Persistent parked player ship POIs vs RNG POIs

[buzzx]

Id love to see some more persistent things in the ED galaxy to make it feel more lived in.
Instead of these meaningless RNG POIs why not use the persistent data that ED already knows about liked parked player ship locations for POIs in space and on planet surfaces.
Even if a player is logged out, ED knows where they are parked. How cool would it be to fire off FSS/DSS and find player ships parked in space or on the surface.
Sure they would need to be indestructible, but it would be so much more immersive and interesting to find player ships when your out exploring rather than these dull and repetitive RNG things.

 

[Drelthar]

How would it be any different than random?

 

[Screemonster]

I'd be more interested in being able to find locations where currently logged-in and in the same mode players might be found.

Like if someone powers up a settlement, their surface instance becomes visible as an active power source even if their wake has long-gone.

 

[FX2K]

If its an indestructible brick, what's the point? Not that I would want to shoot / blow them up either, that would suck!
Would rather see a ship flying around, or no ship at all.

I would even like a FC that isn't persistent. A personal carrier, with all of them that are owned lumped into one parking spot, so when you drop in, if you have one, you see yours and another player, see's their own. Then drop the maintenance.. but that's another topic.

 

[buzzx]

Would be cool, but unfortunately that sort of persistence just isn’t possible with the instancing used in ED.

How do you mean, surely the master DB knows where players are located when they are logged out. You would need some logic and constraints around it, say a DB query they runs when you fire off DSS probes to the surface that returns any players ship on that body that has been logged out for the past 24 hours. Maybe restrict the query to only return a max of 5 ships for example. The other benefit is we have all these players that spend money on paints and ship kits etc but you rarely get to see them out in the wild. If the instancing is not so great live at least this way they can utilise the location data of players that have been stationary and logged of for a time and the data has had time to replicate across the DB. It would even be nice to see a few that have left their ships parked outside settlements or starports etc. Maybe even with their SRV not to far from their ship if thats how they left it. It would add a bit of unexpected variety. Especially when your out exploring 1000s of Lys from SOL it would be interesting to stumble across a lone ship in unexpected places. I guess you would have to allow an option to remain invisible otherwise you would get griefers finding and camping out waiting for someone like obsidian ant to log in and blow him to smithereens

 

[varonica]

It uses a P2P system, FDev don’t even know if we’re playing or afk when in an instance.

You can give as many reasons as you like as to why it’s a good idea, it’s just not possible.

Yes, for a player with thier ship to be instance with another player they "have" to be online. Yes FDEV know where they were when they logged out and where they will be when they log back in because that's stored, but players can't be instanced with them. Unless of course FDEV place an all modes beacons for every ship that logs out there would be no way for other players to know, and that would be silly apart from being impractical in busy systems.

It would also lead to stalking and player harassment if they did plant player beacons for logged out ships, with groups hanging around a player beacon waiting for them to log back, maybe sitting on the ground and helpless, where they can be destroyed easily.

So no, even if it were practical and possible, it's just not ever going to happen.

 

[buzzx]

If it can be done with Fleet carriers, it can be done with player ships.

 

[varonica]

If it can be done with Fleet carriers, it can be done with player ships.

Umm, no, because fleet carriers are all modes, all platforms persistent objects like stations, so unless your player ship can be present on Xbox, Playstation and PC, as well as appearing in Open, Solo and PG's then it's not the same thing. It can't be done with Fleet Carriers, and what Fleet Carriers are doing is not the same as what the OP wants.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

It uses a P2P system, FDev dont even know if were playing or afk when in an instance.

There's still low volume server traffic going on pretty much continuously when alone on a planet surface - presumably things like battery usage, position, etc. being synced up with the servers so that we don't suddenly teleport three kilometres in the event of an unexpected disconnect.

There's nothing technically stopping them taking our player positions, and spawning NPCs with the same name and ship parameters in the same location while we're offline (or even in separate modes while online). Obviously nothing which happened to the NPC would affect the player it was based on in the slightest, and its movements once spawned would have nothing to do with what the player was doing.

It's not a pure P2P system - our savegames are held on central servers and continuously updated there (including while we're offline!); lots of information about the galaxy is dynamically downloaded from those servers rather than being computer-generated. That information could then be used in a variety of ways.

Fleet Carriers (or other equivalent player-owned persistent assets) were long-held by some posters to be impossible "because P2P". And yes, there are differences between a station-like asset and a POI/USS signal source, but as our client gets told about the location of both of them by the central servers, that's not an important distinction if Frontier wanted to go down this route, and the fact that communication between players in the same instance is P2P isn't relevant to that.

P2P doesn't stop us seeing other player's first discoveries whether or not that player is logged on, whether or not that player is on the same platform - CMDR Validating errors aside, and having that information regularly updated. Similarly, when we look at the galaxy map or the comms tab or the social menu and see the locations of our online friends ... that's sent by the server, not by the game attempting to negotiate P2P connections with each of those other players to ask them where they are.




Now, personally, I don't believe they should go down this route - imagine how bad parking would get at busy stations if you had to wait for all the player-based NPCs to leave first every time you entered the instance! But there's really no technical reason that they couldn't do it.