Viajero
Volunteer Moderator
Not even over a year of alphas and betas could hide the truth! Outrageous!
Why can we only Land on Barren Planets after almost 5 years?
- Thread starter Cosmo
- Start date
Not even over a year of alphas and betas could hide the truth! Outrageous!
Exactly. NMS is "sci" only insofar as it is consistent within its own parameters, and uses those to do everyday tasks like manufacturing, resource gathering, etc. There's a scientific method, even if it takes liberties with what we think of as "real". Much as I might wistfully say that I'd like more realism in NMS, too much of it would simply be an annoying obstacle to the player... and as it's intended to be a 1950s pulp scifi experience, it's meant to be an escape from all of that "reality".
I get that there's a few numbers (but actually not that many per system) involved, that go up or down at different rates on each background tick depending on factors, but modern PCs and consoles eat that for breakfast. It's not particularly taxing. For our puny brains it quickly becomes mindblowing, but not for a computer. Most things are pre-generated while you are warping into a system. You seem to be implying that we couldn't have the elements of NMS planets in Elite because of that little background task, and that's simply untrue. The orbital mechanics code is written, and it just sits there, running in the background all the time as an intellectual curiosity and "cool thing". It has nothing to do with the game itself though - not how planets are rendered, what is on them, what you can do on them, etc etc.
Well, whilst they will never admit it, it's fairly clear that Frontier have other priorities and have had for some time (PC, JWE...).
Nonsense. They (HG) could add that "complexity" to NMS any time they wanted & it wouldn't have an impact on the performance of the rest of the game. They've just chosen not to. The two games have very different aims and concepts behind them. NMS is a space opera like you said, written in the style of 1950s-1960s pulp science fiction. Handwavium is part of the whole essence of that.
When they do the same thing in Elite (telepresence anyone?) it jars and feels bad, because "handwavium" doesn't exist in a scientific sense... only in the mind of SciFi / Fantasy writers. Which is exactly why it works in NMS.
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That isn't how engines work. If you want a riveting tale of a team experiencing everything that can go wrong when having objects change reference points in a physical context read up on the the last few years of Star Citizen development. The very fact that it seems to you to only be a 'bit of code running in the background' is illustrative of the stellar job FD has done. Many games skip these challenges, CIG takes years to pull them off then spends months celebrating a single success. Meanwhile FD just does it without bothering you with the details.
Your point is?
There is a lot of fakery involved - DB is a master of it, and showed it with Frontier: Elite 2, and Frontier: First Encounters. Star Citizen disappeared up its own backside several years ago from what I can make out. Perfect example of how throwing money and devs at a problem simply doesn't solve the problem.
Regarding how engines work, I can't speak for the Cobra engine, but in Unity I can create a CoRoutine that will run in the background on the game loop to do these kinds of tasks. I am assuming (granted, we know what that means) that the Cobra engine has something similar. In terms of stations, off the top of my head, they don't "move" - they just orbit at the same rate as the planet does, so appear static. But I'm not a Frontier dev, and I can't speak for how they do it - it's a black art for me - and kudos to them for getting that part right.
Personally, I suspect the delay and/or "reluctance" to a lot of the features we want to be added (and features I suspect DB and FD want to be added as well), is that the game engine has been patched so much, to such a degree, that a Christmas quilt made by someone's blind aunt looks organized in comparison. So FD has to clean up and rewrite the Cobra engine, in a similar way that Hello Games had to rewrite large parts of the NMS engine for Beyond. They had patched it to death as well.
A quilt made out of old elephant leather.
Only 500 Arx if you call within 5 minutes. But wait, not one, but two elephant butt leather quilts for the price of one! ...
I was hoping that this was the basic goal behind Beyond (E: D's 'Beyond') - that most of the work would be refactoring all that rubbish that has been written & patched in over the past few years - basically since 2.0, so they could use it as a platform for moving the game forward. The thing about lots of devs getting their hands on a project is that it quickly becomes incoherent unless managed properly from the get-go. My guess is it wasn't.
They obviously need more time to do it. I hope they're using it wisely.
Did someone find out what the underlying geological model does in terms of gameplay? Or is it only for creating believable planetary bodies?Maybe you missed some of the actual Horizon release dev posts and vids explaining the actual geology principles behind the proc generation in planets? including tectonics principles, crater physics and distribution etc etc.
Source: https://youtu.be/-Et5Ivi_yIg?t=47
Spend some time experimenting with how space works in game. For example, target a station in the game, fly into its orbital path about 5 mega-meters away from station, then drop into normal space, and set throttle to zero. Observe what happens to the station: depending upon the body its orbiting, it'll either approach you rapidly, or move away from you so rapidly even a high-speed iCourrier wouldn't be able to keep up. If it's approaching you, at one mega-meter, you enter its "sphere of influence*" (assuming everything works correctly, of course) and you'll come to a complete stop relative to the station.
For bonus points, observe what happens to other POIs in the system, especially on the (landable) planet the station is orbiting, once you're in the station's SOI. For even more extra credit, pay attention to system POIs when you're in a planetary ring. Everything orbits something, and its the job of the game to keep track of that motion.
I can only think of five games that have attempted this level of detail: Fronter: Elite 2, Frontier First Encounters, Elite: Dangerous, Kerbal Space Program, and Star Citizen. Three are by Frontier Developments, one simulates a single solar system, and one is an utter disaster.
*Spheres of Influence date back to Frontier: Elite 2, and are one of those necessary compromises required to keep things simple enough that a home computer will have enough processing power to do everything it needs to do. SOI changes are also were the illusion created by Frontier tends to break. Frontier did such a good job disguising SOI changes during normal use that you have to jump through hoops to see them in action. SOI changes are also why I believe Frontier artificially requires you to throttle down, despite the FSS being perfectly usable at high speeds: SOI changes are extremly noticable in the FSS for some reason, sometimes jarringly so.
Curiously, Kerbal Space Program also uses SOIs as part of their simulation. I don't know what system Star Citizen uses, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if they're doing their own thing, rather than goes with what obviously works in other games. The KSP Devs back before the game went live talked quite a bit about how difficult it was to get everything working correctly, and they had just a single, and simple, solar system. Frontier has to make sure it works for 400 billion systems, some of which have up to nine nested orbital hierarchies.
Let's say you would create a game about riding horses and you would ask what the representation of horses does in terms of gameplay. That's your question.
I’m having fun with no mans sky. The trick is to pause playing elite while doing it.
It was never intended to be realistic, expecting nms to be real is like expecting frontier to communicate or fix bugs or release more than first pass tools. There are better ways through it
It was never intended to be realistic, expecting nms to be real is like expecting frontier to communicate or fix bugs or release more than first pass tools. There are better ways through it
Call me crazy, but for me being able to fly simulated spaceships (or sometimes flyve simulated surface vehicles) above believable planetary bodies in a simulated Milky Way Galaxy is the main draw of this game. Everything else is an excuse plot.
Maybe you missed some of the actual Horizon release dev posts and vids explaining the actual geology principles behind the proc generation in planets? including tectonics principles, crater physics and distribution etc etc.
Source: https://youtu.be/-Et5Ivi_yIg?t=47
I've been thinking about this post and I must admit that they've put a lot of work in creating realistic worlds.
But as much as I admire the science they apply here I still stumble on the fact that most if not all landable planets still look alot the same, some have more canyons or flat surfaces but still they're barren and devoid of anything to interact with.
The planets are marvels to look at in how they're created but after ten or one hundred of them I start to wonder how this will enhance my gameplay when there's nothing to do.
I can only speak for myself but if I had to choose between ED's planets or less realistic ones but with a more stuff to interact with then my choice will always be the latter.
Luckily I own ED and another game with highly interactive planets.
Fdev made a lot of effort in creating a very beautiful scientific universe but by doing so they lacked in adding playable content.
For many players this beauty is enough for others it becomes stale and boring after so many hours playing.
Same is to say about a lot of other features in ED, the Guardian ruins etc. for example are marvels in their own, the atmosphere is fantastic, the playable content in those places is very minimal however.
The Thargoids are awe inspiring and thrilling creatures to look at but the only interaction with them is shooting at them.
So many features made with incredible creativity and effort but hardly anything that realy adds to the list of things to do in the game besides looking at it.
One thing that was hard to get used to for me in the beginning. I kept on flying to some desolate planet and parked my ship somewhere and turned of all modules except life support when I wanted to "pause".Elite has no pause button.
Is it just me, but wasn't it said once a long while back that we were supposed to be able to interact with the Thargoids in more ways than just shooting at them?
That would be because they are mostly lifeless planets. What else would you interact with?
Or do you think none-atmospheric planets to be teeming with life to interact with?
It is a game.