The dynamic universe and background simulation leaves something to be desired
- Thread starter Johnny Spaceboots
- Start date
Well,
It's funny how everybody said in the beginning that there were lots of things to do in Elite.
It looks nice though untill you realise it is one big grind.
I wonder why people are exited about planetside landings and walking in their spaceships if at the moment:
Missions don't make sense
Multiplayer / grouping doesn't work properly
This so called background simulation is bugged or just isn't fleshed out or doesn't exist (whatever excuse they come up with).
The story is utterly bad written and most of the time it is just utter nonsense.
The balance between professions/careers is totally wrong
A mining laser is worth more then 5 whole spaceships.
If you get into a nice PVP situation (after 2560 trade runs/ 5600 kills of worthless NPC's / 4500 spheres tagged) where you have a real fight to test eachother skills people can escape and evaporate without consequence.
Expansion of uninhabited worlds is not possible
We have 3 meaningless factions that use the same 3 buildings in 2000 star systems
etc...
What do some people expect if they can land on the Earth? In a few years time they only managed to build 15 ships/ 1 sphere with different colours / a few rocks / a cannister / some rings around planets and 3 basic space stations.
Instead of hiring extra people to work on those expansions they should first of all try to make a decent game and not a meaningless space trucking sim with some pew pew injected.
You know why they give so little explenation?
Because nothing makes sense in this game and most of the times there just isn't nothing to explain. The immersion factor is 0 once you look through the nice GFX and sounds.
I feel sorry for the people who try to do 2000 runs from A to B because in the end they will find out that it doesn't matter.
Elite response will be: Hey we encountered a bug. We will fix it asap.
Some guy at the office changes number X to Y and System A will become known as system B. (small exageration ... i know, ahum... yes i know)
Another guy writes a short story about the change in System A... blablabla.
Well that is bloody fantastic. My orange dot changed into a blue dot.
I am a happy camper now
with 60.000.000 galactic credits on my acount.
I am a happy camper now
with 90.000.000 galactic credits on my acount.
I am a happy camper now
with 100.000.000 galactic credits on my acount.
I am a happy camper now
with 1.000.000.000 galactic credits on my acount.
Sing along...
It's funny how everybody said in the beginning that there were lots of things to do in Elite.
It looks nice though untill you realise it is one big grind.
I wonder why people are exited about planetside landings and walking in their spaceships if at the moment:
Missions don't make sense
Multiplayer / grouping doesn't work properly
This so called background simulation is bugged or just isn't fleshed out or doesn't exist (whatever excuse they come up with).
The story is utterly bad written and most of the time it is just utter nonsense.
The balance between professions/careers is totally wrong
A mining laser is worth more then 5 whole spaceships.
If you get into a nice PVP situation (after 2560 trade runs/ 5600 kills of worthless NPC's / 4500 spheres tagged) where you have a real fight to test eachother skills people can escape and evaporate without consequence.
Expansion of uninhabited worlds is not possible
We have 3 meaningless factions that use the same 3 buildings in 2000 star systems
etc...
What do some people expect if they can land on the Earth? In a few years time they only managed to build 15 ships/ 1 sphere with different colours / a few rocks / a cannister / some rings around planets and 3 basic space stations.
Instead of hiring extra people to work on those expansions they should first of all try to make a decent game and not a meaningless space trucking sim with some pew pew injected.
You know why they give so little explenation?
Because nothing makes sense in this game and most of the times there just isn't nothing to explain. The immersion factor is 0 once you look through the nice GFX and sounds.
I feel sorry for the people who try to do 2000 runs from A to B because in the end they will find out that it doesn't matter.
Elite response will be: Hey we encountered a bug. We will fix it asap.
Some guy at the office changes number X to Y and System A will become known as system B. (small exageration ... i know, ahum... yes i know)
Another guy writes a short story about the change in System A... blablabla.
Well that is bloody fantastic. My orange dot changed into a blue dot.
I am a happy camper now
with 60.000.000 galactic credits on my acount.
I am a happy camper now
with 90.000.000 galactic credits on my acount.
I am a happy camper now
with 100.000.000 galactic credits on my acount.
I am a happy camper now
with 1.000.000.000 galactic credits on my acount.
Sing along...
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Thanks. The question is whether Frontier is setting out to build Rome, if they're content building a Potemkin village which is what we're currently stuck at.
I think they are curently building a black hole sun for all galactic lovers.
In my eyes, indisposed
In disguises no one knows
Hides the face, lies the snake
The sun in my disgrace
Boiling heat, summer stench
'Neath the black the sky looks dead
Call my name through the cream
And I'll hear you scream again
Black hole sun
Won't you come
And wash away the rain
Black hole sun
Won't you come
Won't you come (Won't you come)
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Ozrix
Banned
I don't feel like I'm stuck with anything. See? Opinions.
It's not relevant what your opinion is. You can be content with what you have, but that doesn't change the facts of what we have. This thread is about what we've observed regarding the nature of persistence, cause and effect, results of player actions etc as supported by the background sim. You say that Rome wasn't built in a day, sure. But is that what they're building, or intend to build?
Super. As David Hannum stated, "There's a sucker born every minute." Some people are happy with lipstick on a pig, and that is indeed their opinion. Doesn't mean the opinion is not ludicrous on it's face, but yes indeed, those people are indeed entitled to their opinions. Especially when they're say that they like or don't like something.
ollobrains
Banned
slowly implementing features and changes by the looks. Wonder what theyl throw in next week
Ozrix
Banned
Dude, come on. I get the feeling that you use imagination only where it suits you. Yes, they want to make it the best game they can, as they are the same space sim fetishists as you and me.
Ozrix
Banned
Does my opinion imply that I feel the game is finished? Why the hell are you even playing now? Come back in four years, where the game might be at least 1/3 up your standards, and save everyone the headaches of being pulled into a conversation with you.
I might have missed some gal net news articles.
As I stated (far) above, it seemed to me that the farmers union (onion mafia) was winning the war against the federation, then gal net announced the federation bombing the planet and winning.
Now the war is over and the farmers union influence is higher than ever. Did their influence go up even though they lost the war? I would have thought their influence would be reduced and the system would now be under federation control,
As I stated (far) above, it seemed to me that the farmers union (onion mafia) was winning the war against the federation, then gal net announced the federation bombing the planet and winning.
Now the war is over and the farmers union influence is higher than ever. Did their influence go up even though they lost the war? I would have thought their influence would be reduced and the system would now be under federation control,
This is an interesting thread. I've not been playing long so my experience is limited, but it is beginning to feel like what we have now is just the basic framework upon which future development will be built: FD seem to imply such in their announcements.
Maybe though the game should have been fleshed out more before being released. Right now the big selling point seems to be the vastness and detail in the galaxy they've built, rather than features of actual gameplay.
Having said that, there's still a lot to do and enjoy as I pootle through the galaxy and hopefully there will be enough new and existing stuff to keep it interesting.
Maybe though the game should have been fleshed out more before being released. Right now the big selling point seems to be the vastness and detail in the galaxy they've built, rather than features of actual gameplay.
Having said that, there's still a lot to do and enjoy as I pootle through the galaxy and hopefully there will be enough new and existing stuff to keep it interesting.
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I think its doable. The main extra thing the central servers have to provide is continuity of NPC state between thier appearance in player instances and supercruise. Sure there would be some extra client->server updates to to inform the server of when a persistent NPC is damaged or destroyed but I dont think it would be huge. And then some simple "meta AI" needs to be run to decide what an NPC does between player interactions but this would be very high level and abstract e.g. "jump to system x" and when he gets there "head for station y sell cargo"/"go to extraction point and mine"/"interdict any trader I see" etc.
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That's interesting.
I may miss a few points but from this I assume two things:
- there's some kind of background simulation but it's working independently and has no relations to the manually injected events and their effects
- the "game master injection" mechanism has this controlled manually by FD.
I feel hopeful for the first alternative but less cheerful for the second. Manual game mastering renders the whole gameplay to a sort of scripted events while dismisses the individual freedom. So that would be a sandbox where one can only build what the parents allow.
ollobrains
Banned
i think they are slwoly automating parts for well a lot of the fringe and non core areas, but using the inner wrolds as a testbed to finetune and then implement more automtic funtion
Exactly ... they have nothing to do with each other.
They are just there to fake that there is something really going on in the game world but isn't actually happening.
Interestingly enough there are still a lot of people here in the forum who believe that there is a 'background simulation' active which links everything together and creates a coherent world.
You mean like in those little electric toy rockets your kid sits in and you toss a coin into to entertain him/her for 2 minutes?
If when you put your money in, the manufacturers of the rocket came along and bounced it up and down for 2 minutes, then yes.
This is a fantastic thread, and the OP hits the nail on the head with what's wrong with this game.
I too, way back at the Beta stages, thought we were just seeing a vertical slice of the real game - that the Betas were basically Frankengames made up of little bits of features that FDEV wanted tested at the time.
I was surprised and dismayed at the Release on 16th December 2014, when it turned out that yes - what I saw before then is basically what we got on that date.
Anyway, reading through this thread and it triggered an idea.
One of the limiting factors seems to be because ED is based not on a Central Giant Server creating the universe, content, and running everything, but on P2P connections with a smaller server or server farm supposedly running a background simulation.
Would it not be a good idea to turn the 'weakness' of P2P into an advantage?
Think about it - you have thousands of ED game clients running at any one time, more or less on a P2P network. Why not utilise these clients as a distributed computer system? You could basically turn every game client into a node that computes the universe simulation, and indeed, you could in theory create persistent AI/NPC characters via this method.
Sounds like a daunting task, and I've no doubt it would be, but for example, say you wanted a persistent NPC called 'Dread Pirate Roberts' - you'd utilise this theoretical distributed computing system to compute his character's progress. So you'd allocate say 100 or so ED game clients to this task. Any client that drops off (e.g. player has finished for the day and logs off, or just becomes disconnected for whatever reason), and the work unit assigned to them would get reassigned to some other game client. After all work units have been computed, the result is used to update this character's overall status. Any single event, for example, he interdicted a player ship to pirate it, could be updated by a single node (e.g. the node of the player being interdicted), and the result of the event could be fed back to the distributed computation.
You could use this technique for the wider universe as well.
I have no idea how many players are online in ED at any given time, but I'm pretty sure there are enough in any one 24-hour period to be able to produce a pretty powerful distributed computational system, continuously.
Just an idea - I don't know how practical this would be - it certainly seems to work for other distributed computing tasks, and has been for years. Who knows, perhaps this is something that FDEV could be doing groundbreaking work on.
I too, way back at the Beta stages, thought we were just seeing a vertical slice of the real game - that the Betas were basically Frankengames made up of little bits of features that FDEV wanted tested at the time.
I was surprised and dismayed at the Release on 16th December 2014, when it turned out that yes - what I saw before then is basically what we got on that date.
Anyway, reading through this thread and it triggered an idea.
One of the limiting factors seems to be because ED is based not on a Central Giant Server creating the universe, content, and running everything, but on P2P connections with a smaller server or server farm supposedly running a background simulation.
Would it not be a good idea to turn the 'weakness' of P2P into an advantage?
Think about it - you have thousands of ED game clients running at any one time, more or less on a P2P network. Why not utilise these clients as a distributed computer system? You could basically turn every game client into a node that computes the universe simulation, and indeed, you could in theory create persistent AI/NPC characters via this method.
Sounds like a daunting task, and I've no doubt it would be, but for example, say you wanted a persistent NPC called 'Dread Pirate Roberts' - you'd utilise this theoretical distributed computing system to compute his character's progress. So you'd allocate say 100 or so ED game clients to this task. Any client that drops off (e.g. player has finished for the day and logs off, or just becomes disconnected for whatever reason), and the work unit assigned to them would get reassigned to some other game client. After all work units have been computed, the result is used to update this character's overall status. Any single event, for example, he interdicted a player ship to pirate it, could be updated by a single node (e.g. the node of the player being interdicted), and the result of the event could be fed back to the distributed computation.
You could use this technique for the wider universe as well.
I have no idea how many players are online in ED at any given time, but I'm pretty sure there are enough in any one 24-hour period to be able to produce a pretty powerful distributed computational system, continuously.
Just an idea - I don't know how practical this would be - it certainly seems to work for other distributed computing tasks, and has been for years. Who knows, perhaps this is something that FDEV could be doing groundbreaking work on.