NPC pilot: "Here are my qualifications as an SLF pilot"
Me: (Crumples Resume) "Don't care. Let me see your face."
A chance saving your carrier crew faces, and how FDev might restore them:
- Thread starter Khunvyel
- Start date
NPC pilot: "Here are my qualifications as an SLF pilot"
Me: (Crumples Resume) "Don't care. Let me see your face."
Let's be real here, they have zero individual skill stats of importance other than their pilot rating and how much money they are stealing from me, the least they can do is look good while doing it.NPC pilot: "Here are my qualifications as an SLF pilot"
Me: (Crumples Resume) "Don't care. Let me see your face."
I don't know, but you can always orchestrate a "Rerolling FC Crew Friday" on here and Reddit and see if you can force FDev to revert the changes by DDOS-ing their infrastructure with crew rerolls.
NPC pilot: "Here are my qualifications as an SLF pilot"
Me: (Crumples Resume) "Don't care. Let me see your face."
Yeap, that me too...
They have 2 stats of interest to me.
Looks
Voice (Accent)
Apparently they fixed the lose of Accent after relog as per U11 patch notes.
I have to check that - i always hunted for the ones with the British accent, only to have it reverted to the plain US accent after the first relog
I cannot give you a 100% definitive answer, but I'll stick to my 98%+ educated guesstimate; they very much used a truncated version of the holo-me render for Carrier and fighter crew. Yes, the END result was a flat image, but the way they got there was through a portion of the holo-me pipeline.
It is unlikely that these are just "pre-baked" image files that the server loads, there is a high chance they use the render engine to output these things one way or the other, as I mentioned in the technical mumbojumbo spoiler.
Sadly I do not have an Odyssey image from my carrier crew, or rather it's not an easy find. Maybe someone else can provide images from their carrier crew pre-and-post Odyssey release last year. This is where you would see how these images got re-rendered. However. I don't need carrier crew images because fighter crew images just prove that. There you have the exact same character model, but it looks different between the two clients, and it's not just lighting. The same goes for everyone other faction NPC portrait in stations you get missions from. You still see it is the same character generation, the same "seed" for the character, it's just a different render pipeline based on the client.
It could have something to do with optimization. Maybe a prebaked "definition" for a character to load causes much less performance strains and is easier to cook up in the engine than using randomized stuff all the time. Especially since even if they were truly randomized, most of that stuff has to remain semi-permanent when instances are reloaded (disconnects / settlements / stations / etc) as well as multiplayer sync. So it has to be saved somewhere. Might as well as not just go through the hassle right now, because we do know how messy the netcode is for Elite Dangerous
So a fixed seed that can be predefined, maybe even client sided, to then load the characters is certainly easier to digest at least on one level. This is why I suppose they are not going with the full holo-me treatments for all the things.
That being said; carrier services are much more personal than random NPCs with a helmet on running around on a settlement that nobody gives two thoughts about. Therefore, I would hope that the carrier services receive more priority in the love for customization.
That. Since we already can save commander portraits, we should be able to... "surgically adapt" the crew we hire
Case and point for my stats:
Crew Hired: 650
Crew Fired: 648
But that's only me. I see our good StenKIRA has gotten much more lead into that game
The amount of time that could be SAVED when we just could adapt the crew to our desires would be indeed well appreciated...
Imagine how excited I have been everytime they "HAD" to re-roll npc images... I also need a tracker for FC crew churn-rate...
That. Since we already can save commander portraits, we should be able to... "surgically adapt" the crew we hire
Case and point for my stats:
Crew Hired: 650
Crew Fired: 648
But that's only me. I see our good StenKIRA has gotten much more lead into that game
The amount of time that could be SAVED when we just could adapt the crew to our desires would be indeed well appreciated...
You can use a code system to make 2d model just like you can for a 3d. That's what a lot of game use, under the hood (or not).
IE : slider 1 at 6 is coded as a6. That kind of stuff.
And it's much easier if it's just a collection of assets glued together (IE face 3 + hair 5+uniform2). As it seems to have been.
You really don't have to put images if you don't want to.
Some of those hairstyles are not available in the holo-me editor.
I'll say this for the FC portraits. It demonstrates that the portraits we have can/are converted into actual 3D characters.
This provides some hope that FD might, one day, if the stars align, and Jupiter enters Venus, we might one day see our NPC crew in our spare seats on our ships.
This provides some hope that FD might, one day, if the stars align, and Jupiter enters Venus, we might one day see our NPC crew in our spare seats on our ships.
Unlike the station NPCs, carrier NPCs are currently a fixed number and always in the same places. We already have nine save slots in the holo-me editor. It should be possible to make all the avatars of a carrier editable without overwhelming the database. After all it's just a bunch of settings and slider positions that need to be stored. These are likely smaller than the pre-rendered thumbnail pictures used before.
It would be a nice way to personalize a carrier. And since the holo-me editor is already in the game anyway, the amount of programming to make this work should be manageable. FDev could even monetize it by offering various crew uniform designs in the ARX store: Federal, Imperial, Allied, Independent, Outlaw, etc. That's the kind of stuff I would actually spend ARX on, rather than goofy snowman helmets and bobble heads.
That's what I was trying to say with the "truncated" version of the render pipeline, yes. It's interesting how there can be many nuances found, especially with the eyes. So it might just as well be "glued together" at some point, it's just the basis for those parts have been the original render pipeline. They are not "artistic renditions", that's my entire point. They were taken at some point from the same core render engine which is used for the specific clients. If not, then Odyssey would not have different portraits for mission givers and crew members, etc.
Yeah ...
sad story of a friend of mine; his main pilot, Kinley Olzon, Elite Fighter and worth way more than 1 billion was killed PERMANENTLY due to a bug in the system when Odyssey was fresh. The crewmember was not reimbursed. Despite ticket, including recreated video evidence of how one could show this is a problem, our dear "friend" Kinley, who was the topic of many a game session, was not able to be recovered. Likely because he started digging for new characters after a while, so at the time when Fdev was able to recover the recent "drop-offs", she was already overwritten and therefore not able to be recovered.
Which is why I am so urging to anyone who wants to get their crew back to NOT DO ANYTHING with them.
Also, StenKIRA, in your image you show that you have 5 active crewmembers. I suppose FDev threw you some back and therefore you have now more than 3, right? Which would corroborate what I said about the crew members. Because at some point I couldn't hire any crew member since my last slot was filled, only to find out there are now 5 crew members instead of 2 in my roster.
Isn't it only one, the shoulder-long side part for women? Also one of the big mysteries as to why that one doesn't get pulled back into the game.
Precisely my argument, yes. There are far less carriers than players (let's say, 4000 registered carriers?) and each carrier has to save less "portraits" than a station with the average 7 faction. Yet on the contrary, each player can have up to 500 ships and each of them being fully decked with modules? For real now? That's not a trivial amount of data saved and we have a ton more players than we have flee carriers (the ton even being literally).
I would like to know from Fdev database specs, what the save-state sizes are for which part of the account relevant data.
A thousand times that. The variety of clothing seen in mission givers on stations is kind of hysterial, when one looks at what little variations we can wear ourselves...
Odyssey mission giver are still not met in the flesh. They didn't need to update their portraits.
Engineer didn't get an update to their portrait, but they don't always look similar to their Odyssey persona. So I assume it's just a case of not being bothered and complicate things. Especially since Horizon engineer base are basically a waste of time.They have 1 room and nothing to do.
Engineers are the only horizon portrait we can meet in the flesh AFAIK.
You can have literal dozen of entirely customized NPC per character in Star Trek Online, and it's an old MMO.
If the database and ways to store their datas is not atrocious, it would not be an issue. But then it's Fdev, so who knows ?
Maybe it's the way they store and retrieve data, maybe having a bunch of differently clothed and equipped tanked the FPS even more. It could be anything and so far they didn't seem to bother to explain why this was changed, just that they were sorry that they didn't inform us beforehand.
Honestly, I'm certain it's because those were not 3d models. It makes a lot of sense.
Look how different Horizon engineer (on ground) look to their portraits. For the most part. Horizon NPC where never meant to be seen in 3d, they look different. Odyssey NPC we meet look another way. And those are literally the only Horizon NPC we can meet in Odyssey. All the other are "hidden".
It's fairly normal in game dev. And it was used elsewhere. Look at the horrible looking/oversized stair. It was always meant to be seen from afar, so they didn't bother. It is true for other ships as well.
It's a simple rule I wish they used for occlusion culling. If it's not meant to be seen, don't bother.
They didn't bother to tell us because they didn't think it was important. I honestly don't think it is myself, but I can understand that some people kept rerolling until they had
That or the CMs simply didn't get to hear that. Or maybe they thought they told us already. Or maybe they were sleeping like the rest of the galaxy.
This is in parts not entirely accurate. Yes they do look different (sometimes even VERY different) from their portrait when met in the flesh. But the portraits absolutely changed for Odyssey. There is no way to deny that. They have two different sets of portraits, one for the Horizon engine, one for the Odyssey engine. They wouldn't need to do that if they stored images server-side, so there is some generation going on at some part. Same for all the faction contacts in stations. Case and point, images;
(( also, tiny edit; technically, there are mission givers in Odyssey which we only meet on foot, as well as in stations and on settlements, but that's not likely what you meant, just had to point it out
))This is Marsha Hicks in Horizons and Odyssey. Immediately noticeable, vast differences all around. And I intentionally picked Marsha because those portraits are more alike than others, but even with this likeness, there are big differences.
Same goes for all the other engineers. In the highlighted case, Lori Jameson. Not even the color of the jacket is the same. You can see the background is meant to be the same, but is differently rendered plus having a different field of view. Those are absolute and grave differences between Horizons and Odyssey Portraits, even for engineers, which are only a handful unique portraits. They used the Odyssey render to pre-create those images just like they used the horizon render to pre-create the images on the other client. The differences are palpable.
The main takeaway being; they decided to redo something that wasn't necessary to redo, but they did it anyway. Why? To be "compliant" with the game render? To prepare for future endeavors for the client? We won't know. Although the implication of what current crew portraits are having on the current state of affairs is quite the lookout for that. Who knows, maybe it's planned that at some point we will meet the faction contacts in their offices, and they will look as intended? It would be nice, but that's so far down the road, it's (pardon the pun) behind the Horizon.
Well it's a poor comparison to start with, even if we just look at the numbers being used. Elite Dangerous has an incredibly large dataset to pull from. double-digit million star systems which are mapped therefore saving not only the seed but also the readable data when a player reaches for the starmap, eighty thousand factions, a multiple of that as contact NPCs, and each faction has a different state and values per system they are present in, 41-thousand dockable orbital stations, each with their own market and module data, 120-thousand ground stations, hourly updated traffic reports from each and every system that has a station presence in which can be read by any player who docked..., the aforementioned hundreds of possible ships one can store, fully loaded out, therefore exceeding a multiple of the 200 module limit which can be stored just as is... and that's just a cursory glance at things taken at a sentence's breath. Not even exhaustive measures. The datasets we talk about are not trivial, and yes I know a thing or two about keeping value entries short and clean to keep overall database size down, including variable type allocation.
So far, I can't say if performance or datasets are the bigger issue, but they certainly both play a part in how smooth the experience is. I suppose in time we will get prettier, more detailed stuff. What people often forget is, that when Horizons hit, we didn't even have an option to customize our Commander. That came in a later chapter of Horizons, patch 2.3 in 2017.
Yes, most of what we can do is only conjecture, yet given the circumstances we can make fairly educated guesses. I do wonder why Fdev didn't quite nerd out about this stuff like Eve online devs do, because the dataset management alone is quite an alluring topic. I am more concerned about the idea that someone thought this is a nonissue. Because even if they said "sorry we are aware of it, we fix it later" there would absolutely have been people who would've went in to try and reroll their crew, not reading the message.
I personally don't think there will be a fix for that soon, but I just hope that some day the rerolls are going to be "proper" and the graphical changes are retroactive for those who stuck with their carrier crew in good faith. That being said, this hope isn't big and also fairly far away, yet the more people know about it and talk about it, the better. That's the only way to get results.
Because clearly, this is a design choice made for a limited amount of players. Sure they want to push their carrier numbers, but the truth of the matter is, this is not looking like a great sales pitch to get people buying their "portable home station" and a slap in the face for those who already owned carriers. There is only so much a disgruntled people can handle before they turn away again.
The depressed look on that awake commander's face on the left is just so perfect