General [Suggestion] Ability to walk inside ships

[IcewindZG]

I can see where some of the technical issues with this are valid. Having movement in a moving craft could be a massive technical challenge.

But I imagine, if you could walk through your ship when it's docked, or landed or whatever, that you could get a feel of it being a real ship that you're flying through space rather than a cockpit drawn around your head as you hurtle through space.

 

[Misty_Dark]

I am not in any way a game developer and this is just my personal view, but...

There have been well documented performance issues with on-foot settlements. These are single, stationary structures usually comprised of several small buildings, a few NPCs and the odd visiting NPC or player ship.

Now imagine several different potentially customisable mini(-ish) on-foot settlements in the same instance. Which can come and go from the instance instantaneously. And they're moving in 3 dimensions. Controlled by players. And destroyable. And all having up to 4 individual commanders inside. Then there's also NPC traffic in the instance too. And put all that on a P2P platform.

Interiors when landed? Maybe.
Interiors of crashed ships at POIs? Yes plz.
Live interiors in space? Pretty unlikely in the game's current form IMO.

Do not forget about the other clue why this could be problematic, Ship Launched Fighters, as these are also known to cause performance/connection issues when there are several players using SLF in the same instance.

so moving around when flying is likely one of the biggest issue they have with ship interiors.

 

[Ski'Thor]

So moving on moving objects is a challange?
We are moving in stations already... they are moving "slow" sure, but should be possible.
And even if not, just start with "You have to be docked to do this" or "you have to throttle down to zero to do this" like the VSS...
Can't be THIS hard.

 

[HRDiagram]

So moving on moving objects is a challange?
We are moving in stations already... they are moving "slow" sure, but should be possible.
And even if not, just start with "You have to be docked to do this" or "you have to throttle down to zero to do this" like the VSS...
Can't be THIS hard.

I think that, if it happens, it will be like this, indeed.
That's the reason why FCs are going to get interiors, after all, and everyone will need to be strapped on a chair during the jump.

Now I will repeat myself:

I WANT FULL ATMOSPHERIC INTERIORS!

 

[zikolach]

So moving on moving objects is a challenge?
We are moving in stations already... they are moving "slow" sure, but should be possible.

I would like to hear how Fronteer developers (not community managers) would explain the difference and challenges. That would be epic interview to watch.

From my perspective there might be different instances - inside and outside of the station (switching at the moment when rotational correction start to work), so the concourse itself could be "static", but rather ships are getting some additional velocity when rotational correction is off.

Do not forget about the other clue why this could be problematic, Ship Launched Fighters, as these are also known to cause performance/connection issues when there are several players using SLF in the same instance.

Yes, unfortunately that's true. Sometimes even NPC ships start to jump from one point to another, due to synchronization issues between clients. Probably limitation of p2p networking model. But that should be totally unrelated to stationary ships interiors.

 

[Gordon Freeman IV]

Yes I would love ship interiors.

 

[Morbad]

If there's a technical reason, explain it!

I'm fairly confident that FDev doesn't have any workable interior layouts for the bulk of their ships. Many of them are not scaled properly. Many ships have had so many module slot upgrades that any vaguely consistent volumetric requirements would leave smaller ships as tesseracts that need to be bigger on the inside than the outside. If the transition between interior and exterior is to be seamless, then everything has to actually fit, and the layout has to be navigable.

Originally, it was clear they were trying to account for this stuff, but they've made so many unforeseen and apparently ill-conceived modifications over the years (starting with the need to extend the length of landing gear to account for the SRV on some ships, and rapidly ballooning from there) that the current state is a mess that is going to take a lot of work to resolve. I don't know that they can pull it off, certainly not in short order.

Performance is also a major concern, both from a rendering and networking perspective.

If there's a gameplay issue, share it!

I think the gameplay potential is significant and largely self-evident, but I'm not convinced Frontier wouldn't screw that up either. EDO settlements and structures are completely static except for a small handful of highly specific interactive elements. This is not at all what I had hoped for and a ship with the same level of interactivity would be little more than cosmetic cubbyhole or at best a new shooter level.

 

[Ski'Thor]

Maybe it would make sense to use a artificial gravity source.

I mean, this is also used on any Star Trek Federation Ship (to explain why no one is floating ^^)
So in my truly simplified thinking:
The ship should have it's own gravity well.

But thinking about that made me curious...
You can jump on a planet
You can jump in and on a planet based Odyssey Settlement
You can jump on a planet based guardian structure
You can NOT jump in a Station, which isn't one of the above

In my opinion, there are a lot of gravity wells in the game (every planet, every body, every starport etc...) you have masslock everywhere, but I'm not sure, if those masslocks are really calculated depending on the given gravity of the object or just the distance to the standardized object (small star ports, coriolis, orbis, fleet carrier, megaship, asteroid belts...)

Gravity is calculated for the star systems. But is it a permanent calculation every time you enter a system? Or is it just a one time calculation for the orbits or the trajectories of the bodies in the system?

It might be an idea to overcome the problem of moving objects and moving/jumping on top or in this objects.
I once tried if it is possible to stay ON a ship while the ship is moving.
I did it with a fighter (not out of purpose, it was more a fun thing). I was flying the figher, my wife was standing on my windshield.

Did I moved? Yes
Did she moved? Yes
Did she moved together with my ship? Yes
Did she fell off the ship? Yes

So basically it is possible to move on a moving ship, in this particular case the online based positioning system might be the bottleneck (obvoiusly there is a lag between my game client and her game client, going over the server infrastructure and so on...).
But if the ship is calculated on your client, and you charakter is calculated on your client... I think it is possible and "moving on moving objects is not possible" is a myth! Where are the mythbusters?

 

[Gordon Freeman IV]

I am not in any way a game developer and this is just my personal view, but...

There have been well documented performance issues with on-foot settlements. These are single, stationary structures usually comprised of several small buildings, a few NPCs and the odd visiting NPC or player ship.

Now imagine several different potentially customisable mini(-ish) on-foot settlements in the same instance. Which can come and go from the instance instantaneously. And they're moving in 3 dimensions. Controlled by players. And destroyable. And all having up to 4 individual commanders inside. Then there's also NPC traffic in the instance too. And put all that on a P2P platform.

Interiors when landed? Maybe.
Interiors of crashed ships at POIs? Yes plz.
Live interiors in space? Pretty unlikely in the game's current form IMO.

I say in space interiors when stationary only (0 m/s pitch,yaw, roll) that way the physics engine wouldnt break either.

 

[zikolach]

I say in space interiors when stationary only (0 m/s pitch,yaw, roll) that way the physics engine wouldnt break either.

The only exception I can think of is that even being stationary (in space or above the ground) your ship position is still dynamically updated, e.g. when your ship is under fire or rammed by other commander. While stations/FC/etc remain static under fire or being collided with other objects (like ships).

 

[Gordon Freeman IV]

Yeah but landing only interior wouold make EVA impossible