A new perspective..
- Thread starter Mole HD
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- sidewinder
This video is awesome. Sadly, scale is fundamentally wrong in the game so I doubt this could ever be really done in it. The moment you stood up and wanted to walk around a ship (either inside or outside of it) the immersion would immediately fall apart. In-game graphics simply don't have enough details to support such scale and cockpit sizes are fundamentally wrong.
Nicely done little animation. Isn't there some kind of fan project using the Unreal engine? Wondering if this is from that.
I've never imagined the Sidey to be much more than a pilot seat with the thrusters bolted on.
Mr D Page makes a very valid point, IMHO. At times scale is lost, but without that imbalance some items would be unseeable to the user.
Would love to see more of some of the larger ships. But just that little Sidey is probably several days work if not longer.
I've never imagined the Sidey to be much more than a pilot seat with the thrusters bolted on.
Mr D Page makes a very valid point, IMHO. At times scale is lost, but without that imbalance some items would be unseeable to the user.
Would love to see more of some of the larger ships. But just that little Sidey is probably several days work if not longer.
On behalf of the people who already have walked around and in their ships: you are completely wrong on every count.
In game graphics don't have enough detail? You don't think so?
I'm on xbox one and I think they look great up close. What's your ship called, the 'Expectations of Crysis'?
I was kicking around some random planetary base the other evening. One of those ones with surface drilling rigs. I got right up to a bunker in my SRV and had a close look at it with the external camera. I was amazed and thought 'wow that amount of detail is kinda wasted if we can't get up and use it one day' - (or thoughts to that effect)
I'm on xbox one and I think they look great up close. What's your ship called, the 'Expectations of Crysis'?
I was kicking around some random planetary base the other evening. One of those ones with surface drilling rigs. I got right up to a bunker in my SRV and had a close look at it with the external camera. I was amazed and thought 'wow that amount of detail is kinda wasted if we can't get up and use it one day' - (or thoughts to that effect)
What's wrong about the cockpit sizes, apart from often being an impractical waste of space (e.g. Orca, Beluga, Corvette, Python and FDL, arguably, and so on)?
Having done the climbing aboard my own ships in another title...and recognising that there's a lot more to space legs outside of shooting other folks in the face...
I dream of an E-D where this is a reality...Can you imagine living inside your own Anaconda or Cutter? I can...
On topic... but via another perspective...
I dream of an E-D where this is a reality...Can you imagine living inside your own Anaconda or Cutter? I can...
On topic... but via another perspective...
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Having done the climbing aboard my own ships in another title...and recognising that there's a lot more to space legs outside of shooting other folks in the face...
I dream of an E-D where this is a reality...Can you imagine living inside your own Anaconda or Cutter? I can...
On topic... but via another perspective...
That's just the thing, I'm afraid that once we do get legs in ED it'll be nothing more then sightseeing in your ship and shoot some stuff/things.
Play the game in VR, the scale is truely awesome.
Dude... where's the lavatory?
Yeah, I look around my annie's cockpit and see a lot of space that should have something practical in it.....
stormyuk
Volunteer Moderator
Just what you said. And if we were able to stand up and walk around in those spaces, it would become apparent how ridiculous they are. The problem, at least in my opinion, is this: the cockpits in Elite have been designed so that from the pilot's point of view (sitting in the seat) you feel like you're surrounded by displays and equipment. The way you open up the side panels, the main HUD, even the different equipment on the sides of the cockpit look like they are right next to/in front of you. How you perceive the cockpit is very similar to fighter jet cockpits, which I'm sure was the intent. More importantly, everything looks close enough that you could reach them with your hands.
But in reality, these elements are extremely far away from the character, who sits in a seat literally meters away from everything, in the middle of a huge empty space. The instruments and displays you feel surround you are very far, the holographic displays light up from meters from you but they are so big that from the character's point of view they look close. And I think this difference is because of how the game handles scale, and how even the ships themselves have been designed. Ship exteriors, which look like simple fighter jets (the Eagle for example) are, in fact, consisting of overly huge cockpit windows and the bigger ships are even "worse". While a Cutter resembles, by its shape and body/windshield ratio, a passenger jet plane, in reality is made of extremely oversized windows and internal spaces.
The other problem I have with scale in the game is detail, or the lack of it. Look at, say, a landing pad from 1000 m distance. It doesn't really feel like it's a kilometer away. It looks like 80-100m at best. Why? Because graphics are not detailed enough. In real life you perceive distance and size by seeing the very small details. You can make a difference between a close but small object and a far but huge object, even though they would appear the same size, because you can see extremely small details on the large object, giving the impression of size, and also atmospheric distortion/occlusion. This is missing from the game, giving the impression that everything is much smaller and closer than what the game actually tells you. I stop in front of another ship by 100 meters (according to the game) but physically it looks like she's right in my face. The perception of distance and size is just not right. Also, within stations there is very little atmospheric distortion. You look up, it's a 1 kilometer docking bay in diameter but it just doesn't look like the "ceiling" is 1 kilometer high. It looks like 50-60 m. The best thing there giving some impression of scale are the very tiny handlebars around landing pads, giving you some sense of how huge everything else is. But it's just not enough in my opinion.
This is very similar to when they make miniatures for movies. They have to be extremely detailed so when they are shot on film they look like huge mountains etc. If the model is not detailed enough then you can see it's small. The same applies to virtual worlds. Of course, this is a technical limitation as well which is hard to overcome but still, this is what I mean by saying "scale is wrong".
I don't really have much of a problem with that relative scale conceit.
The ships themselves are almost a kind of sci-fantasy middle-ground, between what might be functional, and what our sentimental idea of a spaceship is. In that context, nothing about their internal scaling really matters, because realism clearly isn't the main guiding star. If it was, then these ships wouldn't look anything like they do, and their interiors would represent proper zero-G workspaces instead of romanticised artificial-G ship/plane interiors.
The nitpicky rabbit hole is possibly bottomless... How are the pilots staying in their seats without harnesses? Why is there such a bias towards whacking great rear 'main' thrusters, when going very fast on just one axis in a vacuum (or low-G) is kinda pointless, and will cause you more problems? Why is there any sense of inertia and momentum during FTL flight, when the warp bubble has no properties of mass and conventional acceleration? How do the pilots withstand the forces of the glide stage (especially as they don't have harnesses... )?
Then there's the fundamental violation of basic Newtonian mechanics. Constantly increasing in speed with applied force would be a bit much, sure, but I don't see why they can't at least allow you to maintain boost velocity if you go FA-off or cut thrusters (on a very nerdy point, that'd make more bodies in the game genuinely viable for true orbital insertion).
So yeah, when the outsides, the insides, and the very flight behaviour are so romanticised, UI player scaling isn't much of an issue for me.
Also, as for--
Why assume the pilot always needs to physically interact with them? The gloves seem to have haptic sensors, but there's no reason other combinations of technology can't relate more to gestural interaction (or eye tracking, or fancier cybernetic technologies). As you say, the station services, et al, panels are nowhere near the pilot's hands. But do they have to be? Do you think the pilot would lean forward and tap Station Services or Launch? Either contact isn't necessary, or the designs are simply expressions of interaction that suit it being a videogame (the pilot model never moves their hands from the throttle and stick during panel interactions), which would be perfectly understandable. Elite is [unfortunately] not a simulation.
So maybe we agree there are issues, but I kinda don't see most of them as issues to be concerned or overly critical about - they are just design choices befitting a romanticised game. I might prefer more realism, but that wasn't FDev's intent, and it is their product, so I have to accept it for what it is, as opposed to what I'd prefer it to be.
That isn't really an issue with the game or level of detail (the Xbox can't even handle detailed renders of ships within range of the camera, i.e. there are insane levels of LoD pop-in. bump up the detail, and there'd be no real change on any sense of perspective/distance), it's the medium. Plus, experienced in VR people always tell a very different story.
As for a speculative future for the game where we get to walk around our ships; who know what they'll change, if anything. They'll not change the flight model, nor the exteriors, so I don't see why they'd change the interiors. Perhaps they'll just be economical, and shove more assets and 'stuff' into those gigantic oversize bridges, perhaps as terminals for some form of player interaction.
I do want space-legs, but I don't at all envy FDev trying to find ways to implement it and make it truly meaningful. They can't tether certain functions and actions to out-of-seat nodes/panels, but if there's nothing unique about the cockpit or ship interaction points, then there's no point to leave the flightchair, ergo no reason to walk around your ship.
I don't want some stock FPS model bolted onto the game, as it'll likely be fairly bad or at least horribly simplistic. And yet given FDev's obsession with 'shooting stuff' being a key interaction mode (shoot at ships, shoot at stuff when mining, shoot at Guardian sites, shoot at Guardian beacons, shoot from your SRV to harvest mats, and so on), if they don't include shooting stuff on-foot I'm not sure they'll be able to think of anything else...
Either way, I'm sure the final result will be both amazing and yet have some very 'interesting' design decisions.