Ship interiors are not planned at the moment because from what I can tell, there is no true distinction at the system design level between player agency and vehicle. When in the SRV you 'are' the SRV. When in the ship you 'are' the ship. Horizons level multicrew slaves you to another player's ship. I've not had a chance to sufficiently analyse the odyssey method but it looks like it may be a kludge that effectively does the same thing, going on where crashes and odd behaviours seem to occur.
Fixing that kludge is not trivial (and honestly that's what I though they were aiming for with Odyssey, but guess not). I can't see any other reason to exclude it (other than the asset creation required), but include the hangar/turbolift/concourse faff.
Will we get this fixed? Yeah, eventually. Will it be in the current iteration of the engine? I'd have to say unlikely. FDev have put layer upon layer of incremental development on, and it can only go so far before something vital way, way down in the original codebase can't work any more and you have to refactor the whole shebang from the ground up. Not doing so leaves you with a hacky mess of code that doesn't work the way it was originally intended (so you have to chase documentation tails when bug hunting - and you get some really spurious edge cases falling out of things), corresponding stability issues and an increased cost of maintenance. You spend more time fixing than you do innovating.
Does that mean Elite Dangerous dies and Elite V rises? Mmmmm. I'd say 'sort of, I think'. If I were FDev, I'd already be way into full redevelopment of the engine and core game systems design, especially if the original coders/designers are no longer in the company. Import the existing structures and play use cases onto the new system, sync it all up and a great many people might not even notice. The branding remains the same, player investment (and 'game state') is undamaged and those long time fans keep buying arx on what is effectively a new game that just happens to look very much like the old one, for a while at least. In short, to the end user it'd look like a patch the size of a new install (as assets likely would be refactored too).
But right now, I think the current Elite codebase has a very, very limited lifespan ahead of it.
Edit: @Agony_Aunt mentioned it - but yes, Star Citizen approached this (player separation from ship, ship 'ownership' vs 'authorisation' and so on) problem quite some time ago. They frankly went a little overboard with the implementation on many things in an attempt to future proof the systems to handle 'realistically'. Personally I think losing interial dampers or maglocks on cargo and getting smashed into a wall or crushed by a floating crate against a wall during ship maneuvers, though 'realistic', does not sound fun. Or getting asphyxiated because the CO2 scrubbers aren't working any more. Again, yeah, perhaps realistic, perhaps even fun to do to an enemy, but overall, perhaps one step too far. Anyway, it's not an easy or trivial problem to tackle.
Fixing that kludge is not trivial (and honestly that's what I though they were aiming for with Odyssey, but guess not). I can't see any other reason to exclude it (other than the asset creation required), but include the hangar/turbolift/concourse faff.
Will we get this fixed? Yeah, eventually. Will it be in the current iteration of the engine? I'd have to say unlikely. FDev have put layer upon layer of incremental development on, and it can only go so far before something vital way, way down in the original codebase can't work any more and you have to refactor the whole shebang from the ground up. Not doing so leaves you with a hacky mess of code that doesn't work the way it was originally intended (so you have to chase documentation tails when bug hunting - and you get some really spurious edge cases falling out of things), corresponding stability issues and an increased cost of maintenance. You spend more time fixing than you do innovating.
Does that mean Elite Dangerous dies and Elite V rises? Mmmmm. I'd say 'sort of, I think'. If I were FDev, I'd already be way into full redevelopment of the engine and core game systems design, especially if the original coders/designers are no longer in the company. Import the existing structures and play use cases onto the new system, sync it all up and a great many people might not even notice. The branding remains the same, player investment (and 'game state') is undamaged and those long time fans keep buying arx on what is effectively a new game that just happens to look very much like the old one, for a while at least. In short, to the end user it'd look like a patch the size of a new install (as assets likely would be refactored too).
But right now, I think the current Elite codebase has a very, very limited lifespan ahead of it.
Edit: @Agony_Aunt mentioned it - but yes, Star Citizen approached this (player separation from ship, ship 'ownership' vs 'authorisation' and so on) problem quite some time ago. They frankly went a little overboard with the implementation on many things in an attempt to future proof the systems to handle 'realistically'. Personally I think losing interial dampers or maglocks on cargo and getting smashed into a wall or crushed by a floating crate against a wall during ship maneuvers, though 'realistic', does not sound fun. Or getting asphyxiated because the CO2 scrubbers aren't working any more. Again, yeah, perhaps realistic, perhaps even fun to do to an enemy, but overall, perhaps one step too far. Anyway, it's not an easy or trivial problem to tackle.
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