The transition for the planetary landings

[Patrick_68000]

David said : "The transition from supercruise to orbital cruise is seamless - you just see the altimeter and flight ladder appear. When you drop from orbital cruise to normal flight there is a short transition, as with dropping from supercruise." ----- Your opinion ?

 

[Ydiss]

Pretty much as I expected. But I think this will be badly received.

I'm fine with it. It's the transition from space into the planet that was important to me.

 

[GunnerBill]

Does this make the whole sequence of dropping from SC to normal space obsolete?

 

[Ydiss]

Does this make the whole sequence of dropping from SC to normal space obsolete?

No. It's exactly the same. Orbital cruise is just super cruise but near a planet.

 

[BoggiBlanko]

I'll judge after I tried it by myself! I'm quite sure it'll be fun and immersive, but let's see...

 

[Cynaqq]

David said : "The transition from supercruise to orbital cruise is seamless - you just see the altimeter and flight ladder appear. When you drop from orbital cruise to normal flight there is a short transition, as with dropping from supercruise." ----- Your opinion ?

My opinion ?!??_!!111! is that it's just as predicted. Perfectly fine and with the least amount of things to go wrong which would need to be covered up with additional shenanigans.

Also just the thing to get people start whinging with 'not truly seamless, terribly outdated planetary landing mechanics which have already been solved by a hundred different games 25 years ago even FFE you could seam-less land to planet with atmosphere what is this ??!?!!? sorry english not first language' posts.

 

[BigFW]

My take is that rather than dropping out of supercruise when you get too close you will initially get an 'entering orbital' cruise zone where the additional huds will pop up. Then you will need to get closer to trigger a 'drop out' of orbital cruise to planetary flight which will be similiar to dropping out of supercruise to a station.

Is that completely seemless? Not really
Is it an issue for me? No

 

[Caramel Clown]

I'm alright with that honestly. It would be cool to have absolutely seamless transition, but it works okay as it is. Haven't seen people complain too much about dropping into rings mechanics.

 

[Hadron-Higgs-Boson]

I think the bottom line with this will be how low you can get in orbital cruise before you transition to planetary flight, as you can see in the videos, flying your ship around the planet at normal speeds, despite them being pretty fast, looks as slow as hell, due mostly to no frame of reference to establish your relative speed, see how it speeds up as the base comes into view, or at least how it seems to.

Flying around a planet at planetary speed is going to be very slow, like trying to reach a station in space without supercruise. if the transition from planetary speed to orbital cruise is possible at low enough altitude and no worse than the similar transition in space then it will probably be ok, certainly not seamless, but ok, for now.

 

[Varrag]

Well, I didn't expect completely seamless transition from space to planetary surface (that's not how ED works), so it's okay. As Boson^^ said, important question here is how low can we get in orbital cruise, because flying over the planetary landscape with puny speed of 300 or 400 m/s is way too slow to be of any practical use, except to make final approach to land bases and other points of interest.

 

[Tinman]

David said : "The transition from supercruise to orbital cruise is seamless - you just see the altimeter and flight ladder appear. When you drop from orbital cruise to normal flight there is a short transition, as with dropping from supercruise." ----- Your opinion ?

We already knew that since a Dev update a month ago.

In the game currently supercruise ends with a hard wall when you get too close to a planet. If you have Horizons then your ships will automatically be assigned a module that enables the ship to operate at orbital heights down to the surface in what we’re calling Orbital Cruise. With this module you will transition into orbital flight when you reach the appropriate altitude.


The ship handles a little differently in orbital flight. They key difference is that if you fly within orbital parameters (essentially perpendicular to the surface) you will travel faster and provides a mechanism for moving quickly around the planet. This is also highlighted in the UI by showing the sweet spot on your pitch control. Below orbital cruise you enter into surface flight and the controls change again to reflect the flight model operating within gravity and your thrusters compensating for you flight close to the surface.


As well as handling differences (and high gravity worlds feel different to fly on compared to low gravity worlds) the flight UI has been updated to provide the pertinent information you need when flying near the surface like altitude, pitch and so forth. We’ll show more on this in the coming weeks, but for this week I just wanted to establish the different zones that you can be in and how that affects you while playing.


This is especially pertinent in multiplayer and wings, as you can now be operating across very different environments, but you will have a need to support each other between these environments. It’s also key that transitioning between these is a seamless experience.

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=194124&highlight=orbital+cruise

Which was followed up with this later in the thread:

Orbital cruise is part of supercruise as far as instancing is concerned, so there's still only one transition.

Michael

As for how it will look when dropping from orbital cruise too normal flight...well...like this but with the ship obviously being much much closer to the ground and probably moving a lot slower than the current supercruise minimum (30km/s). Thus making the drop less jarring...
[video=youtube;qnZt6OYhzHs]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnZt6OYhzHs[/video]

 

[Arubeto]

David said : "The transition from supercruise to orbital cruise is seamless - you just see the altimeter and flight ladder appear. When you drop from orbital cruise to normal flight there is a short transition, as with dropping from supercruise." ----- Your opinion ?

Very disappointed. Until yesterday it always sounded as if the whole transition from space to surface would be seamless. I am not too impressed that they just shifted the "loading screen" nearer to the planets surface...

 

[BoggiBlanko]

Since the announcement of Horizons I'm thinking about the whole Orbital/landing process, even now it's the biggest mystery... this is something bad, or something good... time will tell. I hope I can fully controll the ship while in Orbital-Cruise... so that I see the planet getting bigger and bigger and bigger.... and so on...

 

[AnnuverScotinExile]

Also just the thing to get people start whinging with 'not truly seamless, terribly outdated planetary landing mechanics which have already been solved by a hundred different games 25 years ago even FFE you could seam-less land to planet with atmosphere what is this ??!?!!? sorry english not first language' posts.

All missing the point, of course. There has to be a transition in game lore, even if there is also one for the simplest solution* to the PtP instancing. The travel modes are different. Not subtly and slightly different, but wholly different. You go from faffing about with space time to normal space flight. There has to be a transition, the equivalent of the transition we see when we enter supercruise.





* to remove the PtP instancing thingy, they would have to do 'look ahead' instance joining, so that all the handshaking is done in anticipation of joining the instance, with all the code to make it robust when you change your mind.

 

[Tinman]

Very disappointed. Until yesterday it always sounded as if the whole transition from space to surface would be seamless. I am not too impressed that they just shifted the "loading screen" nearer to the planets surface...

Actually...what has been said is what I quoted above your post.

 

[lysan]

When you drop from orbital cruise to normal flight there is a short transition

It all depends how they can hide it. In I: they demonstrated how they do it. That was very cleaver and well hidden.
The transition must happen at some point, so that match making, instance wing mates and so on are correct.

Lets see how its done before we start to panic.

 

[kiario]

I hope they will shorten the instance delay from orbital to planetary flight compared to SC to normal space flight.
We dont need the countdown delay and the graphic effect delay its just getting tiresome. Here's hoping for a smooth transition in 2 sec or so.

 

[lysan]

Well, I didn't expect completely seamless transition from space to planetary surface (that's not how ED works), so it's okay. As Boson^^ said, important question here is how low can we get in orbital cruise, because flying over the planetary landscape with puny speed of 300 or 400 m/s is way too slow to be of any practical use, except to make final approach to land bases and other points of interest.

Well, the mach 1 cap is kind of weird, I hope some day we will at least get it to mach 2 or even 3. They also need to get the sonic booms right when we get into an atmosphere.

 

[Arubeto]

Actually...what has been said is what I quoted above your post.

Michaels quote might imply that the transition is similar or that same as that currently from SC to normal space, but not the dev update you quoted.

I was referring to other statements and answers where "will it be seamless?" was answered with "yes". I hope you believe me that I normally don't make those claims without having the appropriate quotes at hand, so if I can muster the motivation to do so I will search for it (although you might have it at hand somewhere already)

I am also not sure why being nearer the planet surface would make the drop less jarring. If anything, I'd rather think the larger number of visual reference points - mountains, ravines and other surface features - suddenly stopping to move for a few seconds would make it more jarring than just a large textured ball becoming motionless for the same amount of time.

 

[Varrag]

Well, the mach 1 cap is kind of weird, I hope some day we will at least get it to mach 2 or even 3.

Yeah, planets upclose really put things into the perspective: our ships are, in fact, awfuly slow. It's something we weren't noticing before because in space we are always spawned only few kms from stations, RES sites, etc.