-10 different pieces that were procedurally randomised, and the exterior of the big stations have about the same. The interior of the bigger stations have around 3 set designs? I would have liked to see some procedural randomisation on the station interiors myself, but that’s a point for another discussion.
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Looking at that small amount of procedurally generated content in the game, am I the only one worried at how Fdev are going to be able to manage cities and landscapes for Planetary landings? in space you can get away with it to a degree, and even in the older games where having simple textures on the ground was acceptable, but with graphics as they are now and the prospect of walking around it all; it's a huge undertaking to make enough content for the randomisation to be effective.
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I can only hope that the lack of variation in station design is due to them concentrating on the planet content, as that would be a fair compromise to me
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tl;dr FDev struggled to make muc content for stations, how will they manage city and landscapes?
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So, does anyone else share my concerns and are there any others you have?

The station are ture to the first elite, esspecially the Coriolis type ones, later on in frontier I think we saw different types, so I am not concerned that much because they cant have 3-4 types of planet textures in a 4 billion system galaxy, as far as my memory serves me in frontier there as some variation but it was not all the same, so again I am not worried at all, but as the CMDR above said it is way off down the line.

 

[sic]

Universe is random.. no?

It's gonna be similar with real life I think.. gonna be much less surprises ...

 

[Angus]

My only concern re planetary landings is DB's vision of us all walking around hunting game...can't think of anything more tedious.

I take your point, but the irony of Jack, the axe-wielding homicidal maniac looking through a splintered door frame at a terrified Shelley Duvall, in your avatar undermined it somewhat.

 

[Starshoy]

How I read it was: How can we in any way get believable planetary environments when even for the simple space ones frontier only has an extremely limited amount of assets?

Believable planetary environment I want to see are those visible by starship pilot. And those probably include just a choice of few standardized spaceports for Earth like planets and some random landscape for other planets, interesting mostly for survey. There may be a few standard outposts structures for other planets.

I'd like to be able to walk there, as on orbital stations, and do some shopping, research etc in more natural environment than computer interface. I do not expect that full flight from orbit to atmosphere will be implemented, just like we cannot smoothly transit from super cruise to low speed flight. I would agree if some automatic procedure from space controller or ship computer would guide us to a point in a few kilometers of landing targets.

So my expectations are not very high, but I think, implementable rather obvious way.

 

[dannysquid]

Believe me, there's a bunch of good software to do this, so it not necessarily must by implemented from scratch, just look at this wonder.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsNP8-S5ygE

It would be great, but I can't see them creating the cities that intelligently. It's surely too processor intensive to do on the fly. At 60fps you can't really be pondering where to put commercial districts, residential streets, bridges, chinese take-aways, ring roads -- it's a whole load of pathfinding algorithms and other intensive stuff. If there are cities, they'll be modular generic cities made out of lots of little city-block components you can just plop down, hopefully modified by height data.

EDIT: Also, if seamlessness is a goal, you need to do it top-down rather than bottom-up. You can't be thinking about the detail of a city from orbit, just the general shape of things, which can't realistically be based on the path of rivers, altitude, the presence of docks or whatever.

 

[CMDR Brock Samson]

I'd rather have FD adding more variety to space stations themselves before they start working on PL, honestly.
You know, different architexture, voice acting, faces for NPC, etc.

 

[CMDR Sheehy]

Well with the whole procedural generation thing already on the go (think planetary night lighting) it's only a matter of adding the buildings in the same style.

I'll bet the supercruise to atmospheric flight thing will be a module that you can only buy if you've been licensed to purchase it (i.e. paid for the expansion) and will overcome the supercruise bounce-out at altitude, ensuring a smooth deceleration to surface levels with a drop out at say 30,000 feet (10km) to normal space. Of course, for a smooth non-damaging drop out you will need to target a station, or fly close enough and slow enough (like at rings.)

A few choice PA Cannons protecting citiscapes outside of docking privileged areas will stop nosey pilots getting too close to the city scenery to notice the samey samey-ness.

 

[Kiblams]

It's more the cities that I am concerned about, procedural generation can handle terrain and organics pretty well as we have seen but walking around a city is a challenge indeed, you would hope that using surface types like shiny glass and bump mapping bricks and stone will be enough for making a city look good from your cockpit, but it won't cut it for walking/driving around the city.

 

[CMDR Sheehy]

My guess is that initially, you won't be permitted to be in general population. That would make total sense. Imagine the diseases you would spread... and I'm not just talking meeting up with the local girls.

My bet is that walking around will be limited to space ports on populated planets and anywhere on unpopulated worlds.

 

[QziQza]

I can see quite a few stages to this:

Airless bodies (mining machines, detailed scanning, land vehicles, possibly domed surface outposts)
Gas giants and lifeless planets with an atmosphere (advanced fuel scooping, climate modelling, atmospheric flight and fighting)
Planets with surface liquid (undersea travel, undersea outposts, Moray Starboats?)
Planets with flora and fauna (lots of off-ship gameplay - hunting, botany, survival)
Low-population settled planets (small towns dotted about - basic commodities trading and a bit of "wild west" type gameplay)
Med-population settled planets (larger towns and possibly one or two small cities, planets based on agriculture or industrial activity - sabotage, worker revolts, theft, industrial espionage)
High-population settled planets (high tech democracies and dictatorships, old worlds - political subterfuge, assassination)

yeah, i can see them doing it in stages too. maybe releasing a PDC 'core system' with the major functionality and mechanics in place, then continue rolling out FDC 'stages' over time. looking at what is currently available for city and lanscape generation, and with the quality of their own attempts in that field, from some years ago, i'd like to think we will be pleasantly suprised. hopefully the lessons they are learning now will advance their previous FPS style work, translate into better efficiency with the current engine, and allow them to get more creative visually while still maintaining good movement physics. i think i'll try to avoid overthinking 'Planet Landings' though, keep my expectations somewhere simple lol.

 

[Patrick_68000]

I think that Frontier will add new space stations in the future. And the cities on the planets will evolve in the same way

 

[Xaraman]

Planetary landings will be nothing more than a space station, on the ground. You will still hit your "safe to disengage" button, but instead of popping out in front of a space station, you will pop out 9 or 10km up in the air above a ground based landing pad. That's it. Maybe they will introduce a new effect that surrounds your cockpit... but it will be generic, the same for each planet, and like the space stations.. there will only be 2 or 3 different types of cities you will see when you land. They will be procedurally generated just like everything else.

Yes.. I am painfully pessimistic about it's implementation. But I would bet real money what I typed here will be what we see when released.

This is what I'm thinking too.

Have FDev said it will be anything more than this? Maybe some people have combined the fact that we'll be able to walk around our ships and the fact that we'll be able to make a planetary landing to come up with an incorrect conclusion that it means a possible FPS (social) element?

When i think of planetary landings, I think back to Frontier and that's the way i expect them to implement it. I would hope the entry/exit is a bit more than a "safe disengage" element. But I think it will just be another port on a different background.

 

[pippo]

minimum requirements after planetary landing hits...

After reading a fair amount a interesting threads about 4k or planet side graphics, whether procedurally generated or not, it occurred to me that "Planet Landing" or "Walking around Station" was probably going to take a lot more effort from our PC's than today's simple (yet stunning) graphics.
I'm a massive Si-Fi fan, an amateur astronomer and a minimum wage guy whose never built a PC until hearing Elite was on its way back. I'm now worried my very expensive video game (ED+PC+HOTAS) might need upgrade in order to run the next DLC's.
I remember the minimum specs going massively down while the game was being optimize, question is: is it now going to go up again?

 

[Greyhawk]

Why I want planetary landings...



The only spot of land on this entire water world. I want to go there now! My first Waterworld since I started the game so yay!

 

[TheMarshall]

I hope planetary landing is a skill to be mastered

When it comes, I am hoping that planetary landing isn't easy. I want it to be a skill you can learn, something to master. Things like approach angle, velocity, air brakes, switching to atmospheric engines, constant readjustments. I want it to be an experience, all choppy and bouncy, rattling canopy and I want it to be dangerous so that if you mess something up, there will be a chance you breakup during entry. I think it should be seat of the pants kind of flying.

I hope its like that, I would like to see it be used as a tactic for escaping pirates, if its hard and you can be better or worse than someone else at it then you should be able to lose them or gain advantage (or lose it) during descent.

Just my hopes, at the end of the day I will be happy that we get it at all.

 

[Steve50]

That would be really good but sadly there's no way that will happen. It has to be something simple for it to work for the console people. So simplified and easy is the order of the day.

 

[deeepblue699]

your description sounds like fun have some rep..