No landing on planets at launch, but...

Pembs

Pembs
As we know, it will not be possible to land on planets when the game first launches later this year. Landings are planned for a future expansion or patch. What I'm not sure of is what will happen if we try and approach a planet or moon?

The beta will bring super cruise. The ability to quickly travel around a system. Using this, will we not be able to approach a planet closely? One of the early kickstarter videos showed flying in the upper cloud layers of a gas giant for the purpose of fuel scooping. So it must be possible to approach using super cruise?

What is to stop you attempting a landing then? I can understand if the planet has an atmosphere such as the Earth or Mars even, the game could tell you that you do not have atmospheric shielding and even destroy your ship if you go too close. But what about a body that has no appreciable atmosphere like our Moon? How will the game stop us from landing there?
 

Lee Storm

Lee Storm
Probably be some form of atmospheric warning, resulting in ship explosion if you proceeded much further.
Then come expantion, ships would need to be upgraded with atmospheric shielding "for players who (pre)bought the addon"

That's how I'd implement it anyway.
Solves two issues, players who have the addon and players who don't.
 

Frobitz

Frobitz
Demonmaker said:
Probably be some form of atmospheric warning, resulting in ship explosion if you proceeded much further.
Then come expantion, ships would need to be upgraded with atmospheric shielding "for players who (pre)bought the addon"

That's how I'd implement it anyway.
Solves two issues, players who have the addon and players who don't.
Click to expand...
Yeah, but OP makes the point that planetary bodies with little or no atmosphere will be pretty common, so the atmospheric shielding logic falls down there.
 

Angus

Angus
Demonmaker said:
Probably be some form of atmospheric warning, resulting in ship explosion if you proceeded much further.
Then come expantion, ships would need to be upgraded with atmospheric shielding "for players who (pre)bought the addon"
Click to expand...

That doesn't address the OP's central point, about bodies with no atmosphere, or no appreciable atmosphere, like the our moon.
 

Dirk Braben

Dirk Braben
Moving-animated-picture-of-mimes-wall.gif
 

Fromhell

Fromhell
maybe planets in first release will only be background pictures, no real geometry?

you can´t land on background pictures
 

Snowbunnies

S
1. Planets will be just flat spheres with textures on like in Eve (since it's take much time to get to the surface from orbit, it shouldn't be a problem)
or:
2. Invisible wall (with some sort of visual effects or not)
 

Tinman

Tinman
Fromhell said:
maybe planets in first release will only be background pictures, no real geometry?

you can´t land on background pictures
Click to expand...

We already know they are geometry. People in Alpha have already flown over to them. They are really low res in the current build though. My guess is some sort of invisible wall will be implemented.

My best attempt at an explanation for why we can't land yet would be some sort of gravity disturbance that interfere with your Frame Shift Drive. Get to close to a gravity well and the ship starts to shake and goes BOOM! A "bug" in the Mk 1 version of the drives that only gets fixed when you upgrade to the Mk 2 version, AKA the planetary landings expansion.
 

jabokai

jabokai
There's no need for an explanation - we all know it's a feature that's coming in a future release, just leave it at that. Any attempt to explain it will just sound like contrived nonsense.
 

Tinman

Tinman
jabokai said:
There's no need for an explanation - we all know it's a feature that's coming in a future release, just leave it at that. Any attempt to explain it will just sound like contrived nonsense.
Click to expand...

I agree. :)

I'm not saying my "explanation" above is any good. It's just the best I have been able to come up with since atmospheric shielding doesn't work. If people "need" an explanation they can always pretend that's the case, but as you say I don't think FD themselves should try to force something like this into the fiction.
 

jabokai

jabokai
Tinman said:
I agree. :)

I'm not saying my "explanation" above is any good. It's just the best I have been able to come up with since atmospheric shielding doesn't work. If people "need" an explanation they can always pretend that's the case, but as you say I don't think FD themselves should try to force something like this into the fiction.
Click to expand...

I hadn't read your explanation but yeah, Frontier need say nothing on this with regards to fiction as it'll just be messy and you'll still get all the "but why" questions anyway. And once we have planetary landings we'd be left with a horrible stain in the fiction! ;)
 

Pembs

Pembs
jabokai said:
There's no need for an explanation - we all know it's a feature that's coming in a future release, just leave it at that. Any attempt to explain it will just sound like contrived nonsense.
Click to expand...

I'm not really interested in a lore explanation of why we can't land on a body with no appreciable atmosphere such as the Moon or Mercury at launch. The reason as we all know, is that the feature hasn't been implemented yet.

My question is simply, what happens if we try to land?
 

Crayfish

Crayfish
For planets with no atmosphere I don't see why Frontier need to worry about preventing you from landing on them. Just treat them like big asteroids. The ground textures don't have to be super detailed and any planet with no atmosphere will be just a ball of barren rock anyway.

So you could land on them, just as you can on an asteroid in the alpha, but you can't do anything there and there aren't any ports, just like asteroids.
 

Erimus Kamzel

Erimus Kamzel
Pembs said:
I'm not really interested in a lore explanation of why we can't land on a body with no appreciable atmosphere such as the Moon or Mercury at launch. The reason as we all know, is that the feature hasn't been implemented yet.

My question is simply, what happens if we try to land?
Click to expand...

I think I saw DB mention in a video that you will get a warning message pop up, in effect saying 'you can't do that'. In low orbit your ship will probably bounce off an invisible 'wall' maybe? Something akin to how collision detection in Eve Online is handled?

I expect FD to come up with an interesting animation and temporary piece of fiction as to why we can't do that though. Its a pretty big elephant in the living room to leave things unsaid, especially in a game that is going to pride itself on seamless transitions and the absence of invisible boundaries.
 
Last edited:

Cmdr Eagleboy

Cmdr Eagleboy
You will have lack of atmospheric shield warning, and you will be nudged back into space.

If you will try to go in atmosphere using FSD, you will blow up.
 

Tinman

Tinman
Crayfish said:
For planets with no atmosphere I don't see why Frontier need to worry about preventing you from landing on them. Just treat them like big asteroids. The ground textures don't have to be super detailed and any planet with no atmosphere will be just a ball of barren rock anyway.

So you could land on them, just as you can on an asteroid in the alpha, but you can't do anything there and there aren't any ports, just like asteroids.
Click to expand...

The problem with this is that they still would look like crap since the LOD system for planets most likely won't be detailed enough at "ground level" in the first release. It would be like one big blurry texture you flew over which would clash with all other parts of the game. Other visible features from space like lava flows and other features also wouldn't actually be there if you flew down. All this would do is to destroy the illusion that the planets are "real".

Therefore it's just better to be consistent and not let players down on planets/moons at all, no matter what type they are.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom