Why is ship interiors something that is not planned to be included if at least half the player base wants it?

To be honest I thought it was in the original ship design of elite dangerous.
I remember seeing a David B stream, he talked about it on there.

He even said we would be able to hide on someone's ship while they took off.

Your parents told you santa was real when you were a kid too.

kickstarter was a lot of child-like whimsy to get you excited about life. You're an adult now ....that's all dead.
 
I think the real reason they don't want to do ship interiors isn't just that it's a huge amount of work for the art team (they essentially have to build 36 "Levels" inside a very limited space) but it's also because it'll slow down any future ship development, as now you have to conceptualize, build and text both the function, exterior and interior of a new ship.

However, some benefits to being this thorough would be that you don't just create player ship interiors, but you also end up creating 36 + new "Levels" for POI/Salvage style gameplay as well. I'm not gonna lie, when I visited the crashed anaconda during the recent Salvation CG, I couldn't help but think how cool it would be if this was like being used as a base for smugglers/raiders/pirates, and having to go through the ship and clear it out, like an RPG dungeon.

It's hard to slow down 0.
 
Your parents told you santa was real when you were a kid too.

kickstarter was a lot of child-like whimsy to get you excited about life. You're an adult now ....that's all dead.

I don't like holding developers accountable for every wild-eyed fantasy they may envision. Games are, if not art, at least are an artistic process, and often the people who make them have wild dreams untainted by the cold harsh reality of tool and technology limitations.

This is kind of a rude analogy, but imagine a child having dreams of being an Olympic Sprinter, only to suffer a massive spinal injury later. In this case, the Spinal injury is the Cobra Engine. Now, it's not impossible to become an Olympic Sprinter with a spinal injury, it's just real hard.
 
I understand what you're trying to say, ultimately this is a glorified spaceflight trucking simulator, there is no real 'gameplay' as much as people may think there is. So the more you can up the sim part of the game the better, it's their wheelhouse and they should have stayed there. The 'gameplay' to a lot of people is the tedious part of the game.
 
To be honest I thought it was in the original ship design of elite dangerous.
I remember seeing a David B stream, he talked about it on there.

He even said we would be able to hide on someone's ship while they took off.
Yep correct, the same with "big game hunting" etc... Sadly DBOBE said a lot of things that were part of his "vision" for ED, that the dev team simply cannot produce. Maybe that's due to them backing themselves in to a corner with the Cobra engine, or it's just a lack of talent, who knows hey :/
 
I bet its sitting there waiting to be used, and some dude has convinced dev team nobody wants it.

Its no different to walking around a settlement. If you think about it, open a door and have rooms
 
@OP: playing devils advocate here I think it will arrive BUT not at present, it's not even on the roadmap plans for this season. When fdev do see it's on the plan then you can be sure we will hear from it as it would be a huge selling point.

Maybe fdev want to get it all working right before adding in the ability to walk into an airlock and accidentally space your character, imagine the salt planet for that one ;)
 
I think personaly that having ship interiors is nearly impossible. Modelling, coding, designing, ... something that big for all the ships is like making a whole new game. They probably had to prioritise and chose on foot and athmospheric landing over ship interior. And that makes perfect sense. Like they previously said, modelling some of the ships is like modelling an entire level in a game. So bottom line, it's too hard.

Actually, it's almost trivial. You have a contest to get people in the community to do ship X. You give people rewards for doing the models. 1st, 2nd, 3rd, whatever. All submissions are the property of FDev, blah blah. You take the best pieces of all the designs and have one of your graphics guys merge them. You put the winner's names on parts in the ship. Just needs a bit of imagination.

Instead, we have flappy paddles on launch pads.
 
OK Here's the low hanging fruit.

Ship bridges are already modeled.

On ship game play involving ship bridges could include the following:

Comms and Sensor Seated Bridge Station


1) One of the secondary seated positions is a comms and sensor station that allows enhanced communications and sensor function.

a) The comms and sensor station could allow a player to access the mission board, authority, cartographics, etc. from outside the station (within 5km).

b) The comms and sensor station could allow a multicrew member to operate the FSS, or surface probes while at full supercruise speed, or perform a system ping that yields a data set equivalent to scanning a nav beacon.

c) The comms and sensor station could be used to activate and scan data beacons in settlements from a greater range.

d) The comms and sensor station could be used to guide limpets to specific targets without limpet loss after target retrieval or use.

e) The comms and sensor station could have control of chaff, ECM, Thargoid field neutralizers, and add a buff to those functions.

Operations Seated Bridge Station

1) One of the secondary seated positions is an operations position that can manage resources to temporarily enhance or modify ship function.

a) The ops station could use use ship fuel reserves to synthesize module and power plant repairs on the ship.

b) The ops station could use ship fuel reserves or module integrity to enhance local speeds.

c) The ops station could use ship fuel reserves or module integrity to increase supercruise acceleration, deceleration or maximum velocity.

d) The ops station could be used to synthesize ammo at reduced cost, or with a damage buff.

e) The ops station could be used in its current multicrew function to run an SLF or turreted weapons.

Repel Boarders or Hi-Jack an NPC Ship

Through clever use of fade to black , enemies have cracked the door to the bridge after a successful interdiction and an unseen EVA. A secondary interdiction minigame will determine if you avoid or are succesful in your EVA.

1) An elevator-like prechamber, (could be ubiquitous like the concourse, or crafted by ship manufacturer) rotates open and 1-3 NPCs or you and your team spill onto the already modeled bridge of the ship. A close quarters fire fight ensues.

a) Do you repel the boarders and keep your ship?

b) Do you get killed and your body gets spaced (sent to the rebuy screen)?

c) Do you commandeer the ship and sell it for credits or salvage it for mats?
 
Yep correct, the same with "big game hunting" etc... Sadly DBOBE said a lot of things that were part of his "vision" for ED, that the dev team simply cannot produce. Maybe that's due to them backing themselves in to a corner with the Cobra engine, or it's just a lack of talent, who knows hey :/

Realistically they aren't far away from adding big game hunting if they wanted. I mean, we have legs, we have guns, and FD can do animals (Planet Zoo etc), so create some custom animals, have them spawn on a few planets, make them killable and harvestable for whatever (organs, meat?) and bingo, you have big game hunting.

A lot easier than ship interiors.
 
Hunting is definitely something that could be added relatively easily to Elite with the current tech. All they need are the environments for them. The engine already allows the player to walk and shoot on foot and it supports the scattering of vegetation all over the planet as well as the spawning of NPCs to locations. That's all you need for a "hunting experience".

But the ship interiors are pretty different, though I do think many people, FD included are thinking about it from a too big angle. If it be me, I'd just scale down on what people can actually access in ships, at least at first. You'd have a cockpit, already done and some sort of passageway, that leads to exits and on a limited amount of living/recreational areas, depending on the ship size. So, basically a corridor or an elevator with a lot of closed doors.
Rest could be added in piece meal when resources would allow it. There's no need to do it all at once.

That said, if the interiors eventually come, won't change my life in one way or another.
 
Put a system in place, a "market" if you will, and let the player base create, and "sell" (for ARX or real money) interiors you can buy and put into your ship. Expand that to planetary installations, station rooms, corridors, dare I say, even ships!

Now Frontier doesn't have to "do" anything except provide a style guide to content creators and moderate the items. Step back, let the free money roll in (from content creator "license subscriptsion", ARX purchases with real money) and let the players do all the hard work, AND THANK FRONTIER FOR IT.

It worked for the Sims, it worked for Star Trek Online, it works for Flight Sim 2020, it worked for any number of other games that officially allow mods or other 3rd party customizations.

Frontier will never do this however, they have an iron grip on their game to the point of a strangulating the player base at times (HUD color customizations), but it's nice to imagine.
 
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However, I don't think they can technically do it, with the amount of swappable interior components, it would be way too much to design model and texture all the different combinations (I don't think a lot of the modules would even fit into the current ship models) You wouldn't be able to fit the same passenger modules into a python that you would into a beluga, never mind the technical issues of walking around a ship in a Haz rez in the middle of a battle or getting out of your ship onto a planet etc. I don't think it's technically possible in this current build of the game.
It's not that, designing a structure that would allow for modular rooms is possible and all the technical issues are ultimately solvable, it's just that it would involve too much work.

A telling comment from FDev was the 'escape' scenario whereby going from a ship entrance to the cockpit would add little other than waste a players time, especially if they were looking to take off from a location quickly. While this doesn't seem to bother FDev too much where it comes to the time wasted walking to and from a ship in hangers, if all ship interiors are is a generic series of rooms with no purpose, then there is an element of truth in it. So even if they were to introduce ship interiors, my guess is that they would only do the bare minimum. So no internal ship repairs, no hostile boarding combat, no specialized rooms such as labs - just empty, generic fluff.

It would be in keeping with the overall game, where a minimum is done to flesh game play out, instead relying on grind to keep the players busy. So they're right when they say it would add little to game play, if they don't bother to develop anything other than the bare minimum.
 
Realistically they aren't far away from adding big game hunting if they wanted. I mean, we have legs, we have guns, and FD can do animals (Planet Zoo etc), so create some custom animals, have them spawn on a few planets, make them killable and harvestable for whatever (organs, meat?) and bingo, you have big game hunting.

A lot easier than ship interiors.
Hum... from this pov, hunting is already here. We can chase human for bounty 🤷‍♂️
 
I'd just be happy with the same system they use in X4. You enter in through the bottom of your big ship and take an elevator to the bridge. Even just the bridge and a hallway to an elevator is better than literally nothing. Anything small typically just has a ladder to the cockpit or a small set of stairs.
There's no need for every single room to be modeled unless they're used for something.
 
It's not that, designing a structure that would allow for modular rooms is possible and all the technical issues are ultimately solvable, it's just that it would involve too much work.

A telling comment from FDev was the 'escape' scenario whereby going from a ship entrance to the cockpit would add little other than waste a players time, especially if they were looking to take off from a location quickly. While this doesn't seem to bother FDev too much where it comes to the time wasted walking to and from a ship in hangers, if all ship interiors are is a generic series of rooms with no purpose, then there is an element of truth in it. So even if they were to introduce ship interiors, my guess is that they would only do the bare minimum. So no internal ship repairs, no hostile boarding combat, no specialized rooms such as labs - just empty, generic fluff.

It would be in keeping with the overall game, where a minimum is done to flesh game play out, instead relying on grind to keep the players busy. So they're right when they say it would add little to game play, if they don't bother to develop anything other than the bare minimum.
I understand that it could be solved, my point was I don't think they can do it without a complete overhaul of the system, the problem is they built all these models already. It would be hard to have a ship launched fighter in possibly three different tiers on the same ship- So my tier 5 slot could be a fighter hanger, a cargo hold a passenger cabin, shield generator, shield reinforcement or a hull package. My level 7 could also be the same, is that in a different spot? or is it just a bigger version of the thing?
Here it is on a type 10 regardless of the level of fighter bay, where is my other fighter in this bay? What if I want to change this out for a passenger cabin or a cargo hold?
It would be a huge mess to figure out all the combinations for every ship--the only reason star citizen works is because you can't do any module swapping, the ship is the ship.
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I understand that it could be solved, my point was I don't think they can do it without a complete overhaul of the system, the problem is they built all these models already. It would be hard to have a ship launched fighter in possibly three different tiers on the same ship- So my tier 5 slot could be a fighter hanger, a cargo hold a passenger cabin, shield generator, shield reinforcement or a hull package. My level 7 could also be the same, is that in a different spot? or is it just a bigger version of the thing?
Here it is on a type 10 regardless of the level of fighter bay, where is my other fighter in this bay? What if I want to change this out for a passenger cabin or a cargo hold?
It would be a huge mess to figure out all the combinations for every ship--the only reason star citizen works is because you can't do any module swapping, the ship is the ship.
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Since they're modules with specific class sizes, it shouldn't be too hard. All of the same module class should be the same size and shape. The trick would be how to arrange the optional module blocks in relation to a halway or hallways and external access. Like all cargo racks would need tubing access to the hatch, and all bays would need a means to transport vehichles to the drop hatch. So there needs to be space between modules to allow the "plumbing".

Even if you have more than one vehicle bay, the bay just holds it. When launching, it moves to the drop hatch. And all cargo bays use the one hatch. And the hatches don't move.

The hardest part is tetrising the slots to make sense in each ship. Then you only have to make one model for each module.

Realistically, only the cabins would need doorways and models since we're pilots not engineers. The amfu does all the repairing. The rest would be inaccessible labeled bulkheads. They're not rooms, their pieces of machinery stuffed in a hole.
 
I understand that it could be solved, my point was I don't think they can do it without a complete overhaul of the system, the problem is they built all these models already. It would be hard to have a ship launched fighter in possibly three different tiers on the same ship- So my tier 5 slot could be a fighter hanger, a cargo hold a passenger cabin, shield generator, shield reinforcement or a hull package. My level 7 could also be the same, is that in a different spot? or is it just a bigger version of the thing?
Actually I agree with you, but was adding that even if they did do a complete overhaul of the system, ship interiors would still require a bit more content than simply empty halls that serve no purpose. Either way there's a lot of work in it, even without the need for a complete overhaul and I don't think FDev have the desire or resources to take on such a workload.
 
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