A reasonable fear given what happened to multicrew. There are a lot more planets you can't visit yet though. I can't see devs wanting elite feet on atmospheric rocks - through cities, jungles and deserts - being anything less than well polished. And even the best woodwork starts with the roughcut.
Odyssey trailer - thoughts?
- Thread starter Bantha
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A reasonable fear given what happened to multicrew. There are a lot more planets you can't visit yet though. I can't see devs wanting elite feet on atmospheric rocks - through cities, jungles and deserts - being anything less than well polished. And even the best woodwork starts with the roughcut.
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I feel we probably won't get cities or jungles at all
I've no idea why though. Surely ELW's must look like a gaping hole of unused game real estate in the Dev office and I think you need only look at the dinosaur game - built by Frontier, in the same engine - to find assets for jungles ready to go and at the crowd mechanics (for cities) performance optimised in Planet Coaster (also built by Frontier, also in the same engine).
We're not getting earth likes though. Only tenuous atmospheres
No no, not in Odyssey, you're right. Was talking about motivations to continue improving FPS after Odyssey .. these environments I think must be in the devs minds but you're right .. for the future.
I’d be very surprised if Earth-likes were in Odyssey and not a future paid-for expansion. Same with gas giants and space EVA / ship interiors.
Edit: ...and what Winterwalker said
In this iteration, you are absolutely correct.
Dr Ross, in the (still gagged, at the time) livestream did mention, along the lines of an Easter Egg drop, they were already 'playing' with other types - but that is all she said
Pointless getting totally enthused and hyped up, but patience may bring its own reward as far as Odyssey and on is concerned.
This is good to hear but I'll reserve my hopefulness for my own personal sanity.
I remain hopeful, in part due to games like Megaton Rainfall - the product of mostly one guy, runs on PS4+PC - VR & flatscreen - does very good destructible cities that have traffic and pedestrians, and a host of other things on Earth...before also including pretty much the rest of the Cosmos as well
In this iteration, you are absolutely correct.
Dr Ross, in the (still gagged, at the time) livestream did mention, along the lines of an Easter Egg drop, they were already 'playing' with other types - but that is all she said
Pointless getting totally enthused and hyped up, but patience may bring its own reward as far as Odyssey and on is concerned.
And, personally, I reckon they've been 'playing' with other planet types for a LONG time now. Even from the very start of developing Horizons, I'd be very surprised if they hadn't also been looking at how the engine worked with more complex planets like water worlds, earth-likes, ammonia worlds, lava worlds.....not that the results would necessarily be any good mind you, but I can't believe a dev or two wouldn't have been seeing what would happen.
I do think it will be a while before we see earth-likes, water worlds and ammonia worlds in particular, but not because they can't generate the terrain or water. I reckon the real challenge with such planets is the lifeforms. Within the bubble, it would make sense for some cross-pollination of lifeforms across, say, earth-likes.....humans being humans we like to have familiar animals etc around us, so I'd expect to see some imported lifeforms from other worlds in the bubble. But when one gets well out from the bubble, every single earth-like needs to be different - in terms of the lifeforms present, in terms of what stage of the evolutionary cycle they are etc, IF they intend to get it right. While one earth-like might be stuck at simple lifeforms, another might have had events that led to the development of complex lifeforms, and the next might be somewhere in the middle, and the next might have barely developed at all etc etc. It is this level of diversity....across the galaxy....that I think is the challenge, should FDEV deem it worth bothering to try to achieve. And that's on top of the diversity of life that would be required across each individual earth-like, let alone between earth-likes. It's already a little jarring, in my opinion, that the same bark mounds, for example seem to be so widespread - it's not just convergent evolution as the same barkmound, brain tree etc variants can be found all over the place (and it's the same for much of the life we've found so far in-game).
I picked something up about "pre-alpha"? Which puzzled me so near the release. I'd expect it rather advanced and pre-beta. Anyway I looked like it works.
My initial thoughts after watching the gameplay trailer:
- The running animations look really bad. Maybe as gamers we are spoiled with games like RDR2 that look phenomenal. Your character should look and feel like he has weight to him. The current animations look like there's a lot of missing transitional / interstitial animations.
- Didn't understand the stealth approach when it appeared no one cared about your presence. Must have been allied with the faction controlling the base, I would assume, so I would love to see some real stealth gameplay. At what distance does the AI detect you? If they see you briefly as you move behind cover, do they immediately start shooting, or do the investigate further since they didn't get a good look at you? Are there any silent takedowns?
- The hand torch to open the panel was cool
- The FPS combat didn't look horrible, but it didn't look good either. No use of cover. Didn't appear any flanking, etc. Also, it appeared they were under some heavy fire and got through it no trouble at all. Maybe it was easy for trailer purposes.
- Entering the ship was the most depressing thing ever. It's just NMS teleportation . Elite needs to be like SC; you physically enter your ship, via a ladder, gangway ramp, etc., where you can walk around the inside of your ship. Not to mention the amount of gameplay that would be created from simply having access to the inside. Sigh.
star citizen is impossible to run on most pc's.
Imho the real problem with planets like that (apart of earth-like worlds and inhabited earth-like worlds) aren't animals or other life-forms, because on worlds like Titan or waterworlds this problem doesn't exist or may be easily omitted (it's not like you gonna dive in a waterworld's ocean in search of a bio-sphere, at least they won't let you) - it is a weather system and liquids, especially interactions between those liquids and ships/srvs/cmdrs. E.g. can you land on the water? Will your ship sink? Can you even ride into the liquid? The difference between the puddle (that you can just ride through, splashing pedestrians in the process, lol) and the lake/sea/ocean. Waterfalls. Rivers. Generally, the water circuit. The difference between liquids, like water and liquid methane for example (the ship surely would sink in the latter). And so forth. This stuff isn't trivial to code I imagine. Surprisingly, the easiest world to code would be probably a waterworld, because it's just a ball made of water with no land, rivers, waterfalls - just one big ocean.
PS. I remember the FDev said they want to release a paid-for DLC so they can gather resources to actually re-write the whole ED code.
This just furthers my feelings that if a gaming company can't compete with Rockstar, they should do something else
I love the though of roaming such worlds, but procedurally generating decent, believable ones is a massive task (not sure anything's done it before to that scale - I think NMS's planets are smaller, and lack features like cities - apparently it's got rivers at least).
Not all that excited about an FPS but the imginary over-the-top final, complete game would need that element, so why not start with it, and if it wasn't for having become sceptical about Frontier building on features I'd actually be very excited about this step. As it is it's a positive but not a really major one, but at least it'll add a bit to the variety.
I think the problem isn't so much creating the water effects (sinking ship or not for example), and rain just needs to be a graphical effect plenty of games have done - although all sorts of rain on all sorts of worlds, different liquids, different gravity, different atmosphere, that'll get interesting. It's generating it convincingly. Randomly generated terrain with a fixed sea level isn't too hard - that's been done plenty of times, but if you want rivers and so on, calculating where they go on the fly (too many worlds to predefine them all), giving tributary systems that don't cross each other, convincing variation in size, working out where a lake actually is - that all sounds like quite a challenge. A very interesting challenge to be sure, one that sounds like it would be very interesting to work on.
Chucking plants and animals on top of that's the easy part, although ideally you'd want to procedurally generate all of them too to give each world unique lifeforms.
I didn't like it, to be honest.
Where there's a rain, must be a cloud. And that cloud should be visible from the orbit. Yeah, I know the water effect isn't something we never saw before and was made plenty of times, I imagine making a planet, where below certain level water just pops out isn't complicated endavour for skilled programmer. It's details that makes things complicated.
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Critics is good however could you explain what you expected?