Need help understanding USS

N-Zed

N-Zed
I get what they are to some degree; my understanding is if you lock onto and SC into a USS you are accepting a randomly generated event to spawn in that area. My question is, what exactly is happening in the star system outside of that USS? Mainly, why are there USS at all versus things just happening inside that star system see without actively spawning into it? It feels like a lot of dead zone with some random "JPRG-ish random battles/encounters". That is not very sandbox massive galactic adventure to me. It's pokemon.

Is it a resource limitation thing? Did they want players to just blindly go into something unwittingly as a way to engage player pro-activity inside the game? I want to like what USSs offer but to be they seem a little... lazy and slow pacing down to a crawl. Am I not looking these events in the right way?
 

dogdog

dogdog
Correct me if I'm misunderstanding the question here, but what I'm getting is that you're wondering why it's a targetable location and separate instance and not something you can just pull up to.

Essentially they're supposed to be anomalies of activity that your sensor picks up, and the reason it's something one would jump into and out of hyperspace is that the activities happening in them would be too small to see with the naked eye. The slowest your ship can go in SC is 30km/sec, which is insanely fast. There's literally no way to just pull up to a couple dozen meter large ships and check out the action without some sort of instanced event.

The bigger issue here is that USSs provide very little variety as far as events go and their usefulness is limited to various "find this guy/stuff" missions. From an immersion stand point, it does make sense in terms of how we access them, we just need more stuff to do with them.
 

N-Zed

N-Zed
Yes thank you that is what I was asking about on both accounts: Why do we instance into them from SC and why are they so seemingly random and ultimately pointless. I have a hard time wrapping my head around their purpose and or execution. I am just a no body who has no experience in game design or the like so I may come off ignorant. I just don't know if they are all that well received by players or not as they stand now. USS really do slow things down, and remove activity from the over all star system area. I guess I like eye candy, and you're right if we're zooming along, the reality is you wouldn't see all that much going on without first stopping to find find it for yourself. I get it but, could it be done a better way?
 

deMangler

deMangler
USS's have a place in the game but for now they are also being used as placeholder for lots of stuff that will become more fleshed out over time, like persistent NPC's and a richer background model.
I am not saying this because I know FD's plan but is seems clear. This is my understanding from the impression I got following the dev process in the forums and the DDF since kickstarter.
 
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dogdog

dogdog
From a game engine perspective, I can't really see a way to make it fully seamless. If you think about how mind-boggling large even just one solar system is, as far as cubic kilometers go, it seems impossible to have every player-occupied system regardless if it was solo/private/online play have all of these events preloaded and occurring at all times. There server load would be incredibly insane.

If they try to make the events client side it would ease their load but then they would be completely dedicated to the player and lose the ability to have other players come in to them. This might not see like too big of a deal at first, but boy is it nice having my buddy come in through my wake when I'm on those 150K+ assassination missions and lend a hand.

Just try to think of them in their current state as odd signals your ship picks up and you've got to drop of SC at crazy ass speeds to check out the situation.

All that said, I'm in freight management, not game development so all of the above might as well be coming out of my ass, but it's what makes sense to me.
 
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