Oh it all sound so simple. All you need to do is paint a corridor, have a door with a button and bingo ... ship interiors!!
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
- The cabin space has no collision mesh. If you were able to get out of your seat you would fall through the floor.
- The character that is sat in the seat of your ship does not have the capabilities of the similar looking character that walks around stations and planets. Yes its hands react to you moving controls and a random number generator causes it to twitch a bit, but no real movement. That would need to taken out and replaced by the fully functioning model.
- The view from the cockpit is a single point of view. In essence a camera on a gimbal. As such it has limited view capabilities. I wouldn't be surprised if it is optimised for that limited view. Take fleet carrier. You can wander round them and look out the window. What is the one thing you cannot do while doing that? That's right, you cannot move the fleet carrier. Why? Because a fixed camera view inside a moving ship or a moving camera view inside static ship are a lot easier than a moving camera inside a moving ship.
- You then have to unbolt the logic that has been there since the beginning and bolt in the new logic. I can guarantee to you that that code is a heap of spaghetti code, with little or no documentation and everyone who has worked on it has left the company.
- There needs to be a transition between the cockpit and the outside world. Probably the best way to do this is how fleet carrier interiors work. Move you into a lift, load/switch the context while you are in the lift, open the doors onto a new playing field. The problem with the cockpit is that it is not the current context, it just looks like it is. The current context is the current system. You just happen to be viewing it from a fixed point with a fake cockpit façade layered in the way. So the problem is that you want to move from the star system / planet landing context to a walkable cockpit context and vice versa. You need some form of transition, whether that is a animation of you standing up or a fade to black.
- You need to add rules into the logic to stop you leaving the seat when it is not sensible to.
- You need to add code to allow the player to interact with the button on the door and code to animate the door.
- The lighting model assumes a fixed location of the camera (your character's face). Move the view point and the lighting changes. Obstacles get between the viewpoint and the light source. Fine if the light source is fixed and the camera moves, or the light source moves and the camera stays put, but when they both move......
- You finally get to the steps of your ship. However, you have the possibility of landing on uneven surfaces with rocks, plants and other stuff in the way. So the landing logic needs to be updated to take into account the terrain around the stairs. We have all had problems getting the SRV under the ship because there is a bit of lumpy ground in the way. Now magnify that by an order of magnitude cos the stairs extend to the middle of a large plant or lead to the edge of a cliff. Or the stairs stop a rock. You can jump down from the rock, but you cant easily climb back up again. Sure you can jump, but does that break the immersion?
Having implemented all of that you can now get out of your seat, interact with nothing but a single button. It takes you ten times longer to get out of your ship. The immersionists are so happy (well they are for the first few times). The rest of the game players are fed up cos it takes then 10 times longer to do stuff, particularly if you are exploring and constantly jumping in and out of your ship. You have now spends loads of money developing these code changes. You have made a small fraction of the gamers happy for a few minutes, annoyed the rest and brought in zero revenue. Never mind you can always advertise this as the game that allows you to stand up and press a button. That is bound to bring in new customers. Is there new game play? Not really, it looks pretty and its kind of cool for ten minutes. Does it add to the grind of the game? Absolutely. Does it add to the functionality of the game? Nah.
Now if they added EVA with ship repairs, more interiors to buildings we can already get into, new interiors for buildings we are locked out of, caves to explore, more dangers and things to interact with inside ships, buildings and alien structures, then that would be adding game play. That would be worth the development, but it would take much longer. In the meantime the bug fixing would slow down. Standing up and pushing a button, sorry not my idea of fun. For those of you who play SC., is the getting out of bed and exiting your hotel room at the beginning of the game the best part of the game? I doubt it. Is it cool the first time you see it? Probably. Would you like to do it all day long? Nah.
