News 2.3 Dev Update

[BurnyBurns]

Already possible today: http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2009-11/smart-armor-knows-how-its-own-strength-and-enemy
If you think about it, there are plenty of other way to detect damaged parts of your armor plating and an easy way to present its state is via life bars. So there's no need for a lot of imagination there..

I'm not sure if you're serious. What part of "tech to inspect armour condition" leads you to equate this with "whatever is under the armour is protected by a green bar of magic fairy dust" consequitively emptying with hits?

Here's a hint: one shell to the ammo rack may cook a tank and naturally, everbody within it. Yet, the outside armour may remain 80% intact, depending on which metric you chose for "intactness". Complex systems != health bar. The latter being an arcadey gaming convention pretty much present from very early on in games.

Update:
Watched last stream again and it looks like your idea of a camera drone is exactly whats going to be implemented. You get a "signal lost" message if you move the camera drone too far away.

Ah, yes. Unless there's an ingame camera that others can see, that is a nice bit of flair and not worth flips as ingame/inlore explanation. As is the "30km" tethering of SLFs. For starters, the camera can instantly flip between preset positions. In- and outside of the ship. Every ship running around with 20 invisible cameras you may nearly stick up your crewmates' nose without obscuring their sight? Horse. Poo. All these supposed in-universe fantasy lore explanations people bend their brains into knots to come up with have more holes than a Swiss cheese. Apparently though, to some that's easier to live with than to just accept that they're playing a game. It gets silly when these types of people then start banging on about consistency, realism or simulation, while bunny hopping around all the holes in their cheese.

 

[zackmck]

I'm not sure if you're serious. What part of "tech to inspect armour condition" leads you to equate this with "whatever is under the armour is protected by a green bar of magic fairy dust" consequitively emptying with hits?

Here's a hint: one shell to the ammo rack may cook a tank and naturally, everbody within it. Yet, the outside armour may remain 80% intact, depending on which metric you chose for "intactness". Complex systems != health bar. The latter being an arcadey gaming convention pretty much present from very early on in games.

For me it's 21th century technology extrapolated to the 34th century. For those without imagination it's fairy dust magic. Works for me.

Update:
Camera drones these days are getting smaller every year, imagine ... sorry, obliviously you can't or don't want to.

 

[Dakkorie]

For me Realism is what MAKES immersion. I cannot suspend my disbelief if what I`m expected to be immersed in doesn`t make sense. It`s why I can`t stand 3rd person games excpet in the case of games that are squad based where you control multiple people.

Too many games today have been ruined because of people arguing "It`s just a game!" To the point of stupidity since all the realism rules get thrown out and we get Xray vision and regrowing magical health, etc.

Guess we`re all different.

I'm not singling you out but I just want to use your quote to address the issue was realism verses game.

Let's take out all the games out there that don't really bring in a character that you yourself play as. Let's take out platformers and puzzle games and etc. Let's just address games where you are looking for some sort of realism. Each Game has to go through some serious design rigor and critical design decisions. It needs to balance ease of playability over reaslism. It needs to also solve problems with how do you make this particular action feel real through the limited interface you have with a computer. e.g. Mouse keyboard joystick etc.. I think ED has done a great job with balancing Easy of gameplay and realism. For instance the whole docking business first time I experience that I felt a sense of awe and wonder I rarely feel in games. The SRV wave scanner. I think that was a very well implemented tool which allows players to figure out what everything means what the blips do and how to use that information usefully. I think that because we have a literal Galaxy in ED that Multicrew definitely needed some way of quick access. I remember trying to wing up with people it would take almost 2 hours for everyone to even meet up (granted we ships with low jumpranges) by then we'd get like an hour to play around before everyone had to leave for other things.)

Games have to take into account that realism verse time and hardship. How fun is it to just travel forever to meet up and crew someone elses ship? the travel part would probably discourage a lot of multicrew. Also programming realistic simulations is very hard to do and complex. There are many Simulators out there and the good ones are very expensive and offer a lot of realism but they are pretty much exclusively offline and for good reason. Adding netcode to these games increases the complexity tenfold. Ed has done a great job considering how complex net code is.

My point is a lot of you set the bar too high when you really lack any sort of empathy or understanding of what goes into making these sort of things.

 

[rootsrat]

yeah the holo-me thing confuses me after watching the stream. The generator looks pretty darn clever. Bit of a waste of effort from my viewpoint, but very clever nonetheless (I'd sooner the dev time gone into fixing other things - but then, I don't plan on looking at myself in game :/).

but if we're holographic on ship, why do we lose discoveries etc when we blow up? Reckon they should've just left it well alone as a character generator like others have said

We're NOT holographic on the ship. Holo-me is just a Holo-mirror. YOU (your pilot) is physically on the ship, flying it in flesh and bone. Once you fire up Holo-me thingy (device) it displays YOUR PILOT's hologram in front of YOUR PILOT's eyes, so that you can see yourself like you were looking in a mirror...

I think they have unnecessarily confused a lot of people with this

 

[BurnyBurns]

Camera drones these days are getting smaller every year, imagine ... sorry, obliviously you can't or don't want to.

Option 3: I don't need to. It's a game. I can accept that. No need to imagine total rubbish to make gamey features playsible that aren't. And you'd be arguing a stronger position, if you weren't trying to enforce somebody's "realism" argument with "imagination". That works for things the game blanks out, not for ingame verifyable things like magically teleporting invisible cameras.

That is of course, provided the new ingame camera proves to be what it at least appeard to be in the livestream: An invisible entity to be placed at will within or outside of the ship near instantaneously. We'd be talking if there were actual cameras flying around ingame.

 

[zackmck]

Option 3: I don't need to. It's a game. I can accept that. No need to imagine total rubbish to make gamey features playsible that aren't. And you'd be arguing a stronger position, if you weren't trying to enforce somebody's "Realism" argument with "imagination". That works for things the game blanks out, not for ingame veryfiable things like magically teleporting invisible cameras.

That is of course, provided the new ingame camera proves to be what it at least appeard to be in the livestream: An invisible entity to be placed at will within or outside of the ship near instantaneously. We'd be talking if there were actual cameras flying around ingame.

I'm not enforcing anybody to perceive the game my way, like others seems to do. I'm just trying to bring some possible explanation for some in-game mechanics.
If somebody wants to believe ED is part "pixie dust magic" , that's fine for me. If someone's only and final arguments are like: "it's just a game", "I don't care about the lore stuff", "I'm just pressing buttons to change the color of some of my screen's pixels, like in excel", I respect that too, that's their way of playing the game and having fun.

Regarding the "invisible" drones: maybe the HUD blanks out unimportant objects in space like tiny camera drones. I could live with that.

 

[Jason S]

Just saw the muti-crew looks great, especially the gunner.

 

[Winterwalker]

That is of course, provided the new ingame camera proves to be what it at least appeard to be in the livestream: An invisible entity to be placed at will within or outside of the ship near instantaneously. We'd be talking if there were actual cameras flying around ingame.

Yes. If you laid a number of small cameras in the hull, you could easily composite the external gunner view.

For an example look at Bullet Time, the filming method used for the Matrix.

[video=youtube;bKEcElcTUMk]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKEcElcTUMk[/video]

 

[mossfoot]

It's almost as if people sheepishly assume this is their second pretend space person life and everything in it has to be real. 'Sheepish', because apparently our favorite space pretend second life has speed limits in space, hull life bars and all that jazz, which all goes unquestioned.

Explaining things becomes a lot easier, if you adopt the RP of being an Earth ca. 2017 a.d. person, playing a fantasy space game for recreation on their gaming machine of choice. It's highly immersive and helps to fill all glaring holes the game leaves with a simple "it's a game" explanation. Who knows? It might also lead to people actually criticially evaluating game design, rather than sheepishly insisting that things have to or may not be there for "muh immershun" and excuse every glaring flaws away the same way.


Have we already a pathetic wannabe in-universe immersive fictional lore explanation for the external camera allowing for general ship control? Because our pretend second life space persons only see this fantasy world through their own pretend space person eyes, there can't be third person view, can it? That would be immuhrsion sacrilege and totally not a simple flaw of the game since release! It could not under any circumstances possibly be that we're playing a game that wants to let us oogle at our real cash payed ship paints, right? No, there must be some consistent in universe horse poo explanation. External automated drone with limited range, projecting their camera image to the pilot's retina or something. Oh, that's a fine explanation! I'll just imagine that's the case everytime I play the game. Can you feel the immuhrsion?

No offence, but your attitude sucks just as bad as your fanatical "'mursion" targets. You're just as wrong as they are.

Okay, some offence. But I'm Canadian, so I apologize.

 

[jibbercluck]

Just saw the muti-crew looks great, especially the gunner.

cant believe they didn't show anyone being in the SRV while the ship was being piloted and another in a ship launched fighter too - if this isn't possible then i am going to be very disappointed in multi-crew - also need to be able to hot swap between roles if you are playing in solo player mode (not just to GUNNER for example but from SRV to SHIP to FIGHTER too...) otherwise it is just too limiting what they are trying to do ;(

 

[Lokus Midgard]

They did point out the surface vehicle was not configured for crew.

And, no, that external view could not be configured by an array of external cameras on the hull. By definition, it's placed a certain distance away from the ship. Not that it matters - they should really have just left it as an out-of-character external view, like every other game. That whole 'signal lost' thing is illogical.

 

[Winterwalker]

And, no, that external view could not be configured by an array of external cameras on the hull. By definition, it's placed a certain distance away from the ship.

You sure? .. A 3302 computer couldn't layer in a model of the ship on the gunsight?

That whole 'signal lost' thing is illogical.

Camera Suite is a bit different I grant you but haven't heard all that many complaints about the debug cam we have now. 'Signal lost' is to avoid looking out, from inside solid objects, which apart from anything else (clipping) just looks 'orrible. Very neat programming, to tie it into the collision system, I thought.

 

[ZeroAi]

After watching the second stream I have to say multi-crew looks like fun!

I know some out there think it's garbage because friends can join "instantly" no matter where they are, but I like it that way and can't wait to try it out, as well as the Commander Creator (Holo-me just sounds wrong) and other new features.

That said, hopefully someday FD will give the "ultra-realistic" crowd their own servers so they will have:
- no insta-transfers when playing multi-crew!
- no insta-repair for ships! You get to wait at least a week for all your repairs! Good thing you have more than one ship!
- no insta-refueling - this would probably take 10 minutes so go read GalNet or something.
- no insta-reloading! This could really take hours if you have a lot of weapons. Maybe you could switch ships and do something else while you wait?
- no insta-paint jobs! How fast can you paint a starship in 3303? I have no idea, but 2 seconds seems too fast!
- no insta-installing of parts! Yeah, we just ripped out your cargo bay and installed a first class cabin is say, 2 seconds? Not! Sounds like another week worth of waiting...
And the worse offender,
- no insta-reincarnation! On the realism server once you're dead, you're dead period!!! But we're not cruel, you can respawn as a relative and inherit all your ships and cash, but things like rep are gone since, well you're dead!

Fly Safe Commanders! Especially if you're on the (future?) Realism Servers!!!

o7

 

[dubsdj]

I liked everything I saw except a couple of things: 1. The gunner role. The gunner should be in a turret not zoomed out in the middle of nowhere...I just cannot see the logic with that, It would be nice to be sat in a turret moving 360 degrees instead of floating. Does the gunner get ejected into a floating gunship? 2. Also thought I would add that I like the faces in the chat but I thought it would be cool if the character generation could have been used to generate persistent NPC character faces. I thought the tech was in there already so why not use that? OK if the same face is used 1 in 100 times, so be it , nobody would probably notice.

Anyway very impressed otherwise, great work guys.

 

[bitstorm]

I liked everything I saw except a couple of things: 1. The gunner role. The gunner should be in a turret not zoomed out in the middle of nowhere...I just cannot see the logic with that, It would be nice to be sat in a turret moving 360 degrees instead of floating. 2. Also thought I would add that I like the faces in the chat but I thought it would be cool if the character generation could have been used to generate persistent NPC character faces. I thought the tech was in there already so why not use that?

Anyway very impressed otherwise, great work guys.

Trouble is the turret won't be stationary. Your gunnery experience will involve non-stop fighting against an your pilot in order to hit your target. I can't see this being anything but frustrating.

 

[Winterwalker]

Trouble is the turret won't be stationary. Your gunnery experience will involve non-stop fighting against an your pilot in order to hit your target. I can't see this being anything but frustrating.

I don't know that's true. I think the turret camera is (an advanced targetting systen) independent of ship movements. Would have to rewatch the stream to be 100% sure but the fella on the weapons was targetting and shooting just fine (with Sandy flying .. make of that what you will, I'm mentioning no names).

 

[dubsdj]

The whole telepresence thing, I do kind of get that... It is plausible that you are just sat in your home on a random planet (with an internet connection) in the future and teleprecence yourself anywhere you want. This is the year 3000 something and I can see that sort of thing being quite possible. Infact I think that could be a nice twist to the game if the truth comes out. However the only gotcha would be why spend 3 weeks of your life travelling to Colonia edit: Oh and landing on an un-explored planet and exploring it as a telepresence.. Can't explain that LOL

 

[Lokus Midgard]

Camera Suite is a bit different I grant you but haven't heard all that many complaints about the debug cam we have now. 'Signal lost' is to avoid looking out, from inside solid objects, which apart from anything else (clipping) just looks 'orrible. Very neat programming, to tie it into the collision system, I thought.

Just have the camera not capable of moving beyond a certain range - which this, in effect, is already doing. Simple. No need for 'signal lost'. The only interpretation of that message is to assume there are teleporting - and invisible - drone cameras.

Frontier claim they don't like to over-complicate matters and want to adhere to realism, but the methods they often opt for wind up doing the opposite of both.

The whole telepresence thing, I do kind of get that... It is plausible that you are just sat in your home on a random planet (with an internet connection) in the future and teleprecence yourself anywhere you want. This is the year 3000 something and I can see that sort of thing being quite possible. Infact I think that could be a nice twist to the game if the truth comes out. However the only gotcha would be why spend 3 weeks of your life travelling to Colonia edit: Oh and landing on an un-explored planet and exploring it as a telepresence.. Can't explain that LOL

From what I understand, it's only meant to represent pilots who suddenly apepar on your ship. You, yourself, are not remotely flying the ship - otherwise there'd be no requirement for life support or even a cockpit.

This method, however, feels pointless. If it's truly meant to represent other human beings, then why would they need to have a holographic representation physically sitting in a chair? Seems surplus to requirements. They might as well have left the likeness generator until they bring in the ability to walk around environments.

I'm now more interested in the allegedly important unknown content which was alluded to.

 

[zackmck]

After watching the second stream I have to say multi-crew looks like fun!

I know some out there think it's garbage because friends can join "instantly" no matter where they are, but I like it that way and can't wait to try it out, as well as the Commander Creator (Holo-me just sounds wrong) and other new features.

That said, hopefully someday FD will give the "ultra-realistic" crowd their own servers so they will have:
- no insta-transfers when playing multi-crew!
- no insta-repair for ships! You get to wait at least a week for all your repairs! Good thing you have more than one ship!
- no insta-refueling - this would probably take 10 minutes so go read GalNet or something.
- no insta-reloading! This could really take hours if you have a lot of weapons. Maybe you could switch ships and do something else while you wait?
- no insta-paint jobs! How fast can you paint a starship in 3303? I have no idea, but 2 seconds seems too fast!
- no insta-installing of parts! Yeah, we just ripped out your cargo bay and installed a first class cabin is say, 2 seconds? Not! Sounds like another week worth of waiting...
And the worse offender,
- no insta-reincarnation! On the realism server once you're dead, you're dead period!!! But we're not cruel, you can respawn as a relative and inherit all your ships and cash, but things like rep are gone since, well you're dead!

Fly Safe Commanders! Especially if you're on the (future?) Realism Servers!!!

o7

Would be awesome if such a hardcore mode exists. If your decisions have far greater consequences, the game itself would feel much more intense.
If you risk an hour of repair you would think twice about boosting recklessly out of the mail slot. There's more planning ahead involved when trading, if loading time have to be taken into account. And combat would be a real challenge if you could lose everything with one wrong decision.
One could pretend all this to be a reality in today's ED but pretending is not the same as real restriction. Everybody could have pretended Sothis/Ceo and other bugs or imbalances never existed. But most of us did do some cash with it.
But to bad this will probably never happen. Most of todays gamers are just in for a quick reward without a challenge. Thank you EA for spoiling generations of gamers.

Stream was good though and at least there will be some addition to other gameplay aspect beside combat as well. I wonder how turret mining lasers will work in solo? Is that a hint for the option to be a gunner in solo as well?

 

[ocflyer]

I liked everything I saw except a couple of things: 1. The gunner role. The gunner should be in a turret not zoomed out in the middle of nowhere...I just cannot see the logic with that, It would be nice to be sat in a turret moving 360 degrees instead of floating. Does the gunner get ejected into a floating gunship? 2. Also thought I would add that I like the faces in the chat but I thought it would be cool if the character generation could have been used to generate persistent NPC character faces. I thought the tech was in there already so why not use that? OK if the same face is used 1 in 100 times, so be it , nobody would probably notice.

Anyway very impressed otherwise, great work guys.

Have you ever seen the Babylon 5 episode aboard the Minbari cruiser in the situation room with a 3D holographic view of the action around the ship? Standing in the room made you feel like you were floating in space outside the ship, directing the friendly ships to specific targets. The gunner role seems very similar. Very cool.