"Landing" on water worlds

Col Frost

Col Frost
Sorry for posting so much, but I have a bugbear regarding Waterworlds.
Surely it would be not too difficult (although I admit to my lack of specific knowledge on the subject in terms of programming) to enable us to be able to land (i.e float) on waterworlds?
All I would want would be the weather effects, i'e rain and storms and clouds etc. to give the immersion factor.
I'm not even bothered about life forms, I just want to hear the wind howling and the rain coming down.
I suspect we won't see this for years to come yet, but would prefer to see this, rather than getting close to Gas giants.
 

iain666

iain666
Flying in the upper layers of gas giants needs atmospheric flight and believable weather (without much in the way of phase change going on).

Landing on water worlds (even if we can't dive) needs both of those plus other things (liquid-gas phase transitions being a much bigger part of the weather, modelling the water and it's interaction with the gaseous atmosphere at the boundary and in the form of rain).

FDev would be mad to have enough of that written and tested to give us flying into gas giants and then decide to sit on it until they'd done enough to do water worlds and release that first...
 

Cdr Voorheez

Cdr Voorheez
No harm in posting A lot mate. It's good to hear from you :)
Back on topic this would be awesome but I'm guessing super pcs would be needed to pull it off. Something no console can currently do. I'm guessing we will be being held back by console inadequacies for the foreseeable future. FD want a multiplatform game and we can't leave the kids out of all the cool stuff pc owners will eventually be getting in the form of atmospheric landings, etc.
That means waiting for the toys to develop to a semi acceptable pc standard before releasing it to the multiplatform market. Or dummies and teddy bears will be thrown out of the proverbial pram.
For the record I'm not anti console just anti B.S..
 
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Ashnak

Ashnak
Not just the consoles.
A big part of ED is the VR experience. Currently, a top end GPU is pretty much fully loaded (and occasionally overloaded) with what we have in terms of graphics and environment. Push that with liquid dynamics, and VR goes out the window.
 

marx

marx
@ Col Frost: Sure, just landing (heh, watering) on water worlds doesn't sound difficult at first. But then, like others have noted, it's not exactly trivial to implement. I'd like to add that they present much of a challenge gameplay-wise as well: you land, and then what? Be the surface either liquid water or the more rare ice-covered WW, it'd be vastly uniform. You'd have to come up with stuff for the players to do on an almost-unchanging waterscape. The obvious answer would be to dive, of course, but submersible gameplay would basically mean adding a whole new game to it all. (Implementing Subnautica in Elite, heh.)
It would likely be better if Frontier went back to the original state of water worlds, where they still had landmasses as well. Of course, then you have to add more gameplay to land too.
In fact, other than with gas giants, the thing most needed for planetary gameplay is to have more land gameplay. What we currently have with Horizons is barely sufficient, but on more complex worlds, it wouldn't be enough.

@ Cdr Voorheez: Console hardware holding back ED is a popular myth, but the fact is that the PC minimum hardware requirements for Horizons are below what either of the two consoles have. So, if minimal hardware requirements were holding anything back (we don't know if that's the case), then it would be that Frontier is targeting cheap PCs as well. As things go, the engine works remarkably well on older hardware - yet, as Ashnak noted, on the other end, for VR it's really pushing the best current video cards. Still, as we can see, VR doesn't have to be included for consoles. (On the other hand, if Frontier were to announce "water world landing is coming, but not on VR yet", well...)

Still, hardware gets better over time, so I'd say adding good gameplay to more types of worlds would be the biggest challenge. Let's not forget that Frontier haven't even done that to the barren airless worlds that we currently have, and that's part of their plan for next year.
They did say they are working on atmospheric planets as well, so they likely have prototypes running in-house - but Frontier have historically only shown footage of stuff they have in a (near-)beta state, not alpha.
 
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shreddog

shreddog
Two demos to show how I would like to see ocean surfaces and weather implemented(huge rolling waves, rainfall and wind fx, and great immersive sound). I wouldn't mind if they went really crazy on some of the weather types. Oh and fishing from the ship while floating on the ocean would be a great addition for gameplay :) And who knows what kind of beasties are lurking in the deep black water..

[video=youtube_share;GY25Zxz0G9w]https://youtu.be/GY25Zxz0G9w[/video]

[video=youtube_share;trus6OWFCpQ]https://youtu.be/trus6OWFCpQ[/video]
 

BaldEagle

BaldEagle
I'm not really qualified for this discussion but landing on atmosphere bodies sounds good. FSX sorted flight dynamics and weather pretty well, so surely it is realistic, once the flight dynamics of our ships is sorted - T9 looks a bit like a large brick ;)
 

Para Handy

Para Handy
I would be disappointed if by the time we get atmospherics we don't have the Moray Star Boat available in game for water-worlds:


UZA3MVZ.gif



Taking amphibian to a new level. ;)
 

varonica

varonica
Para Handy said:
I would be disappointed if by the time we get atmospherics we don't have the Moray Star Boat available in game for water-worlds:


https://i.imgur.com/UZA3MVZ.gif


Taking amphibian to a new level. ;)
Click to expand...

Yes, however I think doing it properly is much better than just doing it! It would be a big mistake to make a mess of it, so rushing it, regardless of how many people want it, is not something they should do. I think ED FDEV can survive a delay, but an epic disaster just because rush, like some other unnamed game, could make things tricky.
 

Sapyx

Sapyx
First, FD need to get it sorted out between their art department and their science advisory department as to exactly what a "water world" is. Because the art department thinks it's like the movie Waterworld: a planet-wide ocean, with 99.99% ocean and just a couple of teeny tiny islands. Whereas the science advisory department thinks "water world" is any planet with liquid water present on the surface, but some aspect of the planetography making it unsuitable to qualify as an "earth-like". Waterworlds used to be depicted as looking much the same as Earth-likes, only less green; sometime around 1.4 they were edited to look they they look today, blue marbles with no land. Personally, I prefer the old science guys' opinion and that "water worlds" should have some land, whereas some "earthlikes" should be mostly ocean.

Working out exactly what we'll be allowed to do on the oceans of WW, ELW and Ammonia worlds is perhaps one of the reasons why we can't land on any of them now, even the atmosphere-less ones. Solutions range form the simple (like what we had in FE2: you touch the ocean, you die) to complex (purchasing ship mods that allow us to either float on or dive into an ocean, and/or obtaining specialist SRVs to allow us to do such things).

There's a heirarchy of complexity FD is presumed to be following, where each step builds upon the previous one:
- airless (this is where we're at now)
- volcanic airless (as above, but with actual Io-style volcanic mountains)
- gas giant (addition of clouds and weather without the complication of a landable surface, and maybe some simple airborne lifeforms)
- atmospheric terrestrials (adding a barren planet surface to gas giant style atmospherics)
- WW/AWs (adding oceans and simple life)
- uninhabited ELWs (adding complex land-based life)
- and finally, inhabited ELWs (adding human and alien cities, farms etc).

The other issue is quite where to put the "lava lake" planets. They could be equally treated as a "surface" to drive on or as an "ocean" to sail on or dive into but again, you'd want a ship modified and an SRV specially designed for the high-temp terrain.
 

marx

marx
Whiterose said:
Lol, instead of a fuel scoop you could have a fish scoop.
Click to expand...
If I'll ever hear "Fish scooping disengaged", I'll eat a so... nah, I remember how that last guy's story went, so I'll just say I'll eat a fish.
 
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