Moon landing?
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I've read all sorts of suggestions for reasons why you can't land on the Moon.
anything from there being the possibility of a lot of complaints about the Moon not being accurate enough, or that the Moon is heavily populated, and they're working on lots of detailed cities and things, or that there's going to be Something in a later expansion.
anything from there being the possibility of a lot of complaints about the Moon not being accurate enough, or that the Moon is heavily populated, and they're working on lots of detailed cities and things, or that there's going to be Something in a later expansion.
FDev has something special planned for earth's moon. I would imagine they need to code in the Apollo landing sites, Soviet/Chinese rovers before release. And given Earth is the most expensive real estate in lore and that the moon has been permanently inhabited since the late 21st century, I would hope that the moon isn't just scattered settlements everywhere, but dozens or even hundreds of interconnected settlements, with very little open space a la coruscant in Star Wars. Imagine driving from city to city on the moon using highways - which could potentially spawn another type of srv-one that can go at high speeds on roads, but not on rocky terrain - for exploring (or should I say tourism?) of heavily populated planets and moons.
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It's simply because the moon is well known and FD would have had to invest a lot of time and money to design the surface accurately. That's the downside of procedurally generated content. If you got something that you want to recreate, you have to do it manually. Same goes for planet earth. Even way more work to invest.
I imagine Horizons to be a quick shot. They just managed to generate the physical and mathematical models to be able to populate the universe with "landable" planets in time for the Xmas sale/release.
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But I'm really keen on seeing planets with an atmosphere. If they do it well, Elite is going to become an awesome game (oink oink! multiplayer lacking! ;-) ). The planets have to be very "lively".
I see that it's a lot of work to go where they or the players want the game to head towards. But in the end, it's worth the effort. FD should just focus more on the multiplayer part more. The NPC-based game mechanics will not be able to bring us an emergent and thrilling gameplay in the long run (even for me in short term). It's the real player interaction that enables the game to live for 10 years because player behaviour is unpredictable. That's where the emergent comes from. That's where the 'hook' comes from.
I see that it's a lot of work to go where they or the players want the game to head towards. But in the end, it's worth the effort. FD should just focus more on the multiplayer part more. The NPC-based game mechanics will not be able to bring us an emergent and thrilling gameplay in the long run (even for me in short term). It's the real player interaction that enables the game to live for 10 years because player behaviour is unpredictable. That's where the emergent comes from. That's where the 'hook' comes from.
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I also cannot wait for atmospheric landings but also landings on planets with an active biosphere (plants, trees, animals of all sorts!).
I suspect we will have a long wait though as I'm not sure today's PC hardware, even with the top spec stuff, is good enough to deal with that sort of load.
I suspect we will have a long wait though as I'm not sure today's PC hardware, even with the top spec stuff, is good enough to deal with that sort of load.
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So me being a vice admiral in the federal navy doesn't change that? There should be a Moon permit for high federal ranks.
I figured it was because the first thing everyone would do is buy an Eagle, land at Tranquility base, and post a selfie titled "The Eagle Has Landed", and their servers wouldn't be able to handle the load.
The hardware isn't the problem. There are a lot of games with great vegetation. It's simply a lot of work to design the content for an entire planet, especially when people have a pretty clear picture of how it should look like.
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As someone already pointed out, it's because procedural generation can't be used to generate a known, detailed object. You have to actually map it to do that. Which means Earth is never going to be available as a landing point as people will all want to fly to their own real part of the world and be disappointed that it is not correctly mapped. Now if someone could get their hands on all the google earth data and use it as a map in a game ( flight sim probably ) it would be incredible.
I doubt we will see any further expansion of where we can land for a few years, season 4 at the very earliest would be my best guess, though FD may pull it together and have something during season 3.
As there is very little to do on the planets we can land on and even less to interact with at this time and season 2 has nothing more to add (announced) in this area, its either what season 3 is going to be about or season 4 and my money (not that I am going to be spending it) would be on season 3 offering very basic 3rd person out of your seat in your ship, out of your ship in some space station areas, out of your ship in some multicrew ships, walking about eva on current planets and moons.
As there is very little to do on the planets we can land on and even less to interact with at this time and season 2 has nothing more to add (announced) in this area, its either what season 3 is going to be about or season 4 and my money (not that I am going to be spending it) would be on season 3 offering very basic 3rd person out of your seat in your ship, out of your ship in some space station areas, out of your ship in some multicrew ships, walking about eva on current planets and moons.
Good one, I hadn't thought of that.
This is exactly what I wanted to do! 
