Seamless interior interaction on the scale being proposed by most suggestions in this thread, would indeed, require a complete rebuild of ships. Which is, why I suspect you'll never see them in this iteration of ED. The most plausible way for them to happen, would be at the ground level ... so ... ED 2 - Elite Dangerouser
ship interiors - will they happen
- Thread starter Woakes
- Start date
Even if you were developing the game from scratch with interiors in mind, it would be incredibly foolish to design a spaceship as a fully fledged 3D asset, modeled seamlessly from the outside to the inside and back again. When piloting the ship, you don't want to lug around a complex model for performance reasons. And from the outside, you want a model with a reduced LOD, also for performance reasons. And thus, the exterior and interior are never "one" model anyway.
Oh 100% ... a rebuild does mean from a coding and design/layout point of view ... It's not really about the physical 3D model which would be the least complicated part. I really don't think most of the suggested use case scenarios for ship interiors have really been thought through on any meaningful level other then hopes and dreams ... just my subjective opinion on the matter.
Anyways ... good luck interiorphiles ! I hope all your dreams comes true !
Last edited:
Care to add your statement with facts? Otherwise, this is an unrelated word followed by a full stop.
I know the thread is long but there were lots of posts which said that interiors are 'impossible'.
Not entirely correct: The bridge of our ship is pretty functional. What a part of us want FDev to change is that there's more functionality and extend it to other parts of the ship and build game loops for that functionality.
It's pretty obvious, but if you insist:
That's not what the word 'representative' means statistically. Which means there is no 'therefore'. It's a non sequitur. Hence 'false'.
The cockpit/bridge is only accessible via camera, as it's a static 3D asset. When people say you are the ship in ED, that's not entirely accurate—actually, you are just the cockpit/bridge. When you leave the bridge in VR, you see that the rest of the ship is only crudely modeled. Additional rooms could only be accessed in a separate instance with loading screen, separate from the bridge. If you were to add the ship's interior like the bridge, it would have to be dragged around permanently—very bad for performance and therefore impractical.
The bridge is not entirely static. The holos, joysticks and the pilot are animated. The 3rd person cam shows them all. Yes, I wish those screens and other greebles weren't static
The feasibility of having interiors only while landed or also in-flight, or to be specific in any situation in flight, was discussed before. I am siding with 'do it the easy way' and make interiors accessible only while landed or when the ship in space is not changing its position/is not in combat. Although I am not a fan of loading screens, they may also be the best of solutions unless you rebuild the entire game but it would allow those players who do not want to use interiors/get bored use shortcuts.
There are certainly people here who have understood that the interior cannot be seamlessly integrated, but must be "called up" as a separate instance.
By static, I mean there are no interaction options—of course, you can have animations. But I'm afraid that these very animations give the false impression that there could also be interactions like in the settlement buildings.
My issue with interiors is that there are so many existing things in the game that would greatly enhance gameplay if they got some additional development time and polish. Think of almost any existing gameplay loop and you'll come up with a list of things that'd be nice, cool or should be improved. Interiors are a fairly useless cosmetic addition that has little chance of being anything other than an niche waste of time like station interiors. As the game stands interiors should never happen. They're incredibly unlikely to have any valuable gameplay that justifies the amount of player and developer time they'd cost.
Could they be done yes. It's code anything is theoretically possible. Is there any chance that they'll be worth the time. History currently says no. Walking didn't work out so well. Walking in ships while walking is still slapped onto the side of the game. Not promising.
Could they be done yes. It's code anything is theoretically possible. Is there any chance that they'll be worth the time. History currently says no. Walking didn't work out so well. Walking in ships while walking is still slapped onto the side of the game. Not promising.
Yeah, many don't fully understand the "instance" thing, as well as the character being able to walk around in an environment.
It's not really 1st person by showing a pilot sitting in a seat with some hand and head movements.
If the pilot were actually there, they could exit their seated position like in a concourse, just stand up and walk around, or go to a door to the rest of the ship.
That's when "instance" becomes part of the conversation...how to simulate walking through that cockpit door into the rest of the ship. I would say a new "instance" transition, seeing you're not flying the ship, so, what happens in the cockpit becomes irrelevant.
From seated and flying, to getting up and walking to the rest of the ship would be the same as other games where the character enters and exits a motor vehicle.
I know how 'representative' is defined in statistics. And I explained that there are better approaches (FDev would need to create a statistical population based on the data they have about us and then create an in-game survey). As this is not the case, the fall back is a platform like this forum here representing us players. Biased as it may be it is better than creating statistics from Steam numbers or YT surveys.
From my point of view, I would not try to pull up such poll numbers as in previous posts here unless than I am certain that they are solid. I am only one of the advocates in this thread supporting the idea of interiors, as well as giving suggestions how they could be fleshed out, hoping that our voices will be heard by the community managers and considered for the roadmap of the game.
If it's biased, then it's just as useless a data source as other biased things like YT surveys.
(Active Steam user numbers are an entirely different category, as it has nothing to do with any specific question like ship interiors, it's simply a number of a random subset of players, the over-time changes of which can be used to as an approximation of the change of the total player numbers, but that's it).
Fdev presumably have access to more accurate (non public) data sources regarding actual player numbers, but accurate measurements of the distribution of player opinion on any specific topic do not really exist. Not that it's very important since nobody denies that ship interiors is one of the popular ideas. What matters is the feasibility - basically a cost-benefit analysis, taking possible technical difficulties and gameplay benefits/downsides vs the available dev resources into account.
As for potential gameplay benefits, it's mostly a matter of taste ofc, but based on the gameplay quality of previous updates (like EDO itself, for example) I absolutely don't think it would be worth it even to think about ship interiors for a split second. It could even happen to end up ruining what good gameplay we have, because of the high probability of bugs.
As for resources and technicalities, fdev are understandably silent about them (as always). What little data we have is mostly the quality and complexity of the recent updates, and those absolutely don't justify high expectations. EDO was the last big thing and it did not go really well. Fdev have only attempted smaller, 'minimally invasive' (relatively speaking) updates ever since then.
Last edited:
I can only speak for myself here: if I'm looking for gameplay, I'm playing a computer game. Off course I don't use ED as a game; I'm simply satisfying my spaceship fetish and I would also like to waste a little time. For that, I obviously need interiors for the sake of completeness. The following features are important to me: turning the lights on and off, checking the status of the modules, inspecting the cargo hold (e.g., to read the sayings the dock workers have scribbled on the containers), and tearing off the page from my pin-up girl calendar every month in my sleeping cabin. Ah...oh, and of course I want to get goosebumps from the alarm siren when I rush to the emergency exit because I caused the reactor to go into a fatal self-destruct sequence while fiddling around with the powerplant console.
mostly agree with your points but yes, forums is the best we have.
I don't have high expectations, only the wish for big expansions like EDO (thicker atmos, interiors, more exploration, more alien races, etc.). The recent colonisation update was indeed another 'bolted on' update (no matter if I like this game loop or not). I think FDev should look at the EDO learnings, take a calculated risk and try something big(ger) again. Even if EDO was not the success as planned, it brought a wealth of new places and things to do and without it, the Elite galaxy would be much emptier.
Earlier, you mentioned an Elite 5 - this would the best technical approach for sure but from a development and financial perspective the most challenging way to go.
Probably would only work when it would be built for consoles plus PC and backed by a big studio. That would lead to a game which may bear the name 'Elite' but would not have much of its DNA because our space sim niche is way too uninteresting for large studios and they'd demand so many changes to make it interesting for a much broader player base.
What we need is a billionaire who'd invest money into their favourite game, similar how it was done with the 'The Expanse' TV show.
I see what you want but if that's what you want then you don't want interiors in ED. You're aiming too high. Figure out what the absolute minimuim you'd accept. Then go visit some carriers and stations and see how far beyond what we're likely to get even that minimum is. This is a feature that's better to not have than to have cosmetically and incomplete.
If all you have is a wooden spoon and an aluminium fork then you cannot say 'the fork is the best weapon we have, let's go to war against tanks', because while it might be technically true that a metal object is a better weapon, both of them still suck big time under these circumstances.
Wishing is one thing, but realistically none of them will happen.
There can be a point in the lifetime of any complex computer program when implementing any kind of a radically new big update is easier as a complete rewrite than patching the original spaghetti. ED is near (or even beyond) that point, I'm afraid.
Last edited:
Why would other rooms need to be instanced?
Insides of ships would only need to be generated when it's necessary. Like the inside of a station is on approach, sometimes I see it pop into existence.
And if ship interiors are only accessible when the ship is not in motion, I really can't see any issues.
The cockpits don't even have collision or tunneling (why would they when you can't interact with them?)
The rest of the ship interior doesn't even exist.
I suppose you are technically correct - 1% of the work is done...the cockpit graphics...but there are 41 ships and that is a crazy amount of work!
It's certainly not impossible!
I remember Gareth Hughes talking about how Odyssey was akin to remaking the entire game...so it has happened before...
I just don't think it is going to happen again - not this far along in the games life, and not unless the playerbase expands by an order of magnitude.
But if FDev were to announce it tomorrow, I'd still get on the ship interior hype train - I hope I'm wrong!