The dynamic universe and background simulation leaves something to be desired

ollobrains

Banned
O
i think the flashy is 60% their focus and the nuts and bolts is 40%, and thats just the way it is, my guess is expansion of the bare bones implementation over time, they are slowly enhancing all the game, should speed up once they hire some more devs

All we can do is persist with our questions, perhaps play in fringe systems so they see more ppl doing it and start to look at the colony expansion side of things.
 

Johnny Spaceboots

Johnny Spaceboots
ollobrains said:
i think the flashy is 60% their focus and the nuts and bolts is 40%, and thats just the way it is, my guess is expansion of the bare bones implementation over time, they are slowly enhancing all the game, should speed up once they hire some more devs

All we can do is persist with our questions, perhaps play in fringe systems so they see more ppl doing it and start to look at the colony expansion side of things.
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I suppose, although if they are really putting flash before substance to such a degree, I would be somewhat worried about how quickly they can iterate on what we have to a significant enough degree to keep us occupied. I'm already finding it a drain doing anything in the game when I know my actions have no effect, not even a month out.
 

ollobrains

Banned
O
Johnny Spaceboots said:
I suppose, although if they are really putting flash before substance to such a degree, I would be somewhat worried about how quickly they can iterate on what we have to a significant enough degree to keep us occupied. I'm already finding it a drain doing anything in the game when I know my actions have no effect, not even a month out.
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yes i am in the process of moving from mikunn down to lugh to partake in the only player run experiemtn of the background simulator that appears to be having any effect at all. We shall see wha the devs do after that has run its course
 

Moriarte

Moriarte
Yep, "dynamic universe" surprised the hell out of me too, back in the day, when i realised how all of this works. Where they are today is the result of the development direction, not a temporary placeholder, like some of you are hoping here. Do you really think that suddenly, out of the blue, USS concept will be gone and all individual ships will be tied to respective factions and start revolving around their specific tasks, driving individual system economies up and down, left and right? That's not what they wanted. Background simulation does the job of keeping things in check, while you shoot your imaginary NPCs, generated and destroyed on the fly. That's the way they wanted it. At least the DDA says they did. Who wants a random Joe leave his footprint by temporarily destabilising a system in his python with a buddy in anaconda? What we want is - do 7000 missions to change the name on top of the station. And who wouldn't want that?
 

Ted Striker

Ted Striker
Johnny Spaceboots said:
I suppose, although if they are really putting flash before substance to such a degree, I would be somewhat worried about how quickly they can iterate on what we have to a significant enough degree to keep us occupied. I'm already finding it a drain doing anything in the game when I know my actions have no effect, not even a month out.
Click to expand...

I felt the same and haven't played for three days now. The game takes the term "sandbox" to the extreme right now. Zombo.com is a "sandbox" website the way ED's dynamic universe is right now. I mean even if you do manage to get one faction in a system to take control from another, what's the point unless it's a major faction change? Who cares if the Almudji Liberals took control from the Revolutionary Almudji Values Party? It has absolutely no effect so why bother?

Man if they can add even a fraction of Crusader Kings 2's faction AI and system I'd be thrilled. The nuts and bolts are there: lots of commodities, more factions than you can count, alliances with the three major factions, faction events like boom, lockdown, civil war, various faction NPC ships, etc. They just have to make a game of it all. Right now everything is based on pure imagination. If you helped the Almudji Liberals take over a station you can say "yay I helped the Almudji Liberals take over a station!" and that's the extent of it. That's about as fun as playing D&D with a group of people who just make stuff up as they go instead of working within a clearly defined ruleset.
 
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fergal

fergal
Seems a very long time ago that I wrote what was quoted from me in the OP.
Those bugs still exist, tickets for them have been removed though, several times.

I agree with what the OP is saying. Its hard to not be negative when discussing things like this.

When anything like this was brought up the generic answer you would get from some people was "its only beta. We aren't seeing the latest build just a vertical slice of what they want tested"

Then gamma started, and the generic defense was "its only gamma. There are big surprises planned for release. We are only seeing a vertical slice of the games features"

Then the game is released on 16/12/14, I think I had to patch for 30 seconds to update to the release build. Looked exactly the same as gamma. Not even a new ship. You daily galnet news now, galnet didn't update very often before release. Only real new thing is you could gain rank with the federation and empire. Search for that to see how well thats been implemented.

Now if anything like this is brought up you get told "what other MMO had all its features in at release. Look at how long Eve took to get where it is"

The smoke and mirrors of the background simulation need major work, but so does just about everything.
Trading, mining, bounty hunting and piracy are the 4 main activities, I'd say trading is in the best place, not sure how many people don't think there is major room for improvement for all of them. I forgot to mention exploring, many posts about people being unhappy with that too, and there seems to be some scanners missing.
 

CmdrSimonsen

C
fergal said:
Now if anything like this is brought up you get told "what other MMO had all its features in at release. Look at how long Eve took to get where it is"
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To me that's still a very valid point :)

My take on it is that it's very easy to collect a million great ideas, it's quite another story to select 15 of them and implement them within a certain time & money frame.
 

JeffRyan

JeffRyan
fergal said:
When anything like this was brought up the generic answer you would get from some people was "its only beta. We aren't seeing the latest build just a vertical slice of what they want tested"

Then gamma started, and the generic defense was "its only gamma. There are big surprises planned for release. We are only seeing a vertical slice of the games features"
Click to expand...


As one of those 'It's only beta' people I apologise. I did however realise as we entered gamma that 'That was It', I knew at that point with release looming in 3 weeks that there was no 'Magic Build'. I think 'It's only Beta' was fair enough because we had no idea how things would be rolled out. But the people who kept the blinkers on during gamma were being a bit optimistic.
 

fergal

fergal
JeffRyan said:
As one of those 'It's only beta' people I apologise. I did however realise as we entered gamma that 'That was It', I knew at that point with release looming in 3 weeks that there was no 'Magic Build'. I think 'It's only Beta' was fair enough because we had no idea how things would be rolled out. But the people who kept the blinkers on during gamma were being a bit optimistic.
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I thought "its only beta" was a perfectly acceptable answer at the time too.
The main thing people kept bringing up was, as you say, release is in X number of weeks, you can't release the game like this.

I had the unpopular idea of having the devs give everyone money so they don't need to grind again to be able to test the python and orca, particularly the orca and its passenger missions. I thought very few people could earn enough money before release to find most of the passenger bugs.
 

Johnny Spaceboots

Johnny Spaceboots
fergal said:
I thought "its only beta" was a perfectly acceptable answer at the time too.
The main thing people kept bringing up was, as you say, release is in X number of weeks, you can't release the game like this.

I had the unpopular idea of having the devs give everyone money so they don't need to grind again to be able to test the python and orca, particularly the orca and its passenger missions. I thought very few people could earn enough money before release to find most of the passenger bugs.
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I was one of the people cautiously optimistic about it only being a beta as well. It didn't help that FD kept talking about how release was when they were going to "turn on the living universe." ...So I guess I was expecting significant iteration on one of the main selling points of the game.

Unfortunately, the "living universe," or whatever they referred to it as, was mostly just more frequent galnet news updates and injected events. It wasn't really them deepening the simulation, but just arbitrarily injecting events that players couldn't really influence in a meaningful way.
 

Herik

Herik
bassman said:
A massive +1 to everything you said.

I honestly despair when I read posts by people clamouring for fluff content such as FPS aspects and planetary landing when there is still so much work to be done in ED to get its core game simulation up to something approaching modern standards.
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Don't despair bassman; different strokes for different folks, and FD can do more than one thing at the same time.
 

medwyn

M
A bump here may be useful - just to keep this topic in the back of the eye as it touches a fundamental aspect of ED.
Like an orange exclamation mark above the head of the quest NPCs in MMOs :)
 

PIXEL

PIXEL
Great post Op (Johny Spaceboots) so glad to find it...
Yup it seems not to matter whether one is delivering tea or weapons, doing missions, mining?/ what's the point? - It all seems to be about amassing 'big creds' to buy the latest 'Nike' ship with shiny streetz shooters:cool:

Early days I guess... but I hope FD put some comprehensible narrative and player driven story in the game soon... oh and yes PLEASE make the NPC's do something that makes sense - love the fact that some of you guys have actually followed them on their meaningless journey _ lol_ I'm gonna try that out for sure:D
 

Brakespear

Brakespear
I don't know if anyone else has commented on this so far, but here are my findings regarding NPC spawning in "real space" (non-supercruise):

At belts or rings, even in very, very remote systems (the Pleiades Nebula is absolutely writhing with activity) NPCs will start spawning at your location, regardless of that system's supercruise traffic (or lack thereof). Sometimes it will be police, and they will do their routine scan ritual. Most of the time it will be pirates, who will scan you and, if you have no cargo, hang around for ages, repeatedly scanning you as if they have no short term memory.

Eventually, the pirates will leave, and the spawn system will kick in again; once again, it can be police, pirates, or very rarely a psychotic NPC who will attack you on sight.

If you start flying in any direction, and just keep going at top speed, NPCs will keep spawning at the edge of your sensors. They will try to follow you, or leave, and spawn again. Over the course of 15 minutes, I witnessed literally every type of ship spawning on me in a remote system.


Additionally, miner NPCs appear to be broken. I witnessed two different mining teams (a lone Asp, and a Type 6 with two sidewinder escorts) do some pretend mining (no chunks of rock ever appeared, but the ships pretended to scoop them anyway)... and then all four ships flew away together, parked a few hundred meters from the rocks, and sat there.

For an hour.


I rather find myself looking back at X3, and remembering with great fondness the impressive scale and persistence of AI activity. Ships in that game would not only have objectives, they actually did complete them without pretending - watching a trader NPC dock at a station, you'd see the quantity of goods at that station take a big dip as the NPC bought a load of them. Similarly, your stations and assets could be attacked when you were in a completely different system. Freelancer had pretty good AI too, with ships whose pilots actually knew where they were going and where they'd come from, and could tell you.

Elite certainly has some growing to do.
 
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