Game Discussions Bethesda Softworks Starfield Space RPG

Seamlessness is no concern to me. The loading screen has it's place in gaming and often enough it is a little break for looking forward what might be about to come.

Oh I do agree, but it's not for me at the moment from what I have seen of the game so far. Still I will keep an open mind, loading screens aren't bad or good, sometimes they are necessary.
 
Seamlessness is no concern to me. The loading screen has it's place in gaming and often enough it is a little break for looking forward what might be about to come.

Oh I do agree, but it's not for me at the moment from what I have seen of the game so far. Still I will keep an open mind, loading screens aren't bad or good, sometimes they are necessary.

I agree as well, to both sentiments. For me, a huge part of what I consider a "space game" (as opposed to a game set in space) is piloting my space ship. Frontier: Elite 2 remains the gold standard for what I define as a "space game", and coming in a close second is Kerbal Space Program.

Unless we can fly our space ships down on the planet as well as in space, I'm not likely to buy it on day one, and will probably wait for a steam sale. But it's also possible that there'll be enough other features to make it desirable. Especially what I've seen of that ship building system so far. :love:
 
I agree as well, to both sentiments. For me, a huge part of what I consider a "space game" (as opposed to a game set in space) is piloting my space ship. Frontier: Elite 2 remains the gold standard for what I define as a "space game", and coming in a close second is Kerbal Space Program.

Unless we can fly our space ships down on the planet as well as in space, I'm not likely to buy it on day one, and will probably wait for a steam sale. But it's also possible that there'll be enough other features to make it desirable. Especially what I've seen of that ship building system so far. :love:
I've got a question for you. I believe Starfield might do what EGS does - render planet surfaces as a flat rather than spherical. This would explain why you can't seamlessly fly down from space to the planet. What I can't figure out (and I've played a little bit of EGS) is how EGS takes a spherical map (the "globe" view) and places that on a flat plane without getting stretches at the poles. You've played EGS way more than I have - how does EGS handle this?
 
I agree as well, to both sentiments. For me, a huge part of what I consider a "space game" (as opposed to a game set in space) is piloting my space ship. Frontier: Elite 2 remains the gold standard for what I define as a "space game", and coming in a close second is Kerbal Space Program.

Unless we can fly our space ships down on the planet as well as in space, I'm not likely to buy it on day one, and will probably wait for a steam sale. But it's also possible that there'll be enough other features to make it desirable. Especially what I've seen of that ship building system so far. :love:
KSP is maybe the penultimate space game. Once you figured out how to lift that baby into orbit. T/W ratio to hell - real men do it with trial and error!
I think there was a Microsoft shuttle sim once. I liked what I saw but you had to enter codes into a computer and what good is that when you have no clue. So KSP - you get to orbit and then you "understand" by just playing what prograde, suborbital retrograde, peri- and aphelion and all the funny stuff are. It is the most intuitive introduction to orbital mechanics and that earns it an eternal place in my heart. Or mind.
 
I've got a question for you. I believe Starfield might do what EGS does - render planet surfaces as a flat rather than spherical. This would explain why you can't seamlessly fly down from space to the planet. What I can't figure out (and I've played a little bit of EGS) is how EGS takes a spherical map (the "globe" view) and places that on a flat plane without getting stretches at the poles. You've played EGS way more than I have - how does EGS handle this?

In EGS, at ground level, the worlds are cylindrical ones, with the poles existing off the edge of the map... for lack of a better term. If you travel straight north, at some point, you're teleported to the corresponding coordinate at the other side of the map, facing south. It's not a perfect system for replicating a globe, if you try to replicate early astronomical observations or similar navigation strategies, the illusion eventually breaks down, but IMO Eleon Game Studios did a very good job at crafting that illusion in the first place, especially for such a small indie-studio.
 
I've got a question for you. I believe Starfield might do what EGS does - render planet surfaces as a flat rather than spherical. This would explain why you can't seamlessly fly down from space to the planet. What I can't figure out (and I've played a little bit of EGS) is how EGS takes a spherical map (the "globe" view) and places that on a flat plane without getting stretches at the poles. You've played EGS way more than I have - how does EGS handle this?
You know - I've been asking myself how it's done in Space Engineers. From up it's a sphere but back down it's like euclidian space.
Currently I play Dyson Sphere Program and you play on the globe and place down factories. Now the placeables are kinda euclidian but the world isn't. So they have the net over the globe when you makie the placedowns and it's like long/latitude net on earth but you notice once you get to poles that the straight line at some point merges with another straight line and there isn't just enough space further up the globe. There actually is the same place but not in the rectangular planar projection on which you place the buildables down.
I suspect many games make it like that and drop the odd line and spherical projection on a plane always has to cut away something.
 
In EGS, at ground level, the worlds are cylindrical ones, with the poles existing off the edge of the map... for lack of a better term. If you travel straight north, at some point, you're teleported to the corresponding coordinate at the other side of the map, facing south. It's not a perfect system for replicating a globe, if you try to replicate early astronomical observations or similar navigation strategies, the illusion eventually breaks down, but IMO Eleon Game Studios did a very good job at crafting that illusion in the first place, especially for such a small indie-studio.
So it's basically a rectangular projection. Cylinder is much easier.
 
I kinda like it though. DSP isn't heavy on navigating the little planets and the long/lat lines make it easier to navigate, find the poles and put the juicy stuff down there. The emphasis is on the interstellar travel which makes the bulk of the grindwork and unlocks. Now I can visit other places it's actually not that hot anymore, but I'm gonna visit that neutron star anyway. And the black holes. And then paint something silly into the sky.
 
In EGS, at ground level, the worlds are cylindrical ones, with the poles existing off the edge of the map... for lack of a better term.
My brain is still having a hard time with this. The cylinder of at the equator should have a much bigger diameter than the cylinder at say the 45th parallel. And when you say cylinder, I'm guessing you're talking about a virtual cylinder not a physical cylinder, as in it's basically a flat square that is programmatically connected at the seams. It would almost seem preferable to use two cones, bases connected, to simulate a sphere, which would basically be a diamond shaped 2D map..

Oi, my head hurts! Well I guess we'll just have to wait and see how Starfield does it. All I know is that I didn't see any hint of curvature on the horizons showcased in that promo video, making me think the land is flat.

ps - didn't earlier Microsoft Flight simulators (like perhaps FS2000) use a "flat earth" representation of the globe? I wonder how that worked... 🤔
 
ps - didn't earlier Microsoft Flight simulators (like perhaps FS2000) use a "flat earth" representation of the globe? I wonder how that worked... 🤔
As I understood it, yes you're right. This is why you could never fly to the actual north or south pole. Try to do it and you'd be "skewed" around it to the side but you'd never actually hit it. I don't recall directly but it was about 1 or two degrees of null space for both north and south.

As I recall I read this on the flight sim forums when I was still on that.
 
As I understood it, yes you're right. This is why you could never fly to the actual north or south pole. Try to do it and you'd be "skewed" around it to the side but you'd never actually hit it. I don't recall directly but it was about 1 or two degrees of null space for both north and south.

As I recall I read this on the flight sim forums when I was still on that.
So I wonder if instead of being one big cylinder, perhaps instead it's lots of separate but connected cylinders. If I were to fly east to west from say 50° N, it should take less time (a smaller "cylinder") than doing the same thing at the equator. Of course it gets more complicated if I'm flying from Ireland to Australia...

Today they could do something like this:

3-astrophysici.jpg


It's flat, but round. You still need to mathematically compensate for the roundness (walking / flying in a straight line would actually be flying in a circle on that map), but I'm assuming it's still way easier than rendering the world as a proper sphere. 🤔
 
Maybe. But there even the producer says something like "Skyrim in space". He also says "deep crafting system".
Deep like in Skyrim?
🤣
Well, I assume Fallout4 "deep". Collect stuff - spend it to produce weapon mods, and building blocks to use in designated areas.
(That said; The alchemy system does go some way back in the Elder Scrolls series - that's *some*thing... :7)

The mmorpg.com article mentions something about 30fps and less. I just wonder where the man got that from. Should it be true, and knowing this community, I'm sure it will be very welcome here (not).

Well, one need only watch the stream (...where publishers usually tend to go for bullshots), to see the game frequently not managing to fill the frame rate of the video, and other bits of jank that do not fill the soul with graphics-bling-y joy. Only a few seconds in, I was struck dumb by the terrible "blobby" quality on the dust kicked up by the landing craft. :7

(If you care, you could look up the "Digital Foundry" analysis of what can be seen in the presented video, on Youtube.)

The only thing I recall seeing Todd mention, with regard to engine upgrades (...and this was some time ago, but he did project an air of "expect little else)), was an intermediary update (a second "stage" slated for Elder Scrolls 6) to the character animation system - presumably to make zero g, and environment collisions look more "physical".
(As for characters in conversation; Things look as dead-eyed as usual, but I could imagine there being mostly the usual, but some degree of performance capture, or bespoke handcrafting, for a few key main-quest dialogues -- I seem to recall even Fallout4 had a tiny bit of unique character animation in a few places, such as the journalist lady's fit of rage over being locked out of the city where she lived.)

(On something in the MMORPG article, by the way, I'll note that Fallout4 used PBR materials, even if they still managed to make them all look the same flat and drab as usual - Bethesda does appear to love their plentyful base diffuse light :p.)

There are a few thing of note, none the less, beginning with distant land appearing to look significantly better than in previous titles, which had these scant and incredibly boxy and featureless LODs (the view from the airship in FO4 was particularly "empty"), and this could tie together with the second thing, being procedural landscape generation. We are still to see whether this is to say any procgen going on "on-line", whilst playing, or only off-line procgen when mapping in the Creation Kit, with the player loading those prefabricated saved maps cells from disk, just as usual, even for non-points-of-interest. We are also still to see how many square miles we are talking for any body, and how/whether things map to a sphere...

Even without space-to-surface transitions, I could imagine it not being entirely out of the question there could be some low altitude, low velocity flight of some kind... Even Skyrim had its very limited bit of clunky dragon riding... The takeoff cinematic in the presentation looked like the camera was at an altitude somewhere between the Prydwen in FO4, and the bit where the daedric lord Meridia bossed you around in Skyrim. It was facing pretty much downwards, and there may not be as much fog and cloud as there was in Skyrim, to mask how bad the land (EDIT: ...and horizon, or lack thereof...) looks from that height, but with better LODs, and fast loading, maybe you could choose your landing spot from near ground...
 
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I'm sure we'll have atmospheric vehicles in the first round of mods, and as always we'll see why Bethesda avoids vehicles and required a disconnected mode for this one, fast movements across their cell system melts down fast.

The mods are going to be a lot of fun. A lot of wish fulfillment needs to be addressed and modders have weird, unnatural wishes.

CIG and Frontier as playable factions when?
 
Just watched the video. I know I'm late to the party :LOL:

To be honest it looks pretty much like I expected. I'm thinking basically Mass effect with more freedom of movement, and probably more side quests, and probably less well written dialogue, and definitely more jank :ROFLMAO:

Nice to see there is a bit of space combat, I though the ship might just be fast travel, Customising your ship looks cool

I'll probably buy it straight away and sink hundreds of hours into it like other Bethesda games, they have their issues but
they are some of my favourite games, especially when decent mods start apperaring
 
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