Reasonable middle ground solution for ship interiors and the "Armstrong moment"

[Serbanstein]

Note: this suggestion should only be a starting point for the development of ship interiors. Even if you (Frontier) think ship interiors are useless, many players have already made themselves loud and clear that this should be a priority.

Now, for the idea. I tried to think of it in a way that would make implementation easy and satisfying enough for the player.

What if only the cockpit was fully modeled and traversable on-foot? Here's how I imagine going from your seat to the planet surface should be like:

• You select how you want to disembark from the bottom menu (feet, srv, slf etc.)
• You sit up from the chair(*1) with a separate keybind or any other method that allows the bottom menu selection and sitting up to be doable independently.
• You go to the exit door (*2) of the cockpit, interact with it (opens a menu similar to the station elevator) and that there is where you should fade to black into the chosen vehicle. If there's multiple doors, make them functionally identical, just like the multiple station elevators that take you to the same place.
• In the case of going on foot, when the game fades back in, you should be at the exit door of your ship (e.g. a tiny retractable platform and ladder on the sidewinder or at the top of the landing gear stairs with the Imperial Cutter)
• If your ship is attacked or forced off of its trajectory while in the cockpit, you immediately get pulled back into your seat. This is the only reasonable solution I could think of for this scenario and other similar ones.

*1 (animation: hud turns off, your chair turns around and you sit up)
*2 (ships like the Type 9 have 3 exits. Just make them functionally identical)

 

[JTFireblaze]

I think this is the way that it has been mentioned a few times in the Alpha forum.

• Walk around cockpit/bridge
• Door to lift to airlock

Would have been a much nicer experience than the blue circle.

Some of the cockpits and bridges are not fully modelled however so there would still be some work to be done. And some of the cockpits are quite small, eg I don't see how fun it would be to have to get up and walk 2 steps to the door in a Sidewinder.

 

[LKx]

This would be nice, but not as easy as it may sound, and i really don't think we'll see that until the full implementation of ship interiors AND zero-g activities and EVAS, together, in a future expansion.

(don't be scared by some CM or dev demising interiors as useless, in the past someone considered space legs pretty much impossible Sky is NOT the limit)

 

[Murfelton]

I’d definitely prefer a choice.

• Get up from chair and walk as much as possible.
• Teleport (almost as in Odyssey). Put teleport at the top of stairs/ladder. (Bottom of ladder. Ladders in first person are a pain.)
• Teleport to elevator when in station/outpost. Yes, you miss seeing the ship, but whatever. If you want to do a bunch of ground missions, the walking out of the hanger might be a nuisance.

 

[Chrystoph]

This is a wonderful example of why we need a Downvote function in the Forums.

I despise useless transitions in gaming.

P.S. Armstrong's glory wasn't being the first to set foot on Luna, it was the fact that he was the First to do something that had been impossible until then. Uless you haven't played until Odyssey releases, you've probably been on at least one solar, so this "Armstrong Moment" is pure folderol.

 

[m0rl0ck]

Note: this suggestion should only be a starting point for the development of ship interiors. Even if you (Frontier) think ship interiors are useless, many players have already made themselves loud and clear that this should be a priority.

Now, for the idea. I tried to think of it in a way that would make implementation easy and satisfying enough for the player.

What if only the cockpit was fully modeled and traversable on-foot? Here's how I imagine going from your seat to the planet surface should be like:

• You select how you want to disembark from the bottom menu (feet, srv, slf etc.)
• You sit up from the chair(*1) with a separate keybind or any other method that allows the bottom menu selection and sitting up to be doable independently.
• You go to the exit door (*2) of the cockpit, interact with it (opens a menu similar to the station elevator) and that there is where you should fade to black into the chosen vehicle. If there's multiple doors, make them functionally identical, just like the multiple station elevators that take you to the same place.
• In the case of going on foot, when the game fades back in, you should be at the exit door of your ship (e.g. a tiny retractable platform and ladder on the sidewinder or at the top of the landing gear stairs with the Imperial Cutter)
• If your ship is attacked or forced off of its trajectory while in the cockpit, you immediately get pulled back into your seat. This is the only reasonable solution I could think of for this scenario and other similar ones.

*1 (animation: hud turns off, your chair turns around and you sit up)
*2 (ships like the Type 9 have 3 exits. Just make them functionally identical)

After seeing the galaxy map and the mission board / station services interface in odyessy, you think frontier can be trusted with more menus?

 

[Fake Newts]

Walking across the potentially huge bridge of your ship every time you want to deploy doesn't seem like a good solution.

There are numerous examples of games implementing walk-in menus and flavour transitions and having it just be incredibly tedious. Transitions are distinct from travel in games in that no gameplay or surprises can happen in this time, we play the game for many hundreds of hours and slogging across the deck literally thousands of times would get real old.

I do actually agree about the blue circle being bad though. Apart from anything else it looks bad, doesn't fit with other UI elements and a short ladder or door transition animation wouldn't go amiss. Subnautica did this pretty well, balancing speed with a sense of physical weight.

 

[JTFireblaze]

Walking across the potentially huge bridge of your ship every time you want to deploy doesn't seem like a good solution.

There are numerous examples of games implementing walk-in menus and flavour transitions and having it just be incredibly tedious. Transitions are distinct from travel in games in that no gameplay or surprises can happen in this time, we play the game for many hundreds of hours and slogging across the deck literally thousands of times would get real old.

I do actually agree about the blue circle being bad though. Apart from anything else it looks bad, doesn't fit with other UI elements and a short ladder or door transition animation wouldn't go amiss. Subnautica did this pretty well, balancing speed with a sense of physical weight.

Respectfully, I partially disagree about the tedium. I know people complain that things take "too long" to do things in Elite some times, but being able to get up from your seat and walk around the bridge is a big win for immersion.

I recently purchased X4 as it was on sale. My first ship is something akin to a sidewinder or an Eagle. It's cockpit is around the same size. I'm able to get up out of the seat and go to the door to embark, it really helps make the world feel cohesive. There's also a lift door that allows you to access other decks and stuff on larger ships, but it also functions as a way to exit the ship.

I think the current Disembark button from the cockpit is fine, and to be honest, keep it in for options. Some people are fine with a fade to black and that's their choice.

But if they want to walk the bridge to the door, and then from the door select from:

• Deploy SRV
• Disembark on foot
• Deploy SLF (maybe in the future, if they allow an SLF to be flown without the tether)

Menu options are great for keeping up the pace of gameplay and absolutely have their place. But as an option of taking it a bit slower and interacting with elements in the game world, you can't beat the immersion factor.