At minimum I'd like the facility to communicate with all other ships in a particular system. Currently, if I understand correctly, it's limited to those in your own instance only (not taking into account wings). So it means if you are talking to someone in SC and they drop out, you can no longer chat to them. Please correct me if this is wrong, I don't find it very intuitive, in fact I found it downright frustrating as I can be contacted by someone in an instance and try to reply, only to find they've gone to SC.
Universe Wide Chat... Why Is It Not A Thing?
- Thread starter zsharpes
- Start date
Believe me, it's not just a global chat that I find lore breaking.
That said, Galnet outside of human space? Yep, lore breaking. There needs to be an in-game error message displayed when GalNet is opened and you are too far from human space for it to received a signal/connection [ Unable to establish a connection to GalNet, you are outside of the supported range of the communication buoys ]
Unfortunately, ED isn't consistent - you can voice chat to friends across any distance, but can't get remote access 1km away from a station to get the latest commod prices? You can't communicate with someone in another station, but can instantly know where your friends are on the GalMap? All inconsistent enough that it breaks lore if one is focusing on it too much.
Just like the issues mentioned, I'd get used to having a GalIRC - doesn't mean I'll like it. I just wish they'd put a real lore/RP spin on it to increase that sense of realism; from a RP standpoint, I think a delayed message system would be awesome and the further you get from human space, the less likely it becomes that you'll get a message out.
ED immerses me quite deeply, despite the inconsistencies; and the thought that people can just talk to each other across any distance .. it's bothersome. It's like it's spitting in the face of what ED is (in my eyes) trying to achieve.
Yep.
GalNet is updated every 24 hours or so, one could argue that Galnet news takes 24 hours to propagate through human space.
That said, Galnet outside of human space? Yep, lore breaking. There needs to be an in-game error message displayed when GalNet is opened and you are too far from human space for it to received a signal/connection [ Unable to establish a connection to GalNet, you are outside of the supported range of the communication buoys ]
I enjoy the science, breaking or not - in fact, when it comes to science fiction, the more outrageous the better. Jupiter Ascending, for example, I love the science .. even if it can't be explained.
Unfortunately, ED isn't consistent - you can voice chat to friends across any distance, but can't get remote access 1km away from a station to get the latest commod prices? You can't communicate with someone in another station, but can instantly know where your friends are on the GalMap? All inconsistent enough that it breaks lore if one is focusing on it too much.
Just like the issues mentioned, I'd get used to having a GalIRC - doesn't mean I'll like it. I just wish they'd put a real lore/RP spin on it to increase that sense of realism; from a RP standpoint, I think a delayed message system would be awesome and the further you get from human space, the less likely it becomes that you'll get a message out.
ED immerses me quite deeply, despite the inconsistencies; and the thought that people can just talk to each other across any distance .. it's bothersome. It's like it's spitting in the face of what ED is (in my eyes) trying to achieve.
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Quantum entanglement could explain that one... it is a legitimate theoretical "scientific" explanation for the capability.Yeah. I've followed a couple of rescue hookups over IRC. Problem is, the wing/direct comms goes against... science.
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Personally, I think the alleged necessity for a global chat capability is blatantly disproportionate to the reality of the situation.
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It would probably be sufficient, for gaming purposes, to have a fixed number of set messages that can be published/broadcast... for example:-
- SOS - for cases where interactive help is needed (Fuel, Rescue from Hostiles, etc)
- LFG - for cases where players are looking for wingmen (e.g. Escorts for Traders or Trader Escort offers)
- RFI - for cases where players are just looking for comms based help
- PPC - for cases where players are looking to co-operate/co-ordinate wrt PP
These could even be treated as CMDR status strings and players could just have a list of available CMDRs (perhaps searchable by both status and FSD distance/ranges as set by the user).
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The information would be published to the FD server(s) and players would need to actively request this information (or be given automatic updates at a slow rate perhaps).
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Such a system may not achieve all of the goals wanted by some and could still be abused but the bandwidth and server requirements would be theoretically much lower.
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I know what you're saying but that's not the whole picture. Some client has to be the instance lead as kept track by FD. When you go to a zone you tell the FD server "I'm going to System A". FD says "Client B is in system A, talk to client B". Much of the remainder of your conversations from now on will be P2P. At least this is how I understand it.
You can science-spin anything.
1. Faster than light communications could be handled by quantum-tangled particle radios. Who's to say that 1000 years from now we figured out how to maintain quantum-tangled particles infinitely.
2. Communications transit witchspace which requires very little energy to transmit data. And since actual mass isn't being moved through witchspace only data via "witch particles" the data transmits instantly.
That's just two "sciency" explanations for FTL comms. Honestly the "science" explanation is the easy part.
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Excellent cases for use. I think part of the problem here is many people still think of this as a solo game. I wish they could see the big picture.
To me, it sounds like the OP wants to be able to communicate with real people in game more easily. Trying to make the galaxy seem less desolate.
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Would it be possible/feasible to add a commander filter to the Galaxy Map? Would that solve the problem?
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The filter could be pretty vague and still achieve the goal of bringing people together. It could be a simple color code for systems. Say, 5 commanders in a particular system at one time turns the system blue. Add a few more thresholds with brighter colors.
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Such a filter should make it easy to find active areas while not highlighting lone wolf commanders.
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Leave communication systems as they are but now you can find people to talk to if you want.
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Would it be possible/feasible to add a commander filter to the Galaxy Map? Would that solve the problem?
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The filter could be pretty vague and still achieve the goal of bringing people together. It could be a simple color code for systems. Say, 5 commanders in a particular system at one time turns the system blue. Add a few more thresholds with brighter colors.
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Such a filter should make it easy to find active areas while not highlighting lone wolf commanders.
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Leave communication systems as they are but now you can find people to talk to if you want.
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Then you'd have to apply that to anything and everything that could utilise communications: real-time economy information, real-time updates of commander positions ( I mean, with instantaneous communication there'd be no reason not to ), a global outfitter with a list of all stations outfitters and their prices, any information you can think of would be required to be streamed to the players ship in real time, thanks to instant comms ... not to mention the myriad of other things that instant communications would fix and thus would eventually have the community asking/begging/demanding for making the game easier, and easier and more boring by the day.
Quite a predicament because allowing one but not the other is inviting trouble.
Yes, science is the easy part.... when the lore allows for it; which, AFAIK, it does not.
If you just go and ignore lore, then as a developer, you've already sealed the fate of your game. I don't foresee FD doing this.
That said, FD don't want galaxy wide chat anyway as they want to avoid the spam that plenty of other games get.
Ignoring my own personal objections, I guarantee you; we get galaxy chat, we'll eventually get service spam (10 bucks and I'll play your cmdr to get you 100 million billion credits) and then what will happen? Oh...right... the forums will be flooded with people crying about the spammers and scammers in the galaxy chat that those self-same aforementioned people originally demanded.
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First off many users already use the Internet for trade data. Right or wrong that's already done and I do feel not having this data in game feels weak to me. At the same time there could be galactic laws accepcted by all factions that trade data can't be shared if that is a real gameplay issue. As far as a real-time update of commander locations you could say you have to know a commander's "serial number" in order to track them which is "transmitted" to you when you "friend" them.
You can "science" your way in an out of any situation.
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Robert Maynard
Volunteer Moderator
Interesting - my impression of the system was not correct then - although that does not explain why sometimes my outbound data throughput significantly exceeds my inbound.
Robert Maynard
Volunteer Moderator
It was an example used previously - and while unlikely, is possible.
As you say, the chat would require to be segregated into channels - however, the additional throughput would still add to the ongoing server data throughput - which costs money.
Whether the chat in a channel arrives slowly enough to be assimilated by the players (while playing the game) is still an unknown.
Presumably channel names would need to be approved - to avoid EULA non compliant names. Also, I would expect that the chat would be recorded to allow any complaints to be dealt with.
That's correct for the special case that client B is the only one in that area of system A. Otherwise, the (matchmaking) server sees that clients B,D,R and X are in the same general vicinity within system A and says "Go talk to them". No one client owns the instance, instead, authority over the various objects in the area is distributed amongst the clients, and should the owner of, say, a Nav Beacon, quit or SC away, an algorithm determines which of the remaining peers assumes authority over it.
What this means for comms in your model is that the FD comms hub has to pass messages to each peer in the island, or to designate a peer as comms relay and use them to forward to the others.
With the names of commanders, npcs and stations I've seen, it's difficult to believe FD actually enforces any compliance on names. That said, channel creation would have to be authorized by FD to ensure that people wouldn't create 2 channels with the same name. They could filter any channel name that want during channel creation.
WSTEPHENSON is oversimplifying how instances functioned. In his diagram in post https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=184267&p=2849199&viewfull=1#post2849199
doesn't accurately describe the truth. Though diagram 3 is most accurate he neglects to show that one of the peers are still controlling admission to the instance. It may not be fulling acting as a server but it does say who can and can't join the instance.
"Go talk to them vs him"...is this definitive as to how FD does it or guess work. It would seem like a lot of unnecessary overhead if FD transmitted all clients in an instance to the peer joining vs just saying "Talk to this guy, he'll tell you about his peers".
As far as how messages are passed, this already has to happen for the sake of the message being shown to each client. And it's not like all clients need to know past states of a channel, they only need to know the current state which in itself is very simple... Does this channel still exist? Can I still talk to the channel leader? Yes, great. Nope? Force election and tell FD the result.
I do feel like we could keep coming up with more technical issues regarding this but technical issues are just issues that need to be solved.
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Firstly, just to re-iterate I am not in favour of a "cross-instance universe" public chat channel but there is perhaps a simple "group" chat option that could be implemented very simply...
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Chat "channel" names could be based on the name of the "primary" CMDR for the channel (c/f Group names as they are currently implemented).
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The group chat process could be along the lines of:-
The above would be in-line with the current implementation AFAIK and in theory would require little modification to the existing chat system.
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Chat "channel" names could be based on the name of the "primary" CMDR for the channel (c/f Group names as they are currently implemented).
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The group chat process could be along the lines of:-
- Log-in and run game in preferred mode Solo/Group/Open
- Go to comms panel
- Select group chat
- Enter/Select primary CMDR from on-line players (inc. Own name)
- Game would then initiate chat or reject group chat connection based on the options selected by the primary CMDR
- Max Number of participants (as the primary CMDR's game instance would be responsible for relaying messages - above a certain number of particpants on a given setup excessive connections could result in excessive latency - recommended maximum would be 32).
- Private connection (if set the primary CMDR has to approve new CMDRs and could potentially revoke connection rights)
- Group chat could potentially disable map chat while active
The above would be in-line with the current implementation AFAIK and in theory would require little modification to the existing chat system.
How come?
To me, a multi-player game means at some point or another I'm going to have to work with other players to achieve something; ie: WoW; you need to work with other players to get the leet phat loots.
Ah yes, but see this is you preferring a particular style of play, and not the only available one. Elite isn't a single player game, even in solo. It has a persistent universe. Regardless of which one you play, you affect the galaxy to all players. I blazed my own trail in open as soon as I purchased. I flew straight to alioth and grinded for the permit, all along the way befriending the Alliance. That was the moment... I jumped into Alioth and realized the emptiness and lack of depth. There were no perks for the alliance. There was no one in alliance space to interact with, and after realizing this I went back towards noobspace. I stopped into Winters home system of Rhea for a few months and grinded around there, until I deemed participating in PP "too complicated" as I was a member of a "Winters Newsletter email" "REDDIT participate (ewww)" and still not getting the interaction that I considered required in order to be a part of ANY PP group. I decided to come back to noobspace as it would be the most likely place for interaction of interested and still "immersed" gamers. Kremainn is my home now, I help anyone who docks in Wohler Terminal, and protect noobs from high level ganking. I blazed my own trail, wanted more interaction with players, and tried pp. Less than satisfied I now reside in Kremainn (noobspace) as at least there is real players.
This is the most amazing thing I've read, and Fdev should hire you. I'm all for a 15 or 20 dollar "social" expansion.
If this was an added cost, and an optional expansion do you think it would gain traction in the community? Also, I'd like to reference War Thunder. It has what seems like an integrated IRC style chat system, and p2p instances. Its free2play and I recommend you check this game out for an example of community encompassing chat.
I think the issue is the difference between the sim crowd, or the 84'ers. These features are a value add to gamers as a whole. This is why they "didn't want it at all," and why this topic is so controversial. I agree with what you say about the hype, and personally think ED is in trouble if it doesn't hold the attention of gamers. Now from what i've seen in noobspace there are tons of new players. I'm commenting on the way the game isolates you, and doesn't hold a new players attention for long enough to learn the game.
Some will say, oh well thanks for the money... But you want to retain these players as consumers to your ever growning "10 year plan" project.
Why would that chat be outbound? Does IRC not work in a way that the server just pushes inbound with incomming chat, and outbound only for you? There is even a built in prevention from spamming, and the bots themselves banhammer people from the server if they continue. Is this your only worry? Am i understanding the network traffic wrong? I'm genuinely interested, as I have ran multiple connections to multiple irc servers while playing many games over the year and have never had IRC affect my bandwidth and connection in a game, regardless of the server architecture.
Can you elaborate?
I don't see how running a seperate server with an IRC style chat in the starport would affect bandwidth. There has to be more community related, ingame tools to help players find and play with eachother. chat is the easiest way to accomplish that as we can take matters into our own hands.
Here is an example of a game released in 2001 with built in email and an irc client. When Tribes 2 was released the common connection was considered a 56k modem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribes_2
Tribes 2 had irc servers running side by side with the master server, which listed all the dedicated servers and populated the client's list. Not to mention an e-mail system. These features were done when internet speed was... slow. I'm sure alot of ED players even remember Tribes and Tribes 2 hitting store shelves.
And for those of you just looking for the juicy bit:
Without going into the detail of the demise of dynamix and the curse of the tribes IP, (i will personally tickle HiReZ Developers, thanks for listening to tribe's playerbase..have fun cash cowing off smite while ruining my favorite IP and abandoning WHY DID U EVEN BUY IT!!?) These features are the grandaddy of support for a community, I encourage ALL of Fdev do some research into this further as it is fascinating and WELL before its time. Anyone familiar with the VGS system of voice commands will back me up on how awesome it was to play tribes without voice coms.
Imagine you're queued into a channel local to the station you've requested docking. After landing, clicking starport services would initate joining of the local station chat which explains in a whisper to you that you can join chats within XX Lys. A quick queury would populate the list with available public channels within range of the technology based at the outpost you're docked at.
This could be system to system, not galaxy wide. Much like the FSD jumps, the signals would jump beacon to beacon at the distance per jump and maximum distance every jump. These systems can be ignored or utilized by players just like every aspect of ED as other community voices has spoken of maintaining.
MAYBE - you could give a premium social status monthly charge to those who maintain large player groups. they would be able to have a private, as well as public channel and domain and power in these channels. All players regardless of this premium status can particpate however non social premium members can only be so powerful in the public channels and never own public or private channels outright.
This incentivizes player groups to maintain and police public channels themselves. These channels would then be moderated by who starts them, and if a channel gets popular it further incentivizes them to moderate it, as it will either be exciting that so many players are visiting, or a enemy faction causing a ruckus. The community WILL self police themselves if the proper tools are given to them.
This can go into further depth by having sub channels in a system of every minor faction, as well as any PP in the system. Anyone who is working to help this faction can find each other in this chat and coordinate to create a wing or run missions for X station. This is very fast and approachable to players, it incentivizes playing in wings by finding a more select area of players to filter to what you might be doing, and in every sense it adds to gameplay, and teamwork when it comes to missions and the BGS.
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1- Faster and easier to do the converse, wherein players who want to communicate can do so. No sense in pushing some idea X on an entire population simply because you're of the opinion that many want the idea X and it will be good for you even if you don't want idea X (on this same strange torpedo of thought, i think we should lobby for all automobiles to have three cup holders within reach of the driver, one of which should be insulated for holding lots of coffee).
2- I do not share your concern for these people. In fact, these people should be wary. If you are easily crushed by a sense of loneliness and isolation, then a game with a massive, might-never-see-another-player-ever universe might not be for you. Space is not crowded.
3- Subjective trite. Also, please remember (or more likely hearing for the first time) that when this game was originally backed, Single Player was a thing. Once the game progressed to a certain point, it was announced that it was an online world only. Many, many backers made their voices heard regarding the lack of single player. The compromise for this was Solo mode but required internet connection to play. This is worth mentioning because there are populations of players that do not want to interact with other players (which isn't necessarily inconsistent with your chat idea, but is inconsistant with the idea of this game being 'online play' and what that means in this context). On a side note, there is an X Box One client. That being said, I do not want to interact with the majority (if not completely) that population. That is, however, only my personal opinion =D. Good ol Xbox prejudice!
4- This statement causes me to question the range and width of your perspective and judgements =D.
The specific suggestion the comment stemmed from was using an instance owner (player client) to take some of the bandwidth load from FD servers. Instead of sending all of the global chat data to each and every client, the FD server would only have to send to instance owners. The instance owners would then be responsible for forwarding that traffic to any client connected to their instance. In theory, if the chat volume was quite high and an instance had a high number of players, that would make for a significant increase in the outbound data requirements for the instance owner. Also, with the majority of domestic internet connections, downstream traffic is heavily biased against upstream traffic. That doesn't help.
I've had a couple more thoughts on this. Sorry, they're generally on the negative side. But I'm trying to look at it rationally.
Cross-instance communication: This could lead to interesting problems. If the game allows communication between players who are not (or cannot be) in the same instance, it's going to lead to all sorts of confusion. The Fuel Rats' workaround of winging up to force the hand of the island matchmaking won't really cut it for general conversation.
Delayed transit communication: Three points here. 1) I don't think you will ever reach consensus between those who expect instant comms and those who want the pseudo-science delayed comms; 2) While pseudo-science delayed comms might seem more RP, I think its usefulness would drop significantly. There's a reason sci-fi TV shows always came up with some method of near-instant communication. (On that note, why does nobody ever mention Star Trek's subspace communication??); 3) Delayed comms would be hellishly complicated to develop. Seriously, the difference between an almost IRC-like system and tracking message availability by time and distance for each and every player... MASSIVE.
The idea crossed my mind to add comms variants to the app I'm currently building. But there really is a plethora of third-party options available already. The only thing I would be adding would be trying to have something a little more 'specialised' for the ED galaxy. Besides, I think for something like this to be really taken up (particularly by new players), it would need to be an in-game feature.
Cross-instance communication: This could lead to interesting problems. If the game allows communication between players who are not (or cannot be) in the same instance, it's going to lead to all sorts of confusion. The Fuel Rats' workaround of winging up to force the hand of the island matchmaking won't really cut it for general conversation.
Delayed transit communication: Three points here. 1) I don't think you will ever reach consensus between those who expect instant comms and those who want the pseudo-science delayed comms; 2) While pseudo-science delayed comms might seem more RP, I think its usefulness would drop significantly. There's a reason sci-fi TV shows always came up with some method of near-instant communication. (On that note, why does nobody ever mention Star Trek's subspace communication??); 3) Delayed comms would be hellishly complicated to develop. Seriously, the difference between an almost IRC-like system and tracking message availability by time and distance for each and every player... MASSIVE.
The idea crossed my mind to add comms variants to the app I'm currently building. But there really is a plethora of third-party options available already. The only thing I would be adding would be trying to have something a little more 'specialised' for the ED galaxy. Besides, I think for something like this to be really taken up (particularly by new players), it would need to be an in-game feature.
You miss the point I think, the "added cost" I referred to would be a perpetual and on-going expense thus provision would require a sustainable funding model (ads and subscriptions are two of the main ways such things are funded).
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As for it gaining traction, I think it would not personally. With a game such as ED, there is enough going on when flying around that players normally do not wish to engage in idle text chatter (Hutton run being perhaps one exception) - if you crash while you are typing then you are dead and while it may not be game over the in-game cost to the player does smart a bit. There is also the point that those that use either game controllers or HOTAS joysticks most likely will not have free and unrestricted access to the keyboard while in-game, this is probably one of the main reasons why third party VOIP services such as TS and Mumble are so popular.
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So far, in this thread I have seen ZERO justification to support a true Universe wide (and cross-instance) chat system being added as an integrated feature to the game. There are some other targeted concepts that would address the main use cases far more effectively and with less of the technical risks/costs to either FD or the community at large. There are enough other things that actually would add materially to the game that FD would be better spending their time on IMO, and given there are plenty of third party tools out-there (e.g. Team Speak and Steam overlay which works for both Steam and non-Steam games) for player group communication that will work alongside ED there is even less of a justification for FD to spend their precious time on such "distractions".
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For FSX. there is a multiplayer server called Vatnet. There are many radio channels available dedicated to particular uses.
Something like region (the 15 LY influence around a system) system and planet (and its orbiting objects) would not bother me. I could choose how much to read/listen or the local area around my ship as default.
-Pv-
Something like region (the 15 LY influence around a system) system and planet (and its orbiting objects) would not bother me. I could choose how much to read/listen or the local area around my ship as default.
-Pv-