Atmospheric Planet Landings.
- Thread starter Hooplah
- Start date
Deleted member 110222
D
Yes let's start demanding something that may very well not be in the pipeline at all and certainly never stated as definitely absolutely coming.
Most of the expected features players have are based on off the cuff remark that basically amounted to "it would be cool if..."
Apparently that means it must happens and what people paid for even though it isn't. :|
Most of the expected features players have are based on off the cuff remark that basically amounted to "it would be cool if..."
Apparently that means it must happens and what people paid for even though it isn't. :|
The language regarding atmospheric landings was way stronger than 'would be cool', and was used in LEP marketing materials and at the point of sale:
Newsletter 32: 'To Launch, and Beyond with the Lifetime Expansion Pass'
We believe that each stage will be incredible, and the result truly breathtaking. What you will see on the worlds will be a mix of procedurally generated content, particularly the landscapes, cloudscapes, compositions and so on, mixed with hand-crafted elements.
Planetary landing in Frontier
Concept piece for planetary landing in Elite: Dangerous
Elite Dangerous Expansion Pass Store Page - [IE the point of sale] (circa July 2014):
Newsletter 29: Lifetime Expansion Pass - to be withdrawn from sale
Elite Dangerous Development Plan
Etc etc.
FDev have subsequently re-iterated their intention to tackle them:
NB:
The Lave Radio interview with Braben
Which covered design thoughts + some ongoing skunkwork on:
- Inhabited atmospheric worlds
- Gas giant gameplay
- Complex animal life
---
OP is totally within their rights to both expect FDev to attempt them, and for them to be the focus of a paid expansion, and so significant in nature.
That said, the overwhelming evidence suggest the upcoming expansion is focused on Legs:
- The ‘leak’ has hit all its predictions to date. It says Legs. (FPS, Thargs in the flesh etc)
- There was bonus ‘leakage’ from the new ARX site which aligned with the above. (New weapon and building categories).
- The files have showed signs of Legs work
- The old plan was for the second PDLC to feature legs
So expecting Atmos to come any time soon does look like a hiding to nothing.
But hey, we all gotta believe
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Deleted member 110222
D
Fair enough. Alas no time frame was given and no announcements have been made regarding end of support/development.The language regarding atmospheric landings was way stronger than 'would be cool', and was used in LEP marketing materials and at the point of sale:
Newsletter 32: 'To Launch, and Beyond with the Lifetime Expansion Pass'
Elite Dangerous Expansion Pass Store Page - [IE the point of sale] (circa July 2014):
Newsletter 29: Lifetime Expansion Pass - to be withdrawn from sale
Elite Dangerous Development Plan
Etc etc.
FDev have subsequently re-iterated their intention to tackle them:
NB:
The Lave Radio interview with Braben
Which covered design thoughts + some ongoing skunkwork on:
Excerpt:
- Inhabited atmospheric worlds
- Gas giant gameplay
- Complex animal life
Source: https://youtu.be/ypIq3fg9nMM
---
OP is totally within their rights to both expect FDev to attempt them, and for them to be the focus of a paid expansion, and so significant in nature.
That said, the overwhelming evidence suggest the upcoming expansion is focused on Legs:
- The ‘leak’ has hit all its predictions to date. It says Legs. (FPS, Thargs in the flesh etc)
- There was bonus ‘leakage’ from the new ARX site which aligned with the above. (New weapon and building categories).
- The files have showed signs of Legs work
- The old plan was for the second PDLC to feature legs
So expecting Atmos to come any time soon does seem like a hiding to nothing.
But hey, we all gotta believe
OP might have a case if it isn't a thing by then.
But personally I doubt it. Games around the world get features delayed/cancelled/withdrawn on the daily. Including "selling points".
Rule of thumb for always-online gaming: Expect nothing.
Oh, sure, I can get knee-deep in the Hooplah with this.Did I mention this before? Oh yes, last year. Off to McDonalds to get a Big Mac. I can count on them.
Even if they only start with gas giants, as long as space whales are there.
There is plenty of space in Wales at the moment.
![[PS4 Pro - PC] earthtone99](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/194/194606.jpg?1590051410){kind=avatar}
Did I mention this before? Oh yes, last year. Off to McDonalds to get a Big Mac. I can count on them.
I’d be looking at the bun, imagining what kinds of planet surfaces we could get. Sesame seed material scooping in a Happy McSRV.
o7
I hope they do some atmospheric planets one day, I hope they do uninhabited Earth Like Worlds, but I hope they come up with a story reason why we can never visit inhabited worlds. There's no chance they will be able to put the resources in to make that work in a way that work without having to skimp on other parts of the game, and we'd get so much more if they just locked us out of those and then put that effort towards the space sandbox side of things.
Did I mention this before? Oh yes, last year. Off to McDonalds to get a Big Mac. I can count on them.
Want atmospheric landings.....
We should probably be careful with what we wish for.
I've said this before when atmo landings were mentioned, often with people saying they want it more than they want legs, and I'll probably say it again. Compared to legs, atmo landings and realized worlds are a significantly bigger project. Think about it.
The environment(s) you will be walking around in with legs already exist. The way you do it won't change as environments are added (except perhaps "legs in free fall" but do you really think we'll get EVA in legsv1? Dream on.)
Because of this, it makes sense for FD to introduce legs all at once. Atmo landings not so much. There is too much that has to be carefully put together as part of a long-term road map.
If I were planning it, here's how I'd do atmo landings, and it would easily take a few years to finish.
Step 1: Access rocky or icy worlds that have an atmosphere but are no less barren than the worlds we can land on now. Think present-day Mars. Features that would need to be added are the atmospheric flight model and atmospheric sky. This would also be a significant release for terrain generation including such things as surface liquids if the generated atmosphere type and temperature permit - also lava flows for worlds with active vulcanism. The atmosphere is unbreatheable. Any population will be in bases similar to those on airless worlds.
Step 2: Now that we have an atmospheric flight model and sky, we have a pathway into the atmosphere of gas giants. The atmospheric flight model will need to be expanded to include both a pressure hazard and heat hazard as you go deeper, setting a limit purely by ship survivability. Note that players will die "from a case of stupid" here. FD should take note of this in advance and armor themselves against the forum salt, because you know it will happen. Make it so that very hull-tanky ships can withstand more pressure before they implode and you die. Gas mining is now a thing. Floating outposts that stay at a roughly constant altitude by adjusting their bouyancy in the atmosphere but otherwise drift around. Some of the lighter-hulled ships will be unable to reach the deeper outposts.
Step 3: Now that we have a pressure model, we can have waterworld access. Add a "submersible SRV", but the mechanics of its launch and recovery will probably look more like a SLF. What the heck, that's already coded. Even the deepest ocean trenches on a 1G world will present no presseure hazard to any but the lightest ships but on a 10G world? There will be more "deaths by stupid" trying to plumb the depths of those waterworlds in anything but a hull-tank. Allow greater depths in the submersible. Be kind and have "recall ship" when your submersible is too deep for your ship to survive have the ship stay at a safe depth above you. Undersea outposts. Floating bases. Atmo may be breathable but outside a floating base there is no above-sea-level terrain.
Step 4: UNPOPULATED worlds with a biosphere (atmo probably not breatheable but might be on terrafrming candidate worlds). No population centers aside from maybe isolated camps if you're otherwise within the bubble, and not many of those. Flight/legs will need no expansions for this step. The big deal here is that this would be THE major flora/fauna release, along with potentially adding marine life to the waterworlds, cloud-whales to gas giants etc.
Step 5: Populated worlds with biospheres and all atmo types including breatheable. We finally get to land on ELWs. Make towns and cities.
So at least 5 major releases to get to being able to land on any world we find, with the inevitable rounds of bugfixes between them, each one building on the last.
The environment(s) you will be walking around in with legs already exist. The way you do it won't change as environments are added (except perhaps "legs in free fall" but do you really think we'll get EVA in legsv1? Dream on.)
Because of this, it makes sense for FD to introduce legs all at once. Atmo landings not so much. There is too much that has to be carefully put together as part of a long-term road map.
If I were planning it, here's how I'd do atmo landings, and it would easily take a few years to finish.
Step 1: Access rocky or icy worlds that have an atmosphere but are no less barren than the worlds we can land on now. Think present-day Mars. Features that would need to be added are the atmospheric flight model and atmospheric sky. This would also be a significant release for terrain generation including such things as surface liquids if the generated atmosphere type and temperature permit - also lava flows for worlds with active vulcanism. The atmosphere is unbreatheable. Any population will be in bases similar to those on airless worlds.
Step 2: Now that we have an atmospheric flight model and sky, we have a pathway into the atmosphere of gas giants. The atmospheric flight model will need to be expanded to include both a pressure hazard and heat hazard as you go deeper, setting a limit purely by ship survivability. Note that players will die "from a case of stupid" here. FD should take note of this in advance and armor themselves against the forum salt, because you know it will happen. Make it so that very hull-tanky ships can withstand more pressure before they implode and you die. Gas mining is now a thing. Floating outposts that stay at a roughly constant altitude by adjusting their bouyancy in the atmosphere but otherwise drift around. Some of the lighter-hulled ships will be unable to reach the deeper outposts.
Step 3: Now that we have a pressure model, we can have waterworld access. Add a "submersible SRV", but the mechanics of its launch and recovery will probably look more like a SLF. What the heck, that's already coded. Even the deepest ocean trenches on a 1G world will present no presseure hazard to any but the lightest ships but on a 10G world? There will be more "deaths by stupid" trying to plumb the depths of those waterworlds in anything but a hull-tank. Allow greater depths in the submersible. Be kind and have "recall ship" when your submersible is too deep for your ship to survive have the ship stay at a safe depth above you. Undersea outposts. Floating bases. Atmo may be breathable but outside a floating base there is no above-sea-level terrain.
Step 4: UNPOPULATED worlds with a biosphere (atmo probably not breatheable but might be on terrafrming candidate worlds). No population centers aside from maybe isolated camps if you're otherwise within the bubble, and not many of those. Flight/legs will need no expansions for this step. The big deal here is that this would be THE major flora/fauna release, along with potentially adding marine life to the waterworlds, cloud-whales to gas giants etc.
Step 5: Populated worlds with biospheres and all atmo types including breatheable. We finally get to land on ELWs. Make towns and cities.
So at least 5 major releases to get to being able to land on any world we find, with the inevitable rounds of bugfixes between them, each one building on the last.
You know, if we end up with legs and go walking around on icy worlds that'll enable the possibility of slips and falls. Or skates.
As far as unbreathable atmospheres go, that's pretty much a given. There are tons of planets and moons with that kind of atmosphere already. They should still present some kind of challenge, however. Ex: Sulphur-Dioxide should present a huge issue to both ship and space suit worn by the pilot.I was actually expecting that gas giants would be the first on the release list since you don't actually have to make "ground" for them - just make it very, very foggy, limited visibility, etc. You never see that "thing" coming at you until the last second.
Agreed - it may be possible to land the ship and have it float (or hover just over the surface), dropping the submersible into the water, then dismiss the ship (like we do now). One challenge might be returning to the ship during a storm, complicating things with waves preventing the ship from hovering close enough to the water to get the SRV picked up).
I assume this would include ammonia worlds of both gas giant / terrestrial world types. They might do this earlier IF they really want to push forth the Thargoid story-line (I said "if").
That's going to be the hard one, in my opinion. I'm sure there's a few people here and there living on these already. Would we just land wherever we want or will we need to get a permit, get "nav locked" to land at an airport / spaceport on populated worlds (you know, to keep from cluttering up the airways and make sure we pay our landing fees, etc)? Of course, on a primitive ELW, we SHOULD be able to land anywhere. Just watch out for the wild life, especially that thing that looks like a tank with legs that wants to mate with your AspX.
Makes perfect sense to me to have FD release them in chunks like that. Some people might want legs and some don't. Others might want gas giants and don't care about rocky worlds but mining on the ground could be something I could get into as well.
UPDATE: Thanks for all the replies just to let the Frontier Devs know many players like me playing this game for decades want to land in cities on Earth like we did in past versions of this game. New players would probably also love it. We don't need other systems doing this so take Earth as the Beta test. While we are at it open up a moon base that we can land on with your standard graphics you already use for planetary stations.
Earth cities will need larger graphics. It can be easily done on the PC. Maybe not so well on consoles but lower rez on them resolves the problem for now.
We don't need it to be perfect per 'space legs' or any other future game ideas even running around in a SRV. What I want is a great looking city, seeing great sunrises and sunsets with clouds and atmosphere. With your awesome camera controls I can look around a lot better than the limitations of Frontier: Elite II.
Maybe in the past it was so easy to land at New York City, Tokyo or many others. I have a problem wondering why Frontier cannot add this to the game. I would love to know how I could help getting here...Maybe I could help. PM me.
But in years past it took awhile for ED to go from beige planets to something more colorful. Maybe a decent looking atmosphere is harder.
Regards
]
Earth cities will need larger graphics. It can be easily done on the PC. Maybe not so well on consoles but lower rez on them resolves the problem for now.
We don't need it to be perfect per 'space legs' or any other future game ideas even running around in a SRV. What I want is a great looking city, seeing great sunrises and sunsets with clouds and atmosphere. With your awesome camera controls I can look around a lot better than the limitations of Frontier: Elite II.
Maybe in the past it was so easy to land at New York City, Tokyo or many others. I have a problem wondering why Frontier cannot add this to the game. I would love to know how I could help getting here...Maybe I could help. PM me.
But in years past it took awhile for ED to go from beige planets to something more colorful. Maybe a decent looking atmosphere is harder.
Regards
]
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Not gonna lie; I honestly hope they never attempt to do populated Earth Like Worlds, because there's no way they'll be able to do a good job of it. How in the world do you even start with Earth? Can you imagine how many assets, much less mapping, you'd need to reconstruct the ENTIRE planet Earth? All of it? Jesus, the manpower alone to do even remotely well... the closest hope they could have is to use Google Maps to put modern day Earth on there and hope we just kind of accept that nothing changed at all, and that all the 3D renderings of the planet don't exist.
Nope. Nope nope nope. Focus on uninhabited atmospheric planets, maybe with a settlement here or there. Give a storyline reason why colonized ELWs can't be landed on (planetary defenses, pilots guild regulations, etc), and leave all that madness to Star Citizen lol
Nope. Nope nope nope. Focus on uninhabited atmospheric planets, maybe with a settlement here or there. Give a storyline reason why colonized ELWs can't be landed on (planetary defenses, pilots guild regulations, etc), and leave all that madness to Star Citizen lol
I vote water worlds with giant oil rigs to land on.
You’re perplexed as to why they haven’t added a 1:1 recreation of future-Earth to the game yet?
Seriously?
Isn’t it pretty evident that the challenges involved there are numerous and sizeable?
And your rationale, if I’m understanding correctly, is that previous games did it like this:
So... you don’t get what the hold up is. Other than a slight acknowledgement at the end that it might not actually be as easy as you first suggest.
Yeah I think that might be the answer to the conundrum
—
FWIW I’ve never seen any direct claims that they’d take on open cities on highly populated planets. They’ve used some thumbnail concept art in Galnet to that effect. But all the larger concept art & actual talk has been of domed cities seemingly. IE:
+
The Lave Radio interview with Braben
Hold them to account on delivering Atmos at some point, for sure. But maybe recognise that a modern, high-res take is no easy task. And that they’ve essentially pre-sold them as a paid expansion, so that is what they’d likely be. And a paid DLC can’t just be eye-candy, it would have to feature gameplay too. Gameplay that works alongside those absurd scales and fancy graphics too.
So yeah. Maybe hold them to account on stuff they’ve actually said they’d do. Better odds of getting what you’re asking for that way
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On consoles we are currently getting half of asteroids.
Guess we can count on half of the buildings too...
I would expect the buildings to be pretty flat and bland for sure.
I just can't imagine how much it would take to generate a fully populated, colonized earth like world. I mean just a normal ELW would require effort on a near immeasurable scale unless you did very generic and boring planetary generation; it took tons of work for NMS to accomplish this with their planets and they aren't colonized beyond some outposts here or there. But to generate a fully colonized and populated planet cities, towns, infrastructure, etc? On the scale of planets that we have in ED? Especially something like Earth, where we have general ideas of what stuff should look like? Wheeee.
If they actually did it, and did it well, I'd be impressed beyond words. Absolutely speechless. But I can't fathom that. And somehow I imagine PS4's graphics card can't imagine it either =D