External View [A definitive discussion]

[Steve50]

Skins are only useless if you can't see them at all, which is the case now. Sure, you get a fixed camera in the outfitting screen that shows you an authored frozen still of your ship. Yeah, well, for that we already have the FD store page, you can preview paintjobs and decals there if a still photo is enough for you.

No, I'd like to appreciate my ship and its colours and patterns from any angle, even if it's docked, thanks. Is it too much to ask? I mean, I AM TRYING TO GIVE FD MONEY HERE! PLEASE LET ME GIVE YOU MONEY!

Afaik most people buy skins so others will see them, not to see them themselves.

I'm personally against external views and prefer only in-cockpit views but I guess an external view for taking screenshots would be fine as long as your weapons are disabled whilst using it.

 

[Colonel Kenney]

If you think it breaks immersion - don't use external view.

If you are running silent your external views should be powered down.

If hard points are deployed with PC's around they should be powered down.

They are ruining a great opportunity to showcase this game by allowing people to make their own fan movies and screenshots.

They are losing money because nobody will buy skins (unless they are dumb) if they can't even see their own ship!

How can a space ship capable of faster than light travel NOT have at least external cameras for rear/side or PTZ type cameras on the hull?

 

[WeirdWizard]

The poll itself is very misleading. A casual observer might think that the majority of people want an external cam because the Yes bar is the longest and it is listed as having 50.47% of the vote.


No this will break immersion, No the scanner is all you need and No keep everything within the ship are just three ways of saying the same thing. This artificially makes the bars look shorter. If you combine these three, 325 people said no to external view.

28 people said a combat external view. 16 said they want to know where they are being attacked from. This can be grouped with combat, so 44 want a combat external view.

162 people want a non-combat external view. Why this is listed as 50.47% of the vote, I don't know. 162/531 = 30.5%

No: 61.2%
Yes (combat): 8.3%
Yes (non combat): 30.5%

The poll wasn't broken it was multiple choice. So you have to look at each option individually as a yes/no percentage. 50.47% of all people who voted on the poll ticked yes to a simple external viewer non combat, the remaining 49.53% did not. Significantly higher than the highest no external view result.

Regardless the poll is very old and outdated a much more recent poll which was not multiple choice produced a 60% pro external views result. I imagine that percentage in favor of external views will have grown (and continue to grow) even more since release.

 

[Vasea Azure]

Afaik most people buy skins so others will see them, not to see them themselves.

I'm personally against external views and prefer only in-cockpit views but I guess an external view for taking screenshots would be fine as long as your weapons are disabled whilst using it.

I was fighting lots of players and I never could see their skins - too fast and too busy shooting. Unless you follow them peacefully around the station.

 

[WeirdWizard]

Afaik most people buy skins so others will see them, not to see them themselves.

Why would anyone care what other people see? More over I play solo so there isn't even any chance of anyone else seeing them.

 

[Deyn]

If you think it breaks immersion - don't use external view.

If you are running silent your external views should be powered down.

If hard points are deployed with PC's around they should be powered down.

They are ruining a great opportunity to showcase this game by allowing people to make their own fan movies and screenshots.

They are losing money because nobody will buy skins (unless they are dumb) if they can't even see their own ship!

How can a space ship capable of faster than light travel NOT have at least external cameras for rear/side or PTZ type cameras on the hull?

Yes, my car can do better than E: D can currently... You know "Rear view camera" and "Eagle eye view"...

 

[Deyn]

Well astronauts have always been able to see the outside of their space shuttle from every possible angle via cams in real life ... it really stumps me that there was no external camera built in as part of the design of this game from the get go, notwithstanding the design choice of cockpit only.

Sorry but it just seems like a huge oversight as it is a fundamental expectation in any space simulation that the pilot would want to view his beautiful craft. It is a game after all and why not give choice when you are able as it doesn't have to unbalance the game at all if it is designed in the ways already stated.

Hopefully Frontier come through on this one eventually

Actually there is an external camera! It is just limited to the cool Developers... ordinary folks like us, would use it to cheat, you know? So they willingly decided to deactivate the external view they use for tricking people into buying the game to cater a few naysayers that were afraid somebody could look around the corner of an asteroid...

"look at this cool ships" - only you can't in game, "See these cool fly-by through an asteroid field" - you won't be able to see that, "Enjoy the majesty of the universe" - but not from outside your fragging cockpit!

 

[Deyn]

I was fighting lots of players and I never could see their skins - too fast and too busy shooting. Unless you follow them peacefully around the station.

Even if you get close you can barely identify the basic color scheme, let alone see a decal under all that shield flicker and laser blasts.
And I'm definitely not buying any skins for the NPCs to enjoy!

 

[WeirdWizard]

Tbh I'm really concerned about certain dev posts that implied an external camera view did something unexpected to the networking code.

I'm wracking my brains trying to figure out what on earth the camera has to do with the networking code. I had imagined the engine builds up a 3D environment based on incoming network data regardless of where you're looking....

It's troubling that the ED netcode might actually depend on restrictive cockpit views.

Nah there's no way its a technical or networking issue. Even if it was somehow awkward with their netcode they could just implement it in solo mode where everything is stored client side and the server only provides occasional data for missions and such. But honestly I suspect this is either the result of a hand waving excuse or a misunderstanding.

 

[Deyn]

Tbh I'm really concerned about certain dev posts that implied an external camera view did something unexpected to the networking code.

I'm wracking my brains trying to figure out what on earth the camera has to do with the networking code. I had imagined the engine builds up a 3D environment based on incoming network data regardless of where you're looking....

It's troubling that the ED netcode might actually depend on restrictive cockpit views.

As I understood it was a problem with 4K screenshots and the issue could have been the peer to peer approach... yet it seems to work fine for the Developers when filming the promo videos... or do you imply the Developers actually using an "OFFline" mode to make this videos, as this was "technically not possible" as far as I understood the statements from DB and MB???

 

[Roybe]

As I understood it was a problem with 4K screenshots and the issue could have been the peer to peer approach... yet it seems to work fine for the Developers when filming the promo videos... or do you imply the Developers actually using an "OFFline" mode to make this videos, as this was "technically not possible" as far as I understood the statements from DB and MB???

The problem with offline mode was that it could not have had the background simulation running, adding or changing the markets, content, etc. Without that they felt the game would have needed content added to make it a viable/equivalent experience. To do this would have required them to attach enough company assets to basically build a new game. Currently, they could not do this. It wasn't a technical issue with video or anything related to that. BTW the engine this game runs on can actually display up to 8K levels of resolution.

 

[Deyn]

The problem with offline mode was that it could not have had the background simulation running, adding or changing the markets, content, etc. Without that they felt the game would have needed content added to make it a viable/equivalent experience. To do this would have required them to attach enough company assets to basically build a new game. Currently, they could not do this. It wasn't a technical issue with video or anything related to that. BTW the engine this game runs on can actually display up to 8K levels of resolution.

Read my post again. I point at the fact the developers obviously use the same "server based game we do" to make the promo videos etc. so why shouldn't it work in the release build?

I know what FD said why they decided to drop offline (even if most if not all would have been happy with "the limited" experience), but that was all discussed in epic monologues here

 

[Darkflame]

I am very much in favour of cams dotted about the ship.
Much like real spaceships have (mostly to assess damage, but the same effect is you get assume shots)

Drones I can appreciate is more work and should be lower priority. But simple "rear view cams" and such on our "dashboard" - yes sir!

The problem with offline mode was that it could not have had the background simulation running, adding or changing the markets, content, etc.

Yes, it could - you have a background sever on your system, simple.
Other things do this too. Client/Severs can exist fine within a single system - sometimes invisibly.

Its simply Frontier didnt want to dedicate resources to making their sever work on a standard windows pc with easy to install setup etc.

I also dought very much alternative camera views effect anything outside your local client in any way - unless the camera was so far away as to require different objects loaded, but thats unlikely.
Hell, if a hacker is good enough moving the direct-X rendering cam would do it.
(As old NVidia drivers did to support stereo on any game)

 

[Colonel Kenney]

I am very much in favour of cams dotted about the ship.
Much like real spaceships have (mostly to assess damage, but the same effect is you get assume shots)

Drones I can appreciate is more work and should be lower priority. But simple "rear view cams" and such on our "dashboard" - yes sir!



Yes, it could - you have a background sever on your system, simple.
Other things do this too. Client/Severs can exist fine within a single system - sometimes invisibly.

Its simply Frontier didnt want to dedicate resources to making their sever work on a standard windows pc with easy to install setup etc.

I also dought very much alternative camera views effect anything outside your local client in any way - unless the camera was so far away as to require different objects loaded, but thats unlikely.
Hell, if a hacker is good enough moving the direct-X rendering cam would do it.
(As old NVidia drivers did to support stereo on any game)

Cameras all over the ship would be nice. Hell even a turret you could man would be cool too. Eventually for 2nd players to be there.

 

[WeirdWizard]

Cameras all over the ship would be nice. Hell even a turret you could man would be cool too. Eventually for 2nd players to be there.

Sounds a bit like the 20 year old predecessor Frontier: Elite 2. Amazing how we can come so far forward in technology, capability, budget and theory and yet fail to even equal the features of old games made with a fraction of the budget on hardware vastly less powerful than most of us have in our pockets.

 

[Colonel Kenney]

I know... so many basic things are not even in games these days .. and they are considered great. Its the consolization of the PC market that have done this to us. Dumbed down monetized games.

Imagine you had 5 million bucks to make a game over 2 years what you could accomplish even 15 years ago.

Instead of throwing elaborate parties and booths at trade shows... giveaways and all that it could hae been spend on at least a good dozen more coders to put more into the game.

 

[almostpilot]

exactly, talk about bad marketing decisions, I would buy paint schemes if I could see them. but whats the point.
why they cannot just make external view not available in combat mode is beyond a stupid choice all the way around.

they're really shooting themselves in the foot on this one. I love the game, but this will cost them many sales and isn't that what its really all about ?

And despite that cited reason, it is worth mentioning that any flight simulator much more realistic and hardcore than ED has external view of your ship in flight. I think the FD is taking too long to implement this in the game.

 

[Darian]

Rear and bottom view via hud.. it is absolute unbelievable that you pilot an spacesip and doe not have a few cameras mounted under or at the back of your spaceship, hell, cars today have rear view cameras!

 

[Joe Akeem]

External View in stations only

This has been flogged about a lot but it IS a very viable solution while keeping the realism aspect.

For those of us, dare I say; the majority, who occasionally likes to get a perspective on things, bot mentally and for the vanity of it. Place a stationary external cam above your landing pad with some axis bound movement. I spend a good 45 minutes yesterday just headlooking all the in- and outcoming crafts and loved it. Hell, smack a zoom function in while you're at it. The cam will automatically close and grey out when launching. This way it will confine to realism rules but add so much potential/value.

*EDIT* my bad, wrong forum. Sry about that.

 

[NeilF]

IMHO, if a job's worth doing... It's worth doing right...

Let's just have a more complete and functional external view. There's been plenty of talk about it and I'm sure most people can see with a nerfed/controlled enough external drone feature we can have an external view which only adds to the game.

Sadly there's also more pressing features that need to implemented first - https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=77945