The Planetary landing and planetside missions discussion Thread

[Stormprooter]

Nevermind landing, I want to fly through cities with massive skyscrapers and 'buzz' the residents & office workers there, I want to fly through canyons like in Firefox and Independence Day, I want to blow stuff up as well, I want missions where I have to destroy some installation on a planet's surface
I want to circumnavigate a moon at really low altitude, even have battles at low altitude as well.
I really hope we get to have atmospheric/low altitude flight, and not a space to landing pad cutscene or on-rails experience.

 

[soma]

When I die I simply imagine that a clone of my pilot is activated in the last space station I visited and takes over my identity. I find this easier to swallow than the whole "escape pod travels thousands of LY back to the station" thing. If an escape pod had such an amazing range why would people use an Asp for exploring?

 

[Mephane]

You don't need a gun you just don't need a red shirt.

Rather you don't need a gun if you have enough red shirts, but if you are a red shirt, no amount of gun is going to help you.

 

[Slippery Jim DiGriz]

If there are planetary landing stock up on the H.E. Suits otherwise............



1 hour after returning from a planetary landing:

"You have a slight fever and have broken out in glowing blue spots."

An hour later:

"Your left leg has fallen off. And exploded - Your right leg is not responding and you are losing a lot of blood."

"You are dead."

"Game Over - Insert coin."

 

[bitrogue]

I want to combine ED with my other gaming profession and track down ancient civilizations and raid their tombs.

 

[SteveLaw]

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That's exactly how procedural generation works and is the key to the scale of the galaxy (and a lot of other things) that ED models. Of course once the algorithm is run to generate a planet you are approaching it can be held in memory for a period of time or dependant on your distance or whether you are in that star system (you wouldn't need a planet fully rendered if say 200,000ls or 20LY away for example).

I would fully expect it that for some things like grass, clouds, etc. but not for planets, cities, etc.. But I stand corrected thank you. (There must be some fixed elements, though, such as seed, that are saved for each system/planet other wise I could go to a system you previously visited and find a completely different configuration or types of planet.)

 

[Tryst]

It should but the way I imagine it would work is that once the content is generated it is saved as fixed. I can't imagine every systems or planet is generated on the fly each time it's visited.

Do you realise how much disk space that would take up if each planet visited had to be saved to disk? No, it would have to be created on the fly.

It does cost money to make games you know ... :rolleyes
Your commenting on something you know nothing about yet.

Admitted that I don't know about planetary landings yet but, as a programmer and PC engineer, I do have some idea of the amount of work involved in having an entire planet to move around on. I also realise the amount of data it would require to do it and, as I have said above, it would have to be generated on the fly each time. This is why I have speculated that you will be confined to the starport or at the very most, only a small area of the planet.

And it doesn't matter how great your algorithm is, you cannot procedurally generate an EXACT copy every time. There will be differences, some significant unless a considerable amount of data is stored for each planet. We have 400 Billion different systems, it's easy to do this on a small scale using exact copy procedural generation with suns and planets but for an entire planet, trees, flora, fauna, coastlines and so on. How many billions of trees can you get on one planet? How much coastline is there? A small bay that was there last week is now suddenly gone because the seed to generate it exactly the same couldn't be stored. How many planets are there we could potentially land on? FD would have to fill their entire offices with disks just to store a fraction of it.

Look at how much data is required to generate the map for Skyrim exactly every time, the textures alone take up 2.6Gb. You can run at a jogging pace from Markarth to Riften in about an hour at most so it's about 10 miles or so. The earth is 24,901 miles in circumference... You really want to go down that path?
Outerra Anteworld has done it for one planet 606Mb on disk currently and that's just for the basic land masses, grass and trees, no rivers or lakes, no roads or cities etc so you could probably easily double that and then some with the extra data to generate the other bits and extra textures etc. That now 1.2Gb and how many core systems alone have planets we could land on? Even if we call it 2,000 (I know there's more than that), that's still over 2Tb of data just for the core systems. The ONLY way it can possibly be done is by duplicating them so, at some point, you are going to see at least two planets that are identical in every way.

Edit: Also Outerra Anteworld doesn't generate it EXACTLY every time.

 

[SteveLaw]

Do you realise how much disk space that would take up if each planet visited had to be saved to disk? No, it would have to be created on the fly.

I don't expect the whole textured planet to be saved, no of course not, but I would expect some data to be saved for each system/planet to ensure persistence. I probably just over-simplified my comment.

 

[SteveLaw]

"Game Over - Insert coin."

Won't be the first time.

Spoiler

 

[Crank Larson]

Yes, it is likely to be a full price expansion, and I won't be able to get my money to them fast enough. It was always intended (from early Kickstarter) that expansions would be paid for, and additional content of planetary landings is certainly worth full price. Oh, I've just remembered Kickstarter get the expansions anyway... I'll have to buy some skins instead...

 

[(-o-)]

I'd like to walk around with no guns, can't we appreciate the planet and lifeforms, why do we have to always kill everything?

I don't mind us getting out of our ships and walking around meeting people etc, but must we have guns all the time?

Live and let live

compromise: you do the talking.. and then i come in and blast them into smaller pieces - win-win

 

[Skizomeuh]

I don't expect the whole textured planet to be saved, no of course not, but I would expect some data to be saved for each system/planet to ensure persistence. I probably just over-simplified my comment.

That's the case: all seems about overrideable seed. Seeds makes default generation persistence, overrides take care of "hand made" adjustments (names, tweaks, players influence...) over starting rules at low database space cost.

 

[VR Mr Teatime]

Trying not to teach to suck eggs, but have a look at this video (also worth watching the whole thing) from 2013 (repeat 2013 ) - pay attention especially to the part where the planet gets "built up" on screen:
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[video]https://youtu.be/GEVutbSqBI0?t=7m10s[/video]
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As for memory requirements on disk, SpaceEngine does in essence the whole universe for about a 1Gb download using the same techniques, which makes ED's galaxy infinitesimally small in comparison:
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[video]https://youtu.be/rswRCT3097g[/video]
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Of course both of those "tech demonstrators" for want of a better expression in the videos don't make a whole game, but given time and money (and the vision and will) I fully expect FDev to achieve what they have set out to do. The Cobra engine from what I have seen and made educated guesses about, has all the foundations in it to do seamless planetary landings and first person and that's the core of whether these expansions will be possible, as opposed to say CryEngine, which starts to choke over an area of roughly 32x32KM due to some fundamental limitations at its core.

 

[bossbrigand]

I'd like to walk around with no guns, can't we appreciate the planet and lifeforms, why do we have to always kill everything?

I don't mind us getting out of our ships and walking around meeting people etc, but must we have guns all the time?

Live and let live

Speak for yourself - I want to meet strange and exotic lifeforms to sell by the ton.

Also, it'd be fun to chase bounties on foot into the depths of a space station, or through a crowded city street, and so on. FPS combat will add a lot to the game.

 

[amigacooke]

I can't help feeling that if FD are so cagey about PowerPlay our chances of getting information about planetary landings is zero.

 

[Adept]

I hope planetside will be more exploration, and very little FPS.

 

[Crank Larson]

There isn't sound in space, either. And the "hand-wavium" explanation for that is pretty loose.

Actually, I thought the explanation for that worked pretty well. I didn't actually know the explanation until I watched the Twitch feed last night... But the ship generates all the noises as it was found this was psychologically better for pilots. It's a very simple explanation, and fits perfectly in my view.

 

[thehairymob]

If you die in the future what will happen is your conciousness will be download into another body. That is unless you are a human, hehehe

It's good to be a droid

 

[Rowander]

I hope planetside will be more exploration, and very little FPS.

Let's all hope that or this is going to turn into Call of Duty: Elite. No way

 

[Zplintz]

You leave your ship in a suit with a giant remlock in a backpack that acts like an escape pod and transports you back to your ship or if your ship is gone, back to the last station you docked at.