Why wouldn't it be seamless? FE2/FFE could do it (and that game fit on a 1.44MB floppy disk), Pioneer could do it, No Man's Sky can apparently do it ... why not Elite Dangerous?
The Planetary landing and planetside missions discussion Thread
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It won't be seamless. We all know that it'll be like the transition into the asteroids because it has to load the instance. We know it in our hearts.
It would still be better than a loading screen or repetitive cut scene though :-D
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Some people forget that this is a Milky Way galaxy simulator, not a space simulator.
It has also escaped people's attention that planets are in space. It has also escaped people's attention that this was promised in the earliest stages of production-- if they backtrack on that now, they can expect a HUGE amount of demands for refunds, me being one of them. People forget that Frontier and First Encounters had planetary landings.
You lot of anti-planetary landings people are almost like this kind of faux-hardcore bunch of "concentrate on the 'game'", whatever the hell that means. Planetary landings are a proposed element; they are a mainstay of this franchise; it will open up enormous degrees of depth and intrigue to missions, and most importantly exploration.
It may have escaped your attention - oh ignorant and selfish ones - but other people like to explore, and methinks they would be rather excited to actually go down to all these planets and do detailed ocean/tundra scans.
Mining will also be presented with new gameplay mechanics.
This isn't a game made for just one group of people: that's why there are so many different ways to play it (not just yours oh selfish ones).
Just to end with a question: what exactly is the point simulating the entire galaxy? I mean, why bother with all those billions of stars when most of them are just background fluff? You can't really 'do' anything as you might put it in these systems where all you can do is scan.
Oh selfish ones, please drop this and realise you ARE being catered for; rather, accept that it isn't only you that play it.
It's at times like this that the insanely over-zealous moderators punish you for using 'meany' words.
It has also escaped people's attention that planets are in space. It has also escaped people's attention that this was promised in the earliest stages of production-- if they backtrack on that now, they can expect a HUGE amount of demands for refunds, me being one of them. People forget that Frontier and First Encounters had planetary landings.
You lot of anti-planetary landings people are almost like this kind of faux-hardcore bunch of "concentrate on the 'game'", whatever the hell that means. Planetary landings are a proposed element; they are a mainstay of this franchise; it will open up enormous degrees of depth and intrigue to missions, and most importantly exploration.
It may have escaped your attention - oh ignorant and selfish ones - but other people like to explore, and methinks they would be rather excited to actually go down to all these planets and do detailed ocean/tundra scans.
Mining will also be presented with new gameplay mechanics.
This isn't a game made for just one group of people: that's why there are so many different ways to play it (not just yours oh selfish ones).
Just to end with a question: what exactly is the point simulating the entire galaxy? I mean, why bother with all those billions of stars when most of them are just background fluff? You can't really 'do' anything as you might put it in these systems where all you can do is scan.
Oh selfish ones, please drop this and realise you ARE being catered for; rather, accept that it isn't only you that play it.
It's at times like this that the insanely over-zealous moderators punish you for using 'meany' words.
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None of those are multiplayer Alien.
* back on topic though....
- Take out npc/player vehicles on the surface or in atmosphere around a body.
- Transport goods from one base to another, local body, system and out of system.
- Bases to dock at that are not in space.
- Hunting for exotic meats.
- High resolution scans for flora, animal life and minerals.
Any kind of mission that already exists could transpose to planets.
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I know the numbers will have moved on, but the last number I saw for the cost of building E: D was £8M. The last revenue number I saw (which was later) was around £17M. So there is certainly some money sloshing around to fund more stuff. But, of course, they are a business, they want revenue. However, their actions seem a little strange given what they have said as a company. They have said that their revenue is above their 'high' plan numbers: largely due to maintaining a higher per-licence price than their plans assumed, IIRC. That would suggest that if anything chasing new sales is less important than they thought it was going to be. Yet they are clearly doing a money-grab: going to steam much earlier than anyone expected, and the XBox version is probably earlier than most of us expacted, too. So I am somewhat bemused, here.
I imagine the sequence to be something like this ...
1. Jump into the system
2. Supercruise to within orbit range of the planet, no different than supercruise to within range of a station
3. exit supercruise
4. fly seamlessly down to a planet's surface.
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The older Elites were not multiplayer, and there was much less data to load. Your point about NMS is spot on though, when I watched the trailer I saw some kind of small loading time when entering the atmosphere, the screen would turn redish and you could see the ground, aliens etc appear. But I doubt the whole planet is loaded at once. Will it be multiplayer though ?
They should set up a test planet for planetary landings. Like Earth or Mars. And use that as a "Beta planet" for testing. And also start with landing on bases, and then continue to land out in the wild where ever you want. Then being able to walk out and explore.
I also suggest a SC approach in the start then being able to go through the atmosphere and feel those effect on the ship.
With SC approach I mean exactly how its done with orbital bases. You disconnect SC at a certain altitude and fly in for landing.
And you say what if I want to fly around the planet and explore. Well, I guess Frontier will have to find out if this is doable in the start.
You can also setup landing as a video or a script. Easy but not quite Elite I guess
I also suggest a SC approach in the start then being able to go through the atmosphere and feel those effect on the ship.
With SC approach I mean exactly how its done with orbital bases. You disconnect SC at a certain altitude and fly in for landing.
And you say what if I want to fly around the planet and explore. Well, I guess Frontier will have to find out if this is doable in the start.
You can also setup landing as a video or a script. Easy but not quite Elite I guess
Because of the new lore with supercruise and hyperspace and normal flight meaning that there are 3 flight modes. Flying down to a planet would probably have to be different to 'normal' flight, and thus a fourth mode. Even if there was not a technical need to change instances (with all the handshaking, etc., going on), there would need to be a transition from supercruise to normal flight (and no one seems to object to the transition from normal flight to supercruise). There will presumably be similar instancing to support planetary landing (though the number of players in an instance may be different, because of the nature of what the players will be up to). There will need to be a technical transition for the instancing, as well as the lore transition of the travel mode change.
If the instance was created at point 3 - then I would hope it is possible.
Personally I would prefer it took time and involved an amount of skill and concentration to successfully land on the surface or fly in atmosphere (but then I would like SC flight to be more challenging).
My vote would be for point 4. My concern is how many people complain about anything that isn't instant these days.
As for lore, they can always say there was a minor outbreak of a "space virus" on the pilots federation academy, and all pilots who where there has to maintain quarantine in a controlled environment until further notice.
(this even explains why we don't have passenger missions, or co-pilots)
I think that the whole game world is generated on the fly and the graphics whilst pretty, are quite deliberately low poly and shaders toon-ish to keep overheads down (ie no loading of anything other than the base data anyway). However the MP issue still persists NMS has no intention of being MP as far as I can tell. Each player has their own 'parallel' universe and they can share their experiences - no mention of MP.
Any single player game needs only deal with the whole game world in relation to the single player view point. Anything that cannot be seen does not exist until it can be seen. That is completely different from 500k different view points all (potentially) existing at the same time, some of them shared between groups of players.
As we would (presumably) be able to have 6000k players in the same place on one planet as we can already do in space in ED - the same instancing rules would have be managed.
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I would like to see the ability to get missions to smuggle wildlife from one planet to another.
It could be classed as illegal in some situations if the animal is endangered, or could be to help save it from extinction to ally with some activist groups, I think this would fall in well with some lovely looking terrain
Aaron
It could be classed as illegal in some situations if the animal is endangered, or could be to help save it from extinction to ally with some activist groups, I think this would fall in well with some lovely looking terrain
Aaron
Seamless planetary landings is already possible in the game, we are just prevented from doing it by "invisible walls", because the surface collision and PG detail hasn't been cranked up in the version we are playing. In Beta 3 I went down to a moon's surface (in supercruise and normal flight) and it only needs ground collision and height mapping (easily achieved with techniques such as Perlin noise) to transform the already pretty screenshot below into something spectacular:
Of course what you do when you're down there is a different matter, but even with the current mechanics there's much that could be implemented with a little imagination and not a huge development budget such as:
Moon bases, outposts, which you can interact with in the same way as space stations - maybe not as "exciting" as we already have that functionality, but even "trivial" stuff like weather could make that more interesting.
Floating bases on water worlds could be pretty cool and would be essentially space-stations on the water, especially when you consider wave sizes are largely dictated by gravity (and wind speed) - waves on an ocean on Mars for example would be huge compared to earth. Try landing on a floating platform when it vertically displacing in 100 metre swells.
The whole Bespin cloud base thing could be added in the top layers of gas giants - plenty of opportunities for fun in the clouds and again just spacestations in the clouds.
The community goals thing could easily be adapted to provide cargo hauling based opportunities for visible settlement expansion, atmosphere processing (think Aliens), mining and extraction, sending out probes to do prospecting and then help set up mining colonies.
Missions could also be added to rendezvous with agents and "individuals" at remote locations on the surface whilst maintaining stealth (we already have mechanics for that), which gives you smuggling opportunities, or arms deals or other covert nefarious activities.
All this stuff could happen without having to get out of your spaceship or engage in pew pew (not that those opportunities shouldn't exist) on the combat side of things you may have to do some of the following:
- bomb bases
- locate them (imagine having to find smugglers for the authorities camped out on the surface of a remote moon)
- root out a pirate base (or join them)
- fly CAP (Circle And Protect) over a ground based asset, which is being targeted
- escort valuable cargo ships (passengers would be nice)
- rescue a stranded spaceship that's out of fuel or has a broken component you have to send them using a drone
There's a raft of potential survival scenarios as well.
The list goes on and on and these are probably harder to achieve currently than the actual planet surfaces and simulation activities to get down there. In fact the framework items added in 1.1, 1.2 & 1.3 also help set the groundwork for "stuff" to do on planets as well as space and I expect more framework functionality to be added over the next couple of years at least. I don't expect to see planetary landings until Q4 2016 at the earliest though and nor do I expect First Person until at least a year after that, not because the engine mechanics can't support it, but because the asset creation involved in supporting it (apart from maybe basic airless moon base landings) will require a lot of work and time. Specifically I am think of interiors (and the animated stuff like doors, lifts etc) for the space stations outside of what is already visible from your cockpit when docking.
Of course what you do when you're down there is a different matter, but even with the current mechanics there's much that could be implemented with a little imagination and not a huge development budget such as:
Moon bases, outposts, which you can interact with in the same way as space stations - maybe not as "exciting" as we already have that functionality, but even "trivial" stuff like weather could make that more interesting.
Floating bases on water worlds could be pretty cool and would be essentially space-stations on the water, especially when you consider wave sizes are largely dictated by gravity (and wind speed) - waves on an ocean on Mars for example would be huge compared to earth. Try landing on a floating platform when it vertically displacing in 100 metre swells.
The whole Bespin cloud base thing could be added in the top layers of gas giants - plenty of opportunities for fun in the clouds and again just spacestations in the clouds.
The community goals thing could easily be adapted to provide cargo hauling based opportunities for visible settlement expansion, atmosphere processing (think Aliens), mining and extraction, sending out probes to do prospecting and then help set up mining colonies.
Missions could also be added to rendezvous with agents and "individuals" at remote locations on the surface whilst maintaining stealth (we already have mechanics for that), which gives you smuggling opportunities, or arms deals or other covert nefarious activities.
All this stuff could happen without having to get out of your spaceship or engage in pew pew (not that those opportunities shouldn't exist) on the combat side of things you may have to do some of the following:
- bomb bases
- locate them (imagine having to find smugglers for the authorities camped out on the surface of a remote moon)
- root out a pirate base (or join them)
- fly CAP (Circle And Protect) over a ground based asset, which is being targeted
- escort valuable cargo ships (passengers would be nice)
- rescue a stranded spaceship that's out of fuel or has a broken component you have to send them using a drone
There's a raft of potential survival scenarios as well.
The list goes on and on and these are probably harder to achieve currently than the actual planet surfaces and simulation activities to get down there. In fact the framework items added in 1.1, 1.2 & 1.3 also help set the groundwork for "stuff" to do on planets as well as space and I expect more framework functionality to be added over the next couple of years at least. I don't expect to see planetary landings until Q4 2016 at the earliest though and nor do I expect First Person until at least a year after that, not because the engine mechanics can't support it, but because the asset creation involved in supporting it (apart from maybe basic airless moon base landings) will require a lot of work and time. Specifically I am think of interiors (and the animated stuff like doors, lifts etc) for the space stations outside of what is already visible from your cockpit when docking.
Being able to draw a planetary surface does not take into account MP - you need to provide instancing - that is why you do not see seamless transitions in ED, not because it is not technically possible graphically.
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Splitting hairs here but instances aren't 'created' as YOU are the instance. PL would be a procedural affair initiated the moment you press thr button to descend to the planet surface. It would be similar to when you enter hyperspace - you work out the algorithm for your destination when you leave normal space (at the cant stop countdown) rather than compute all possible destination PG results when in normal.
I see it similarly to this. Once you pass the emergency stop zone at low supercruise speed, instead of an emergency stop (as would happen with stars), you instead exit supercruise and enter Atmospheric Flight Mode. However the speed transitions from 30,000 metres per second to on average 300 metres per second needs to be addressed, as does escape velocity. Perhaps a controlled flight computer vector whereby your forward velocity slowly falls as you approach the surface might help. Because planets are bigger than stations, the top speed can be 30km/s in Atmospheric Flight Mode, and minimum speed at this stage some 300 m/s, allowing enough time for the game to load up settlements on the ground and in the air or whatever.
It is also at this point that heat effects from atmospheric re-entry will come into play, and may even obscure your field of vision and scanners and HUD, so that any settlements then only suddenly "appear" from out of nowhere.
A more subtle arrangement will need to be made for landing on airless ground stations with domes and airlocks. As for escape velocity, I am thinking that the same handwavey mechanics that enable ships to escape the pull of black holes would also come into play here.
Once you reach a settlement, the onboard computer can then automatically try to slow the ship down to the standard space station speeds of metres per second (or even less than this). However, if you approach too fast and don't pull up in time, your ship will crash and you will die.
With bonus (negative rep) points if you happen to go all Star Trek Into Darkness on the city below.FE2 had a hyperspace limit of 12 km altitude from ground stations. I think a supercruise limit should also be put into place here: the transition from settlement flight to atmospheric flight could also be a similar distance (out of safety from FSD use) from which the 0-300 (or whatever) limit then transitions into the 300-30000 limit. From there, there would be another limit to the supercruise emergency stop horizon, at which point supercruise is safe without an escape vector, and it would be safe to even jump to another system.
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It is the joining of players (the instances if you like), the synchronisation, that requires the less than seamless transition.
This can be done in the background when the play area is small enough that you know what is coming up next (as happens with most modern rpg mmos where speeds are restrictive so Zones are preloaded in the direction you travel and the engine has the time to pre-load everything in the background. Unfortunately the play area in ED is so large, the possible destinations infinite and multi-directional and we travel at such high speeds, it is impossible to know what to load in time.
I suppose if we drop out of SC into normal space the decent towards a planet may be slow enough to make the instancing appear seamless?
I don't have an issue with the current system for Hyperspace or SC - I would prefer it if any transition to planetary flight didn't involve a jump from space to the surface or atmosphere though.
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A lot longer.
Yes, I'm aware you can get out of or into a gravity well at any speed given enough fuel. But the point remains, I think, that in order to create a realistic and seamless experience, they'd have to rework the flight model into something more Newtonian. Since that seems to be anathema to them now (great shame), it isn't going to happen. So there will need to be seams of some sort.