The Planetary landing and planetside missions discussion Thread

I think most of the REALLY tricky seamlessness will happen when they do world's with atmospheres. And rivers. Possibly roads. And maybe cities. I think about his sort of stuff a lot (I'm that sort of person!) and it seems to me that lots of the calculations you'd want to do would be bottom-up sort of calculations (when should this river branch? how would the road connect two towns, or 12 towns? should there a commericial bit near the river?), but you're actually having to do these calculations top down, from orbit, with potentially hundreds of thousands of possible rivers, roads or cities in view. I can imagine how you'd approximate things, but I can't see how you'd avoid a fairly sharp transition somewhere... To what extent are the larger views of things dictated by tiny details? I think you could have ELITE without roads, but without rivers?

On rocky worlds will there be ravines? Gorges? Even craters seem quite tricky to me! But I suspect they're doing clever things I haven't even guessed at. Would love to know.

It's very difficult, but in a fascinating way. Possibly more difficult than fascinating if you've got tight deadlines!

I fear you might be thinking War and Peace level game play while we actually get Animal Farm level game play. That doesn't remove the quality from either, just the volume.
 
I believe the change from SuperCruise to OrbitalCruise and re entry is probably necesary not for asset loading but rather for old instancing conexions to be droped and new ones to be created. Much in the same way we have to go through that exact same stage when we go in and out of SC at the moment: Normal combat speed and SC speed mean a totally different set of player and AI spawn connections. It is not really the map or the PG I suspect, it is the network and instancing.

Hmm, too bad no one invented a way for creating/dropping connections seamlessly.
For example, when you start the descent, people on your contact list start disappearing and new ones start appearing.
 
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I know NMS is kind of a red flag for some people here, but given the current discussion I thought I'd link the video from E3 where Sean Murray shows of some live gameplay of the game where the way NMS handles space-planet transitions can be seen:

http://www.ign.com/videos/2015/07/06/no-mans-sky-18-minutes-of-uninterrupted-gameplay-ign-first

Go to the 12 minute mark to see how approaching a planet from space looks like in the game.

The graphics are of course nowhere near the quality of EDs visuals and the planets seem to be very small and not really 1:1 scale of real planets, but the smooth way Sean can land on the planet impressed me nonetheless.

I really hope FD is able to pull something of that is at least as smooth regarding planetary landings as what we can see in this video.

Personally I really look forward to No Man's Sky, but I'm not really that impressed with their transition down to the surface. The is a very visible switch IMO when the name of the planet comes up and there is a fade to white effect going on in the background. Perfectly fine for what it is, but there are far more "seamless" transitions out there. Outterra, SpaceEngine or Inovae for example. Plenty of other examples on Youtube of people playing around with these techniques on their spare time.

The planets in SC aren't really that big, which means for 1:1 planet scale, there has to be a transition somewhere (Orbital Cruise). There might be some technical wizardry I'm not aware of that FD could pull off but I think my assumption is correct.

The planets in ED are indeed 1:1 scale. Doesn't matter if it's in supercruise or normal space since supercruise is still taking place in the same world as "normal space" (which I've already explained earlier). This has been confirmed many times over by the devs. However, when you move at the speeds you do in supercruise you're brain can't make sense of that. The same thing would happen to real life astronauts if they had ships with supercruise and flew around for real. We have evolved down here on earth and our sense of scale is therefore based on what we can experience here. We know a mountain off in the distance is large because of "hints". If it's far away there will be more atmosphere between us and the mountain and it will therefore be tinted blue. Another thing we use to understand scale is how fast the object on the horizon is moving compared to our own movement. If you look out through the window of a moving car things will appear to move slower the further away they are from you.

None of these hints works in space where there is no atmosphere and when we are talking about moving at speeds your brain can't comprehend. If your brain sees an object moving fast by you without any hints like atmosphere to help it will just assume that this thing "must" be smaller than what it actually is. Which of course is the wrong conclusion, but so hardcoded into us that we can't turn it off. ;)

Play around in SpaceEngine and fly quickly by the planets and you will experience the same sense of them being small. Which of course can be easily be proven wrong by then flying down to the surface.
 
Thing is, normal flight is too slow to go into the atmosphere, and supercruise is too fast...so you need a new cruise option. I think it's for that reason.
 
Thing is, normal flight is too slow to go into the atmosphere, and supercruise is too fast...so you need a new cruise option. I think it's for that reason.

My hope is that this orbital cruise is not something you manually drop into by pressing a button, but rather something that happens automatically when you hit the "gravity well". Now when we hit that "well" we are simply pulled out of supercruise into normal space and can't go any further, but with the Horizons update we wouldn't drop into normal space but instead we simply transitions into orbital supercruise but hitting the "gravity turbulence". The shake of the turbulence could hide the transition.

Basically something similar in terms of shake as we can see in the No Man's Sky video linked above, but minus the fade to white effect and better LOD systems. :)
 
I have a hunch it'll be "approach vector" principle (similar to escape vector).
It could work like this: you approach a planet, your FSD must be in blue area. When your ship reaches a point of "dropping - too close", we will get the "approach vector" (those without Horizons will just drop out). Being aligned with the approach vector, the ship gradually starts slowing down below 30km/s and the descend/orbital cruise/loading screen starts automatically after a few seconds.
 
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The mechanic they have described sounds pretty clever, really.

It establishes an environment to separate owners of the Horizons expansion and filter out non-owners
It sidesteps any issues about complex entry corridors, and allows new gravity & atmospheric effects to be included
It provides a different context for velocity that makes sense for orbiting a planet at varying altitude
It will be the environment in which surface POIs will show up, just as Supercruise is the one in which USSs show up
The transition effect will allow time for asset calculation, rendering and islanding

If the cost of all this is a brief transition between states, fine. In the grand scheme it's a small price to pay, as long as everything after that is effectively seamless.

I was originally far more concerned by David and Sandro's Q&A which suggested (to me anyway) that landing locations might be limited to designated areas. However after listening to the interviews with Eddie (bless him!) I felt a lot more comfortable with what they seem to be planning.
 
Personally I really look forward to No Man's Sky, but I'm not really that impressed with their transition down to the surface. The is a very visible switch IMO when the name of the planet comes up and there is a fade to white effect going on in the background. Perfectly fine for what it is, but there are far more "seamless" transitions out there. Outterra, SpaceEngine or Inovae for example. Plenty of other examples on Youtube of people playing around with these techniques on their spare time.

Yes, sure, if you compare NMS' transition to those in SpaceEngine etc. it may not hold up that well, but I was comparing it to the SC-normal space transitions we got in ED so far, since I reckon that's more likely the kind of experience FD is able to do right now. And when compared to those ED-SC-exits/-entries, NMS' planetary landings are way smoother than what ED has shown so far.

Edit: even if there is a visible "switch" in NMS, it's way better hidden and much shorter than those jarring 2-3 seconds when transitioning to/from SC while loosing control in ED.
 
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Landing on metal planets

So, i guess this is going to be a thing in "Horizons"?

latest


Look really fun! :D
 
Planetary Landing does NOT mean First Person right?

Will planetary landing bring First Person (or Third Person, or Person after all) to Elite, or
is this planed for later?

Could imagine it will be quite similiar to station docking then?
 

Mike Evans

Designer- Elite: Dangerous
Frontier
Will planetary landing bring First Person (or Third Person, or Person after all) to Elite, or
is this planed for later?

Could imagine it will be quite similiar to station docking then?

You drive the buggy from a first person perspective but no it doesn't mean walking around in first person which I think is what you meant.
 
Well, if you mean if it brings FPS walking around, it's not included. You can land as you do now, anywhere you like as long as it's an airless moon or asteroid.

You can then drive around in your buggy and do whatever.
 
You drive the buggy from a first person perspective but no it doesn't mean walking around in first person which I think is what you meant.

Ok, fine, but you aren't answering the most important question:

Is the drive model any good and most importantly...is it Newtonian?!? :eek:
 
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