Advanced SRV gameplay - minning, underground exploring, cooperation.

[Xender]

Thank you Frontier for adding explorable Thargoids crash sites, those are amazing! I think that this technology is good starting point for more cooperative ground based SRV gameplay. This new way of planetary gameplay should consist of few aspects:

1. Addition of procedurally generated caves, with tens of hundreds of kilometers length. It should contain veins of minerals and materials. There should be walls to drill, rifts to jump over and other difficulties. As deeper players go there should be better materials and minerals.
2. In order to support cooperative gameplay, there should be added another types of SRV: Cargo miner with huge cargo and mining/drill lasers; Fuel refinery SRV which have huge fuel tanks and can produce fuel straight from collected materials and share this fuel with others.
3. Gameplay should be highly cooperative. You can go on your own however if you go with Scarab you fuel will end soon. You may go with Fuel refinery SRV however your performance will be quite low. However if you bring friends and you will form proper "mining expedition" it will optimize your efforts.
4. There should be automatic mapping tools which draws 3D map according to your path. It also should highlight "exit" path.
5. With addition of Thargoids and Guardians ruins there should be opportunities to find ancient artifact and data underground.

I think this is good opportunity do enhance ground based activities and improve engineers material grinding. What do you think about this concept?

 

[patttiat]

good point to start with, would be great one day on earth like in deep space.

 

[Xender]

Writing this topic I though about old flash web games about digging down on mars. you know, collecting better and better resources, buying better equipment. It was really nice resource based gameplay. It could work well in procedural world of Elite!

 

[Robert Maynard]

1. Gameplay should be highly cooperative. You can go on your own however if you go with Scarab you fuel will end soon. You may go with Fuel refinery SRV however your performance will be quite low. However if you bring friends and you will form proper "mining expedition" it will optimize your efforts.

With enough sulphur and phosphorus in stock an SRV can go a long, long way without running out of fuel - thanks to SRV fuel synthesis.

 

[varonica]

Thank you Frontier for adding explorable Thargoids crash sites, those are amazing! I think that this technology is good starting point for more cooperative ground based SRV gameplay. This new way of planetary gameplay should consist of few aspects:

1. Addition of procedurally generated caves, with tens of hundreds of kilometers length. It should contain veins of minerals and materials. There should be walls to drill, rifts to jump over and other difficulties. As deeper players go there should be better materials and minerals.
2. In order to support cooperative gameplay, there should be added another types of SRV: Cargo miner with huge cargo and mining/drill lasers; Fuel refinery SRV which have huge fuel tanks and can produce fuel straight from collected materials and share this fuel with others.
3. Gameplay should be highly cooperative. You can go on your own however if you go with Scarab you fuel will end soon. You may go with Fuel refinery SRV however your performance will be quite low. However if you bring friends and you will form proper "mining expedition" it will optimize your efforts.
4. There should be automatic mapping tools which draws 3D map according to your path. It also should highlight "exit" path.
5. With addition of Thargoids and Guardians ruins there should be opportunities to find ancient artifact and data underground.

I think this is good opportunity do enhance ground based activities and improve engineers material grinding. What do you think about this concept?

Caves will require a major change to the current system, at the moment the planet surface is generated using a height map, this doesn't allow for even simple caves like overhangs, the only practical way to place caves at the moment is to manually place them. it would be nice but I don't see it happening for a long time.

 

[Xender]

Caves will require a major change to the current system, at the moment the planet surface is generated using a height map, this doesn't allow for even simple caves like overhangs, the only practical way to place caves at the moment is to manually place them. it would be nice but I don't see it happening for a long time.

Are you sure that they generating heighmaps for planets? Even if, they may lower significantly certain area, or add a code which will create hole in certain area. Then insert pregenerated mesh as a cave. To be honest it shouldn't be extremely difficult.

 

[space voyager]

Love these ideas. As a mostly solo players I'd love the option to use an NPC, too.

 

[patttiat]

Love these ideas. As a mostly solo players I'd love the option to use an NPC, too.

thats what i always wanted the most, npc crew in the ship and so on.
now we have multicrew and no one use it, waste of money for writing this worthless code.

 

[Teh Smoo]

Once you put in voxel modification of planets, the storage required skyrockets. Not quite sure how bad, but I suspect orders of magnitude.

And simple cave generation is hard as well, as it's a 3d space that needs to be pathed extensively. Just look at how long SINGLE PLAYER games take to generate even shallow cave systems, and those frequently don't even interconnect.

Me? I'd just like multicrew SRVs, and the ability to putter around with people from their 2 or 4 SRV bays.

 

[Xender]

Once you put in voxel modification of planets, the storage required skyrockets. Not quite sure how bad, but I suspect orders of magnitude.

And simple cave generation is hard as well, as it's a 3d space that needs to be pathed extensively. Just look at how long SINGLE PLAYER games take to generate even shallow cave systems, and those frequently don't even interconnect.

Me? I'd just like multicrew SRVs, and the ability to putter around with people from their 2 or 4 SRV bays.

I am not sure if volumetric representation is necessary. As I mentioned there might be trick for not rendering height map at certain position, and then generating only layout of cave and placing it.