More things to do on planet surfaces!

[Simorth]

Right now there is very little to do on a planet outside of a settlement, I've often attempted to go out and explore a planet with a surface vehicle, but after a short while of exploring and shooting the very occasional rock for mats, or scanning some exobiology, it very quickly get samey and boring, so here are some examples and proposals I would love to see added:

A Surface Mining Vehicle
It would be great to have a larger vehicle designed for surface mining, a new module could be added that fits into ships that have SLF, the vehicle itself would be equipped with a turret mounted mining laser and a downward facing sub-surface displacement missiles, it would also carry 32 tons of cargo and a refinery and with a scanner that prospect the land for high valve materials (could scan the land like the bio tool, finding hotspots on the surface for subsurface deposits, and larger rocks with high value materials) and any mined materials go strait to the internal cargo

Caves
Caves would give so may opportunity for exploration, some of them could contain small quantity of highly valuable minerals you could mine with a hand mining tool that could be a part of the Artemis suit equipment, in addition some of them could have underground pirate bases where you have missions to clear them out (i.e. more non-illigal on-foot combat missions)

Rocks
Just more surface rocks in general! currently they are just so far and few in between!

Anyway they are just a few of my suggestions (which I'm sure some have be suggested before) I enjoy surface vehicles and really just want more to do with them, so feel free to add your own ideas to this discussion for things to do on the surface of planets!

 

[varonica]

Note: This is a duplicate of my other post, I posted this previously and I came back to check on it, and it had vanished without a trace (refreshed the page and looked though my history and couldn't see it and thought maybe I only had it drafted or something) so I repost it and once I did my other post reappeared, so if someone could please delete this thread (as I seem to be unable to) or redirect your replies to my other one so that this thread dies.

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Right now there is very little to do on a planet outside of a settlement, I've often attempted to go out and explore a planet with a surface vehicle, but after a short while of exploring and shooting the very occasional rock for mats, or scanning some exobiology, it very quickly get samey and boring, so here are some examples and proposals I would love to see added:

A Surface Mining Vehicle
It would be great to have a larger vehicle designed for surface mining, a new module could be added that fits into ships that have SLF, the vehicle itself would be equipped with a turret mounted mining laser and a downward facing sub-surface displacement missiles, it would also carry 32 tons of cargo and a refinery and with a scanner that prospect the land for high valve materials (could scan the land like the bio tool, finding hotspots on the surface for subsurface deposits, and larger rocks with high value materials) and any mined materials go strait to the internal cargo

Caves
Caves would give so may opportunity for exploration, some of them could contain small quantity of highly valuable minerals you could mine with a hand mining tool that could be a part of the Artemis suit equipment, in addition some of them could have underground pirate bases where you have missions to clear them out (i.e. more non-illigal on-foot combat missions)

Rocks
Just more surface rocks in general! currently they are just so far and few in between!

Anyway they are just a few of my suggestions (which I'm sure some have be suggested before) I enjoy surface vehicles and really just want more to do with them, so feel free to add your own ideas to this discussion for things to do on the surface of planets!

Surface mining would be nice, I think that's the one practical suggestion here.

Caves can't be done without a complete planetary engine overhaul, at least in any meaningful sense. Sure the devs can hand place a few custom made caves, but seeing the same caves everywhere wouldn't be acceptable, it would need to be procedural or not at all, and since the current planetary tech can't do it, it won't happen till they change it.

We have endless threads complaining about the surface being to rough and difficult for SRV's to drive on and to many rocks everywhere, personally I don't disagree with you, but unless you can convince the ones who think there are already to many rocks that also will probably never happen.

Oh yes, maybe ping a mod to remove or lock the other thread or we will start getting replies in both.

 

[Simorth]

Surface mining would be nice, I think that's the one practical suggestion here.

Caves can't be done without a complete planetary engine overhaul, at least in any meaningful sense. Sure the devs can hand place a few custom made caves, but seeing the same caves everywhere wouldn't be acceptable, it would need to be procedural or not at all, and since the current planetary tech can't do it, it won't happen till they change it.

We have endless threads complaining about the surface being to rough and difficult for SRV's to drive on and to many rocks everywhere, personally I don't disagree with you, but unless you can convince the ones who think there are already to many rocks that also will probably never happen.

Oh yes, maybe ping a mod to remove or lock the other thread or we will start getting replies in both.

It wouldn't be too hard to make procedural caves, you just makes a number of segments and randomly select them in a random paths, that combined with different planet surface colors would add sufficient amount of variation (much the same way the settlements buildings are done, with them being similar and just arranged a bit differently)

Well there are still plenty of rocks, they just aren't minable , so just make a few more of them minable basically

Ill remove the content of the other one for now, and move my note from this one to the other (since we are using this one now)

 

[varonica]

It wouldn't be too hard to make procedural caves, you just makes a number of segments and randomly select them in a random paths, that combined with different planet surface colors would add sufficient amount of variation (much the same way the settlements buildings are done, with them being similar and just arranged a bit differently)

Well there are still plenty of rocks, they just aren't minable , so just make a few more of them minable basically

Ill remove the content of the other one for now, and move my note from this one to the other (since we are using this one now)

The planet tech doesn't support it at all, it's a bitmap height map, I don't think there's any realistic way you could add cave entrances and things like that onto the planets, and cave systems generated from a number of components, even a large number, isn't going to work well at all. They have problems already with floating buildings and rocks intruding into hangers and etc, the current planetary tech is simply not flexible enough to support caves, I can imagine cave systems poking out the the ground already. Plenty of times I have seen fumaroles and geysers just hanging in the air.

Suggest watching the talk about caves in star citizen to see how hard it is and then remember that star citizens planets are entirely hand made so they can adjust height surface easily, but with 400b proceduraly generated planets and caves made from hand crafted components stuck randomly together, I can imagine the horrors already!

 

[Simorth]

You can just cut out part of the height map terrain where the cave entrance, it what most games that use height maps do, and they already do it in Elite with the surface settlements where they have underground hangers so the tech is definitely already there as for poking out of the ground, since these will be random place and generated using a single seed once, it wouldn't be to hard to do a clipping check once, and regenerate just parts of the cave if clipping occurs

Also you have jetpacks to get around, so you can be more liberal in cave design (well as long as they are on low gravity worlds , but you may limit cave generation on the high g worlds as I would image caves would be less common normally on them as they would realistically have to support more weight)

And the other stuff, just bugs that need fixing

But anyway maybe that's just my optimum talking as I prefer to find ways to solve obstacles rather then use them as reasons not to do something

 

[varonica]

You can just cut out part of the height map terrain where the cave entrance, it what most games that use height maps do, and they already do it in Elite with the surface settlements where they have underground hangers so the tech is definitely already there as for poking out of the ground, since these will be random place and generated using a single seed once, it wouldn't be to hard to do a clipping check once, and regenerate just parts of the cave if clipping occurs

Also you have jetpacks to get around, so you can be more liberal in cave design (well as long as they are on low gravity worlds , but you may limit cave generation on the high g worlds as I would image caves would be less common normally on them as they would realistically have to support more weight)

And the other stuff, just bugs that need fixing

But anyway maybe that's just my optimum talking as I prefer to find ways to solve obstacles rather then use them as reasons not to do something

It's, difficult, to make the terrain flat even for surface settlements and ports, and that's for basically hand placed assets not procedurally generated assets, that was in one of the talks, they have a special tool for flattening the ground around settlements, but you can't do that for 400b proceduraly generated planets with caves. Ground ports with hangers are hand made, the ground hand levelled, and even then I have been in many ports where rocks protrude into the middle of the hangers, rocks floating in mid air where the ship comes down, building not touching the ground.

I am not argueing it's a reason not to do something, it simply can't be done the way you want with the current planet tech, regardless of wishful thinking! Caves would be great, even simple overhangs to park under, can't be done at the moment, sorry but that's the way it is.

You really aren't thinking of a way to solve an obstacle because the obstacle is in the planetary tech and you aren't discussing that.

 

[Simorth]

It's, difficult, to make the terrain flat even for surface settlements and ports, and that's for basically hand placed assets not procedurally generated assets, that was in one of the talks, they have a special tool for flattening the ground around settlements, but you can't do that for 400b proceduraly generated planets with caves. Ground ports with hangers are hand made, the ground hand levelled, and even then I have been in many ports where rocks protrude into the middle of the hangers, rocks floating in mid air where the ship comes down, building not touching the ground.

I am not argueing it's a reason not to do something, it simply can't be done the way you want with the current planet tech, regardless of wishful thinking! Caves would be great, even simple overhangs to park under, can't be done at the moment, sorry but that's the way it is.

You really aren't thinking of a way to solve an obstacle because the obstacle is in the planetary tech and you aren't discussing that.

You wouldn't even need to flatten the ground for caves, and in fact most of the caves would have very little interaction with the terrain besides the cave entrance.

I've come to the conclusion that you and I have very different ideas of how caves would work, and that I have done a very poor job in conveying how I envisage them working, and just for reference I personally wouldn't suggestion something without fulling thinking it though to ensure it could feasibility be implemented, anyway this thread was meant to just to start listing ideas of things that you could do on the surface, rather then get bogged down on the details of just one idea, and of the three suggestions I provided the surface mining vehicle is the one that would interest me most, but I'll look into making a separate post detailing how I could see caves been feasibility done in this game.

Anyway to get back on topic, do you (or anyone) have any ideas that you think could be implemented that would give more life to the surface of planets?

 

[varonica]

You wouldn't even need to flatten the ground for caves, and in fact most of the caves would have very little interaction with the terrain besides the cave entrance.

So how do you expect to match a randomly generated landscape to a cave entrance? How do expect to match a random accumulation of cave bits to aground level that can rise and fall precipitously over a distance of a few dozen meters or less?

I personally wouldn't suggestion something without fulling thinking it though to ensure it could feasibility be implemented,

Glad you are so familiar with the way the planets are generated in the Stellar Forge and surfaces generated using procedural generation, now all you need to do is to apply to FDEV for a job in cave making, good luck with that.

Anyway to get back on topic, do you (or anyone) have any ideas that you think could be implemented that would give more life to the surface of planets?

Certainly do, and have put forward those suggestion many times in many other threads, so I'm certainly not going to start repeating them again for your benefit. You really think this is the first time this subject has come up?

 

[Simorth]

So how do you expect to match a randomly generated landscape to a cave entrance? How do expect to match a random accumulation of cave bits to aground level that can rise and fall precipitously over a distance of a few dozen meters or less?



Glad you are so familiar with the way the planets are generated in the Stellar Forge and surfaces generated using procedural generation, now all you need to do is to apply to FDEV for a job in cave making, good luck with that.



Certainly do, and have put forward those suggestion many times in many other threads, so I'm certainly not going to start repeating them again for your benefit. You really think this is the first time this subject has come up?

We seem to have gotten off on the wrong foot, my apologies if I have caused you any offence, none was intended, anyway please see here for my proposed cave system, feel free to pick holes or add to it if you like.

 

[zikolach]

I actually saw once almost a cave (see screenshot ). I guess FDev could develop a set of entrances, shuffle them and generate rest of each cave procedurally.

 

[zikolach]

Just got an idea - what if there would be some sort of dynamic events on planet surfaces. E.g. volcanic eruptions. Currently we have relatively small gaysers emitting substance at high speed. It would be like to have opposite ones - volcanos slowly emitting magma onto the surrounding surface. There may be missions generated to evacuate scientists from the camp next to volcano or sightseing missions.

 

[Florenus]

Just got an idea - what if there would be some sort of dynamic events on planet surfaces. E.g. volcanic eruptions. Currently we have relatively small gaysers emitting substance at high speed. It would be like to have opposite ones - volcanos slowly emitting magma onto the surrounding surface. There may be missions generated to evacuate scientists from the camp next to volcano or sightseing missions.

That would be awesome to have volcanoes. I'm not sure if rest of your idea is doable, because everything in Elite is running in instances that reset once all players leave.
But yeah, big, dangerous volcanoes spurting deadly lava rivers sounds like fun

 

[[VR] Bulbulunufus]

Plug:

Make low-level "surveys" of planetary features possible

A new exploration data type to add to explorers' earnings and reward actual exploration of a planet's surface. This would add a further layer of data underneath honk, FSS, and DSS that would sit close to the Odyssey plant bagging, and codex stuff for surface features. These "surveys" would...

forums.frontier.co.uk

But yeah, there's definitely a bit missing from exploration. Something that actually involves drilling down through the layers of info that we get from exploration (including the SRV scanner or some new ship-borne instruments) to make it feel like a scientific hunt that ends in something actually quite valuable. Something that also can't just be cheesed or mapped, although it might be possible to research ways to maximise your chances of finding it. I guess I'm thinking of a valuable, very rare natural commodity or something, that occurs from a conjunction of factors.

 

[zikolach]

That would be awesome to have volcanoes. I'm not sure if rest of your idea is doable, because everything in Elite is running in instances that reset once all players leave.
But yeah, big, dangerous volcanoes spurting deadly lava rivers sounds like fun

Teoretically slow-enough processes could be also procedurally generated based on the seed and timestamp. Like planet positions on the orbit and (hopefully) axis rotation (day/night change).

 

[Simorth]

That would be awesome to have volcanoes. I'm not sure if rest of your idea is doable, because everything in Elite is running in instances that reset once all players leave.
But yeah, big, dangerous volcanoes spurting deadly lava rivers sounds like fun

You could just use the current point of interest / signal source system, you could just have several large volcano models for variation, and maybe with some sort of sanity check so they aren't placed on the side of an existing mountain or crater, and if you need a lore reason why it vanishes after awhile? well its a volcano, they do blow themselves up from time to time

 

[Tenshi]

It wouldn't be too hard to make procedural caves, you just makes a number of segments and randomly select them in a random paths, that combined with different planet surface colors would add sufficient amount of variation (much the same way the settlements buildings are done, with them being similar and just arranged a bit differently)

Well there are still plenty of rocks, they just aren't minable , so just make a few more of them minable basically

Ill remove the content of the other one for now, and move my note from this one to the other (since we are using this one now)

Caves would only really exist if there is a liquid of some sorts be that lava, water, methane or nitrogen., so seeing that we are limited to what planets we can land on and all of them without liquids there would be no caves.

As for surfacing mining I am all for this as it could also mean a bigger surface vehicle with more cargo space and a refinery pod you could drop from the ship to refine the materials.
Gameplay loop.
Land on planet
Mine lead, tin, mercury and such like rather than shoot random rocks. Also allowing the players to mine the minerals that are only found on surface stations.
Collect in the Surface Mining Utility Rover (SMUR) tried to get an F in there so it would then be shortened to SMURF
Take back to ship pod
Refine
Place in cargo hold of ship
Go back out and repeat till full.
Sell at station.

 

[Simorth]

Caves would only really exist if there is a liquid of some sorts be that lava, water, methane or nitrogen., so seeing that we are limited to what planets we can land on and all of them without liquids there would be no caves.

As for surfacing mining I am all for this as it could also mean a bigger surface vehicle with more cargo space and a refinery pod you could drop from the ship to refine the materials.
Gameplay loop.
Land on planet
Mine lead, tin, mercury and such like rather than shoot random rocks. Also allowing the players to mine the minerals that are only found on surface stations.
Collect in the Surface Mining Utility Rover (SMUR) tried to get an F in there so it would then be shortened to SMURF
Take back to ship pod
Refine
Place in cargo hold of ship
Go back out and repeat till full.
Sell at station.

There are some planets with geothermal activity such as geysers, so we're not total without worlds with liquids

There is such potential and opportunity for expansion into surface vehicles in this game, and they already have potential facilities to carry larger surface vehicles in ships that have the Ship Launch Fighters, and it would give more reason to use Keelback as well

I also did have some other ideas for larger vehicles such as:

Drone Carrier
A Multi-crew vehicle designed to assaulting a base from a distance, it is armed with a SAM launcher and a long range AA defensive Beam laser turret with limited turret arc (i.e lowest angle at horizon level so it cannot be used against other ground vehicles) with the ability to launch up to 4 light drones controllable by all the crew members

Heavy Tank
A Slow (20mps tops), cumbersome, and heavily armed and armored vehicle designed to engage other ground vehicles, armed with a main cannon with explosive rounds and a coax multi-cannon for personal defense

Of course all this is contingent on things being implemented that would require such vehicles, but lets hope things a planned that way as they did introduce a combat focused SRV (SCV) the Scorpion