Ahh well, it turns out he was just guessing. I suppose we are back to wondering about the particulars.
97% of Viewers (Players?) Want Ship Interiors!
- Thread starter Obsidian Ant
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SC has not worked out the bugs created by ship interiors in a multiplayer space sim after almost a decade of development. As soon as you have multiple ships with interiors in an area, you have complex 3-D assets that are rotating and translating independently, which is not a feature of buildings in FPS. Unless the engine rebuild supports this out of the box, the development might be a comparable rebuild time as Odyssey.
They could cheat and only have ship interiors when docked, but that will not please a lot of people - particularly explorers.
There’s the interior assets for 30 ships and all the module types, which will keep asset designers busy. They can only do a small part of the interior, but people are not going to be completely satisfied with that.
In any event, if FDev could rebuild the engine to support ship interiors in just a few months, why don’t they? Do you think they get psychic satisfaction from the salty tears from forum posters?
The question is actually if there is any acceleration while traveling in supercruise, as the compression/decompression of space is what "moves" your ship. So as long as you are traveling in a straight line, there should be no acceleration effects even though you are reaching higher compression factors. Travel in real space (a.k.a not supercruise or hyperjump) would be a different matter, as any speed change would be incurring acceleration effects.
So I could imagine walking around while your ship is traveling in supercruise or when it is at rest in real space or moving at a set speed. That could give you something to do on long flights. In APEX taxis, with their sudden course changes and slidey maneuvers, I imagine that we would be smacking into a wall, floor or roof constantly.
My wild guess is that they could not get rid of fade to black without re-engineering large parts of the foundational tech in the game. It could be one of those loose ends you pull on which unravels the entire tapestry of the game.
Lets take just one aspect of 'ship interiors' that he previously alluded to: overlapping physics grids. In short, the idea is that you are in a spaceship (with its own physics grid), that itself is moving in a larger physics grid. How to deal with this?
1) Only allow walking in ships when the ship cant move, AKA a 'static level'. At this point the ship doesnt need its own physics grid. This would be the case when you can only walk in crashed ships, or docked/landed ships. Think Mass Effect. This is the easiest, and at this point a 'ship interior' is not much different from a random building or set of rooms.
2) Always allow walking in ships, and 'hand over' the player between different grids when needed. This is not trivial to do. Star Citizen has been trying to add this to CryEngine for literally almost a decade and it is still extremely buggy. In this case the player frequently just dies, or gets catapulted 100000 km or whatever when you leave a grid or when grids need to interact. This is the 'doing it realistically' options that studios typically try to avoid at all costs because it is a huge amount of effort for relatively little gain.
3) Always allow walking in ships, but complete separate the interior/exterior. This is how Warframe 'fakes' it. You are in your own little level, and the 'outside' is at best projected on the windows but not 'really there'. This might seem to be the best of both words, but it does bring limitations (you can really shoot from outside a ship at someone inside, for example) and makes concepts like 'boarding' tricky as you need to hide a loading screen somewhere. This is the 'intelligently fake everything' design school, which is generally considered a very good approach if you want to get a lot of 'bang for your devbucks'.
So already just one choice could add many, many years to the development, shorten it drastically or create further interesting design choices. If you want to seamlessly enter the interior of an Anaconda wrecked and floating in space, and the ship is spinning/pushable, that is not easy to do. If you drop the need for 'seamless loading' and its okay to just load at some entry point it becomes vastly easier. So it is impossible to estimate anything at all. But I can say that if someone were to argue FD would definitely need to go for #2 and definitely only add 'cosmetic stuff', that person is simply painting a worst-case design scenario for obvious ulterior motives. Which is really not needed.
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Actually, I have suggested a number of times the possibility of modelling only a few rooms within each ship. There is no need to map out every cubic centimeter of the ship all at once. You could start with introducing bridges. Later on, maybe include living quarters, ship's lockers, engineering section, SRV bay. The rooms that are not likely to change much if at all. This could save an enormous amount of time in terms of when we see the initial release, and then, if Frontier decides that it was worth it, they could go further. If it's not worth it, they could stop at bridges and cut their losses.
Wow. Thanks for adding these ideas. I never even considered these kinds of implementations and it's good to add these to the discussion. I have to do some more thinking about this now.....Lets take just one aspect of 'ship interiors' that he previously alluded to: overlapping physics grids. In short, the idea is that you are in a spaceship (with its own physics grid), that itself is moving in a larger physics grid. How to deal with this?
1) Only allow walking in ships when the ship cant move, AKA a 'static level'. At this point the ship doesnt need its own physics grid. This would be the case when you can only walk in crashed ships, or docked/landed ships. Think Mass Effect. This is the easiest, and at this point a 'ship interior' is not much different from a random building or set of rooms.
2) Always allow walking in ships, and 'hand over' the player between different grids when needed. This is not trivial to do. Star Citizen has been trying to add this to CryEngine for literally almost a decade and it is still extremely buggy. In this case the player frequently just dies, or gets catapulted 100000 km or whatever when you leave a grid or when grids need to interact. This is the 'doing it realistically' options that studios typically try to avoid at all costs because it is a huge amount of effort for relatively little gain.
3) Always allow walking in ships, but complete separate the interior/exterior. This is how Warframe 'fakes' it. You are in your own little level, and the 'outside' is at best projected on the windows but not 'really there'. This might seem to be the best of both words, but it does bring limitations (you can really shoot from outside a ship at someone inside, for example) and makes concepts like 'boarding' tricky as you need to hide a loading screen somewhere. This is the 'intelligently fake everything' design school, which is generally considered a very good approach if you want to get a lot of 'bang for your devbucks'.
So already just one choice could add many, many years to the development, shorten it drastically or create further interesting design choices. If you want to seamlessly enter the interior of an Anaconda wrecked and floating in space, and the ship is spinning/pushable, that is not easy to do. If you drop the need for 'seamless loading' and its okay to just load at some entry point it becomes vastly easier. So it is impossible to estimate anything at all. But I can say that if someone were to argue FD would definitely need to go for #2 and definitely only add 'cosmetic stuff', that person is simply painting a worst-case design scenario for obvious ulterior motives. Which is really not needed.
If you check their roadmap you'll also find they are hoping to deliver 'T1 Stair Tech' at the end of 2021. Pretty sure FD managed to have stairs that do not kill you in EDO without needing 11 years of dev time. Maybe SC is not the best yardstick to guess how long something takes. Maybe that is because they are using a FPS engine from the PS3 era that was designed for very small but highly detailed maps for singleplayer shooters, not a huge multiplayer space game.
Dunno.
Oh yes, SC could totally be exempt of law of physics, so a good senseful place to wander inside your ship while it's moving. And yes that's my first thought when I tried Apex: "Haha, there'll be so much salt as Apex was making my brain yell 'I want to sit up!' like 2mn after the pilot FSD'ed"
Though what if you're out of your seat and SC assist ends? Or you're piloting and want to get out of SC but you crew mates are up and running inside?
If you are interested, there is a fun part about how Warframe devs added 'spaceflight' to what used to be 'static ship interiors' in this article: https://www.pcgamer.com/15-years-later-warframe-is-finally-close-to-realizing-its-original-vision/
The dev here clearly articulates what kind of 'faking' they did, and importantly, why. Its easily to fall in the 'Chris Roberts Trap' where you think you need to 'model reality' to get a 'realistic experience'. But that gets you absolutely nowhere, regardless of your budget. What you need to do is consider what kind of user experiences you want the players to have, precisely define them, and then think of the easiest/efficient way of creating that within the restraints imposed by the engine/etc you are using. And ideally you do so while taking into account what you want to do afterwards, next year, or even ten years from now. So you don't end up 'faking' something in a way that doesn't work for something else you want to do later on.
It is really fundamentally impossible for us outsiders to have any idea of the long list of considerations the devs face in this specific situation, and what kind of possible solutions are available to them. It could be there are so many limitations that it would take very long to accomplish very little. It could be that there is already a solid framework to relatively easily obtain interesting user experiences. Who knows.
So what we get to do is be mindful of the limitations of our perspective, and just say:"Yay, interiors be wicked cool!" or "Nay, interiors be super dull!".
Or, alternatively:"Interiors could be fun, other things could be fun too, only FD knows how much they get for their 'devbucks' for each possible feature and I'll just wait and see."
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Oh yes, SC could totally be exempt of law of physics, so a good senseful place to wander inside your ship while it's moving. And yes that's my first thought when I tried Apex: "Haha, there'll be so much salt as Apex was making my brain yell 'I want to sit up!' like 2mn after the pilot FSD'ed"
Though what if you're out of your seat and SC assist ends? Or you're piloting and want to get out of SC but you crew mates are up and running inside?
Depends upon the fact of whether a drop out of supercruise involves any sort of acceleration (positive or negative). If not, then it's no biggie. If it is then you'd smack into something, most likely the floor as you pivot around the magnetic boots stuck to the floor.
Right now, in Odyssey, people are clipping out of space stations in space, and they appear to be cheating with the station physics (everything rotates in a fixed fashion). In Star Citizen, players routinely clip out of their ships into space.
You just need a single rounding error from a calculation, and the player and the ship go their separate ways. Reducing the ship complexity presumably helps a bit, but the underlying issue remains.
If someone wants to just walk their bridge, just use VR.
Fdev did not spit out Horizons and Odyssey in a manner of months either.
It is clear that FDev’s Cobra engine was designed for ships, and is used for ground-based games. That doesn’t imply that it can magically solve the computational problems created by traversing multiple moving and rotating complex 3-D structures.
As I pointed out to someone else, if you really believe that FDev could just flip a switch and have working ship interiors, why didn’t they do that in Odyssey? Why do they have ship legs pencilled in as a major expansion, which implies 1-2 years development time (at least), as based on previous precedents?
Exactly this.
We`ll never know how well Frontier have been able to stick to their original plans in this regard, and what legacy design decisions are effective roadblocks to certain expansions.
No you dont. That's Frontiers Job. Your job is just to ask for what you want.
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Straw man.
It is used in all their games, ranging from 'ground based games' to 'galaxy based games'. You cannot determine anything whatsoever about what it can or cannot do, how it is build, or how easy it is to change/add/modify any aspect. You know literally nothing about any of it, none of us do.
Another straw man. Nobody talks about 'magically solving' anything. In fact, I even gave three general approaches to it with examples.
Another straw man. Nobody mentioned 'really believing' they could 'just flip a switch'. Bad faith disingenious nonsense like this is not needed at all.
Anyway, you just pretend to know things in an attempt to make the concept of ship interiors sound unreasonable. The simple truth is neither you nor anyone in this topic has any clue as to what either an interior DLC would contain, how much work it would entail, what gameplay it would enable, how useful it would be to which players and what alternative DLCs they could make it in that time. No clue at all.
So kindly just stop with the endless straw men fallacies, stop pretending you know how long it would take to create a DLC with an unknown featureset using an engine you also know little to nothing about and just stick with "I think interiors are for poopypants.". At least it'll just be an honest opinion without the fluff.
Pretty much. Fortunately for me I can easily imagine ship interiors to be fun, but I also can easily see atmo planets or more space-stuff being cool. So I dont have to worry my pretty little head about any of this stuff and can just let FD figure out what they should spend their resources on. Maybe there are, to us invisible, roadblocks that prevent them from doing interiors. Maybe not. Maybe they cannot render extensive flora on atmo planets beyond what EDO does. Maybe it is trivial. So instead of randomly yelling that what I like is possible and what others like would take a millions years and be stupid, I'll just let FD figure it out.
And last I checked I am not forced to buy their products, so the literal worst case scenario is that a company makes a DLC I dont enjoy. I'l llive.
This is the age-old problem of the customer attempting to step into the shoes of the delivery team. Many customers find this behaviour irresistible.
I see no reason to attach much weight to your theorycrafting or your attempts to handwave all the flaws in your logic as “strawmans.”
All that matters is FDev’s understanding of the situation. If they could make the changes in the engine to support it within 1-2 months, they would obviously do it. Maybe they did the work with Odyssey already, which is possible.
If they don’t that, that almost certainly means that they agree with my assessment of the time commitment: 1-2 years. We will find out by 2023.
Intersting usage of the word "assessment".
It's usually a problem when people learn a little about something but don't realise how much they yet don't know. Like when people learn words like 'netcode' and 'engine'.
It gets worse when companies leverage that such as with CIG, when they go full techno-babble to give their customers the idea they are understanding what happens.
"We've run into an issue implementing Tier-0 of our iCaching netcode as part of our global Server Meshing solution. Resolving this will help our physical grid inconsistencies when applying 64b precision computation to multi-server instancing."
Customer:"FD can't do ship interiors, I learned from CIG how many hurdles there are!"
Whatever hurdles truly exist is completely unconnected to this nonsense. At least I know that I don't know what I need to know to properly grasp the specific challenges FD faces.
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