More stations
- Thread starter InDigital
- Start date
Devs said they will add more in the future. Personally I'm hoping for large outposts that handle the heavy ships, hopefully when passenger missions come into play, massive passenger terminals in low orbit around terraformed planets. After watching the CQC trailer, it would be great to see some of those stations in the universe
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here is the problem with that. im sure they obviously know that the 4 different stations arent enough. but in the future there is suppose to be planetary landing, ship interiors and of course station interiors.
maybe this is why they are keeping it at such a low quantity.
just my guess.
maybe this is why they are keeping it at such a low quantity.
just my guess.
Can you elaborate on that? I've been away from the game for a few months. What new outposts have been added? There was always a wide range of outposts because they are procedurally generated.
Cheers
It's pretty disappointing the little variety we see in the game. This is not just limited to stations and station interiors, but also to stars, planets, rings, moons, asteroid fields. It is a vast galaxy, made up of about a few dozen standard objects, that look pretty much the same at one end of the galaxy than on the other. 
Now we have Mining Outposts, Civilian Outposts, Scientific Outposts, Commerce Outposts, Unsanctioned Outposts, Industrial Outposts.... Something else, I guess. They all differ pretty much.
These have been here since the outposts were added in Beta 2.
Some stations that I hope we will see in the future:
- Dodecahedral station
- Cylindrical Stations (FFE)
- Orbital Cities (FE2)
- Space Dredgers (fits well with the mobile stations feature)
.It's pretty disappointing the little variety we see in the game. This is not just limited to stations and station interiors, but also to stars, planets, rings, moons, asteroid fields. It is a vast galaxy, made up of about a few dozen standard objects, that look pretty much the same at one end of the galaxy than on the other.
I have seen this complaint raised various times here in the forums and it always, well, makes me scratch my head a bit. So lets break things down:
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Stations and Station Interiors: yes there are what, four types of stations and platforms in the game right? I could actually understand why the different types look the same. In line with the Lore which describes how there are only a few companies making ships, I would envisage that there are only a couple of companies making stations etc. So of course they will look the same, they are all designed that way. We are not told how old the stations are, for all we know they could be centuries old and all came about due to a galactic wide building spree when the human expansion happened.
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Now the one that always makes me laugh: the complaint that stars, planets, rings, moons and asteroid fields all look the same. Umm how should they look, square, green with red polka dots? Basic physics clearly shows that any sun or planet will be round, go figure! As for moons, well the majority would also be round, just like our moon. Yes there are exceptions line the moon of Jupiter but there are scientific thought that they were originally large asteroids that were captured in the gravity well. So about the only thing that can change in appearance of galactic bodies is colour and I have seen enough variants to show FD at least tried. Hey they got the nightside planetary lights lining up with the land masses, that has to be a start.
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Of course the big test for FD will be if they introduce planetary landings, then people might have reason to whinge if landscapes, buildings etc start to look similar.
Well there is some more room for variation with system bodies:
As you say, all planets are currently round. AFAIK there doesn't seem to be any support´ingame for irregularily shaped bodies? A lot of the ''planets'' are small enough to be far from guaranteed to have a round shape.
Neptune-likes seem to be extremely rare, and for some reason, neptune itself counts as a gas giant. Why?
Being tidally locked seems to have no effect on planetary environment. I'm pretty sure that a tidally locked Earthlike would have weather systems and biome placement that would correspond to the fact that the sun literally is only in one part of the sky the entire time.
For station interiors, I also think a lot can be done. New interiors, to correspond with governments, faction alignment, system prosperity and system economy.
And these:
Also special factories and other facilities with more specific purposes like this:
Taken from Josh 'Badger' Atack's blog (concept artist for FD previously)
http://muonbee.tumblr.com/post/120776851994/from-bottom-to-top-design-of-a-solar-forge
They already have the concept art after all.
That would allow more interesting trade and missions.
It could work something like this:
Specialist stations/facilities are positioned around a system and produces something. Asteroid bases or small platforms might for example be mining facilities in close proximity to resource extraction sites. Especially in a extraction/refining system combos. Basically these will be the centerpoint for the RES.
If you are neutral these special facilities are not accessible for the player. If you are friendly you might be able to drop of mined resources from the belt, but they might not let you buy the refined material. Instead that material is sent over to the trading station/outpost in the system where you have to buy it for a bit more (middlemen taking their cut). If you are allied however you could potentially buy straight from the source for a lower prices. Your rep with individual factions would in other words be a lot more valuable and worth pursuing.
You could also have missions around these. The obvious one would be "deliver ore X in Y amount", but that's not to exciting...defending the outpost from an incoming raid of enemies/pirates could be awesome though!
A bit like "protect the capital ship" that we had during Alpha/Prem Beta.Ah yes, specialist stations!
I think that we need more stations, more destinations in general in every system. Factories, space dredgers (corporate, private/independent and unsanctioned) and pirate havens. Generally unamrked until you get a mission there or people trust you enough to give you the data, although the station still is there.
Also another thing those concepts have a lot of: exterior styles. There's a bit of that already, but only for the coriolis stations and only in some cases.
Give the imperials that white porcelain/marble look. The federation the grey/blue metal, the alliance/indeps the ''NASA'' plasticy white and the anarchists the reddish brownish patched metal..
I think that we need more stations, more destinations in general in every system. Factories, space dredgers (corporate, private/independent and unsanctioned) and pirate havens. Generally unamrked until you get a mission there or people trust you enough to give you the data, although the station still is there.
Also another thing those concepts have a lot of: exterior styles. There's a bit of that already, but only for the coriolis stations and only in some cases.
Give the imperials that white porcelain/marble look. The federation the grey/blue metal, the alliance/indeps the ''NASA'' plasticy white and the anarchists the reddish brownish patched metal..
As for more variation to exteriors/interiors...well...time to copy & paste that PM I sent to Michael again!
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Tinman said:Hi Michael!
I sent this to Chris Gregory too, but since he haven't been on the forum for a while I'll thought you should could get a copy too.
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I've been meaning to send this PM for some time so here it goes.
I think we all understand that one of the most challenging aspects of making Elite feel alive in terms of visuals is to have enough variation in the gameworld. Having a galaxy of 400 Billion stars with close to a 100.000 inhabited star systems (in some form) feel varied enough and not "samey" is no small feat. To put it mildly...
Let's take the current stations as an example. They look great, but the amount of variation isn't where it needs to be to make the world come alive. We should be able to tell if we are in the Empire/Alliance/Federation by just looking at a station for example. The purpose for each station should also be even more clear than what it currently is, both on the actual station and also with supporting structures around it. These two concept images comes to mind:
Outposts are better off in terms of variation, but the number or building blocks the large stations are made of are to low to make them stand out. Right now these consist of the docking cylinder, large ring, smaller ring, "cargo units", heat vents, "solar panels" and that is pretty much it unless I missed something. When it comes to the Coriolis station I still hoping to see these at some point to mix things up a bit:
Wouldn't it be possible to crowd source this and let all the modders out there loose on these? Why not create a template file, give out the "design bible" for the different factions and see what people out there can come up with? Then have us players vote on what we like to see put into the game and you can then select your top choices every month or so and put them into the asset library the stations are generated from to increase variation. Only if they meet your standards of course and under the clear understanding that the creators later can lay no claim on the assets and demand payment. If you want this could involve prices (real or digital) for the winning contributors, but that's up to you.
Same thing could possibly be done to the interior slots that are populated by prefabs. Let modders create more for the game to choose from. This might be a bigger issue though due to future plans when it comes to being able to move around these stations so it might be wiser to hold this off until later. I DO think there is a very simply way of making these rather "samey" interiors feel a little bit more varied with very little work. Simply create a "empty" prefab for the different slotsizes where nothing has been built and use that to mix up the interiors a bit more. Presumably these interiors aren't built in on go...rather a station would slowly fill out all the slots over time as the population and traffic increased to the system. Visiting a large station close to the frontier would therefore mean that many of the slots haven't been populated yet and based on population numbers they are filled out more and more. I always loved the ambience of this image due to the emptiness of the station and that the entire station was basically just a "empty" floor.
Seeing things like this out close to the frontier would be great! You can also look at that image and imagine that only some of those slots are populated by the prefab buildings you already have in the game. Preferably placed in clusters like "mini cities".
But let's get back to crowdsourcing assets shall we?
Later when you start to open up planets modders could help in the same way when it comes to creating (morphable) parts for plants/vegetation, body parts for aliens (presumably you are going to do something similar to what can be seen in Spore and No Man's Sky), buildings, ancient ruins, rocks, landmarks...basically everything.
So...what do you think? Any chance this might happen?
Actually, now on Civilian outpost just about now I've seen this.
Frankly, I'm seeing that for the first time. What that dock could mean, interesting? Says 'authorized craft only'.
View attachment 49771
That's where the System Security Donut shop is.
Those concept arts are so nice - why cant we have all this in game?
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Are you sure, it doesn't look big enough to allow 3 Anacondas, 5 Pythons, and god knows how many smaller security ships in at the same time. Maybe they do shop to ship delivery of the donuts, coffee is of course extra (hence why you see the missions from a faction begging for coffee ..).
Those concept arts are so nice - why cant we have all this in game?
I'm sure the devs agree with you, but the answer is rather simple:
Time, money and manpower coupled with prioritizations (that we might or might not agree with).
Personally I would rather have them stop making ships altogether for an update or two and focus their 3D modelers/artists on these things instead, but I'm not in charge and "shiny ships" seem to be something people want and feel "entitled" to due to the promise of 30 ships.
Sometimes people simply don't know what's good for them!!!
(Hopefully some of the work that has been done on the CQC assets (stations) can be reused in the main game in a not to distant future though...not sure about 1.4 though since CQC still hasn't been released...)