add jump mini-game

[Darth Ender]

You seem very certain of what I want to do and how I derive my enjoyment of the game, and yet you're completely and utterly wrong.

If the current way the game treats travel in the game is how you enjoy games then I have to assume your only hope is to one day be the only one playing the game so you can rule the galaxy unopposed.

When the biggest time sink in the game is lacking any gameplay ...you can objectively improve it by adding almost anything. Nobody should want to do nothing most of the time they are playing a game. What purpose is there in creating such a situation in game design? nobody wants it. And i'm convinced the only people arguing for keeping things the same do so either with some warped sense of reducing the playerbase to be more important or simply to troll players in a version of get gewd. Like it's a medal of hardcore-ness to continue playing a game that is so mind-suckingly boring most of the time.

 

[Robert Maynard]

keep in mind, if you read the posts... you're not jumping a lot anymore. high jumps become infrequent compared to today by a significant amount. You're spending much more time in normal space and at different places within the system. You're becoming much more invested in a given region and there is much less need to venture all around the place constantly to get your kicks.

Why should any player require to become more invested in a given region, in your opinion?

jumping constantly across hundreds of systems is not playing. Watching loading screens one after another with no real gameplay in between the 1st or the thousandth is not playing. Your argument that this is a mode of gameplay is disingenuous at best and far more likely trolling. People do this because they have to. Not because they want to. That's not an opinion. That's common sense.

The target > jump > scoop > target loop is what we have at this time. The game requires systems to be loaded / generated at some point - and the current jump provides the game the time to do so. I did read one proposal earlier regarding chained jumps, each within the range capability of the ship and dependent on fuel - I thought it had merit.

 

[[Diplomacy] Carnegie]

If the current way the game treats travel in the game is how you enjoy games then I have to assume your only hope is to one day be the only one playing the game so you can rule the galaxy unopposed.

When the biggest time sink in the game is lacking any gameplay ...you can objectively improve it by adding almost anything. Nobody should want to do nothing most of the time they are playing a game. What purpose is there in creating such a situation in game design? nobody wants it. And i'm convinced the only people arguing for keeping things the same do so either with some warped sense of reducing the playerbase to be more important or simply to troll players in a version of get gewd. Like it's a medal of hardcore-ness to continue playing a game that is so mind-suckingly boring most of the time.

I spend the vast majority of my time in game flying a spaceship, which is EXACTLY what I bought it for. After the last 'improvement' to gameplay based on people not wanting to fly their spaceships I've only recently found a way to enjoy the game again. Constant minigames would remove all that pleasure again. If you want to campaign for optional modules that provide the gameplay that you're looking for, that would be fine by me. Just don't try to inflict your 'enjoyment' on everyone else.

Your inability to comprehend other people's perspectives is entirely your problem.

 

[Darth Ender]

I spend the vast majority of my time in game flying a spaceship, which is EXACTLY what I bought it for. After the last 'improvement' to gameplay based on people not wanting to fly their spaceships I've only recently found a way to enjoy the game again. Constant minigames would remove all that pleasure again. If you want to campaign for optional modules that provide the gameplay that you're looking for, that would be fine by me. Just don't try to inflict your 'enjoyment' on everyone else.

Your inability to comprehend other people's perspectives is entirely your problem.

Your perspective is wrong. Polluted by your refusal to see uneventful empty time sinks and repetitive loading screens as a negative when everyone else does including Fdev.

The only difference i'm proposing is in how that is dealt with. Not if it should be dealt with....which is for all intents and purposes, universally agreed upon. Instead of all the changes made since day one to reduce flying add automation to flying and future ideas to further reduce SC time which does so and is proposed to do so by eliminating scale and adding nothing to the game, I would rather not eliminate scale and turn travel into something skill based that requires thought and active player feedback. All Fdev has done and continues to propose is widdling away at the game when it comes to travel, not improving it or adding to it.

Anyone who enjoys the way it currently works will find something else in the game to enjoy. like dropping out of supercruise at 200km and flying in normal space for the next 30 minutes or some other waste of time. Even in my proposal you'd still be able to make such choices. You could still spend all your time jumping system to system.. You just wouldn't be able to watch <videos> at the same time without problems. You wouldn't be able to "play the game" while supercruising when in fact you're web browsing or reading a book or watching tv. Objectively, things no game design should want players to do and no players should want to do when playing a game.

 

[Darth Ender]

Why should any player require to become more invested in a given region, in your opinion?

Because it gives their actions in the game meaning. It makes doing similar activities every day have some visibility - if only to themselves for those who are off in some corner of the bubble no body cares about. It would give players a connection to the background simulation and npcs that make up the majority of what any human player will interact with. Becoming invested in a small region is needed to ground a player in the game story. Become part of it rather than everything happening in the game being irrelevant, ignorable, and all activity a pointless loop that changes nothing and does nothing.

By getting players into a region specific gameplay mindset, where benefits and such require local investment and where such investment actually matters and where local factions actually matter and differ from one region to the next in meaningful ways, you get a more natural and player directed version of powerplay....one that naturally expands and collapses and makes alliances and conquers completely at the participants direction and on their narrative.

By regionalizing the game you expose the opportunity to vary the look and feel of stations and identity of sections of space to further help players identify with the npc's they're supposed to be playing for and with as well as fellow human players. You could have ship variants based on regions instead of just mass produced types that are the same across the galaxy.

If the economy is changed in ways i suggested, you could even have regionalized prosperity with different levels of missions and quality of stations and such depending on economic statuses. You could run regions into bankruptcy, you could have uber rich regions with massive uber-stations instead of the pre-fabbed stuff everyone currently has in one slightly different form or another.

The target > jump > scoop > target loop is what we have at this time. The game requires systems to be loaded / generated at some point - and the current jump provides the game the time to do so. I did read one proposal earlier regarding chained jumps, each within the range capability of the ship and dependent on fuel - I thought it had merit.

game data can be loaded while interactive smaller environments with less textures are being played. God of war does this with very limited resources compared to pretty much any pc system. My ideas for high jumping would not be too far off from that behavior, just somewhat more involved than just needing to stay on a path running around a tree.

 

[Lestat]

When the biggest time sink in the game is lacking any gameplay ...you can objectively improve it by adding almost anything. Nobody should want to do nothing most of the time they are playing a game. What purpose is there in creating such a situation in game design? nobody wants it. And i'm convinced the only people arguing for keeping things the same do so either with some warped sense of reducing the playerbase to be more important or simply to troll players in a version of getting gewd. Like it's a medal of hardcore-ness to continue playing a game that is so mind-suckingly boring most of the time

Remember We have 66,000 stations some far and most of them are close. 90% of them are a relatively short distance to the main star. It's your responsibility to decide if that system travel too far. It the same with Exploration. So if it too far. You have a choice to jump to a different system. We have 400,000,000,000 to suit both our needs.

 

[Darth Ender]

Remember We have 66,000 stations some far and most of them are close. 90% of them are a relatively short distance to the main star. It's your responsibility to decide if that system travel too far. It the same with Exploration. So if it too far. You have a choice to jump to a different system. We have 400,000,000,000 to suit both our needs.

It's not about distance. it's not about how many jumps.

It's that you do nothing during even 1 jump. It's that you do effectively nothing (and even less with autopilot modules) with even close SC jaunts.

Even if you only go to things that are close, you end up playing the game by repeating the trip more frequently. So the end result whether you spend 6 hours on a single long distance trip or 6 hours on hundreds of short trips is the same. you spent most of your time doing nothing. It's the same for everyone. There's no version of gameplay where traveling requires player skill and feedback. It's mindless and empty at best and repetitive on top of that at worst.

that is the problem that isn't solved by buffing jump distances and nerfing scale and adding autopilot. Those are solutions that do not add gameplay to the game, only widdle away aspects of the game that continually make it apparent that the only thing that they think matters is being docked or some destination where you have to do something and return. Completely ignoring or destroying what the game should be focussing on, the getting there part.

 

[Vandaahl]

wall of stuff

Thats a lot of faf for a mini game.

I don't think its gonna happen by the way.

 

[[Diplomacy] Carnegie]

Your perspective is wrong.

Yeah, I stopped reading at that point, because anything subsequent to a statement of such rabid myopia can be safely ignored.

 

[Florenus]

@Vandaahl has most appropriate avatar for this discussion, we should listen to him, he looks like he might know a thing or two about the topic.

 

[lenna]

The target > jump > scoop > target loop is what we have at this time.

Except - as with the anti-honk argument - there is more too it than the oversimplified perspective some like to try to push as fact. In both cases the general line of argument is deeply flawed.

The game requires systems to be loaded / generated at some point - and the current jump provides the game the time to do so.

Exactly true - it also allows for the session matching/pairing servers to tie up sessions - at least in open and private groups.

I did read one proposal earlier regarding chained jumps, each within the range capability of the ship and dependent on fuel - I thought it had merit.

There is one problem with allowing chained jumps - while it may suit the long distance point A to point B traveller gameplay style it would reduce the chances of piracy and interdictions. Maybe not a major concern when exploring far enough away from populated space, but then explorers would potentially miss out on en-route discoveries of opportunity.

If the chained jump terminated early on detecting suitable en-route conditions then that might mitigate the inevitable "but it is cheating" argument that I can see being generated from some quarters of these forums. Suitable en-route conditions might include:

1. Other player presence in a system en-route (Open and PG - you would have to be able to instance with them)
2. Some types of PvE events (e.g. random PvE piracy)

However, the chained jump would not necessarily mitigate the time involved with fuel scooping. Currently, economic routes take more jumps, longer time, and consume less fuel per Ly while longer jumps are quicker and consume more fuel. Chained jumps on the other hand would notionally require some form of time/fuel balancing to offset the time saved, for example increased charge time and/or increased fuel consumption over the route selection.

At one point, the concept of an intra-system jump (e.g. being able to target and jump to a suitable gas giant or stellar body in the same system) was proposed/considerd which would perhaps address concerns about super-cruise travel times in cases such as the Hutton Run but I thought this had already been dismissed as an option by FD.

 

[varonica]

It's not about distance. it's not about how many jumps.

It's that you do nothing during even 1 jump. It's that you do effectively nothing (and even less with autopilot modules) with even close SC jaunts.

Most computer games, specially MMO's, are about effectively doing nothing most of the time interspersed with bouts of frantic activity. NPC wants rats tails, you ride there doing nothing, get the tails, ride back doing nothing, turn them in, he sends you out again to kill rats, you ride there doing nothing etc. Of course you can stack missions, just like in Elite, or take side journeys to explore something. Flying out to a CZ to kill X enemies, delivering Y to Z station, there's not a lot of difference.

Trying to fill every second of this game with frantic activity would soon have many people thinking about leaving. Sometimes people just want to chill and fly a spaceship and see what's there. I have spent many days exploring in MMO's without doing any assigned activity, climbing mountains, swimming down streams to see where they go and whats there, some people call that a waste of time because I am doing nothing instead of completing missions to level up, I say, I will play it my way! Shoving mini games into jumps is the same as inserting random encounters into an MMO every time I travel somewhere just to sightsee, just irritating. Yes the occasional one is exciting, but not every time you turn your head and sit there for a few seconds.

Of course if the auto-pilot modules are making it so you have less to do during jumps, then don't use them. A number of people have been demanding some sort of auto-pilot for quite a while, now it's here you are complaining it takes away things that you had to do during jumps? Talk about a no win scenario, so now FDEV has to add extra things in game because a feature demanded by some players which they added means they are doing nothing for a few minutes?

Give us all a break!

 

[Micha]

<lots and lots>

Overall you have some good ideas. But it sounds more like you are wanting more a complete redesign of what Elite is instead of merely an improvement. Fog-of-war supercruise; forcing people to stay in a local area; etc.

You're also completely incapable to the point of trolling (funny that you accuse others of doing the same to you) of seeing other peoples opinions/replies to your posts. In any discussion you have to accept the fact that not everybody thinks the same way or has the same goals in mind. If we did, there wouldn't be a need for a discussion.

I certainly wouldn't mind if there was a way to override the automated jump-sequence and take manual control of the ship during a hyperspace jump or supercruise(*). That would, by definition, be optional though; the standard jump would be the same as now, it's only if you take active control of the jump sequence would it give you the minigame. This could then lead to bonuses or penalties depending on how you perform in it.

But your ideas of a complete replacement of the entire travel mechanics are very unlikely to fly. Overall Elite meshes things together very very nicely. Sure, they can be tweaked and expanded on (for example the planetary approach sequence is far smoother and superior to the standard supercruise experience), but replaced by a completely new system which has far-reaching impacts into most aspects of the game? I don't think so.


(*) Incidentally you're wrong on that point; hyperspace and supercruise are completely different things. The former is effectively creating a wormhole which you jump through, the latter is an imagination of an Alcubierre Drive. That said, I believe the early proposals for hyperspace jumps had people enter realspace at the NavB Buoy instead of entering the system in Supercruise near the star.

 

[Darth Ender]

(*) Incidentally you're wrong on that point; hyperspace and supercruise are completely different things. The former is effectively creating a wormhole which you jump through, the latter is an imagination of an Alcubierre Drive. That said, I believe the early proposals for hyperspace jumps had people enter realspace at the NavB Buoy instead of entering the system in Supercruise near the star.

That depends on if you're using the "canon" books or the game implementation.

I take the game implementation to be place-holders that never got completed and any attempt to explain why they behave the way they do now is a semi-retcon of canon set by the books (which are technically based on descriptions of how things should behave as a final product).

nothing about how the FSD drive works makes any sense to have a Alcubierre effect that then turns into traveling thru hyperspace ...then then with even more power, rips a hole thru normal space directly thru hyperspace into another part of normal space. There's no logical progression of compressing space to make those leaps. However, if the FSD opens hyperspace with low power allowing travel within at a certain speed. Then with more power allows traveling at an even faster speed then with cap level power just tears thru ... you get a nice progression of behavior that matches the different modes. With power level of the fsd dictating speed and the lore around it all operating under the same principle via the same device.

 

[lenna]

nothing about how the FSD drive works makes any sense to have a Alcubierre effect that then turns into traveling thru hyperspace

The Alcubierre Drive concept essentially requires the drive to warp space around the vessel in order to achieve the effect of faster than light travel. This has it's basis in Einstein's General Relativity theories.

The standard fictional concept of a Hyperspace drive actually has no solid basis in actual scientific theory and glosses over the precise details in most cases. There is one notable exception to this and that is Babylon 5 which posits that Hyperspace is another 3 dimensional space that maps onto normal space but has different rules relating to our concept of time and distance. In the Babylon 5 concept, the transit between systems can take days or months because the ships in question are essentially travelling through space at normal speeds but just with a different dimensional reference.

According to Wikipedia

The pioneering Elite series uses "hyperspace" jump drives for travel between systems. These incorporate features of both listed types; a hyperspace jump can be initiated almost anywhere in-system so long as it is a certain minimum distance from a docking station, planet, etc., but will eject transported ships at roughly the same outer-system location each time, leaving it vulnerable to pirates lurking nearby. Jumps are not absolutely instantaneous, but only take a few seconds each, which must be considered literal as the series makes few other concessions to the vast distances and travel times of deep space (e.g. for sub-light intrasystem travel, Frontier merely provides a low-multiplier "fast forward" option). Elite: Dangerous also features a low-power version of the warp drive allowing to travel at speeds up to a few hundreds of times the speed of light.

Thus if you actually consider Babylon 5's concept of hyperspace and combine it with the Alcubierre Drive the end result does kind of fit well with what we have as "jump drives" in ED. The Alcubierre Drive effectively minimising the time in hyperspace.

However, given the concept of hyper-dictions and the way that inter-system jumps feel, I would say the Elite Dangerous jump drive is more like a burst form of an Alcubierre Drive where the ship gets a massive and uncontrollable (direction change wise) burst of acceleration in a specific direction. It could be a form of wormhole drive (Einstein-Rosen bridge) but that kind of messes up the logic behind hyper-dictions. Either way, arguably the whole concept of the FSD being responsible for both Intra-System FTL and Inter-System FTL travel is not that way out and is supportable by current accepted scientific theories.

 

[Velixar]

Here a Idea Op. Stop chain jumping. Engineer your ship or Start Exploration.

 

[varonica]

nothing about how the FSD drive works makes any sense to have a Alcubierre effect that then turns into traveling thru hyperspace ...then then with even more power, rips a hole thru normal space directly thru hyperspace into another part of normal space. There's no logical progression of compressing space to make those leaps.

That's because it's probably not doing that at all. The Alcubierre effect that we use to SC draws power continuously to maintain the effect once it's initiated by a small power draw, this is most noticable if you are traveling a long way in SC or jump into and out of SC rapidly. Each time you jump into SC it takes a certain amount of fuel, then it draws continuously to maintain the effect. Hyperspace does neither of these things, you just dump several tons of fuel into the drive chamber, whatever it takes to power the jump then it's all gone at the start of the jump, after that you are essentially free falling through the hyperspace passage to the exit point, no power draw, nothing.

There's nothing in the description or actions or the two different travel methods to really strongly indicate that hyperspace is just a much faster SC using the Alcubierre effect, that's just an assumption.