Wait, 30 tons for the Scorpion?! That seems wildly excessive. I would have thought closer to five, maybe ten tons at the outside. 30 tons is the same as the gross weight limit for a non-articulated lorry in the UK.
Elite Dangerous plans for 2024
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Part of that, from my point of view at least, is that they insist on comparing the on-foot portions of Odyssey to first person shooters. In my opinion, "Elite Feet" is better described as a first-person role playing game, and IMO it's a decent enough example of one, with one of the better stealth systems I've seen. I'm not a fan of Frontier repeating most of the mistakes they made with the first iteration of Engineering, but at least this time around, it's been fairly trivial to find decently upgraded gear without the requirement of gathering components and unlocking engineers.
I dunno, NPCs will see you sailing over their buildings and inside locked areas and say "yeah that's normal, unless that guy gets within a short distance of me in which case maybe I'll check that out".
They did that so it would not be as "bumpy" as Scarab.
But yea, scorpion weight much as your average modern tank (light ones), while it isnt an one. Frontier logic at its finnest.
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It's heavy, but not inconceivably so, given that it's supposed to be heavily armored. They could have used a lot of tungsten or depleted uranium in it. What is categorically impossible is the SRV weighing more than the hangar module it's stored in (no matter how it's stored). SLF hangars are even worse...a Taipan is 28-30t as well and the class 7 hangar can print thirty of them, out of a sixty ton module (this hints at fighters originally being conceived as similar to SRVs with regard to replacements).
And in early beta's a lot of people ended up outside of stations because stations not only rotate, they orbit, so it was quite possible, in the early beta of Odyssey that you would end up floating in space. Keep in mind rotate and orbit are very slow process, we aren't talking anything like speed of light movement, how that translates to moving around in ships while traveling fast and maneuvering sharply in combat or just in ordinary activities could make huge difference in difficulty of implementation.
Quite easily, in fact you go and land on KOI 1710 A with a 45g surface gravity and 30 tons is a laugh, you are talking easily several hundred tons, which is one of the reasons I basically ignore most of the weight measures used in ED. When you are flying around in zero gravity the scarab weighs zero tons, but has a mass, and what they have done is they have assigned a "mass" that would result in the scarab weighing 30 tons in earths gravity, but only several hundred pounds on 90% of the planets we actually land on. It's all basically made up stuff to provide statistics for working out power and shields requirements for our spaceships, but really means nothing once you are on the ground and driving around. As Morbad says they could be using some really dense material for armour and etc that would make that mass up but that's irrelevant really, most of the other module weights make little sense until you actually realise they are there for ship balance and little else.
If the station's orbital rotation could somehow move the character - the character would fly a hundred kilometers away from the station in a second. Orbital movement is a movement with huge speed around the anchor point located in the center of the planet. Nothing "slow" is even close to being there. And if you continue to follow the same logic, you can add the rotation of the planet around the sun, which will be a thousand times faster and then the character at the slightest lag of the server would fly away at once for thousands of kilometers.
But this does not happen, because the player on the station is in the local 3d space of the station, he is not affected in any way neither the rotation of the station, nor the orbit, nor the stars.
So if the character for some reason left the station through the wall - this problem has nothing to do with the coordinates in the system. It could be a problem of desynchronization at the moment of changing the parent object (for example, when riding in an elevator) or some other problem.
You understand how instancing works in ED right?
But gravity, maybe not. Technically the orbital speed of an object depends on how far away from the primary body, and the how high the gravity of the primary body is and also to some extent its size, since gravity doesn't pull you towards the center in the way you are suggesting. Gravity pulls you from every single atom in the planet, and some of those won't be directly below you, they will be off to the side and average attraction will be towards the center of the planet. Orbital movement isn't a movement with huge speed around a center point of the body, it's a movement that is defined by the gravity and size of the parent body and indeed this can be quite large, there are equations that give you an accurate result for any body of any size and gravity, but that's irrelevant because ED only simulates gravity, it's not actually gravity.
No it had nothing to do with riding in an elevator, in fact in ED we don't actually ride in an elevator, the elevators don't move, it could happen when just standing next to a vendor, like at the Apex counter.
No the player isn't in the local 3D space of the station, he's in the space stations "instance" but his location is still tracked using the ID64 location data of the system, in ED individual ships and stations don't have their own 3D location data, everything is tracked using the system location data, which is why space ship need to have auto-rotate on to make manual landings easier so it synchronises with the rotation of the station, otherwise the landing pad will move away from underneath you when you try and land.
It was certainly an issue with synchronisation, but this issue increases the greater the difference the changes in velocity are, note the "changes" part. If you have a stable rotation and stable orbit you have a predictable path that the object follows in relation to the station and that's relatively easily compensated for, but it took them a while to get that part right, sometimes the location and velocity of the individual and the location and velocity of the station fall out of sync because they are tracked using the ID64 location data of the system, so they ended up outside the station. The greater the changes in velocity and direction the more likely a failure of syncronisation will take place so applying this to rapidly maneuvering small ship is much harder than relatively stable station and fleet carriers which all have predictable and stable motions.
You can see this phenomenon first hand by dropping out between two planetary rings, one will be unsynchronized with the other. Once you cross that void, you'll see the speed at which these rocks move. It's actually pretty amazing and quite scary. I've not done it in quite some time and not sure it's even a thing now, but it was once.
I wouldn't call it an RPG because I have a very specific definition of that. I'd call it an Aventure game though, and combat just happens to be part of it.
That also happened when a moon's orbit cut into the outer edge of a ring, because the ring is treated as a single object the rocks outer edge completed an orbit int he same time period as the rocks at the inner edge, meaning individual rocks were moving much faster than they should have been given their distance from the planet, and would pass by at a rather rapid pace compared to the moon's orbital speed when they should have been the same, hence the gravity in ED being only a simulation and not actually a complete model.
Well, indeed - I point out some of this stuff because "why don't you just bolt four 2A powerplants together" is funny, but it doesn't affect actual gameplay. But it's one of those things where that works best if you don't make it too easy to look behind the curtain.
Lots of people will insist that ED is a "hard sci-fi" universe because it's got a galaxy generation that aimed to be scientifically accurate and a few lore points like "no artificial gravity" where it doesn't use space magic ... while entirely ignoring things like violation of conservation of mass or energy (even outside of contexts like hyperspace where a bit of space magic is essential) or its utterly cavalier approach to the scale of anything which isn't a star system.
From a game perspective, no big deal. It's not Kerbal, it's not trying to be Kerbal, it doesn't need "mass" or "energy" to represent similar things to real life. And that holds up until they use the same drinks model for planetary bases and orbital outposts and there's suddenly a bunch of people who were perfectly happy overlooking all the other cases where "no artificial gravity" is quietly ignored who can't do the same here.
"Ship interiors for immersion" might be the worst possible outcome, in that context!
I didn’t say it’s perfect, or even great. I just said it’s better than most other games I’ve played, and those games set the bar fairly low. I’m well acquainted with the major pitfalls of developing stealth gameplay, and Frontier managed to avoid them. The stealth gameplay is worth playing, and that’s all I really expect from this game. Just like about everything else in this game, if I just want great stealth gameplay, I’ll play one that specializes in it.
If I want to fly my spaceship to a settlement on a mission to steal some information, I can do that in Odyssey. I’d do it a lot more if this were a single player game, but that ship sailed back in 2012, and I was aware of that fact when I Kickstarted the game.
Yeah. Even if you compare them with AFVs with non-composite armour... Light armoured reconnaissance vehicles are 10-15 tons, though admittedly most of them can only equip a couple of weapons.
I wouldn't call it an RPG because I have a very specific definition of that. I'd call it an Aventure game though, and combat just happens to be part of it.
That’s also a fair description, and I think I’ll start using that instead. It cuts down the inevitable “But there’s no leveling system!” objections, as well as better describes what I want from ED in general.
Even if there’s no ”point and click this obscure pixel” gameplay to be found.
In reality, yes. The relationship between mass, gravity and velocity? In reality, absolutely yes. But not in the ED. ED is a 2014 computer game. Everything there is a fake. Not in a bad way or a good way, but just as a fact.
I'd say it's much simpler than that - any body with gravity in the game is a spherical field with a point at the center. The point in the center is the anchor point, it provides rotation. Also between the lowest point on the surface and the edge of that sphere is a gradient falloff that calculates gravity. To calculate this kind of "gravity" a calculator will suffice, unlike simulating the attraction from each atom.
It also perfectly explains the phenomenon with rings or "sticking" to moons at landing as in this video -
here already the ship sticks to the local space of the moon (which I described earlier) and at this moment nothing else acts on the ship except the gravity of the moon itself. Because local space.
Maybe you work or have worked on the cobra engine and are involved in the development of the game? If so, then I have no further questions. Maybe the game is mathematically brilliant and built with atoms in mind - then I have no questions about the low frame rate and quietly leave the forum.
If you are not working on elite, then how can you know exactly how anything works there? My conclusions above are assumptions based on experience and observation.
Yeah I already told you all that, good job you were reading at the time.
im going to ignore the thing that actually having a fleet of ships that you can fly, fight, mine, or get absolutely lost in space with is not enough to feel like you have a ship...
im already tired of running from my ship to the concourse and back and if there was an option to bypass it, i would use it 9/10 times.
i am a proponent of walkable cockpits. id like to sit in my chair, put a plushie on my dashboard, hang a smelly tree and have a tea. running around halls? meh.
Choosing to skip walking through your ship to me would be on par with choosing to skip supercruise.
Of course, I'd ideally like to see actual mechanics available when walking in your ship, but to simply add immersion, that would be enough for me. Especially if you could customise it, like you can the cockpit area and external paintwork, but inside. Then I'd love to check out my friend's ships to see what they've done to make it to their liking, even if there's zero actual "gameplay" involved.
I like it when things are as seamless as possible, or the loading screen is heavily disguised as canonical gameplay, for example FSD jumps. But boarding your ship isn't even disguised, it's just an immersion-breaking black screen.
For me, walking through your ship without gameplay would be to Supercruise, as walking to the concourse is to moving through a settlement towards a mission objective.
The former are simply time sinks, while the latter offer numerous opportunities for adventure… even if you don’t take advantage of them.
That’s why I find being unable to skip straight to the station concourse to be so odious. By all rights, stepping out of your ship should be a gateway to adventure. What, or who, greets you there should be the first indication of the nature of the station. A customs official willing to take bribes? A gangster offering “protection?” People desperate to leave? THAT would make the walk from ramp to elevator worthwhile.
There are numerous way to add gameplay value to your own ship’s interior. But given how badly Frontier dropped the ball on station interiors, I’d rather they focus on adding new worlds to explore.