How stupid can one be?

[shadragon]

9 years ago - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yI5YOFR1Wus

8 years ago - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-d2-PtK4F6Y

6 years ago - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FR9xI0GgrBY

Last year - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlR2geuzPXI

 

[Jex =TE=]

I'm definitely excited about landing in cities, if they do eventually get round to it. Obviously, we need atmo landings first!

Landing in different types of cities would be great:

Alliance/Fed/Slaver high tech boom / capital worlds would be awesome if they looked like Corellia or the central planets like Ariel from Firefly - big shiny skyscrapers, local traffic, human docking contacts and landing pads with nice shiny superstructures in a nicely laid out "airport".

For industrial / mining worlds, landing in something that looked like LA 2019 from Blade Runner would be amazing - lots of pipes, gas flares and exposed girders. Pads would be grimy, practical and full of boxes. Robot voice contacts.

Low-tech, poor terraforming worlds might be like descending into Mos Eisley from Star Wars or Eavesdown Docks on Persephone from Firefly - basically pads hewn out of the local rock and very scruffy. Heavily accented, colloquial slang voice contacts.

And when (if?) we get legs, exploring all these options will be a dream come true. I want all of this so hard!

I think you excellent imagination is setting you up for disappointment but yeah, I think we'd all like something like that

 

[Cosmo]

The procedural generation would be a fast method to generate full-scale cities. The current surface ports aren't procedural though. So only Frontier knows which method they'll use.

 

[lysan]

I think you excellent imagination is setting you up for disappointment but yeah, I think we'd all like something like that

I would like all of that too I would even pay good hard earned money for it

 

[Jex =TE=]

I had to pause here as Frontier seems to take a "Build it and they will come.. if they want to." kind of philosophy with their mechanics/features.

I get what you're saying, I do, I'm just saying that I wouldn't be surprised to see fully fleshed out cities that are virtually content empty hit the game before anything else. Hell, it would be one hell of a pleasant surprise to actually get living cities in a single update rather than the step-by-step type of implementation we seem to have been going through over the last 2+ years.

Well we all know that what's being said here is nothing like what will be made in the finished product and will be like you say. FDev make barebones stuff and never fill them - that's the way the game has been made to date. Everythting needs more work and yet nothing has had more work as they plow on adding new features. Volcanism and geysers are the break from the norm so planets at least are getting work done on them but that's just eye candy though really, you need VR to appreciate it I think much of Elite is missed on a flat screen and no, I don't have VR I've just heard people on the forums here talk about it and trust their recommendation that it really is two different games.

Sometimes I think I might just get an OR solely for ED but then reality kicks in and I can't justify the expense lol (but I keep thinking about it argh!)

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I would like all of that too I would even pay good hard earned money for it

Me too! Amazing content I'll happily pay for

 

[lysan]

Well we all know that what's being said here is nothing like what will be made in the finished product and will be like you say. FDev make barebones stuff and never fill them - that's the way the game has been made to date. Everythting needs more work and yet nothing has had more work as they plow on adding new features. Volcanism and geysers are the break from the norm so planets at least are getting work done on them but that's just eye candy though really, you need VR to appreciate it I think much of Elite is missed on a flat screen and no, I don't have VR I've just heard people on the forums here talk about it and trust their recommendation that it really is two different games.

Sometimes I think I might just get an OR solely for ED but then reality kicks in and I can't justify the expense lol (but I keep thinking about it argh!)

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Me too! Amazing content I'll happily pay for

Me too, but before I fork out $600 or $800 they need to be a whole lot better in resolution!

 

[AgamemnonWhen]

I would like all of that too I would even pay good hard earned money for it

Yes, I would also buy a DLC for cities!

However, we need atmo landings first, and I'm guessing that's going to be a while yet...

I think you excellent imagination is setting you up for disappointment but yeah, I think we'd all like something like that

Yeah, I get that a lot - but we already have this kind of thing in-game with the different stations: There are different "textures" for the same starport mesh - from rusty old industrials that look like they're still being built to shiny high-tech palm-tree-filled stations.

I'm not a developer (so it's all too easy for me to run away with my own imagination), but surely using similar techniques for ground-based structures is very similar - if not a bit simpler? I appreciate that the planetary bases are probably currently hand-crafted, but most of the theory is the same, just with different assets.

Obviously, one day, I'd love to get off-ship and visit the grimy bars of Hutton Orbital or the distilleries of Lave, but I'll settle for some imagined planetside R&R for now...!

Fancy PG city videos

Great stuff. I'm willing to bet the FDev team are already experimenting with this kinda thing.

Someone mentioned domed cities earlier... that would also be great, landing on the outskirts of the hab-domes of pre-terraforming worlds (ammonia/methane atmos?).

Now, the tricky thing is going to be those floating cities in the upper levels of gas giants... ooooh, Bespin-style gas mining stations!

 

[Jex =TE=]

I hear you, and basically I agree.

What can be done to make it interresting? landing pads, get out of your ship and take a tube train to an area where you can A) get special missions not available on the BBS. Visit shady Tavern or just hang out at the local ship dealer to see then from the inside maybe even test drive one (virtually of course).

Walk around the docking bay, look at the activity, maybe sneak onboard a ship, place a tracker in some cargo crates the only sky is the limit.

Stores where you can buy pants, jackets, suits for in game credits or get to a special store where you can get tailor made "stuff" for real money.

Well this is the hardest part - what do you put in an entire city to make it feel believable. GTA 5 did an amazing job with filling the world with people and we know FD made a version themselves so let's assume that work is done and they can PG buildings enough to make them look believeable at ground level. After that though, what do you add in? We can look at GTA for things. Driving around the city, going to bars - the problem with space games is once you get on a planet - it's no longer a space game.

It becomes a normal, on planet game so perhaps we need to get away from trying to make it spacey on the planet surface. Most societies will work the same with the usual stuff you'll find in cities. I would imagine it would need capable AI to act as gangs out to get you or police to stop you or the gangs after you if u had any.

Once you had that down you'd need to maybe shop around for supplies? Souveniers for your ship? Get missions to go places? And then you need to code all this in and for every planet with a settlement AND make the art look different.

This is a massive challenge and I don't think it can be done to any level that would be acceptable for gameplay due to how much time it would take, not that it can't be done.

Look at Star Citizen - remember when they showed the planet you could land on and that bar you could go to - once you'd landed there 20 times it's going to get old unless they add in things that distract from that so you need reasons to be there but it's a limited area - the back alley for shadey dealings? Well there's only one and if the police don't know about it by now i dunno what to say lol.

If we just get lifeless cities though, what's the point of putting them in the first place and remember, once they start, every inhabited system will have to have settlements so it's a massive undertaking and probably the hardest thing to over come so far in game design for FDev.

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Me too, but before I fork out $600 or $800 they need to be a whole lot better in resolution!

I thought the latest release was at least 1080?

 

[lysan]

Well this is the hardest part - what do you put in an entire city to make it feel believable. GTA 5 did an amazing job with filling the world with people and we know FD made a version themselves so let's assume that work is done and they can PG buildings enough to make them look believeable at ground level. After that though, what do you add in? We can look at GTA for things. Driving around the city, going to bars - the problem with space games is once you get on a planet - it's no longer a space game.

It becomes a normal, on planet game so perhaps we need to get away from trying to make it spacey on the planet surface. Most societies will work the same with the usual stuff you'll find in cities. I would imagine it would need capable AI to act as gangs out to get you or police to stop you or the gangs after you if u had any.

Once you had that down you'd need to maybe shop around for supplies? Souveniers for your ship? Get missions to go places? And then you need to code all this in and for every planet with a settlement AND make the art look different.

This is a massive challenge and I don't think it can be done to any level that would be acceptable for gameplay due to how much time it would take, not that it can't be done.

Look at Star Citizen - remember when they showed the planet you could land on and that bar you could go to - once you'd landed there 20 times it's going to get old unless they add in things that distract from that so you need reasons to be there but it's a limited area - the back alley for shadey dealings? Well there's only one and if the police don't know about it by now i dunno what to say lol.

If we just get lifeless cities though, what's the point of putting them in the first place and remember, once they start, every inhabited system will have to have settlements so it's a massive undertaking and probably the hardest thing to over come so far in game design for FDev.

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I thought the latest release was at least 1080?

Not going to be easy that's for sure. I can spend hours looking at Cities: Skylines, those little citizens walking around doing their business. So it can be done, will they pull it off? don't know however I hope they will as this will for sure sell more copies and we all know that they need to sell more copies to support development.

https://youtu.be/HRDdyJZHSo4?t=19m35s

 

[AgamemnonWhen]

If we just get lifeless cities though, what's the point of putting them in the first place...

For the aesthetics, of course! I'd argue that stations and outposts ARE pretty lifeless - yes, there's other ships using other landing pads and some yellow lorries trundling round the rimroad, but it's not like there are gangs of dockers waiting to attach refuelling hoses, or cargo loader robots, or a couple of likely-looking mechanics with hammers ready to unbolt your beam lasers or... well, you get where I'm coming from.

It's an illusion of a working station. The different voice actors that issue docking instructions adds to this illusion (and very well, if I may add). And, to be fair, if we could get something like that for planetside city docks, I'd be pretty pleased with that alone. Anything else is just icing on the cake.

My imagination (and/or my g/f) will fill in the bits where I slope off to the Pleasure District for some Holo-Me "multicrew" action...

Oh, and will one of the mods please give this excellent thread a better title already!

 

[PiLhEaD]

...Fractal Cities ...

Some incredible examples.

Just wondering, is it possible for FPS to go negative...? :O

 

[zimms]

Nice post, OP! I'm really looking forward to what Elite might look like someday.

 

[lysan]

Some incredible examples.

Just wondering, is it possible for FPS to go negative...? :O

Actually they really don't impact the FPS that much, complexity is not always equal to low FPS.

[video=youtube;iJxgfRZV9n4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJxgfRZV9n4[/video]

 

[Arindor]

What kind of processing power are we talking here? IIRC, since it appears that FD reduced PC GFX to improve performance across all platforms, I can't see anything like this happening at all. Hope I'm wrong though, the idea is fantastic after the cut and paste alien ruins debacle.

 

[Dogeh]

What kind of processing power are we talking here? IIRC, since it appears that FD reduced PC GFX to improve performance across all platforms, I can't see anything like this happening at all. Hope I'm wrong though, the idea is fantastic after the cut and paste alien ruins debacle.

Not being rude or anything but how has it been a debacle?

Have you seen those housing estates around Britain? They all look the same no matter which part of the country you go to!

 

[lysan]

What kind of processing power are we talking here? IIRC, since it appears that FD reduced PC GFX to improve performance across all platforms, I can't see anything like this happening at all. Hope I'm wrong though, the idea is fantastic after the cut and paste alien ruins debacle.

Never did a test, but my estimation would be that any modern GPU can process this on the fly without any notable issues.

This is an old video, where the processing is in real time.

100+ FPS (Sandy bridge 4.5GHz + SLI GTX 560 Ti 448 cores)

[video=youtube;XIzScwydxOE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIzScwydxOE[/video]

 

[Kayweg]

The procedural generation would be a fast method to generate full-scale cities. The current surface ports aren't procedural though. So only Frontier knows which method they'll use.

Whatever they do, when/if they do it, let's hope it's not the Alien ruins sort of approach.
Why didn't they use their PG expertise on that i keep wondering.

 

[Jex =TE=]

For the aesthetics, of course! I'd argue that stations and outposts ARE pretty lifeless - yes, there's other ships using other landing pads and some yellow lorries trundling round the rimroad, but it's not like there are gangs of dockers waiting to attach refuelling hoses, or cargo loader robots, or a couple of likely-looking mechanics with hammers ready to unbolt your beam lasers or... well, you get where I'm coming from.

It's an illusion of a working station. The different voice actors that issue docking instructions adds to this illusion (and very well, if I may add). And, to be fair, if we could get something like that for planetside city docks, I'd be pretty pleased with that alone. Anything else is just icing on the cake.

My imagination (and/or my g/f) will fill in the bits where I slope off to the Pleasure District for some Holo-Me "multicrew" action...

Oh, and will one of the mods please give this excellent thread a better title already!

The issue there is, like with stations, if they're none interacting then they all become the same after a while and there isn't really much to see. Also, who wants to land on a planet and not be able to explore the cities?

Is there any reason why that can't add in a PG city and fill it with people so it's like GTA? We know they have that game they worked on that was like GTA so we know they can do that and with the PG generation they could have vehicles and people walking around the streets then add in some PG enterable buildings?

Looking at stuff is obviously some peoples cake and I can appreciate that for a while but once things become samey and non interactive they fade into the background for me and I suspect others too. It needs more than just a big pair of melons to oogle over

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What kind of processing power are we talking here? IIRC, since it appears that FD reduced PC GFX to improve performance across all platforms, I can't see anything like this happening at all. Hope I'm wrong though, the idea is fantastic after the cut and paste alien ruins debacle.

Well I doubt it's so much the processing power and more the terrabytes of memory you'll need to store all the textures lol. Just think of other games that run cities fine like GTA and they have no issues. It'll process what it can render. The calculations will be server sided I would guess to make a city so I wouldn't think our PC's will have issues by the time it hits.

 

[AgamemnonWhen]

The issue there is, like with stations, if they're none interacting then they all become the same after a while and there isn't really much to see. Also, who wants to land on a planet and not be able to explore the cities?

Well, obviously I'd love to wander round the city... but just being able to land at one is a terrific start, no?

Is there any reason why that can't add in a PG city and fill it with people so it's like GTA? We know they have that game they worked on that was like GTA so we know they can do that and with the PG generation they could have vehicles and people walking around the streets then add in some PG enterable buildings?

In a perfect world... yes, absolutely this.

However, the core of ED is about the space flying stuff, so whilst I'd love all of this, I can't see it happening any time soon.

Now, if FD were to develop an "add on" cyberpunk FPS/RPG game that plugged in to ED (so that when you landed, you could go outside), I'd pay good money for that! As has been mentioned, they've done some development for this sort of thing already... now, if that beloved movie franchise there's been so much speculation about turned out to be Blade Runner - well there's your obvious link!

 

[CmdrJacks]

Have that book. It's good.