people who usually spend money on arx do it to customize their ships, what is the purpose of customizing the ship? do you have any associated missions? I don't think so, and there's money, in the squad that I belong to, all the ships of the commanders who play with me have skins and most of them have bodykits, these things are useless but people buy them, the interior of the ships would be the same thing .
Well, keep in mind that SC is not a game; it is a demo as now.
The point of interiors is to have gameplay (multicrew gameplay too), but as is now you can just grab stuff from the counters and get furniture to open/close, so not much more to do there.
SC eventually will have that; so they built interiors from day 1; while for ED the interiors are an afterthought; and that is why Frontier didn't spend time making interiors for ships; when they can barely maintain the game features and make something playable (as demonstrated by the minigame for collecting DNA samples).
Walk around a ship doing nothing is something interesting for some; but if Frontier decided to not make that part of the Odyssey release, clearly it means that they have numbers that show that only a small percentage would appreciate that, so they diverted their efforts into something more useful for the majority of players. Hard to say; only Frontier knows what is going on and why.
Ship customization and cosmetics are what sell things. Fortnite, overwatch and every other game that offer cosmetics make money for a reason. SC sell ships that does not even exist, so you buy a JPG image and yet people buy those.
Although ED is not a game made to sell cosmetics first and foremost; it is a simulator in the end. So I am sure that Frontier has a very clear idea about how much money they would make (or lose) by not making interiors with customization. Eventually it will come; if the money to make in that way will be considerable of course
There are 2 problems:
1. Interiors must be designed, and that is not so easy as ship-kit, because unlike SC ship is not fixed. You can change modules in any combinations which must change internal view. So without of game play it is pure waste of human power.
In fact if this problem with swapping modules will be solved this will mean they made real blueprint of real ship. You can bring it ti plant. So it needs same scale of money to develop as NASA do, like couple billions of dollars per ship.
2. Ship kits does not change game play while interiors will do for everybody - simple time needed to run from sit to exit added.
Last edited:
u need hours repeating things in this game to evolve, i am sure that walk inside a ship will not be a problem, bilhons to make a ship interior kekw, just omegalol dude
Weren’t all of the ships in ED supposedly designed with ship interiors in mind?
Not necessarily; they were designed to have a cockpit area; but I exclude that Frontier was so ahead with their planning, that they included also actual walking interior space in their models. Even the SRV was basically jammed in the ships that support it
Have no idea. Only pilot's room looks designed. Everything else need real engineering solutions. For example all we know there is "loading lane" in ship. How should you draw it if you want to swap modules or replace 1 cargo by cabins etc.
So full ship walking like it is in SC is not trivial task. Simple cabin walking has no sense at all.
SC could do full walk because ships have fixed design. No changes are possibly inside.
Hell, no. Some of them don't even have proper doors.
There is an interview with David Braben on the official elite dangerous channel from about 7 years ago, in that video he says they were making the ships with their interior in mind
Well, they'll need to fix all the problems they've inflicted on them since then. Just for a start, you need a ladder to get up each of the Cutter's steps, your commander won't even be able to reach the controls for the airlock on top of the Anaconda, the rear ramp on the Asp Explorer hasn't opened since Horizons (shame, I liked that), there's a blank wall at the top of the Python's lift where the door should be...
Right now if they add interiors they won't match up with the exteriors. The ships themselves need a proper sanity pass long before we worry about getting inside them.
They certainly have thought about how ships are laid out internally. They are forced to, at least a little bit, by design, because they made modules individually targetable. Therefore each core module and optional internal slot does have an assigned position inside the ship model. They even have hitboxes that correspond to the slot size, although according to debug renders from FDev and player experiments, the hitboxes are simple spheres, not any kind of model shape.
However, that does not remotely imply that they have made sure that all ships can be modeled or navigated internally. We know there are serious geometry conflicts, like hardpoints and landing legs clipping into cockpits and cargo bays etc, that would have to be handled. Undoubtedly these elements overlap internal space that would be needed for physically realized modules, too. And that's to say nothing of whether they would actually fit. In general ED ships are pretty big compared to module masses and cargo volumes, so there would probably be a whole lot of unused void space in most ships - but some of the smaller ships have odd shapes and tightly packed modules, so there might not be a reasonable internal module shape that wouldn't have them clipping through the hull of, say, a DBX.
Those were the dev diaries from the kickstarter; most of what is said there didn't really happened as they discussed it. The plan was to have space legs soon after release; and we all know how it ended.
The proof that they never thought about interior is in how the ships are designed. Many users extracted the models from the game and imported them in unreal engine or blender, and neither there were doors, the proportions for the stairs were totally messed up and the route from where the door should be, to the internals, made no sense.
Yep; statistically speaking, it is easier to start new projects and do it right, than fix old codebase. Elite at this point is quite old; the more you touch in the code the higher is the chance you will end up triggering a bug.I'm sure it's easier to get it right when the whole game is new
Not sure I'd agree with that. It's certainly always easier to start a new project, but doing it "right" in a way that you'll still be happy with years later is a much harder task, and one that few development teams achieve. In general, in real world development, this is one big reason why you try to be things as modular as possible - it's easier later when you have to rip parts out and replace them, and less likely that fixes in one place disturb some unrelated system. Unfortunately, strong compartmentalization tends to exist in tension with maximizing efficiency, so in performance-sensitive domains like games those practices are more likely to be sacrificed for other gains.
Definitely true in general, but it's been suggested that a significant portion of the codebase was overhauled with Odyssey. It may well have a fresh lease on life, once they achieve the big merge and retire the Horizons branch. The fact that they're able to iterate as fast as they have with the Odyssey update releases hints to me that the codebase and tooling are significantly more manageable now than previously.
I can bring in what I saw in 22+ years of experience working as software engineer in silicon valley; which is by any means no standard, but statistically if many companies prefer to start anew a project, instead of overhaul an existing one, there must be clear cost benefits.
Being modular is one of those mythical beasts that everyone talk about but you rarely end up seeing
Kinda like TDD; where everyone start with the best intention and down the road, the whole thing fall apart because you need to ship, you are late and can't worry too much about this or that. Write down technical debts and move on... And few years later you wonder who the heck wrote that code and how it even works.To a point you can swap some parts, like libraries for example, but if you are writing logic that is not clearly divided by the interface and implementation (or if you want to go for the MVC design pattern, you are not making the controller and the view detached and mix up things across them), changes end up more and more problematic. when you have a small codebase you may keep things in check; but after years... I am not so sure, and Frontier is a big company and I imagine the codebase for Elite is quite large.
I would take the info given about codebase by Frontier devs with a grain of salt; especially because we have no visibility on the codebase, so whatever they say may mean something or anything at all. If I want to get a game that was made for a standard 2d camera, and add VR, that is done by changing some components in the camera area; but you need to change also part of the UI, and how interactions happens. If you add locomotion (space legs) to a static camera, the issue is not only related to change the camera parent point to the player, but you have to deal with other issues, like the player physics itself (is it touching the floor? does the animation for the IK work as expected? and so on), but you have also a whole different level of complexity related to how you manage the camera frustum, occlusion culling and a ton of other factors that you won't even consider when your camera is stuck in a cockpit floating above a static player mesh sitting on a chair.
Chances are that they added changes to the existing systems, replacing only what can be replaced; again without see their code we can only speculate. If their code is cleaner now, good for them; but I suspect that all that they did was to add on the back of the poor mule, an extra load and ship... This is what most companies do; and the huge amount of bugs in Odyssey and the fact that it took 7 updates to fix just the major issues, should be quite an amber light flickering as warning.
Could be enough for you, not for me with Virpil joy + HOTAS. I don't want vJoy or similar, I want native support like MFS, DCS, ...
Yes. And that doesn't imply much more than what can be seen currently has been modeled with somewhat correct proportions, access points, etc. That's all needed if interiors traversal isn't planned yet.
Though, as SC is mentioned, I'd say it's quite funny that for a game so heavily focused on interiors some ships were released with roof so low players clipped through it, or ships meant to transport ship or vehicle having so tiny bay that putting the said vehicle is a PITA?