Documentation is always the first thing that does not get done due to cost cutting. Very short sighted and always comes back to bite you in the long term.
How big do you think the Elite Dangerous development team currently is?
- Thread starter baron_V_S
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Don't forget that we can't land on planets with atmospheres...One of the possibilities the fermi paradox says is Intelligent Societies die before they become space faring, there is not a detailed specification of what that means (one system? two?) but that would suggest that the galaxy might be littered with dead civilizations for us to find.
If the speculation that ED is written in C++ is correct, the right term is probably lasagna code.
I'm also partial to the theory that they have a problem with source control, and that merging code sometimes overwrites a previous fix.
I spend 90% of my time here exploring.
Exploring ruins, exploring tourist beacons, exploring settlements, exploring stuff from the codex, it really is an exploration game.
Isn't that the idea? Outside the bubble offers the best part of the game, im constantly pinching myself at some of the screenshots i get.
Two years in and im only half way down my exploration wishlist, it really is an exploration game.
This is exactly the point, looking for lost stuff, Raxxla, new guardian sites, undiscovered Black Holes and Earth Like Worlds.
Did i mention this really is an exploration game?
O7
And it is. There are dozens of systems of dead Guardian "litter" alone, along with deep-space human litter from INRA expeditions. Now I will grant you that Elite would have been more interesting if Guardian outposts were actual unique cities in ruins instead of these cookie-cutter tech Egyptian monuments. It would also be more interesting if instead of one race spread across dozens of systems, there were dozens of different races each in their own single solar system. The idea that FTL would be ubiquitous to all races with tech seems like a stretch. It'll be decades (if not longer, if at all) before humans colonize our own solar system, let alone other solar systems.One of the possibilities the fermi paradox says is Intelligent Societies die before they become space faring, there is not a detailed specification of what that means (one system? two?) but that would suggest that the galaxy might be littered with dead civilizations for us to find.
But to say that the galaxy in Elite is empty is a bit disingenuous. It's no more empty that what we've encountered in IRL exploration of our galaxy (albeit via radio telescope / SETI). On the other side of the spectrum, you have NMS, where out of 18.7 quintillian planets, 18.69 are inhabited by one of four races. I find that way more "boring" (easy mode) than Elite's emptiness. In fact, in NMS, I go searching for those super-rare uninhabited planets. It should be the other way around.
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It really depends on how you play it. If like you and I, discovering the wonders of the universe is your thing, the the galaxy is a vast resource of possibilities. On the other hand if you prefer to blow other ships up then the galaxy outside the bubble and Colonia is a waste of space (excuse the pun).I spend 90% of my time here exploring.
Exploring ruins, exploring tourist beacons, exploring settlements, exploring stuff from the codex, it really is an exploration game.
Isn't that the idea? Outside the bubble offers the best part of the game, im constantly pinching myself at some of the screenshots i get.
Two years in and im only half way down my exploration wishlist, it really is an exploration game.
This is exactly the point, looking for lost stuff, Raxxla, new guardian sites, undiscovered Black Holes and Earth Like Worlds.
Did i mention this really is an exploration game?
O7
Even then I don't consider it a waste of space, because when I'm focusing on combat in the Bubble, I still greatly appreciate the realistic and dynamic skybox that is only possible if each one of those points of lights are actual stars rather than just an artist flicking pixels on a bitmap. I would love it if X4 "wasted space" like this!
This sounds like you are falling into the "appreciation of the vastness and wonder of the galaxy" group rather than the "where is the next thing to shoot" or the "why do people not play in open so that I can blow them up" group, which is what I was talking about.
i think the server side is written in PHP, i know someone who joined the server team and that was what they told me they'd be coding in.If the speculation that ED is written in C++ is correct, the right term is probably lasagna code.
I'm also partial to the theory that they have a problem with source control, and that merging code sometimes overwrites a previous fix.
As an explorer I spent many years out in the black( outside of the bubble less people to interact withI spend 90% of my time here exploring.
Exploring ruins, exploring tourist beacons, exploring settlements, exploring stuff from the codex, it really is an exploration game.
Isn't that the idea? Outside the bubble offers the best part of the game, im constantly pinching myself at some of the screenshots i get.
Two years in and im only half way down my exploration wishlist, it really is an exploration game.
This is exactly the point, looking for lost stuff, Raxxla, new guardian sites, undiscovered Black Holes and Earth Like Worlds.
Did i mention this really is an exploration game?
O7
) my elite was achieved in 2018 , I still beg to differ , I've done a raxxla hunt visited all regions on the map, seen and jpeg'd many interesting areas . But you could really fit all that into one region possibly 2 if you stretched it out a bit ( well apart from the penduncle trees which take up nearly two regions ) . The rest is for effect, time spent travelling . But if you enjoy it then who am I to argue ??Yes, IIRC you're right, there is youtube presentation with Dav where he explains some of the backend architecture. I did mean the client, but I think that was a rumour based on a screenshot from the Frontier offices.
So it is an exploration game then?As an explorer I spent many years out in the black( outside of the bubble less people to interact with
I could spend another hundred years out in the Black, but like you said i enjoy exploration.
O7
Hmm, so there's one thing I've kind of been wondering about -- wondering more ever since players' sitting down in chairs in select locations was added...
With an object-oriented approach, and such a dynamic environment as the Elite game world, one might imagine a chair object might be encapsulated by a class that includes any ancillary things, such as the interaction-condition volume, and click-target, and animation origin point, various state flags and parameters (interactable? occupied? Which animation set to use - maybe one that has the player scooting in from the side, because there's a table in front? ...and so on...), functions and callbacks, etc...
This way, a map designer might just drop a sofa into their map, and it would "just work", and subsequent updates to classes could be inherited by existing instances.
...but... I don't know, I can't put a finger to it, but something about... I really don't know - maybe something about the overall balance in the game between hand-built, and procedurally puzzled-together, maybe something about location restrictions... Something kind if makes me wonder if rather than the above, the map makers had to go through each of the affected maps, and hand-emplace, and manually link all of the required components, for each and every seat in them...
With an object-oriented approach, and such a dynamic environment as the Elite game world, one might imagine a chair object might be encapsulated by a class that includes any ancillary things, such as the interaction-condition volume, and click-target, and animation origin point, various state flags and parameters (interactable? occupied? Which animation set to use - maybe one that has the player scooting in from the side, because there's a table in front? ...and so on...), functions and callbacks, etc...
This way, a map designer might just drop a sofa into their map, and it would "just work", and subsequent updates to classes could be inherited by existing instances.
...but... I don't know, I can't put a finger to it, but something about... I really don't know - maybe something about the overall balance in the game between hand-built, and procedurally puzzled-together, maybe something about location restrictions... Something kind if makes me wonder if rather than the above, the map makers had to go through each of the affected maps, and hand-emplace, and manually link all of the required components, for each and every seat in them...
I started off as a poor trader just managing to keep my python together, then hit BGS and combat , then a bit of raxxla hunting and the dark wheel . Whilst mixing jumping around the map . So not just an exploration game but a many faceted game with enough other stuff so when you get bored of 1 you can do something else . 7 years in this iteration plus a few more in the Amiga and spectrum so it's not a bad game .So it is an exploration game then?
I could spend another hundred years out in the Black, but like you said i enjoy exploration.
O7
Truly I'm much more concerned about the lack of bug fixing than on the slow development. My friend I play with a lot is cutting back because he is just tired of all the bugs and black screen locks when getting in and out of vehicles.
I'd put that down to a lack of an overall plan or vision, as there's almost always no consideration of second/third order effects. So many changes lack any strategic vision of the broader game design.
Take the mineral price changes that occurred. FD's intent was clearly "Lets give trading a bit of a boost" by bumping a bunch of mineral prices. But nobody[1] foresaw the effect this would have on delivery/source missions, whose rewards are tied directly to cargo value, and therefore horribly imbalanced them resulting in a nerf a month or two later. Clearly, never considered.
On missions, we then had the time when factors such as station distance got included in missions... but nobody thought "What about Hutton Orbital, or those other long-range stations?" and thus, Rhea and other farming was born. Likewise "Robigo long range slave trading" was another unintended consequence of not having range limits on interstellar mission offers, and just identifying "nearest possible station".
Continuing with missions... notice how chain missions/in-space mission offers are all but gone now? Not suggesting this is the reason why, but something you might've noticed is that most of them were bugged in one way, shape or form, or lacked the "balance passes" that normal mission board missions had received over time. Again, that's because these were overlooked... fixes to missions were just for "mission board missions" not "all missions where they occur", again a lack of overall vision.
And so on and so forth.
There's nothing inherently "wrong" with any of these implementations, it's just that they were never planned, which means they almost always had dags that needed cleaning up after the fact.... which all ties back to a lack of planning and strategic vision.
... of course, more cynically, there is a strategic vision, and it's driven by the shareholders who want the "next big content update" for profits++... to achieve that, all these issues can pretty much stay as they are and my rationales aren't relevant. People don't buy games for their bugfixes.
[1] By nobody I mean within FD. For myself and numerous others, this was the first thing we checked, thus, it got nerfed pretty quick.
Yes, but we should still see their satellites (how many do we have polluting our space?), their probes, space telescopes and their rovers on dead moons.
I'd imagine that time and entropy would take care of that. Once we're gone, I imagine that most of our tech stuff would be gone relatively quickly, and the only traces of us would be found by landing on planet earth. Still one should certainly be able to occasionally come across something interesting, maybe some long abandoned moon base, some mysterious artifact, maybe a dead space probe, or indeed a rover wreck.
Stuff on earth would be eradicated quickly (in geo scales) by weather, plants and erosion (there's a whole TV program about this). Stuff in space will pretty much last forever.