ED: Andromeda or ED: Magellan?

varonica

varonica
Lulzwhat said:
Look at KSP 2, game is garbage, no doubt. But what is looks really cool there is Jool clouds. And it's procedurally generated i suppose.
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Yes, and when we get landable earth like worlds I expect them to all be landable, not a single landable ELW, that's the entire point of the Stellar Forge, to avoid having hand craft planets and systems except where necessary.

Christopher Roberto said:
The distances between systems are carefully managed to create a terrain of sorts with difficult routes, bottlenecks, one-way passages, dead-ends, fuelless wastelands, etc..
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You are talking about a hand crafted galaxy, that's never going to happen! The entire point of the Stellar Forge is that it's impossible to handcraft a galaxy, all you are doing is suggesting FDEV make a poor mans Starfield, apart from that we already have fuel less wastelands in the dwarf regions, dead ends, ever flown out to the very end of a spiral arm? Navigating to some places already requires single route journeys of considerable distance even for Fleet Carriers. And one way passages? Of what use are those, I mean look at the conda graveyard when the only way to get to HD 76133 was to neutron jump there. Be nice to jump to a star in Andromeda and find the only way out is to commit suicide and re-appear in the bubble....umm no it wouldn't actually, we already get a lot of complaints about people having to fly back from prison ships, flying back from the bubble to Andromeda, that will be fun!

I am all for expanding the game, but the point is the galaxy is proceduraly generated because that's the only reasonable way to do it at the moment.
 

Christopher Roberto

C
varonica said:
You are talking about a hand crafted galaxy, that's never going to happen!
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It's possible. The existing galaxy is mostly hand-crafted, at least in terms of its structure, Stellar Forge is just used to fill it in. The problem is, they mainly focused on the looks of the galaxy, not what kind of gameplay that galaxy could provide, and so at a system level it's largely been left featureless other than for the existence of spiral arms and a lump in the middle.

varonica said:
The entire point of the Stellar Forge is that it's impossible to handcraft a galaxy, all you are doing is suggesting FDEV make a poor mans Starfield, apart from that we already have fuel less wastelands in the dwarf regions, dead ends, ever flown out to the very end of a spiral arm?
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It's mostly just down to luck, they didn't plan that in (other than the gaps of course), and there's no gameplay purpose to exploration in ED so there's nothing to reach. They also haphazardly increased jump distance and let fleet carriers jump to unexplored systems so it's clear they never really thought about traversal as being deeper than watching netflix while waiting. It could have been done differently, and with a new galaxy would come the ability to correct past mistakes.

varonica said:
And one way passages? Of what use are those, I mean look at the conda graveyard when the only way to get to HD 76133 was to neutron jump there.
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imo it was pretty cool that there was a risk of getting yourself into a cluster of systems that you couldn't get out of. Had to carefully plan exploring some regions. It was meaningless of course, since there was no reason to explore those regions, but it showed that exploration had more potential than was being tapped. These were just eddies in the randomness of procgen that dissipated over time with changes to the game affecting travel, but this kind of thing could have been designed in and mattered more.
 

varonica

varonica
Christopher Roberto said:
It's possible. The existing galaxy is mostly hand-crafted, at least in terms of its structure, Stellar Forge is just used to fill it in. The problem is, they mainly focused on the looks of the galaxy, not what kind of gameplay that galaxy could provide, and so at a system level it's largely been left featureless other than for the existence of spiral arms and a lump in the middle.
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Hmm, shows a basic misunderstanding of how procedural generation works or how the galaxy is created by the Stellar Forge, there isn't a lot of handcrafting that goes into the galaxy, human space there's quite a lot because, well, people want stuff to play, but the galaxy itself no, there are a couple of tech talks around that would help you with that, so suggest you look at them.

The galaxy came first, the game play is made up by the hand crafted parts that FDEV put in, the galaxy is by no means hand crafted.
 

Riverside

Riverside
varonica said:
Hmm, shows a basic misunderstanding of how procedural generation works or how the galaxy is created by the Stellar Forge, there isn't a lot of handcrafting that goes into the galaxy, human space there's quite a lot because, well, people want stuff to play, but the galaxy itself no, there are a couple of tech talks around that would help you with that, so suggest you look at them.

The galaxy came first, the game play is made up by the hand crafted parts that FDEV put in, the galaxy is by no means hand crafted.
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I think you underestimate what can be done. The galaxy we have now is a maze of dead ends and navigation challenges in unengineered ships now, and there will have been some degree of coordination between the game designers & the stellar forge devs to set typical distances between stars and expected ship jump ranges.

The ships & our ability to traverse the galaxy have changed, the galaxy has not. The opportunity is there to add back that kind of challenge.

Mostly though I think the adage that if you don't like what the game already delivers nothing they add will change that. It will be mostly more of the same (which I think would be fine).
 

Riverside

Riverside
Danieros said:
I don't think we need another galaxy.

I think we need a BGS update to allow it to colonize new systems and build more infra-structure (stations, settlements, installations, etc) in existing ones.
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A feature like that would make a good addition to compliment the colonisation of new galaxies. It could potentially be used in conjunction with some sort of additional resource gathering (in addition to ring mining) to help make a new colony self sustainable. Some elements of colonisation could be done or augmented by the playerbase, some could be simulated by NPCs.

Colonisation & resource gathering could be added with ot without new regions to explore, but I think the features would be complementary.
 

Christopher Roberto

C
varonica said:
Hmm, shows a basic misunderstanding of how procedural generation works or how the galaxy is created by the Stellar Forge, there isn't a lot of handcrafting that goes into the galaxy, human space there's quite a lot because, well, people want stuff to play, but the galaxy itself no, there are a couple of tech talks around that would help you with that, so suggest you look at them.
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I understand it. It's a hand-made mass map for the galaxy shape, some hand-imported real stars for flavor, and then Stellar Forge adds stars to make up the difference in mass. A lot of games work in similar ways where procgen is used to fill in details for the artist who guides it. Without procgen, ED's star data still looks like the Milky Way, it's just far less dense.

It's all well and good for making something look like a galaxy, but to make a good game it should have had some thought put into the galaxy as terrain. Just for an example, not suggesting this as gameplay, imagine a boundary region between the outer edges of the galaxy and the rest. In that boundary, no stars would have neighbors close enough to reach via normal jumps, you'd need a FSD boost. Then imagine the region leading up to the boundary doesn't generate procedural neutrons/dwarves (also, imagine this is before fleet carriers). Now you've got a situation where access to the edges of the galaxy are gated, and you can place gates (manually or procedurally) in the form of secondary stars that are neutrons/dwarves. Players would only be able to get to the outer edges by exploring nearby systems to find these secondary stars. No magic necessary, just guided procedural generation.
 

Lulzwhat

Lulzwhat
varonica said:
Yes, and when we get landable earth like worlds I expect them to all be landable, not a single landable ELW, that's the entire point of the Stellar Forge, to avoid having hand craft planets and systems except where necessary.
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Well there is no real reason to handcraft non-existed planets. I think it could be possible to have handcrafter Sol planets but no more. Probably small key areas on certain planets. Like cities, facilities, etc.
Currently procedural generation gives is enough advanced to not have a copypaste planets.

FDev broke some things with tiling but i hope they solve it someday.
 

Fizzatron

Fizzatron
Kira Goto said:
Or we could just try to calm both sides currently in the war down and talk. The Thargoids are an interesting concept that has barely been explored other than “How does it react when you repeatedly poke it with a stick?”.
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I completely agree with you. But, I think the time for that is when we are able to interact with them face to face. Hopefully, once Frontier add onfoot Thargoids there can be moves to increase the interaction of them beyond shooty shooty. Though it's going to be shooty shooty to begin with, I'm sure.
 

Jmanis

Jmanis
varonica said:
They have already hit the limit of stars using 64bit numbers, it would be a huge task to add another galaxy...it could be done using the method the first ED game used, by unloading the current galaxy from memory and loading the new one, however the point of this galaxy simulation is that DB wanted to create a seamless galaxy experience so that's probably not on the cards, still plenty of places in the current galaxy we could encounter more aliens.
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I'd need to dig out the quote, but there was a dev post a while back basically saying "no" to additional galaxies.
 

Reggit

Reggit
It's an old argument - but here goes...
"Only 0.059% of the galaxy has been discovered in the Elite Dangerous live game so far..." - 10 Jan 2023
It is estimated, that it would take Cmdr's 150,895 years to map the entire Milky Way at the current rate.

I'm certainly not opposed to 'more stuff' - but having 100% more of the 99.941% no one has ever seen before...?
We need new gameplay, new mechanics, new atmospheres, new aliens......Not more empty space.
 

marx

marx
You know, there are errors / bugs with the "old" galaxy's generation. These will never be fixed, as fixing them would remake practically all systems' contents, which in turn would almost certainly demolish the BGS and PowerPlay.

Now, would adding a new galaxy with different generation be worth the time and effort? Bear in mind that it's quite likely that nobody who worked on the original Stellar Forge works at Frontier anymore (well, we certainly know that Dr. Kay Ross doesn't), so whoever would work on a new version would have to learn the old one first.
Then there's that a new galaxy would either be much better to explore than the current one, in which case a fair number of people will complain that all the old discoveries became obsolete (nobody's exploring the Milky Way anymore, so nobody will visit the old attractions), or it won't be, in which case even more people will complain that it's just more of the same.

Alternatively, some issues with the current galaxy might be fixed not by modifying the current generation, but by adding a second layer on top. However, that approach has its own issues too: that would likely be quite prone to breaking things. Consider nebulae, for example. It's a common (and valid) complaint that there are too few proc. gen. nebulae in the galaxy, especially on the far side. If Frontier added more as a second layer, then whenever the game has to check for the presence of a nearby nebula, it'd have to check two generations.

In any case, there's also that that even if there were new fog of war mechanics (not all of the galaxy map visible at the start), I'd wager it would be all mapped out in a matter of weeks. So the new content wouldn't last long.
What exploration needs are new gameplay mechanics, and fixing the FSS at least where Odyssey broke with its design principle. (It was that you could jump into a system, look at the barcode and decide if there's anything that you're interested in, and jump out if there isn't. Except with all of Odyssey's exobiology content, this no longer works, as you can't distinguish thin atmospheric planets until you scan everything.) As we've already seen, new content will only last for so long.
 

Darth Wonko

Darth Wonko
Lulzwhat said:
History knows a lot of "no" turned to "yes".
So... never say never:cool:
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I used to believe this until a judge told me otherwise.

Reggit said:
It's an old argument - but here goes...
"Only 0.059% of the galaxy has been discovered in the Elite Dangerous live game so far..." - 10 Jan 2023
It is estimated, that it would take Cmdr's 150,895 years to map the entire Milky Way at the current rate.

I'm certainly not opposed to 'more stuff' - but having 100% more of the 99.941% no one has ever seen before...?
We need new gameplay, new mechanics, new atmospheres, new aliens......Not more empty space.
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I think you're right on point here.

It's interesting to me that with only 0.059% of the galaxy explored, players are asking for a different galaxy.

Perhaps FDev should take notice that some players have basically assumed the other 99.941% of the galaxy is going to be just as repetitive and uninteresting as the 0.059% they've already seen.
 
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