Ok no ship interiors: can we at least have a cargo lift that brings us directly to the cockpit instead of the horrible blank animation?

[Vanquish383]

I don't know if we will ever get ship interiors and I don't know if this is due a technical reasons.

In any case.... without reinventing the wheel, could we get at least a sort of cargo lift that brings CMDRs directly into the cockpit instead of the blank animation? This already happens in games like X4.

This magic lift could also be recycled to bring us to the SRV cargo bay.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

It would have to work the same as the station lifts, which teleport us between maps. The lifts don't actually move. Its smoke and mirrors.

We have to teleport to our seats regardless unless FD implement code to allow us to move around inside ships anyway. They'd also need to redo ships to add lifts to them. Currently they are all designed to be entered through stairs or ladders and a doorway.

 

[Phoenix_Dfire]

One of the reasons I felt that the 'Neil Armstrong Moment', they pushed during the initial marketing for Odyssey, didn't work was because you never walked down a ramp (or lift) and took that 'one small step'. Teleporting to the surface didn't have the right immersion for that. I always wanted it to get to the stairs, run up them, open the hatch at the top to going an airlock and be taken straight to the cockpit door from there, run around to the seat and then take off, and Visa-versa for landing. If, when landed, they had the bridge door being a 'turbo lift' that would take you about the ship, then at least we could have had a ship cabin which we could decorate with ARX bought decorations, but even that is a huge amount of work for something that doesn't really have any gameplay attached to it.

I'm only speculating here but I always thought the reason we got the teleport function was because they were aiming for console ports of Odyssey. The consoles would not have been able to handle the extra geometry required to put ship internals into the game. It was only after the problems with Odyssey were resolved did they realise the consoles didn't have the ability to run Odyssey at a reasonable frame rate. The Xbox -X and PS5 probably could but both MS and Sony have policies that expansions must run on all platforms. The XBone and PS4 couldn't cut it.

 

[Dillon Fallon]

The Xbox -X and PS5 probably could but both MS and Sony have policies that expansions must run on all platforms. The XBone and PS4 couldn't cut it.

Well, about that. The Cyberpunk 2077 expansion Phantom Liberty isn't available on PS4 or XBone as it would have made the game impossible to run on those consoles as currently designed/implemented. So this is only available on XB-S/X and PS5 versions of the game.

It would be possible to have Odyssey on the current gen consoles only and I absolutely believe Odyssey could run on XB- X and PS5. The question is could the game run in a reasonable way on the XB-S. Lack of any further development on consoles suggests to me the answer is no.

I do believe you're right with about the use of stairs/ lifts however. You only have to see the SRV boarding/disembarking animation to see what I think they would have done something similar too, rather than have a blue circle.

 

[HRDiagram]

Even simpler than the lift (and therefore even less important) I would like to see the entrance to the ship.
Ships that already have stairs or lifts are ahead, but I would like to see that lift that gives you access to large vessels, like the Corvette or the Anaconda, or the ramps opening for ships like the Vulture, the Diamondbacks, the Saud Krugers and so on.
I know, it's completely cosmetic and irrelevant to gameplay, but that blue circle beside the Dolphin, or the Orca, for example, always makes me wonder.

Edit: typos

 

[Tifu]

One of the reasons I felt that the 'Neil Armstrong Moment', they pushed during the initial marketing for Odyssey, didn't work was because you never walked down a ramp (or lift) and took that 'one small step'. Teleporting to the surface didn't have the right immersion for that.

Ironically, you at least get the Neil-Armstrong-in-a-moon-buggy moment if you disembark in a SRV. Even launching & docking with an SLF was a more immersive experience. It's one of the reasons I've always felt the Oddysey on-foot experience was something optional and not compelling at all

If it wasn't for PP 2.0, the stronghold fleet carriers and the changes an orbital station would experience during shifts in factional loyalty, I'd still feel the same way.

 

[CMDR Saigon]

I would pay serious money to get rid of that ridiculous blue circle!

 

[Vanquish383]

I meant something simple as already happens with the Constellation for Star Citizen:

A simple lift to the cockpit, the same lift mechanism for all ships. Easy embark option that can coexist with the ship interiors if they will ever be implemented

 

[Dragsham]

Let's just have ship interiors!

 

[Arioch]

I think it would be more like Starfield with the way it works in Elite - you run up to the airlock hatch and get a brief fade-to-black and you reappear either in your ship on the other side of the airlock or teleport directly to the pilot seat.

Even just the little bit of a loading bay and ramp in the default Starfield ship is a much better Armstrong moment than Odyssey’s beam down effort.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

It goes to the living quarters, but I get your point.

Although the way ships exist in SC is fundamentally different to how the exist in ED.

Whats the difference?

 

[Dragsham]

There isnt

 

[TNTDany]

I meant something simple as already happens with the Constellation for Star Citizen:

A simple lift to the cockpit, the same lift mechanism for all ships. Easy embark option that can coexist with the ship interiors if they will ever be implemented

That video is 7 years old though. Let that sink in.

 

[Morbad]

Whats the difference?

The lack of a rendered ship interior is the main difference. It has to teleport/loading screen the CMDR because there is next to nothing between the exterior hatches and the cockpit. What is rendered is also significantly lower detail/resolution that the cockpit seen once the standard cockpit view is loaded.

A basic external lift would require changes to the external models, but anything resembling what SC does would need an actual ship interior.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

I know this. That's not really what I was asking. I would like ship interiors myself, full interiors for smaller ships, and partial for the bigger ships. But the ship interiors don't need to be rendered until we actually see them, surely?

The lack of a rendered ship interior is the main difference. It has to teleport/loading screen the CMDR because there is next to nothing between the exterior hatches and the cockpit. What is rendered is also significantly lower detail/resolution that the cockpit seen once the standard cockpit view is loaded.

A basic external lift would require changes to the external models, but anything resembling what SC does would need an actual ship interior.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

In SC you’re always in first person, you don’t become part of the ship as you do in ED.

You're still in first person view, and not part of the ship. If you look around, you can see your body and hands etc.

 

[kofeyh]

Almost every 'space' within ED is an instance, also a number of the ships basically cannot work as they are, with navigable interiors that are connected to external access, as that all then has to work with the highly-instanced model Frontier use, never mind that virtually all ships will have constraints around where things are placed. Vast majority of ships have entirely missing interiors, many of which would require fundamental rework (where SRVs sit, where fighter bays sit, cargo, living, entrances, everything really) because at present none of it matters as it's not presented to the player.

I get the allure of having Star Citizen like 'Neil Armstrong' moments in ED. However the game is not built to facilitate this, majority of ship designs are literally a decade old and space legs was not a thing to plan for (the textures for some ships sure have not aged well, either, and do not start me on the state of the really, really poor quality of ship paints at this point.. argh!) .. and I am not sure Frontier would want to consume the time, resources and people to achieve it.

Frontier could make the entries to ships interactive in the sense of having lifts for the large ships (SRV could have an animation that vaults us into the chair for example) and have the various ship stairs connect to an interact-able 'door' that then does the instance/ seat switch -- to at least create the sense we're able to ingress and egress somewhat like normal people -- but I think people will always, always want the whole SC seamless experience for ships (and other spaces), and I am not sure the developer has the time, inclination or resources to add literal years of work to the pipeline for it, even if the engine could in principle be re-engineered to do at least some of it.

There are things Frontier can do and (after coming out of a state of sleep paralyses) are doing, which is not something I thought I would see in the year of our lord, 2024, but I think the whole FPS first ability to access ships and the world at large, requires a fundamentally different approach, and ED may stop being the ED a lot of people like in the process. Something not lost on Frontier, I am sure.

 

[Einar Donarsson]

I never felt like a Pilot or Person in Elite. I always felt like I AM the Ship or a Vehicle. My Ships never felt like a Home because of it.

You are glued to that seat like you are a inbuilt part of the craft you are in. Now that we have Space legs, this only slightly changed. Now my Ships feel like some kind of Exosuit i get sucked in when stepping into the blue circle.

 

[Robbie Rocketpants]

That's just it. You are the ship when you're flying, the pilot model in the seat is no different to a weapon on a hardpoint - when you get out, that ship model remains (sans the pilot) and you are spawned in next to the ship. So it's just a context switch.

While it would be a lot of effort to create an interior to that model so that you could run in and then interact with the pilot seat to intitiate that context switch, the insurmountable problem occurs when you factor in that this is an online game and there could potentially be other commanders aboard walking about when you take off, and the engine just doesn't support that.
A whole rework of the physics and a flying container/parent hierarchy would be needed and it's just not necessary.

If you've ever even just tried to fly with someone's SRV on your roof you'll know what I mean. That's my take on it.