Some ships don't even have the stair ramp descend, e.g. the DBX.
ship interiors - will they happen
- Thread starter Woakes
- Start date
True, I only ever fly my old AspX myself, which I am not aware of even having a ramp -- just the lift at the back.
I have run up the stairs of abandoned Eagles and Cobras at points of interest, though, but those apparences of the ships are most likely static meshes...
The requests for ship interiors show it's popular as ever. For example on the ED subreddit: A real discussion: what would adding ship interiors look like to you? - 2 Nov 2024 - 66 upvotes, 122 comments in 13 hours.
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Well, it already happened in Braben's friend's game called StarCitizen.
That probably counts against it around here.
Well that’s odd. As they are both friends, and the success of one encourages growth of the other.
But in all seriousness, FDev needs to make interiors a thing. Blacking out not enter ships that have interiors partially designed seems odd.
It is good to have hopes and dreams. However it helps to temper them with expectations.
Frontier, one day, may add improved interaction animations, to cover a commander getting to and from the chair, but full FPS-centric navigable ship interiors are highly improbable.
Indeed, Frontier may surprise us all, one day, and deliver an elite dangerous update on a vastly updated 'Cobra' engine with seamless instance changes, broadly navigable interiors and so on. But the pragmatist in me sees how CIG have struggled to do that whole seamless thing, and build ships and build mechanics in the 11 years they've been at it. Do not underestimate the amount of work Frontier has to invest, at the cost of other features and choices open to them, to do this.
Frontier built Elite Dangerous to be a modern homage to the original. That was the goal. It is asking of them a great deal, to fundamentally change the direction of the game, overhaul large amounts of prior work, physicalise interiors with nav meshes, etc (a texture map is not the same thing) and build out entire new technologies and instance architecture to support it, after the 11 years of existing development and the endless technical debt that they now have to manage.. just so we can do something that seems 'obvious'; it will be just as obvious to Frontier, as it is to us.
The only difference is, they have perhaps the most clear understanding of what that entails. That it does not yet exist, perhaps illustrates more than anything else.
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I would like nothing more than to see them, but I've always had a strong gut feeling that we'll never get them. Seems like too much work for not much gain on their part. You designed two dozen ships without interiors in mind 10 years ago, and now have to go through a massive process of design, overhaul, etc, for like, 3,000 players? Doesn't seem worth it, from a dev perspective, when you can just move onto doing something like earth-likes, that will be a big headline selling point to get new customers.
I just play that when I want ship interiors. Helps with the itch, haha.
I don't know about how much gameplay is actually involved with 'player housing', or ship interiors. They're all the same, in every game I have played, that included players housing, it turned out to be a huge wasted effort, that could have been used to deliver actual stuff to do. FD have not, so far, fallen into that trap. They opted to introduce a feature that will offer activities for ever. I hope they continue with that approach.
Requests to make aspects of the game open only are also hugely popular... with certain portions of the community.
Requests to add many features to the game will always be hugely popular. A thread asking FD for atmospheric landings would be hugely popular. A thread asking for on-foot Thargoids would be hugely popular.
Its always a question of resources and viability, and of course, the developers willingness to do it.
As noted on this page, a comment from a dev about adding interiors to crashed/landed ships would be doable with the game's current state. This is because they wouldn't use the current ship models or require any extra coding. Just new assets of unmovable ships (eg: crashed Anaconda), like buildings that you can enter.
The tricky part with ship interiors is handling the physics of moving objects and disconnecting the player and NPCs from the ship. When you enter a ship, you are not your character. You are the ship. Moving around inside a moving object adds a lot of complexity.
Not saying FD can't do it. They already do it with station interiors. I guess they use the same trick i've suggested for ship interiors myself. When you enter the station its a fade to black and you are actually on a different "map" from the exterior. When you look through the window in the bar, you're not actually in the same space, the same "map", you're looking through a kind of portal to the other "map", so your character isn't actually rotating with the station, just the camera view is.
So, maybe they could do ship interiors in the same way. You fade to black to the interior, and there you aren't actually in the same space as the exterior, just a separate map you can walk around and the windows show the other map. This would require a rework of the engine to handle that for spaceships of course, especially flight.
Another way, in which they interior is in the same space as the exterior, is only allow walking around when landed. As soon as you sit in the pilot seat to move, then fade to black for everyone, evereyone is put in seats (or kicked off the ship if more people than seats) and then its back to the old model for the flight. On stations, you can only stand up once in the hangar and therefore in the fixed map space.
Or they could go the Star Citizen route, but that is a lot more work and lot more bug prone, which you will have seen if you've watched videos of people moving around in moving spaceships and getting ejected into space and clipping through floors and whatnot. I don't think FD can afford to try that route.
The big question for FD would be "is it worth it?" If its just so people can walk around the interiors, i think the conclusion has to be no. Its a lot of effort for effectively zero added gameplay. If it comes with some interesting mechanics, then the answer might be its worth it. But that depends on the approach. For example, ship to ship boarding and EVA and stuff only would be possible with the fade to black entry/exit and separate map variant of the first option.
I don't see the interiors themselves as a major factor as to whether to do interiors. A competent designer and modeller could probably whip up some prefab modules to snap together to make the interiors relatively quickly, as long as player's aren't expecting interiors to change based on modules installed (eg: actual passenger cabins), although even that might not be too tricky. At the end of the day, its just map assets, and 3D modellers have been whipping them up for decades now and the tools to create objects are very advanced. throw in some templates and themes for different ship vendors and imperial vs federal looks, and you could probably whip up an interior for a new ship fairly quickly. Keep in mind, interiors for some ships would be little more than a corridor and cabin space.
The tricky part is the mechanics, the coding, to make it work.
There is a top 5 list of features that ED players want the most. Based on previous forum and subreddit threads we have an indication what the community prefers. For example these analyzed results:
- Base building (became System Colonisation)
- Hunt procedural alien wildlife / New planet types and biomes (tied)
- Ship interiors
- EVA outside a ship in space
- Deep NPC interaction with AI voices
- On foot VR mode
- Guild system for player groups
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Not surprised, there is a very great resistance to an open only mode for any ED activity.
Always worth remembering that ship interiors was indicated as a future part of the game by Frontier at KickStarter time.
300,000 players more like.
Probably because its only a major topic on these forums and a relatively limited group pushing for it. New content on the other hand... most people want new content.
Well many people want it and there's whales ready to spend big bucks on ship interior content. We know this is true based on the other game that racked in $100+ million.
Frontier said they designed the ships with interiors in mind. If the interior is a separate level (map) then the exterior can stay the same. It doesn't need to fit perfectly, because it's a level / map. It just needs to give the illusion that the player is inside his/her own ship. We can't walk inside most modules anyway. Lots of space ship enthusiasts would like it.
Ship interiors would enable lots of new cosmetics: furniture, wallpapers, apparel, carpets, pets, modules etc.
This is a major topic at many places such as the ED subreddit, discord, Steam, this and other forums.
All those features in the list would be new content.
Obsidian Ant did a poll in march 2021. It had 6900 votes and 97% wanted ship interiors.
Seconded. Frontier and Braben himself mentioned ship interiors numerous times.
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97% of players wanted something rather than nothing given the option, hardly surprising is it?
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The other option is not "nothing". The poll asked if people wanted ship interiors in the future. If it was truly unpopular then the poll would show mixed results or most votes would be "no".
The other option is not "nothing". The poll asked if people wanted ship interiors in the future. If it was truly unpopular then the poll would show mixed results or most votes would be "no".