How FD undermined their own creation

[MadDogMurdock]

But apparently it's exploration

It is now anyway

 

[Valorin]

Game over man, game over

You wrote so much to finish like this?!? Can I have your stuff?

I actually don't mind any of the decisions you criticized, but agree on the part where they could have made a lot more from the concept they started with. In my opinion. I played a lot Frontier and First Encounters back then and always returned to these games because of the believable setting, scale and simulation.

All I really want from ED is to be like those games with better graphics and better thought-through mechanics. I basically want the best space sim that has ever been created. So I naturally give a flying [redacted] about space legs and instead want atmospheric landings, but also so much more SCIENCE. I want to be able to interact with whatever we find out there in a scientific way and not just blow up stuff and shoot at pylons, rocks, whatever to charge or "mine". At some point they decided to give us weapons instead of tools, and that's still something I really loathe in ED. For me the scale tipped into the wrong direction with that decision.
That said, Elite is still my favourite space game and I also like Frontier as a company to be honest. Gotta respect the Braben (and all the good underlings as well, of course. )

 

[[Diplomacy] Carnegie]

You wrote so much to finish like this?!? Can I have your stuff?

I actually don't mind any of the decisions you criticized, but agree on the part where they could have made a lot more from the concept they started with. In my opinion. I played a lot Frontier and First Encounters back then and always returned to these games because of the believable setting, scale and simulation.

All I really want from ED is to be like those games with better graphics and better thought-through mechanics. I basically want the best space sim that has ever been created. So I naturally give a flying [redacted] about space legs and instead want atmospheric landings, but also so much more SCIENCE. I want to be able to interact with whatever we find out there in a scientific way and not just blow up stuff and shoot at pylons, rocks, whatever to charge or "mine". At some point they decided to give us weapons instead of tools, and that's still something I really loathe in ED. For me the scale tipped into the wrong direction with that decision.
That said, Elite is still my favourite space game and I also like Frontier as a company to be honest. Gotta respect the Braben (and all the good underlings as well, of course. )

Maybe the new era will be called "Elite: Scientific".
A man can dream...

 

[aRJay]

The greatest single aspect of ED is without doubt Stellar Forge and the recreation of a 1-1 galaxy with all the variety that RNG can muster with 400 billion potentially unique outcomes.

Unfortunately, almost every single decision made about exploring it has been wrong and has undermined the glorious scale and variety of our home, the Milky Way.

Blunder 1. The Open Galaxy
By making travel unrestricted, FD immediately and irrevocably removed the wide possibilities of path-finding as an exploration mechanism.
A huge amount of gameplay could have been built around the idea that hyperspace routes between systems need to be established before they can be used.
Imagine a hard frontier around the bubble of explored space, as there was on a smaller scale during Beta. A key gameplay mechanism could have involved some form of route discovery to both push the frontier outwards, and improve transport links inside the bubble.
Instead, the #1 attraction in the entire galaxy, the centre of it, was reached becore the game even officially launched.
Rather than an exercise in path-finding led expansion, travelling our galaxy became an exercise in endurance.

....

I have issues with the discovered routes idea, one is that it can lead to the situation that to get from system A to system B there are only a couple of routes so everything gets very predictable. Another is how routes are discovered and established the easy way is a survey ship flies to the ‘new’ system and establishes a beacon for the route of course they have to go there in normal space or supercruise or the equally slow method of surveying and calculating for months as used in Starman Jones or for plotting wormholes in the Honor Harrington books with of course the possibility that there is no route back.

My main issue though is that we get stuck with a network of fixed routes and have as little freedom of choice about how to get to places as in a railway game.

That sort of route pioneering exploration belongs in an era before any of the Elite games were set.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Oh c'mon! A tag is just binary -1 byte (discovered/undiscovered) and the router will download even less information than what it does becuase it doesn't get the information for all galaxy system (now it also tells you what star type is and it calculates the distance of each).

No.

The game doesn't download information about the stars position at all. Nor does it store on disk in advance the position, name and primary star class of all of them (which would take hundreds of GB) ... with the exception of a very small number of hand-placed stars like Sol, Alioth, Sag A*, etc. and a slightly larger number of hand-edited stars like Beagle Point.

All of this is generated - rapidly - on-demand when you do something which looks at a sector or system, by re-running the procedural generation algorithms. It's a really impressive feat of programming that they've managed to get it fast enough that it looks like the data is all already there (and presumably hide quite a bit of calculation behind the zoom and pan animations), but it is an illusion and it does have limitations compared with a real database.

Once you start adding any network round-trips into that it's going to slow right down. 100ms (on a good day, quiet server and fast network) to get a response back from the server about whether a set of systems has been discovered, just because of speed-of-light limitations in the network itself, would be pretty obvious while scrolling the galaxy map. If you're scrolling it fast through the core regions - or plotting a route through them! - you could be requesting tens of thousands of systems per second.

Even just re-calculating the existence of those systems is pretty slow on that scale, which is one of the reasons that routing around the core was painful until they managed to optimise it in the 2.2 release (at the expense of a little route quality and consistency, so it's not so much "fastest route" as "pretty close and good enough").

 

[Stealthie]

Not true - pre-2.1? your incoming angle was random, so you probably wouldn't end up in the wrong place the second time, while after that your incoming angle was dependent on your direction, so you could approach the system from a different direction (above or below the orbital plane) to guarantee avoiding the problem.

Well, yes.

The point, though, is that if you make a jump in the same circumstances then you will get the same result every time.

There's no way for the game to alert you to a potential danger or for it to adjust things as a result of the data that previous visitors to a system might have provided to UniCart.
That being the case, simply moving the jump-in point to somewhere (allegedly) "safe" is a fairly reasonable band-aid solution.

What I'd prefer to see, however, would be some kind of adaptive system that would initially simply dump ships close to the star, come what may, but would then (upon collecting exploration data) update individual jump-in points for a system.

As Drew C says, it's true that a jump-in point might be "safe" from certain directions, or perhaps when binary stars are at certain points in their orbits, but dangerous at other times.
Those would be the sort of things that any kind of adaptive UniCart system would have to account for.
You might, for example, jump into a system one day and it'd be safe because a Binary star was on the far size of the Primary and UniCart would consider that jump-in orbit safe.
Half a solar orbit later, you might jump into the same system and get cooked by the Binary, at which point UniCart would recognise that the jump-in orbit wasn't safe after all and it'd update it's database so that the jump-in orbit was clear of both the Primary and the Binary.

In practice, I don't think it'd be especially difficult to design.
The Stellar Forge would create systems and then roll it's dice to decide what, if any, hazards a system contained and then it'd set a jump-in point a given distance from the Primary (which could be considered as a hypothetical "sphere" surrounding the Primary).
Ships would jump into a system, encounter hazards and then, as data gets sold to UniCart, the game would modify the "jump-in sphere" of each system until it was in a position where it didn't intersect any of the hazards in a system.

 

[aRJay]

See, that's exactly the argument I'd use if I was defending the status quo; we can already map the galaxy in a rudimentary way so it seems likely that the entire galaxy would be mapped in the 34th century.

Thing is, from a gameplay perspective, there should really just be.... more.

It'd be nice if there were, for example, significant solar flares, radiation storms, asteroid belts, comets, micro-meteorite clouds and all sorts of other things which might present a hazard when entering a system - especially for the first time.

When we engage the FSD we currently get a little message telling us the class/state of the destination system.
Imagine if, instead, we got a little pop-up box that could tell us how well-charted a system was, whether it contained any known hazards or whether it was a completely unknown system.
You'd jump in and things might get properly exciting for a while - if the system contained significant hazards.

And then, gradually, as more and more people visit a system, UniCart would "update their records" and the jump-in point would be moved to a safe location, at which point the system would be considered safe for routine travel.

It could, perhaps, be argued that it'd become tedious having to deal with all that stuff continually on a trip to, say, Beagle Point but, then again, if all that stuff did happen all the time then we probably wouldn't be making routine trips to Beagle Point yet and instead there'd be an army of courageous/foolhardy explorers throwing themselves out into the dangerous unknown just to chart a safe course to SagA or attempting to reach the stranded Jaques Station, system by system, instead.

Now that is a much better reason to have routes between systems.

 

[MadDogMurdock]

You wrote so much to finish like this?!? Can I have your stuff?

I actually don't mind any of the decisions you criticized, but agree on the part where they could have made a lot more from the concept they started with. In my opinion. I played a lot Frontier and First Encounters back then and always returned to these games because of the believable setting, scale and simulation.

All I really want from ED is to be like those games with better graphics and better thought-through mechanics. I basically want the best space sim that has ever been created. So I naturally give a flying [redacted] about space legs and instead want atmospheric landings, but also so much more SCIENCE. I want to be able to interact with whatever we find out there in a scientific way and not just blow up stuff and shoot at pylons, rocks, whatever to charge or "mine". At some point they decided to give us weapons instead of tools, and that's still something I really loathe in ED. For me the scale tipped into the wrong direction with that decision.
That said, Elite is still my favourite space game and I also like Frontier as a company to be honest. Gotta respect the Braben (and all the good underlings as well, of course. )

The dev post that the FSS is it and that FD are happy with it and have no intention to reinstate anything like the ADS is the confirmation that I needed to finally acknowledge that it's unlikely that I'll log in again. It's been 6 months already.
I only came back to the forum because the balls-up they made with the last update breaking the FSS meant there was a slim chance that it would be revisited.

ED is still my favourite space game, I just can't bring myself to play it while the FSS is a mandatory gate to exploration.
It certainly did go a lot more pew pew than I'd hoped for somewhere along the way, and many opportunities have been missed to add better and more engaging tools for non-combat roles.

Sections of the forum cut FD a lot of slack, hoping that the Q4 exploration update would finally provide functionality worthy of the role, so to instead be presented with something that I personally just don't find compelling in any way is bad enough, for it to be obligatory is just the final nail in the coffin.

Game over man

 

[aRJay]

No, SCA will orbit a planet at low speed.
DSS also works at low speed.
What i'm not sure is SCA speed being low enough for FSS to work and also orbit altitude big enough for DSS to be usable

I don’t think that the ‘orbit’ will let you point at the planet, could well be wrong as I have only made orbit using SCA twice it mainly face planted me into the planet before I gave up on it.

 

[[Diplomacy] Carnegie]

Well, yes.

The point, though, is that if you make a jump in the same circumstances then you will get the same result every time.

There's no way for the game to alert you to a potential danger or for it to adjust things as a result of the data that previous visitors to a system might have provided to UniCart.
That being the case, simply moving the jump-in point to somewhere (allegedly) "safe" is a fairly reasonable band-aid solution.

What I'd prefer to see, however, would be some kind of adaptive system that would initially simply dump ships close to the star, come what may, but would then (upon collecting exploration data) update individual jump-in points for a system.

As Drew C says, it's true that a jump-in point might be "safe" from certain directions, or perhaps when binary stars are at certain points in their orbits, but dangerous at other times.
Those would be the sort of things that any kind of adaptive UniCart system would have to account for.
You might, for example, jump into a system one day and it'd be safe because a Binary star was on the far size of the Primary and UniCart would consider that jump-in orbit safe.
Half a solar orbit later, you might jump into the same system and get cooked by the Binary, at which point UniCart would recognise that the jump-in orbit wasn't safe after all and it'd update it's database so that the jump-in orbit was clear of both the Primary and the Binary.

In practice, I don't think it'd be especially difficult to design.
The Stellar Forge would create systems and then roll it's dice to decide what, if any, hazards a system contained and then it'd set a jump-in point a given distance from the Primary (which could be considered as a hypothetical "sphere" surrounding the Primary).
Ships would jump into a system, encounter hazards and then, as data gets sold to UniCart, the game would modify the "jump-in sphere" of each system until it was in a position where it didn't intersect any of the hazards in a system.

There's a couple of downsides I can see to having a fixed (or updating to fixed) jump-in point.

1. It puts us back in the position of having an essentially random location for the next jump target. This is a pain in the behind for traveling since you can't skim-scoop the star as you're lining up for your next jump - if it's behind you. If you're flying a 'Conda that's a lot of wasted turning time.

2. Once gankers figure out the Shin drop-in point you can guarantee they'll be there waiting to interdict people as soon as they've dropped in.

I prefer the system we have now - it's convenient and logical.

 

[aRJay]

I'm at Sol, I open the galaxy map and I can see an undiscovered system next to Beagle Point.

NO! That shouldn't be possible!

In the galaxy map we should only be able to see already discovered stars.
While the undiscovered systems should only be visible in a range of 500 ly (for example) from our current position. This would make the other explorers effort useful by opening routes throughout the galaxy and it would leave the sense of "unkown" in the galaxy sectors.

For example I could see Colonia and plot a direct route to it because the system is known and many stars in-between have already been discovered thanks to the first exploring settlers.

Stars that are visible from anywhere that has been visited by anyone in the game who has sold exploration data on their return should be in the galaxy map. Now any information other than the star type and position shouldn’t be available.

 

[Jenner]

Wholeheartedly agree with point #1. I think having essentially unlimited range severely hamstrung exploration. It turned it into something that is only restricted by time and a player's patience. It should have been an involved process of route finding, managing supplies and repairs, and navigating environmental dangers along the way. That's not to mean exploration shouldn't be the chill gameplay profession that it is. There are ways to make it challenging, but low-key.

As for the other points, and the FSS in particular, I don't agree as much. In particular I don't see the logic in pulling the FSS into this as it's not related to the issue you coupled it with - that of idle time in SC. "The problem with SC isn't so much the time it takes to get to secondary stars, it's the lack of things to do on the way there. " you say. I agree that SC is pretty 'dead' as far as gameplay goes, but the FSS has nothing to do with that. If you find a cool planet to go explore that is 200k LS away you're going to be hoofing it in SC whether you use the FSS or not. The 'boring' nature of in-system travel is the same. I also don't agree that long intra-system travel times are required for a sense of proper scale. As OA points out in his latest video there are different ways to accomplish this besides inflating travel times. I'm even ok with travel times in the minutes as long as there's something interesting to do on the way.

 

[MadDogMurdock]

I have issues with the discovered routes idea, one is that it can lead to the situation that to get from system A to system B there are only a couple of routes so everything gets very predictable. Another is how routes are discovered and established the easy way is a survey ship flies to the ‘new’ system and establishes a beacon for the route of course they have to go there in normal space or supercruise or the equally slow method of surveying and calculating for months as used in Starman Jones or for plotting wormholes in the Honor Harrington books with of course the possibility that there is no route back.

My main issue though is that we get stuck with a network of fixed routes and have as little freedom of choice about how to get to places as in a railway game.

That sort of route pioneering exploration belongs in an era before any of the Elite games were set.

Without getting into what the actual mechanism is, what is the limitation you see on establishing a new route?
If a direct link between two systems within jump range didn't exist, why wouldn't you be able to establish one?

It's an awful lot of links to establish, but I could eventually see a situation in the bubble where most systems are linked directly to all systems within 25 ly, with a number of longer links established between key systems to facilitate rapid transit across the bubble.

This kind of functionality indirectly serves multiple game mechanisms - PP factions would want to establish networks, BGS factions would want to connect their systems directly.
Establishing new routes could also affect trade, etc. etc.

 

[Stealthie]

There's a couple of downsides I can see to having a fixed (or updating to fixed) jump-in point.

Sorry, I'm struggling to explain it properly.

What I'm proposing would work much as things work now - you'd jump into a system and arrive at a set distance from the star, on a vector dependant on where you arrived from.
As I said, the jump-in point can be thought of as a "sphere" concentric to the Primary and your actual jump-in location will depend on where you intersect that "sphere", depending on what direction you're coming from.

The difference would be that if you encountered any kind of hazard, and then handed the data over to UniCart, the jump-in distance could be changed so that subsequent visitors might avoid that hazard.

So, for example, let's say the initial jump-in point is 2Ls from a star.
that would create a hypothetical "sphere" 4Ls bigger than the star.
You jump in, from any direction, and arrive when you intersect the "sphere".

Let's say the star was giving out solar flares 10Ls long and you get toasted.
You hand-in your data and the jump-in point gets moved so it's, say, 12Ls from the Primary in order to avoid solar flares.
The "sphere" is now 24Ls in diameter, so you'll always arrive at a point 12Ls from the Primary, from any direction.

Now let's say the system has Binary stars and somebody jumps in, arrives 12Ls from the star and gets toasted by the Binary.
They hand in their data and the jump-in point gets changed again so it's now, say, 18Ls from the Primary in order to avoid the orbit of the Binary.
The "sphere" is now 36Ls in diameter, so you'll always arrive 18Ls from the Primary, from any direction.

+EDIT+

Also, I should say, I don't mean to labour this specific thing too much.

The only point, really, was that when the jump-in distances are arbitrary, and you ARE always going to suffer consequences if you encounter things like Binaries, and there's nothing you can do to prevent it or be forewarned about it, I think it's reasonable that people might moan about it and ask for it to be "fixed".

If, OTOH, the system was more dynamic, and you could expect hazards in uncharted systems or expect safety in well-travelled systems, then it'd allow FDev to throw in a bit of jeopardy and excitement for explorers and there'd be no reason for people to moan about it.
If players encountered a hazardous system, it'd be up to them to survey it and get the data back to UniCart so the jump-in distance could be modified in-game instead of moaning to FDev to "fix it" out-of-game.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

This is an interesting point, however i would imagine the fog of war would only have to change each time we connected to the UC servers and they only need to be updated say once every 24 hrs.
would that really be a huge amount of data to transmit and to store at the end of the day? All it would add would be a tiny bit of lag each time we connected to UC - assuming there was an update of course.

2GB of data stored locally, if they did it that way, would double the size of the Elite install. And it's only going to get bigger...

You'd probably need to download and sync about 1.5Mb daily, which isn't a massive amount if you're logging in every day, but would be pretty sizable if you came back after a few months break, or were reinstalling on a new PC.

 

[[Diplomacy] Carnegie]

Sorry, I'm struggling to explain it properly.

What I'm proposing would work much as things work now - you'd jump into a system and arrive at a set distance from the star, on a vector dependant on where you arrived from.
As I said, the jump-in point can be thought of as a "sphere" concentric to the Primary and your actual jump-in location will depend on where you intersect that "sphere", depending on what direction you're coming from.

The difference would be that if you encountered any kind of hazard, and then handed the data over to UniCart, the jump-in distance could be changed so that subsequent visitors might avoid that hazard.

So, for example, let's say the initial jump-in point is 2Ls from a star.
that would create a hypothetical "sphere" 4Ls bigger than the star.
You jump in, from any direction, and arrive when you intersect the "sphere".

Let's say the star was giving out solar flares 10Ls long and you get toasted.
You hand-in your data and the jump-in point gets moved so it's, say, 12Ls from the Primary in order to avoid solar flares.
The "sphere" is now 24Ls in diameter, so you'll always arrive at a point 12Ls from the Primary, from any direction.

Now let's say the system has Binary stars and somebody jumps in, arrives 12Ls from the star and gets toasted by the Binary.
They hand in their data and the jump-in point gets changed again so it's now, say, 18Ls from the Primary in order to avoid the orbit of the Binary.
The "sphere" is now 36Ls in diameter, so you'll always arrive 18Ls from the Primary, from any direction.

Okay, jump-in 'shells' rather than 'points' works

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

That sort of route pioneering exploration belongs in an era before any of the Elite games were set.

to each their own but I disagree with this personally....

but that said, i would be all over a prequel DLC which is separate from the game set 500 years earlier before it all began possibly set around the split of the federation and the empire (but all of that being background) and the main point of the game is exploration. That way any design choices made in ED would not affect anything in that dlc. (dates plucked out of my nose........ i would have to look at the official timeline to be more accurate)

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

2GB of data stored locally, if they did it that way, would double the size of the Elite install. And it's only going to get bigger...

You'd probably need to download and sync about 1.5Mb daily, which isn't a massive amount if you're logging in every day, but would be pretty sizable if you came back after a few months break, or were reinstalling on a new PC.

I would suggest that on each patch, the data was added in to the install. Dont forget it would not get as big as you may 1st think. it is only the boundary of the fog of war which would need to be tracked. anything inside that would be visible exactly as it is now...... all our machine would have to download / store would be the boundary worlds.

PS how have you got your install down to 2GB? iirc mine is around 20gb. (i could be wrong) it is not unusual for games to be far in excess of 50gb these days however, with gears 4 a whopping 120gb!!!)

 

[Arioch]

to each their own but I disagree with this personally....

but that said, i would be all over a prequel DLC which is separate from the game set 500 years earlier before it all began possibly set around the split of the federation and the empire (but all of that being background) and the main point of the game is exploration. That way any design choices made in ED would not affect anything in that dlc. (dates plucked out of my nose........ i would have to look at the official timeline to be more accurate)

2160’s was the mass exodus to the stars, if my FE2 Gazetteer is to still be believed.

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

There you go then..... Elite: Exodus a DLC set starting 2160 purely about exploration and fighting the environment, all really hazardous as the tech is far from safe...... all different ships, probably not that many needed, but then of course as easter eggs those wrecks could be added in as rare finds in E and would potentially be extremely valuable as barnyard salvage finds.

less about combat, possibly not even need weapons as such, but carrying equipment purely to allow the ability to mine stuff needed to carry out repairs and survive in space as well as sampling equipment and scanning stuff.