Elite Dangerous Game Engine / Ship Interior question.

[Alien]

So with ship interiors, I'm sure many of us have asked ourselves, 'what would it take for Elite to introduce ship interiors'.

The obvious answer? (especially now): The opportunity for monitization.

Monetization doesn't enter the discussion for Frontier when it comes to ship interiors. I think (ie this is speculation based on opinion) that there's three factors preventing ship interiors.
1) The ship models themselves can't accommodate an internal layout. Features like the SRV bay and SLF bay are located in spots which, on some ships, are literally right behind the door at the back of the cockpit. You can't open that door and have an SRV blocking your path.
2) The code for Elite Dangerous is (from what I've seen others say, those who actually know programming) a mess. It's original code that has been patched up and patched up and patched so many times that making simple changes either breaks things that shouldn't break or makes the game very unstable. We have to remember, Elite Dangerous isn't using an industry standard game engine like Unreal (for example), so every time Frontier hire a new employee to work on Elite Dangerous, they have to learn Frontier's Cobra engine.
3) It would take a lot of work to design and plan ship interiors, it would require model changes, it would have to incorporate some level of new gameplay (yes, I know I often say it doesn't need gameplay, but I'm looking at this from Frontier's POV, not my own and they'd have to have gameplay in there for interiors). And it would require someone to decide if it's a free update or its own DLC on a level with Odyssey. Frontier would have to be ready to handle negative feedback (because there are many in the community who would be negative towards this no matter what). And taking all that into consideration (again from Frontier's POV) Frontier probably think it's easier to simply not do it. This is also probably the same reason we don't get landing on atmospheric planets.

Don't misunderstand me here, I would love to have ship interiors. I truly believe Frontier could do it if they decided to, but I simply don't believe Frontier have the motivation to do so.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Is it a case that Frontier are not able to implement ship interiors (Engine constraints and so on)

Literally impossible in the engine seems highly unlikely - it's not, quantitatively, a different problem to letting us walk around the concourse of a Coriolis station. Plenty of other (much older!) games have "travel inside a vehicle" as a normal and working part of gameplay and the calculations involved are mathematically trivial (I have a tiny spreadsheet that uses the graph-drawing mode to implement ship interiors, though the rest of the game is currently missing)

Frontier have also achieved many things - fleet carriers, numerous parts of the Thargoid war, soon to be colonisation - which players had confidently declared to be completely impossible because of engine limitations: the main answer is "yes, it would be impossible if implemented that way; they don't have to implement it that way"

(Also, it's their engine: they can just add an extra feature to it if they really need it)

Or is it a case that they simply chose not to? (Costs too much to design and implement)

This will largely be it, I expect.

On the sales side:
- Odyssey did not sell particularly well and made a giant loss; trying to sell a further expansion which goes further down that route in terms of feature set is risky
- that also reduces the cosmetics market for it; it's notable that they haven't even thought it worth trying to make carrier interior cosmetics
- there's such a wide range of interpretations of what counts as "ship interiors" that it risks the Odyssey "that's not what we meant by space legs" response (quite a few of the suggestions would declare that X4 did not have enough ship interiors to count, for example)

On the cost side:
- other than the cosmetics side of it, it's difficult to think of gameplay requiring ship interiors which couldn't also be implemented some other way (and therefore quicker and cheaper) without making ship interiors a pre-requisite for it. Frontier have essentially said this directly on one occasion.
- walkable areas require a lot more model detail than others, which therefore costs more: it's notable if you look at recent features ... they've implemented three more ships and one more on its way, all of which are entirely new models, paints, ship kits, etc. but the cockpits which get looked at really up-close are copied from an existing ship ... they've put the new Stronghold Carriers in and one thing they don't have (nor particularly need, in gameplay terms) is a walkable concourse.
- they've already been putting essentially every £ ED brings in back into its development since they started making Odyssey in mid-2018, and the company as a whole is not currently profitable enough to justify risking spending more than that.

Does that mean "never"? Not necessarily. But they need to change things up a bit first.
- get more people to buy Odyssey (attaching ships to, making some AX and Powerplay activities use various aspects of it, dropping the price significantly)
- get more people actively playing ED in general (the Engineering updates seem to have been good for that; it's early days on Powerplay but the principle is sound, Colonisation could go the same way)

 

[babelfisch]

Successfully implementing ship interiors the way players want, that is the way Star Citizen does, is far harder than it appears to the average player. There's a reason Fleet Carriers make you all sit down in a seat before jumping, because what people want is not easy.

Obviously I can't speak for everyone, but I am sure that a large portion of the player base would already be happy with standing and walking around in the cockpit. Add a few customisation options for the store and you are done.
Full space legs with access to the entire ship, gameplay, boarding etc. would be better of course. But if it's either just the cockpit or nothing I go for the cockpit.

 

[Darrack]

Can't get that StarCitizen-level money without putting in StarCitizen-level work

Yet Fdev actually made a working game

O7

 

[Darrack]

Expected release is now 2026

O7

 

[thistle]

Is the release date still 2125?

2016, I can't wait I'm so excited!

 

[angusmadmac1]

Personally ship interiors and/or Consoles coming back have as much of the same chance

 

[FixMeNow]

Rather have player own planet bases, but FDev got to actually put some effort into it and add gameplay loops.

Already got the assets would be alot easier to do.

 

[Rat Catcher]

the collective hate-on people in these forums have for Star Citizen is embarrassing.

At least I gave them money for old rope, rather than just hate for the sake of it...

ETA: Currently, for the money I gave Chris toward his pet project, every hour of play has cost a little under £6, it has been that much fun!

 

[Darrack]

At least I gave them money for old rope, rather than just hate for the sake of it...

Likewise my initial backing of 50quid has at least given me some entertainment value of the years

O7

 

[Valorin]

If it was easy to do, we'd already have interiors. It's as simple as that.
It just isn't.

And the way they could probably make it happen, would most likely just set the Forum on fire and everything else, because it's not what people meant when they screamed for ship interiors. Exactly like they did when we got those highly sought after space legs...

Here's your space legs, people! But NO, these are not the space legs we wanted, we wanted a different kind of space legs, and where the hell are our interiors anyway?!

Building interiors to walk around in a moving object is not an easy task at all.
Building interiors for every single ship in the game, especially with the size if ships in Elite, is a lot of work. And imagine the rage when ships would look similar and are not all different, or if we would only get part of the ships.... "Whut?! I can only walk around in my cockpit?! But I wanted the whole ship Fdeeeeev!" ...

And then there's the gameplay stuff... I mean, sure, you could do engineering stuff and all that in a ship, which would be cool, but otherwise?! Decorations maybe? Roleplay?

 

[metatheurgist]

Is the release date still 2125?

It's already released. The janky unplayable mess it is now is the game. It's not getting any better, supporters just haven't figured it out yet.

 

[varonica]

Literally impossible in the engine seems highly unlikely

Oh I agree it's probably not impossible, the issue I have is with people saying "it's easy," because it's not. If it was truly easy do they not think FDEV would have done it already? It very likely falls into that area of being possible with a lot of work but is it worth doing re: dev time and possible monetary return. I mean if we are talking upgrading the game engine for start there's investment that generates zero return.

Plenty of other (much older!) games have "travel inside a vehicle" as a normal and working part of gameplay

Got to be careful quantitatively, because for instance Star Trek Online appears to have that feature but it doesn't actually have that feature, it's all smoke and mirrors, the same with Starfield.

In the end it comes down to, if it was indeed easy they would have probably done it when they released legs.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Got to be careful quantitatively, because for instance Star Trek Online appears to have that feature but it doesn't actually have that feature, it's all smoke and mirrors, the same with Starfield.

Would anyone actually care if Elite Dangerous didn't have ship interiors but let you walk around the interior of a ship anyway?

The Stargoids didn't really supercruise from system to system either, but they got the job done.

In the end it comes down to, if it was indeed easy they would have probably done it when they released legs.

Of course - and it's one of the few features Frontier have explicitly said they're not planning to do, too. But the difficult bits probably aren't what "forum wisdom" thinks they are.

 

[varonica]

Would anyone actually care if Elite Dangerous didn't have ship interiors but let you walk around the interior of a ship anyway?

I suspect a large number of people would, I would be happy if they only let you walk around when you were docked to avoid some of the problems, but there's a lot of people who would be unhappy with that. There's a tech demo that's created a lot of expectations for ship interiors and interactions, and the fact they have been trying for 10 plus years and still haven't got it right doesn't seem to occur to a lot of people.