Callsigns when approaching a station...

lemon cup

L
Greetings CMDRs,

I’ve recently hopped back in to E:D after nearly two years of not touching it. So much has changed, I’m having a blast. One thing I noticed has to do with the station control voice when you approach a station.

For me, as soon as I come in range, station control hails me and addresses me as “DeLacey Lima Echo Mike.” The first part, I realized pretty quickly is due to piloting a DeLacey Python.

I figured the next three words were just some random sequence the game assigned to me, but recently it clicked. My gamer tag is lemon cup, and after watching a couple youtube vids from other commanders receiving different callsigns, it is apparent that the game takes the first three letters of the username and converts to NATO (or Pilot’s Federation I suppose) Phonetic Alphabet.

Thats pretty cool! I’m guessing this isn’t new, though I’ve never noticed it, but my next question is this: why not use the given Ship ID as your callsign when approaching stations? There should be almost 0 issues implementing this, as the game obviously already contains the dialogue for all 26 letters and 10 numbers of the Phonetic Alphabet. Just change the reference from username/gamer tag to Ship ID and boom.

Has there been any dev remarks about this? Its very clearly a minor issue not really in need of fixing, but I think it would be neat and probably make more sense. Sorry if this has been mentioned in a previous newsletter, like I said I’ve been out of the loop for a while.
 

Yaffle

Volunteer Moderator
Yaffle
It's been mentioned a few times - shortly after ship names came in the first threads on 'why stick with the commander, why not the ship ID?' arrived.

As far as I know FD have never commented, but I may be wrong.
 

Hunter241

Hunter241
Yaffle said:
It's been mentioned a few times - shortly after ship names came in the first threads on 'why stick with the commander, why not the ship ID?' arrived.

As far as I know FD have never commented, but I may be wrong.
Click to expand...


I guess that may be too much for the game to handle?
Maybe something to do with CMDR names not changing but ships names/IDs being able to change? I don’t know tbh

But if the current system works, don’t try and fix it
 

C4R1TON

C4R1TON
I've been playing now for over a year and I still think it's a cool feature...still remember when it hit me that the game was using my commander initials. I was like...wow, that's too cool.
 

dm0815

dm0815
Yaffle said:
It's been mentioned a few times - shortly after ship names came in the first threads on 'why stick with the commander, why not the ship ID?' arrived.

As far as I know FD have never commented, but I may be wrong.
Click to expand...

Probably because ship ids are not unique, commander names are however. Doesn't explain why they whouldn't do it. Maybe they don't want players messing around with it to... produce "funny" results.
 

Enderby

E
I'd like it to be the ship name and if a ship has not been named, stick with the commander name. It would feel better, some how, to me.

But, either way, I'm not greatly fussed. :)
 

Surprised Brony

S
Hunter241 said:
I guess that may be too much for the game to handle?
Maybe something to do with CMDR names not changing but ships names/IDs being able to change? I don’t know tbh

But if the current system works, don’t try and fix it
Click to expand...

On Xbox, I changed my gamertag not too long after the feature arrived. It worked perfectly, changing from "Tango Golf Charlie" to "Sierra Uniform Romeo" as soon as I changed it. Perhaps it's because they are greeting the CMDR, not the ship.
 

lemon cup

L
TGC Brony TO said:
On Xbox, I changed my gamertag not too long after the feature arrived. It worked perfectly, changing from "Tango Golf Charlie" to "Sierra Uniform Romeo" as soon as I changed it. Perhaps it's because they are greeting the CMDR, not the ship.
Click to expand...
Not likely, I’m not manufactured by Faulcon-DeLacey, to my knowledge :p
 

Zebaoth

Zebaoth
Hunter241 said:
I guess that may be too much for the game to handle?
Maybe something to do with CMDR names not changing but ships names/IDs being able to change? I don’t know tbh

But if the current system works, don’t try and fix it
Click to expand...

Just have voice recordings for the entire alphabet including numbers 0-9 and only allow those for ship IDs.
Not that hard to implement, I guess voice recordings already cover all needed options.
 

Pigshead

P
This explains why the stations constantly refer to me as Papa Indio Golf. It never occurred to me they were basically calling me PIG.

Mind blown.
 

Brrokk

Brrokk
It's a great little detail. I'd been playing several days before I noticed and then found it hard to believe. They've actually recorded all the letters in every station voice, and they string them together so that you can't hear the joins. Neat programming skills!
 

Cmdr Eagleboy

Cmdr Eagleboy
FD certainly can make controllers to say anything with military code, it is precoded recording then arranged and envelope applied to it.

As far as I understand in 2.4 they even changed placeholder system to something closer to voice synth (or using audio enveloping) so they can basically make controllers to say anything.

FD is working towards system where they take actor/actress, record lines, words, and then use it to arrange as they need.

Even for something like NPC dialog ;)
 

thistle

T
In a programming sense I'm quite sure it's possible to do from the data held, but it would be more complicated than just swapping out one variable for another. The problem would likely be the scope of the variables, considering the ID can be changed (I think?) as many times as we want. Much simpler and safer to use something constant, like the commander name. I imagine it would be very low priority to change.
 
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