How to Build a Foreground Simulation (FGS) / How to Bridge Modes

[Jmanis]

@Northpin has it covered pretty much, but Elite's drawcard is it's procedural generation, and the key to successful and interesting procedural generation is simple rules to create complex outcomes. This ensures the management of that process is relatively straightforward, in that the extreme bounds can (or at least, should[1]) be known, but what actually happens, while difficult to predict, is known to be within a bounds of what's considered "reasonable".

By having complex outcomes, or outcomes controlled by otherwise human inputs, these can be much harder to wrangle both in terms of computation or overall game balance and ensuring all your mechanics make sense... when it comes to games, sound mechanics and balance are way more important than realistic ones. Losing control over that can send your game into a doom spiral.

It wouldn't be helped by the fact that the game's mechanics are already critically broken in many ways... so garbage in, garbage out. You'd need to put a huge amount of effort in to balancing the current mechanics before you could even think about doing this sort of thing... and there's so many edge cases (like the platinum thing)... you'd just lose control of the situation so quickly, even if you got it right.

[1] In the history of Elite's development, so many things have been changed or introduced and, somehow, the knock-ons have slipped through FD's radar. Whether it was Seeking Luxuries and perma-boom, "Robigo Runs", Borann, or the rebalanced mineral prices. The latter in particular was, when I saw the change in patch notes, entirely predictable and literally the first thing I thought of (that is... minerals going up in price by 5-10 times? That's gonna be a huge increase to delivery payouts)... resulting in a knee-jerk response fix which addressed that issue, but was essentially a major nerf to other delivery payouts. If FD can't even get static rulesets wrangled, injecting player data is doomed from the get-go.

 

[[VR] Bulbulunufus]

I think my suggestion of removing NPCs that have been destroyed for a period of time would address this, the idea that if it were an actual CMDR getting destroyed, they'd rebuy at the local station and return to their previous activities in relatively short order.

That said, it will still be a form of "smoke and mirrors" that anyone looking really closely at will be able to reveal in these very unique (and likely rare) situations. I still think it would be way more believable than the current RNG system. In suggesting this idea, I want to keep the mechanism as simple as possible, otherwise it devolves into a complex, convoluted system that's not worth the time developing.

Sorry, I was away, heh. If they already exist in another player's instance then you can still encounter them after destroying them by joining that instance. But I take your point that it's rare and potentially preferable regardless. In any case all it takes is to not spawn the same NPC twice (even just changing the name is enough). So what you said really, but removing them from the pool when they spawn, not when they die.

I also confess that the main reason I'm suggesting this is because in my recent experience, seeing other CMDRs is extremely rare unless I'm at a CG. This is because we now have almost a dozen non-crossplay modes (Open x5, PG x5, and Solo), so I'm very dependent on NPCs for "population" in my game. If I were encountering actual CMDRs everywhere in Open, then I'd be less bothered by NPCs being animatronics on rails, because the CMDRs themselves would serve as that realistic population. As for CGs and busy places like ShinDez, I've actually advocated in the past that Frontier remove NPCs from those instances (at least traders), because NPCs at a busy CG just clutter space and are the number one reason for poor performance around stations. Of course if you're in Solo, having a large number of "realistic" NPCs at a CG would be an incentive, at least for me, to partake in the CG, because it would feel like a true community goal, unique compared to unvisited systems.

This is nothing new for me, there's never been quite enough CMDRs, and they should in any case be embedded in a rich background of casually believable NPC bustle (preferably that stands up to some focused scrutiny and which even delivers some gameplay from that).

I think my idea diverges from yours in a complementary way. Yours represents NPCs doing anything up to trekking the galaxy, while mine is suited to more local NPC trips. The way I see it, you'd have say 20 timelines each representing a pair of systems within X ly. NPCs would be journeying between them with some aim that emerges from the contents of those two systems in terms of assets and factions. Each timeline is chunked randomly into schedules representing a different NPC and if the schedule coincides with the system you're in at the right time, then there the NPC is when you enter, with some interpolated SC position. But travelling to potentially do something interesting that has a BGS impact if you witness it succeed (escort) or fail (goes boom, possibly). There'd have to be no net effect from AFKing in an instance (e.g. installation) though.

Of course as ever I'm assuming there isn't anything like this already in game! And milesred above has got me thinking I'm not observant enough, even if his claims seem, at least, a little outlandish... I know there is stuff that can be done sort of organically with NPCs, but I'm always scared of looking too hard for fear of finding crudely hidden cogs. And it never feels like the BGS meta to do that, so it's fun over efficiency at best. It feels like the lack of exposure of any clever NPC behaviour is partly responsible for the assumption that there's nothing interesting going in.