Hi Michael!
I sent this to Chris Gregory too, but since he haven't been on the forum for a while I'll thought you should could get a copy too.
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I've been meaning to send this PM for some time so here it goes.
I think we all understand that one of the most challenging aspects of making Elite feel alive in terms of visuals is to have enough variation in the gameworld. Having a galaxy of 400 Billion stars with close to a 100.000 inhabited star systems (in some form) feel varied enough and not "samey" is no small feat. To put it mildly...
Let's take the current stations as an example. They look great, but the amount of variation isn't where it needs to be to make the world come alive. We should be able to tell if we are in the Empire/Alliance/Federation by just looking at a station for example. The purpose for each station should also be even more clear than what it currently is, both on the actual station and also with supporting structures around it. These two concept images comes to mind:
Outposts are better off in terms of variation, but the number or building blocks the large stations are made of are to low to make them stand out. Right now these consist of the docking cylinder, large ring, smaller ring, "cargo units", heat vents, "solar panels" and that is pretty much it unless I missed something. When it comes to the Coriolis station I still hoping to see these at some point to mix things up a bit:
Wouldn't it be possible to crowd source this and let all the modders out there loose on these? Why not create a template file, give out the "design bible" for the different factions and see what people out there can come up with? Then have us players vote on what we like to see put into the game and you can then select your top choices every month or so and put them into the asset library the stations are generated from to increase variation. Only if they meet your standards of course and under the clear understanding that the creators later can lay no claim on the assets and demand payment. If you want this could involve prices (real or digital) for the winning contributors, but that's up to you.
Same thing could possibly be done to the interior slots that are populated by prefabs. Let modders create more for the game to choose from. This might be a bigger issue though due to future plans when it comes to being able to move around these stations so it might be wiser to hold this off until later. I DO think there is a very simply way of making these rather "samey" interiors feel a little bit more varied with very little work. Simply create a "empty" prefab for the different slotsizes where nothing has been built and use that to mix up the interiors a bit more. Presumably these interiors aren't built in on go...rather a station would slowly fill out all the slots over time as the population and traffic increased to the system. Visiting a large station close to the frontier would therefore mean that many of the slots haven't been populated yet and based on population numbers they are filled out more and more. I always loved the ambience of this image due to the emptiness of the station and that the entire station was basically just a "empty" floor.
Seeing things like this out close to the frontier would be great! You can also look at that image and imagine that only some of those slots are populated by the prefab buildings you already have in the game. Preferably placed in clusters like "mini cities".
But let's get back to crowdsourcing assets shall we?
Later when you start to open up planets modders could help in the same way when it comes to creating (morphable) parts for plants/vegetation, body parts for aliens
(presumably you are going to do something similar to what can be seen in Spore and No Man's Sky), buildings, ancient ruins, rocks, landmarks...basically everything.
So...what do you think? Any chance this might happen?
