AMEN!!!!!!!!!!!
No Single Player offline Mode then?
- Thread starter Brandon31
- Start date
- Status
AMEN!!!!!!!!!!!
He entered the thread about 300 pages back, with the same poorly understood legal arguments, lack of empathy and baiting. And still going strong.
I have been warned about suggesting he go away, since he hasnt added to the debate. So he is welcome to be here and post, the mods are protecting him.
But the mods should realise that its just making things worse, his right to free speech is the same as the Westboro Baptist Church.
Sweet.
Hmm, the T&C advertised on the Frontier store are illegal for australian purchases, and I'd be interested to see what their position is on kickstarter refunds. Otherwise unless you're actually denied a refund I'm not sure if it's really time to drop the megaton
I'm a little confused... Are we talking about consumer rights under Beta access or consumer rights under final release of the finished product?
- OldSchoolPlayer
- OldSchoolPlayer
So is the reason for no single player offline mode due to what I have read under section 8 of the EULA?
" The Game may incorporate technology (which may be provided by Frontier or third party service providers engaged by Frontier (each a "Dynamic Advertising Provider")) which enables advertising to be uploaded into the Game on your PC, and changed while the Game is being played on-line. In order that the Dynamic Advertising Provider is able to direct advertising appropriate to your Game and geographic region, as well as to the correct location within the computer game, certain non-personally identifiable data and information may be retrieved and retained by the Dynamic Advertising Provider including your I.P. address, geographic location, in-game position, and information concerning the appearance of advertising visible during your gameplay (for example, the length of time an item of advertising was visible, the dimensions of the advertisements). In addition, the Dynamic Advertising Provider may assign a unique identification number which is stored on your PC and which is used to monitor and calculate the number of views of dynamic advertising during gameplay. None of the information collected for this purpose including the identification number can be used to identify you.
The technology employed by Dynamic Advertising Providers may be located outside your country of residence (including outside of the European Union).
Where a Game incorporates dynamic advertising technology, the technology which serves the provision of dynamic in-game advertising is integrated within the Game. This means that if you do not want to receive dynamic advertising, you should only play the game when you are not connected to the Internet."
So in the end you force these 3rd party advertisers on everyone since we can't now play the game while being disconnected.
" The Game may incorporate technology (which may be provided by Frontier or third party service providers engaged by Frontier (each a "Dynamic Advertising Provider")) which enables advertising to be uploaded into the Game on your PC, and changed while the Game is being played on-line. In order that the Dynamic Advertising Provider is able to direct advertising appropriate to your Game and geographic region, as well as to the correct location within the computer game, certain non-personally identifiable data and information may be retrieved and retained by the Dynamic Advertising Provider including your I.P. address, geographic location, in-game position, and information concerning the appearance of advertising visible during your gameplay (for example, the length of time an item of advertising was visible, the dimensions of the advertisements). In addition, the Dynamic Advertising Provider may assign a unique identification number which is stored on your PC and which is used to monitor and calculate the number of views of dynamic advertising during gameplay. None of the information collected for this purpose including the identification number can be used to identify you.
The technology employed by Dynamic Advertising Providers may be located outside your country of residence (including outside of the European Union).
Where a Game incorporates dynamic advertising technology, the technology which serves the provision of dynamic in-game advertising is integrated within the Game. This means that if you do not want to receive dynamic advertising, you should only play the game when you are not connected to the Internet."
So in the end you force these 3rd party advertisers on everyone since we can't now play the game while being disconnected.
Lol. Skin mods are the easiest to do. Skin mods will DEFINITELY be possible. There is no way to avoid it.
It's a really low debate tactic trying to make it about such an obvious wedge issues when there are a million mods for thousands of games that are fun and productive and help the game.
My word there's a lot of self important people on this thread that seem to have promoted themselves to FD spokespersons, why not try leaving this thread to the people who are unhappy about not having an offline mode.
If your happy with what you have got, go make another thread and talk about it there.
This is for the devs to sort out.
If your happy with what you have got, go make another thread and talk about it there.
This is for the devs to sort out.
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On "dynamism" and offline
Long post warning.
Conclusions and TL;DR at the bottom.
I've been thinking about this whole DYNAMIC™ nonsense.
First of all, it doesn't make sense.
We have, what, a couple hundred thousand players, at best... let's say a million players, for the sake of argument... in a 400,000,000,000 star galaxy. That's 400,000 stars per player, in the best of cases.
OK, OK, so they're not all inhabited (by humanity, at least); fine then, how many are? A couple hundred thousand, I hear? Let's say one hundred thousand, again, to get the best possible result for the sake of argument.
So we have, at best, 10 players per inhabited star (assuming no one takes off exploring the other 399,999 uninhabited ones that would correspond to them, of course).
Fine then... how many NPCs do we have per inhabited star? Let's assume one million, on average (which probably wouldn't be economically and politically sustainable, but again, we're picking best cases for the sake of argument).
So, if we take this numbers, we have 100.000 thousand NPCs per player. We're not the one per cent, we are the one per one hundred thousand (or more realistically, one in a million).
Not only that, but the whole Elite concept (if there's anything left of that) and Frontier themselves tell us that players won't be the kind of people who influence things on the grand scale. We're not potentates, presidents, kings, or crime lords. We're regular joes. We're truckers, mercenaries, small crooks, petty criminals. We're anything but influential. Many of us will have less effect on the galaxy's society and economy than they have in real life. We can't even gang up or organize, we won't have EVE-style guilds or associations, Elite is everyone out for themselves.
Player influence on galactic economy and politics makes no sense. It's a mathematical impossibility. Marketspeak. Hogwash.
Elite: Dangerous, except for combat, is, like all previous Elite games, a single player game, by sheer mathematical imperative.
But that doesn't mean we can't have a changing, evolving, and interesting galaxy.
We know the galaxy is procedurally generated.
To clarify for anyone who doesn't know, this basically means that you take a basic seed, shared by all players so that we all get the same results, feed it into a pseudorandom number generator (which generates sequences that look as random as possible, yet are deterministic), and use the results to generate every entity on the galaxy whenever they are needed (the whole point of procedural generation is to exchange processing power for storage space, generating entities as needed and discarding them after use).
For instance (this is probably not the exact process the game uses, but it's intended as an example of the kind of process it uses), when you want to generate a star system, you feed your coordinates and the seed to a system generation algorithm (the famous "stellar forge") which generates the list of objects in the system. For each object that probably means type (G class star, rocky planet, ice moon, orbis space station, ice ring, whatever), parent (what it orbits), second focal point in the orbit (the first one is the parent), direction of orbit, starting angle of the orbit (I'm quite certain Kepler's third law means you don't need to specify orbital period), plus a seed/ID that can be fed to subsequent algorithms.
For our hypothetical system that'd give us a primary star, and maybe some secondary stars orbiting it and each other, some planets and rings orbiting them, moons and rings orbiting the planets, and stations orbiting the moons and planets.
For each of those entities, you can then get their seed/id and type (when you need to because you're close enough to see them), feed them to the appropriate algorithm for their type, and generate the physical model for the object.
This process can be repeated ad infinitum. For instance, for stations, you might generate a rough model for when you're far away, with a list of subcomponents (inertial rings and whatnot) and, once you get close enough, generate details for those objects (up to the point, once we can walk inside stations, of generating details for a specific barn in a specific section in a specific inertial ring... but not for all other barns that are too far away for you to see).
That doesn't only work for physical characteristics, either; the same way you can generate a planet's surface you can generate a station's list of market goods, or list of missions.
Of course, all this can be overridden. We have a list of stars taken from stellar catalogues, for instance. If your coordinates coincide with one on the list, you simply use that stored data to generate the system, instead of the stellar forge (you might still use it to generate the rest of the entities in the system, though, if we haven't yet found any exoplanets there or if we suspect there might be more).
For certain systems, like Sol, you'll even override the planets, moons, rings and stations.
All this can be done in a run-of the mill PC. Frontier: Elite 2 did it (with less detail, obviously) in an Amiga over twenty years ago. Space Engine does it (with arguably more detail for stars and planets, but without stations and whatnot) for the entire universe. Limit Theory, a game not very dissimilar to this one but developed by a single person, will do it. Heck, I'm quite certain that the Elite: Dangerous client is already doing it (it would make no sense to be shuffling all this data over the network).
it gives us, however, a pretty static galaxy, one might assume at first look... but that needn't be so.
Take exploration, for instance... how do you handle that in a procedurally generated galaxy that can't be influenced by player action?
Simple, really... we define a starting date, or clock tick, and we subtract it from the current date, or clock tick (which can be server based so that everyone uses the same number regardless of timezones), and use the resulting number as a time-dependent (yet still deterministic) seed.
[UPDATE] - Some people might prefer a galaxy that only changes while they are playing, and not while the game is off; just use a counter that gets incremented only while the game is running instead of the date, then; there could even be an option in the configuration menu to switch between the two modes.
That means that after a certain pseudorandom amount of time a by default unexplored system might start to be generated as explored (you might even define various gradual stages of exploration between completely unknown and fully colonized). Take also into account the system's distance to "human space", and you get a gradually expanding civilization, at apparently random rates, in apparently random directions (all handled by your algorithm, though, so you still have full control of the rate and direction of expansion).
That also works for other possible effects, like famines, wars, and whatnot. Same way you can generate a high-contrast spotted pattern with a Perlin noise, you can generate relatively short periods of special circumstances amongst significantly longer periods of "business as usual").
You feed that into the mission generator, and you've got yourself a pretty dynamic looking galaxy.
And at basically the same cost as the static one.
But OK, let's forget all that, let's forget maths, let's forget that players are irrelevant in a sea of uncaring NPCs, let's skew the numbers and against all reason give players the power to influence the economy and politics and whatnot.
Does that mean we'll now need a server, that we can no longer do it on our regular PCs?
Let's see... let's generate a GUID as each entity's seed/id (that might be overkill, but we're arguing for the sake of argument anyway). Remember that even though you generate and discard entities on demand, the results (except those that we've made dependant on the date), including this GUID, will be the same every time any player generates the same entity, so IDs will still work even though the entities are procedurally generated.
Let's also make a database table, with the following columns: "entity GUID", "player GUID", "date" (or "clock tick"), "status", and, um... "target", let's say. We'll keep that serverside, for now.
What do we store there, then?
Let's start with player-driven exploration, for instance. We can still have the regular automatic one, or not, doesn't matter.
Let's see; a player arrives in a system. The stellar forge has flagged each entity in it as either explored or unexplored (that's the automatic exploration working).
The player detects the main star. The server looks at the table we made earlier, filters it by the star's GUID on the "entity GUID" column, and counts the results. If it gets none, the star was undiscovered.
The server then adds an entry to the table: Star GUID, Player GUID, current date, "explored" (you would store it as a binary flag, not as text, but you get what I mean, I hope), Player GUID.
Repeat for any other entity the player discovers in that location.
If the star had already been discovered, instead, the server could have filtered the results again by "player GUID", to see if that particular player already had data on the star.
When the player later sells this information, we can add another line with Star GUID, Player GUID, current date, "revealed" (or whatever), GUID of the faction the player sold the data to.
That table will (for now) grow every time a player discovers any stellar object, or sells that information. The server can then filter the table by "entity GUID" when it's generating the system and use the number of results to calculate the exploration status; for instance, if it's over a certain threshold, generate an Ocellus station, if over an even larger threshold generate a more permanent station type (maybe at various progressive states of construction), whatever.
You can even automatically start a war, if the system information has been sold at similar rates to two opposing factions. All this statuses will generate different market demands, which will generate different mission sets, as advertised by Frontier.
That can be then optimized by periodically cleaning up the table. Once you've got an Ocellus station there, you probably don't need to keep track of all the discovery information, the system is already discovered, let's get some space back and start tracking how many players trade with the system, or pirate it, or whatever, and base system growth on that. It would probably make more sense to put that in a separate table that didn't track individual players, but only growing systems.
Anyway, we now have an automatically (or not) expanding dynamic civilization that is heavily influenced by player exploration.
The same concept can be expanded further to other player interactions. A player affiliated to a certain faction killed an NPC affiliated with a certain other faction? Keep track of that and, once you have enough incidents, you might have a war going on. A player has depleted a certain stock from a certain market? Keep track of that, and you might eventually have a famine going on. The concept is basically the same, in any case.
The cost of this is, basically, a quickly growing (even with optimization and regular cleanups) table or set of tables, with the growth rate and total size directly dependant on the number of players.
This probably means that you'll have pretty hefty storage and processing requirements, quite probably beyond those of regular PCs.
If you are managing hundreds of thousands of players, that is.
This design doesn't depend on the number of players. It's certainly more "dynamic" the more players there are (and it needs much more resources), but it will still work equally well with a single player.
And, really, how much space would a single player need? Could it be handled by a single PC? How many systems will the average player discover over their whole time on the game? One thousand? Ten thousand at most? How many wars can they start, if any? How many lines can a single player really add to the table(s)?
We're probably talking megabytes, here, not even gigabytes.
Your regular PC should easily be able to handle that (without synchronizing with the online servers, of course, but we don't really need that, offline was supposed to be separate anyway; we could still get the Frontier-originated events, like Thargoids and whatnot as updates, though).
And that's disregarding the fact that the end result would be, both for single player and massive multiplayer, virtually indistinguishable from the automatically dynamic procedural galaxy I discussed earlier, which makes one question the need for all this fooling around with tables and player influence and other nonsense.
And, for those worried about people who play offline finding out the "secret stuff" before those who play online... since online and offline modes are independent, just give different seeds to each one (and, if you want, don't give Frontier-specific overrides to the offline mode). The code doesn't need to change. Just a single number.
So, in conclusion:
I'm far from the most intelligent person I know. I know a little about coding (I somehow managed to get an engineering degree on computer stuff), but I've never coded professionally or even steadily. I have no significant coding experience. My capabilities, therefore, are undoubtedly way below those of the people who are making Elite: Dangerous.
Yet, in my ignorance, after a bit of thinking I've managed to come up with what looks like a design that would allow a game like this to work without problems and still fulfill Frontier's marketspeach.
I can have no doubt that the far more experienced minds at Frontier will have come up with much better, much more efficient designs.
Yet, somehow, they claim they failed to do so. :S
Now, I'm the first to call for Hanlon's razor to be used, but it's very difficult, if not outright impossible, to apply it to people who are clearly neither incompetent nor stupid.
Which, tragically, leaves us with only one possible explanation.
TL;DR: Brookes' excuses don't hold water; they make no sense; by any rational analysis, we are for some unknown reason (which I'd like to know) being given false information.
Which, frankly, sucks.
Long post warning.
Conclusions and TL;DR at the bottom.
I've been thinking about this whole DYNAMIC™ nonsense.
First of all, it doesn't make sense.
We have, what, a couple hundred thousand players, at best... let's say a million players, for the sake of argument... in a 400,000,000,000 star galaxy. That's 400,000 stars per player, in the best of cases.
OK, OK, so they're not all inhabited (by humanity, at least); fine then, how many are? A couple hundred thousand, I hear? Let's say one hundred thousand, again, to get the best possible result for the sake of argument.
So we have, at best, 10 players per inhabited star (assuming no one takes off exploring the other 399,999 uninhabited ones that would correspond to them, of course).
Fine then... how many NPCs do we have per inhabited star? Let's assume one million, on average (which probably wouldn't be economically and politically sustainable, but again, we're picking best cases for the sake of argument).
So, if we take this numbers, we have 100.000 thousand NPCs per player. We're not the one per cent, we are the one per one hundred thousand (or more realistically, one in a million).
Not only that, but the whole Elite concept (if there's anything left of that) and Frontier themselves tell us that players won't be the kind of people who influence things on the grand scale. We're not potentates, presidents, kings, or crime lords. We're regular joes. We're truckers, mercenaries, small crooks, petty criminals. We're anything but influential. Many of us will have less effect on the galaxy's society and economy than they have in real life. We can't even gang up or organize, we won't have EVE-style guilds or associations, Elite is everyone out for themselves.
Player influence on galactic economy and politics makes no sense. It's a mathematical impossibility. Marketspeak. Hogwash.
Elite: Dangerous, except for combat, is, like all previous Elite games, a single player game, by sheer mathematical imperative.
But that doesn't mean we can't have a changing, evolving, and interesting galaxy.
We know the galaxy is procedurally generated.
To clarify for anyone who doesn't know, this basically means that you take a basic seed, shared by all players so that we all get the same results, feed it into a pseudorandom number generator (which generates sequences that look as random as possible, yet are deterministic), and use the results to generate every entity on the galaxy whenever they are needed (the whole point of procedural generation is to exchange processing power for storage space, generating entities as needed and discarding them after use).
For instance (this is probably not the exact process the game uses, but it's intended as an example of the kind of process it uses), when you want to generate a star system, you feed your coordinates and the seed to a system generation algorithm (the famous "stellar forge") which generates the list of objects in the system. For each object that probably means type (G class star, rocky planet, ice moon, orbis space station, ice ring, whatever), parent (what it orbits), second focal point in the orbit (the first one is the parent), direction of orbit, starting angle of the orbit (I'm quite certain Kepler's third law means you don't need to specify orbital period), plus a seed/ID that can be fed to subsequent algorithms.
For our hypothetical system that'd give us a primary star, and maybe some secondary stars orbiting it and each other, some planets and rings orbiting them, moons and rings orbiting the planets, and stations orbiting the moons and planets.
For each of those entities, you can then get their seed/id and type (when you need to because you're close enough to see them), feed them to the appropriate algorithm for their type, and generate the physical model for the object.
This process can be repeated ad infinitum. For instance, for stations, you might generate a rough model for when you're far away, with a list of subcomponents (inertial rings and whatnot) and, once you get close enough, generate details for those objects (up to the point, once we can walk inside stations, of generating details for a specific barn in a specific section in a specific inertial ring... but not for all other barns that are too far away for you to see).
That doesn't only work for physical characteristics, either; the same way you can generate a planet's surface you can generate a station's list of market goods, or list of missions.
Of course, all this can be overridden. We have a list of stars taken from stellar catalogues, for instance. If your coordinates coincide with one on the list, you simply use that stored data to generate the system, instead of the stellar forge (you might still use it to generate the rest of the entities in the system, though, if we haven't yet found any exoplanets there or if we suspect there might be more).
For certain systems, like Sol, you'll even override the planets, moons, rings and stations.
All this can be done in a run-of the mill PC. Frontier: Elite 2 did it (with less detail, obviously) in an Amiga over twenty years ago. Space Engine does it (with arguably more detail for stars and planets, but without stations and whatnot) for the entire universe. Limit Theory, a game not very dissimilar to this one but developed by a single person, will do it. Heck, I'm quite certain that the Elite: Dangerous client is already doing it (it would make no sense to be shuffling all this data over the network).
it gives us, however, a pretty static galaxy, one might assume at first look... but that needn't be so.
Take exploration, for instance... how do you handle that in a procedurally generated galaxy that can't be influenced by player action?
Simple, really... we define a starting date, or clock tick, and we subtract it from the current date, or clock tick (which can be server based so that everyone uses the same number regardless of timezones), and use the resulting number as a time-dependent (yet still deterministic) seed.
[UPDATE] - Some people might prefer a galaxy that only changes while they are playing, and not while the game is off; just use a counter that gets incremented only while the game is running instead of the date, then; there could even be an option in the configuration menu to switch between the two modes.
That means that after a certain pseudorandom amount of time a by default unexplored system might start to be generated as explored (you might even define various gradual stages of exploration between completely unknown and fully colonized). Take also into account the system's distance to "human space", and you get a gradually expanding civilization, at apparently random rates, in apparently random directions (all handled by your algorithm, though, so you still have full control of the rate and direction of expansion).
That also works for other possible effects, like famines, wars, and whatnot. Same way you can generate a high-contrast spotted pattern with a Perlin noise, you can generate relatively short periods of special circumstances amongst significantly longer periods of "business as usual").
You feed that into the mission generator, and you've got yourself a pretty dynamic looking galaxy.
And at basically the same cost as the static one.
But OK, let's forget all that, let's forget maths, let's forget that players are irrelevant in a sea of uncaring NPCs, let's skew the numbers and against all reason give players the power to influence the economy and politics and whatnot.
Does that mean we'll now need a server, that we can no longer do it on our regular PCs?
Let's see... let's generate a GUID as each entity's seed/id (that might be overkill, but we're arguing for the sake of argument anyway). Remember that even though you generate and discard entities on demand, the results (except those that we've made dependant on the date), including this GUID, will be the same every time any player generates the same entity, so IDs will still work even though the entities are procedurally generated.
Let's also make a database table, with the following columns: "entity GUID", "player GUID", "date" (or "clock tick"), "status", and, um... "target", let's say. We'll keep that serverside, for now.
What do we store there, then?
Let's start with player-driven exploration, for instance. We can still have the regular automatic one, or not, doesn't matter.
Let's see; a player arrives in a system. The stellar forge has flagged each entity in it as either explored or unexplored (that's the automatic exploration working).
The player detects the main star. The server looks at the table we made earlier, filters it by the star's GUID on the "entity GUID" column, and counts the results. If it gets none, the star was undiscovered.
The server then adds an entry to the table: Star GUID, Player GUID, current date, "explored" (you would store it as a binary flag, not as text, but you get what I mean, I hope), Player GUID.
Repeat for any other entity the player discovers in that location.
If the star had already been discovered, instead, the server could have filtered the results again by "player GUID", to see if that particular player already had data on the star.
When the player later sells this information, we can add another line with Star GUID, Player GUID, current date, "revealed" (or whatever), GUID of the faction the player sold the data to.
That table will (for now) grow every time a player discovers any stellar object, or sells that information. The server can then filter the table by "entity GUID" when it's generating the system and use the number of results to calculate the exploration status; for instance, if it's over a certain threshold, generate an Ocellus station, if over an even larger threshold generate a more permanent station type (maybe at various progressive states of construction), whatever.
You can even automatically start a war, if the system information has been sold at similar rates to two opposing factions. All this statuses will generate different market demands, which will generate different mission sets, as advertised by Frontier.
That can be then optimized by periodically cleaning up the table. Once you've got an Ocellus station there, you probably don't need to keep track of all the discovery information, the system is already discovered, let's get some space back and start tracking how many players trade with the system, or pirate it, or whatever, and base system growth on that. It would probably make more sense to put that in a separate table that didn't track individual players, but only growing systems.
Anyway, we now have an automatically (or not) expanding dynamic civilization that is heavily influenced by player exploration.
The same concept can be expanded further to other player interactions. A player affiliated to a certain faction killed an NPC affiliated with a certain other faction? Keep track of that and, once you have enough incidents, you might have a war going on. A player has depleted a certain stock from a certain market? Keep track of that, and you might eventually have a famine going on. The concept is basically the same, in any case.
The cost of this is, basically, a quickly growing (even with optimization and regular cleanups) table or set of tables, with the growth rate and total size directly dependant on the number of players.
This probably means that you'll have pretty hefty storage and processing requirements, quite probably beyond those of regular PCs.
If you are managing hundreds of thousands of players, that is.
This design doesn't depend on the number of players. It's certainly more "dynamic" the more players there are (and it needs much more resources), but it will still work equally well with a single player.
And, really, how much space would a single player need? Could it be handled by a single PC? How many systems will the average player discover over their whole time on the game? One thousand? Ten thousand at most? How many wars can they start, if any? How many lines can a single player really add to the table(s)?
We're probably talking megabytes, here, not even gigabytes.
Your regular PC should easily be able to handle that (without synchronizing with the online servers, of course, but we don't really need that, offline was supposed to be separate anyway; we could still get the Frontier-originated events, like Thargoids and whatnot as updates, though).
And that's disregarding the fact that the end result would be, both for single player and massive multiplayer, virtually indistinguishable from the automatically dynamic procedural galaxy I discussed earlier, which makes one question the need for all this fooling around with tables and player influence and other nonsense.
And, for those worried about people who play offline finding out the "secret stuff" before those who play online... since online and offline modes are independent, just give different seeds to each one (and, if you want, don't give Frontier-specific overrides to the offline mode). The code doesn't need to change. Just a single number.
So, in conclusion:
- Player influence on the galaxy makes no sense given the numbers involved and simple math.
- A dynamic, evolving galaxy that isn't influenced by players can easily be produced through procedural generation on a regular PC.
- A dynamic, evolving galaxy that is influenced by a single player and by important Frontier updates can easily be produced through procedural generation on a regular PC.
- A dynamic, evolving galaxy that is influenced by hundreds of thousands of players and by important Frontier updates probably can not, and will need servers, but doesn't need the code to be substantially different from the single player version; it doesn't need to be a "different game" as Brookes claims.
- The galaxies on points 3 and 4 will be virtually indistinguishable from the galaxy on point 2 (except for Frontier's updates, and those could easily be implemented as overrides), so why the heck even bother!?.
- Given the previous points, Frontier's excuses for not providing an offline single player mode make no sense whatsoever, I'm afraid.
I'm far from the most intelligent person I know. I know a little about coding (I somehow managed to get an engineering degree on computer stuff), but I've never coded professionally or even steadily. I have no significant coding experience. My capabilities, therefore, are undoubtedly way below those of the people who are making Elite: Dangerous.
Yet, in my ignorance, after a bit of thinking I've managed to come up with what looks like a design that would allow a game like this to work without problems and still fulfill Frontier's marketspeach.
I can have no doubt that the far more experienced minds at Frontier will have come up with much better, much more efficient designs.
Yet, somehow, they claim they failed to do so. :S
Now, I'm the first to call for Hanlon's razor to be used, but it's very difficult, if not outright impossible, to apply it to people who are clearly neither incompetent nor stupid.
Which, tragically, leaves us with only one possible explanation.
TL;DR: Brookes' excuses don't hold water; they make no sense; by any rational analysis, we are for some unknown reason (which I'd like to know) being given false information.
Which, frankly, sucks.
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Disappointing
Well I'm probably joining the discussion late, but this news is very disappointing, however I sank 165GBP into this game to support the idea and see it released to a wider audience who maybe never had the delight of playing the first Elite.
So long as ED does not suffer the traditional problems of server crashes, lag etc, then I will be happy to get a couple of years play for the money, after that it's a bonus.
Well I'm probably joining the discussion late, but this news is very disappointing, however I sank 165GBP into this game to support the idea and see it released to a wider audience who maybe never had the delight of playing the first Elite.
So long as ED does not suffer the traditional problems of server crashes, lag etc, then I will be happy to get a couple of years play for the money, after that it's a bonus.
Otherwise unless you're actually denied a refund I'm not sure if it's really time to drop the megaton
True.... but there's no harm in warming it up...
Part of the core idea's behind the principle of Hanlon's Razor is to never jump to grand conspiracy before looking at more benign reasons. We can look at the incompetence in this case as simply running out of time and/or money to implement the offline client, and so they ditch it in order to get the rest of the features out the door, hoping that the online-only restriction won't upset too many people to ruin the launch and that they can wear the hit from those who demand a refund.Now, I'm the first to call for Hanlon's razor to be used, but it's very difficult, if not outright impossible, to apply it to people who are clearly neither incompetent nor stupid.
Which, tragically, leaves us with only one possible explanation.
TL;DR: Brookes' excuses don't hold water; they make no sense; by any rational analysis, we are for some unknown reason (which I'd like to know) being given false information.
Which, frankly, sucks.
This would make sense (about the razor) only if they promised to make the off-line mode later mode. They ditched it completely. Now and in the future.
wolverine2710
Tutorial & Guide Writer
The cancellation of the offline mode has been picked up en mass by the press/media. You can find them in the ´Elite Dangerous in the media´ thread. It start here. Some have in the headliness things like ´cancellation of the promised offline mode. In One of them also has a screenshot of a conversation of OBEDB where he states there will be an offline mode. Not sure if their are also screenshotsof Michael Brookes which has stated the same (you can find that one at least here in this thread. I just watched a youtube video of Game Trailers which seems to be hitting pretty hard on the cancellation of the offline mode. They ask subscribers/users to comment on it. Hence its possible there will be a follow up from GT.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GderSUzPYPo&feature=youtu.be&t=1m25s . Also we just hit Slashdot as well.
You know the saying: Bad publicity is also/still publicity.
In the mean time I don´t believe FD has made an official statement on the matter. It looks as if the matter will go away. If that is a smart move,only time will tell.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GderSUzPYPo&feature=youtu.be&t=1m25s . Also we just hit Slashdot as well.
You know the saying: Bad publicity is also/still publicity.
In the mean time I don´t believe FD has made an official statement on the matter. It looks as if the matter will go away. If that is a smart move,only time will tell.
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Long post warning.
Conclusions and TL;DR at the bottom.
I've been thinking about this whole DYNAMIC™ nonsense.
First of all, it doesn't make sense.
>snip<
So, in conclusion:
Now, and here's where I might get banned (disclaimer - I bear no malice towards Frontier or any Frontier employee, my intention is not to harass or insult anyone, and even less to cause harm; I'd just like the truth to come out; I apologise in advance for any offense I might unintentionally cause):
- Player influence on the galaxy makes no sense given the numbers involved and simple math.
- A dynamic, evolving galaxy that isn't influenced by players can easily be produced through procedural generation on a regular PC.
- A dynamic, evolving galaxy that is influenced by a single player and by important Frontier updates can easily be produced through procedural generation on a regular PC.
- A dynamic, evolving galaxy that is influenced by hundreds of thousands of players and by important Frontier updates probably can not, and will need servers, but doesn't need the code to be substantially different from the single player version; it doesn't need to be a "different game" as Brookes claims.
- The galaxies on points 3 and 4 will be virtually indistinguishable from the galaxy on point 2 (except for Frontier's updates, and those could easily be implemented as overrides), so why the heck even bother!?.
- Given the previous points, Frontier's excuses for not providing an offline single player mode make no sense whatsoever, I'm afraid.
I'm far from the most intelligent person I know. I know a little about coding (I somehow managed to get an engineering degree on computer stuff), but I've never coded professionally or even steadily. I have no significant coding experience. My capabilities, therefore, are undoubtedly way below those of the people who are making Elite: Dangerous.
Yet, in my ignorance, after a bit of thinking I've managed to come up with what looks like a design that would allow a game like this to work without problems and still fulfill Frontier's marketspeach.
I can have no doubt that the far more experienced minds at Frontier will have come up with much better, much more efficient designs.
Yet, somehow, they claim they failed to do so. :S
Now, I'm the first to call for Hanlon's razor to be used, but it's very difficult, if not outright impossible, to apply it to people who are clearly neither incompetent nor stupid.
Which, tragically, leaves us with only one possible explanation.
TL;DR: Brookes' excuses don't hold water; they make no sense; by any rational analysis, we are for some unknown reason (which I'd like to know) being given false information.
Which, frankly, sucks.
Sooooo... how many games have you coded in your lifetime?
Your logic is sound, but based on conjecture. You may as well be talking about an entirely different, fictitious game for all you know. And as has been said, this is not a matter of what is possible, but what resources are available.
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As much as I'm not interested in your constant baiting of various users and misinformation, but I guess neither of us will get what they want
Addendum : Forums, prepare ye for the storm of all storms. For we are about to be slashdotted : http://games.slashdot.org/story/14/11/18/0353240/elite-dangerous-dumps-offline-single-player
If you want to know what slashdotting feels like, it's brought down large scale commercial sites to their knees before, let's just hope they don't all decide to turn up at once >.<
Are you proud of this gamergater style attempt at terrorism and propaganda then? Some people here seem bizarrely gleeful and spiteful about any trouble being stirred up. You will gain nothing from this, but sour things for a lot of people, and maybe poison the happy and productive atmosphere at FD.
You must be very proud
There's no rational reason that the same code can't be used for both modes, though.
Either the initial design didn't take offline mode into account (and we were thus falsely told it did), or the current code can handle offline mode, but there are other reasons for it being scrapped.
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