I'd like to see some animals added for scanning. Some could be aggressive and need to be put down with weapons at times.
Addition to Exo-Biology
- Thread starter Cmdr Alzaroc
- Start date
Big game hunting was mentioned during the kickstarter, but it would take even more effort than exobiology, so I doubt we'll see it for at least a year or two.
Unlike other games, they don't like the results of procedurally generating biologicals, so they couldn't just make a bunch of assets and mash them together, they'd need to hand-develop each one individually, and that'd take quite a while to do. Not to mention, they would have a hard time justifying their existence on tenuous atmosphere worlds, so you'd need to be able to land in thicker atmospheres, and we'll be waiting a WHILE for that.
My personal expectation is that we'll see Gas Giants with lots of flying creatures first. Flying creatures can borrow from the existing flight models and won't interact as poorly with the procedurally generated terrain. You could have giant floating mushrooms for them to land on(filled with hydrogen extracted from the atmosphere, probably), and birds you need to sneak up on on foot, or capture in the air to scan and release. Then you'd have bigger flying creatures, large enough to take down an SRV. You'd need a flying skimmer SRV, too.
But at that point you'd basically need Volumetric clouds and wind and weather and stuff.
It'd be a great expansion, but at the current rate, the next expansion probably won't be for at least 3-5 years.
I won't be completely happy until we have proper procedural generation for exo-biology. Animals won't be appearing until we get planets with denser atmospheres I am guessing, so lets hope they are working on those now.
There are SOME kinds of animals you could add. They'd be very slow-moving, but could function, in theory.
One of my favorite examples of a truly bizarre creature was in this old scifi story I read. It was a silicon-based life form. It was mostly photosynthetic, but with some chemical fuel sources as well, mostly acquired from the desert sand. It would crawl along the sand until it found a place with the right materials, and it would slowly make bricks of silicon, slowly building a protective pyramid around itself. Once the pyramid was complete, it would enter its sexual cycle, and release sprays of crystalline bubbles out the top of the pyramid, which would float across the light atmosphere, and when they touched down, would seed a new creature. Once its sexual cycle was complete, it would burst out the top of the pyramid and begin its slow, slow crawl to the next location.
Each time, it would grow a little bit larger, so particularly successful variants could build pyramids a dozen or more meters high, but you could trace its life back across the sand, a chain of broken pyramids, each a few cm shorter than the last, and a thousand years older than the last, until they vanished into the desert sand.
There are some "animals" that live in harsh conditions even on Earth. Like the volcanic snails and different types of worms, bugs etc that may not require oxygen atmospheres to live in. Also, they could pair them with different types of "plants" or even geysers and fumaroles to make the planets more interesting, alien and give to exobiology some extra variety.
We already have plants that live in fumaroles, I suspect the reason we have only low atmosphere planets is that FDEV is not ready to put in a full biosphere like weather and animals, it's the same argument for why we don't have ELW's yet, FDEV aren't ready to release them and they aren't going to add them to the existing set of available worlds. Just like Horizons planets didn't get any Odyssey plant life, but I can use my Odyssey scanner on Horizons plants like Brain Trees, the Odyssey stuff will remain as is until they are ready with the next lot of bodies, then we will get new stuff.
I am aware of this very well. I just went with the "easyest" way of implementing a type of animal-like organisms in game without having the need to model more complex stuff like bypedal animals, birds, reptiles, mammal-like hunting animals and so on. To be done right, they would also require more complex animations (either borrowed from other existing assets or by motion-capture from living animals like cats, domestic reptiles etc) and also behavioral interactions. If it was done in a set environment it would be easier but you would also need to factor where to spawn them, not to clip trough thextures, to have an organic look and not something robotic or puppet-like aspect of their motions etc when you work with a procedurally-generated galaxy. And I know that right now, elite is struggling with raw resources and crystals and other stuff that spawns them on planet as well, since in Odyssey they're supposed to spawn on the "hot-map" surface areas, yet they're missing alltoghether or bugging trough textures and with missing/wrong hit boxes a lot. Incremental steps will be fine if done right, I'm still waiting for them to fix the raw materials issues in Odyssey as well since it's impossible to get them unless you change your client back to Horizons (where they spawn in the same, classic fashion of geological signal locations in a preset area around the planet - also the planets are totally different geologically and texture-like between those 2 clients).
And that's utter rubbish, I play Odyssey all the time and have no trouble collecting mats from bio and geo. The old PIO system was a very poor simulation of geo and bio spread, how can you possibly have, at times, one single geo location on an entire planet, which is why it was abandoned in favour of a much more realistic spread, and that's how it's staying, there's nothing to fix up. The bio/geo was broken in Horizons, and once the new planetary tech makes its way to that client it will be the same for both.
There's no heatmap, it's a location map, and you need to recognize geological features where vulcanism will be concentrated. I personally wish it was a heat map, but apparantly that was to complicated for some players so we have what we have, and once you take the time to learn where concentrations are by looking at the planetary geology you will get along much better. But it's coming sooner or later and that's what we will have.
I am not saying the old way was better, just that the new system is not working as intended yet. Not all planets are the same, but I can guarantee this system is still work in progress and has some issues. There are planets which are supposed to give decent Tellurium for example (around 1.7%) and all I got on their surface was Rank-1 raw materials since no crystal or other types of sources spawned (not refering to the Crystal geological form, but the chunks you have to shoot at since rarity 1 spawns in cobbles, rarity 2 in crystal chunks etc). I had fumaroles and geysers with the cobbles appearing scarcely anywhere on the surface of the planet, yet I couldn't find a single crystal type (needle or cluster etc) in some systems.
I know, as I said above it's still work in progress. Some resources appear in the area as intended (if you read it right - got the chance to scan some varied biological forms like bacterias, plants, trees etc) and some will not, even if you look on geographical areas where these are supposed to spawn.
I can give you some locations where this happened to me: HYADES SECTOR CB-X D1-113 (look for the planet with 1.7% Tellurium - it also should have 3.5% Sellenium) with nothing but cobbles spawning (and them even rarely appearing on the surface near geysers, fumaroles and lava sprouts) and HIP 36601 where the Crystal geological elements have issues with hitboxes. Also, geysers may shoot the materials in the sky when they're broken for collection and may even crash your game if you get close with the SRV (some instability with engine physics perhaps - my guess is the geyser's physical model makes elements with mass fly and the materials will fly in the sky since they're very small in weight).
But this is a discussion for another issue and another thread so I will not get into further details - I've just let those details above if you want to experiment with them.
Yes. But only on planets with .33 atm and other plants/animals or higher as animals need more than plants. To live. Liquid water (or ammonia) would need to be present. There are HMC planets currently with spots of green and blue that are NOT ELWs maybe this life breathes CO2 or something else. It would be neat to have animals but not on current planets as the atmospheres are extremely thin and no liquids are present due to the pressure making it not really believable.
Im excited to fly through a cloud. Hopefully we can fly though storms (they already have volumeteic clouds and lightning in said clouds as legrange storms) im also excited to have wind effect my ship
Dragons in a gas giant that would need to be killed with a ship.