Space legs isn't "difficult", in any real sense. Nor is all the stuff that goes around it. "Difficulty" is NOT the reason we can't get up from the pilot's chair and walk around yet.
We have the pilot model, customizable with deformers and alternate skins to give us holo-me. The evidence for this next part is a little sketchy but if that model isn't already fully rigged and capable of being animated I'll eat my remlok.
Making the scenery to walk around IN, aboard your ship and within the station isn't "hard" - and some of it has clearly already been done given the "interesting" viewpoints some folks have achieved by piloting their camera into odd places. It is, however, time-consuming. Seriously time-consuming. Stations, settlements, outposts and megaships are easy. There's a reason that when Star Trek needed a low-budget episode it happened in caves or entirely aboard the ships. Creating a "set" with 3d modeling is no different, if it's all interior/technological it's a lot easier and takes a lot less time than an organic environment.
Similarly wrapping the code around moving through that set isn't "hard" either, it just takes a lot of man-hours.
Right now, with "what it's possible to do in the game", space-legs isn't worth Frontier's time.
When we have worlds we can land on with breathable atmospheres and a biosphere to explore, when there are not just sealed settlements but cities on worlds that we can land on, then space-legs will potentially be a thing. Not before.
We have the pilot model, customizable with deformers and alternate skins to give us holo-me. The evidence for this next part is a little sketchy but if that model isn't already fully rigged and capable of being animated I'll eat my remlok.
Making the scenery to walk around IN, aboard your ship and within the station isn't "hard" - and some of it has clearly already been done given the "interesting" viewpoints some folks have achieved by piloting their camera into odd places. It is, however, time-consuming. Seriously time-consuming. Stations, settlements, outposts and megaships are easy. There's a reason that when Star Trek needed a low-budget episode it happened in caves or entirely aboard the ships. Creating a "set" with 3d modeling is no different, if it's all interior/technological it's a lot easier and takes a lot less time than an organic environment.
Similarly wrapping the code around moving through that set isn't "hard" either, it just takes a lot of man-hours.
Right now, with "what it's possible to do in the game", space-legs isn't worth Frontier's time.
When we have worlds we can land on with breathable atmospheres and a biosphere to explore, when there are not just sealed settlements but cities on worlds that we can land on, then space-legs will potentially be a thing. Not before.
With the upcoming squadrons feature, even a basic space legs implementation, where you get to say only walk in a station lounge, interacting with other commanders, or even NPCs, would be great. Walking in your ships too, even better!
Elite basically needs space bars, the best part in all space fiction
How the riff raff in this game survived that long without them is .. well, beyond me
Imagine the black market being a bar, with shady characters giving you illegal missions and buying your hot cargo. It s just a glorified GUI, but it would make for great immersion.
Elite basically needs space bars, the best part in all space fiction
How the riff raff in this game survived that long without them is .. well, beyond me Imagine the black market being a bar, with shady characters giving you illegal missions and buying your hot cargo. It s just a glorified GUI, but it would make for great immersion.
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I think you've misread what I've been saying. I don't expect FD to actually develop anything meaningful to go with space legs. I just want to walk around in my ship, sit down and interact with consoles, and occasionally leave the ship with a laser pistol or rifle the same as I would do with the SRV. I don't expect any real gameplay to go with it. I don't even expect FD to give us a minimum viable product verson of space legs so describing the various types of gameplay I would like to see for a proper version of space legs is completely irrelevant here. My point here is that even a minimum viable product version of space legs would be a worthwhile addition to the game, exactly the same as how the SRV has added to the gameplay experience despite not having any meaningful content to go with it. Even in such a rudimentary form FD would probably make an absolute fortune selling meaningless cosmetic items such as space suits and accessories, not to mention unique weapon designs even if there is no functional benefit.
If you're asking what could be done to make space legs worthwhile from a gameplay perspective, that is a completely separate issue. To start to answer that you really need to take a look at what Star Citizen is doing. Your character has a full range of weapons and armor, repair tools, medical gear, they can ride bikes and operate ground vehicles, they can interact with NPCs for missions and so on. You could make it as detailed and immersive as you want, the only limitation here is development resources. I don't expect any of these things in an Elite version of space legs however becuase FD would never put that level of resources into the game.
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But what are you going to do in a Space Bar?
Emote and use the chatbox? Draw weapons and shoot each other? Perhaps - but I expect the station would take umbrage and vapourise you with the main station guns - you and everyone else in the bar, just in case
Get incredibly blootered and attempt to outdo the Drunks of Sol at single malts? You'll have a fuzzy screen shader, an empty wallet, and wake up in a Starter Sidey in Eravate with your controls reversed and your screen inverted for a week
It could certainly be done, and it could certainly be fun, but the development required would be essentially making a whole new game.
Emote and use the chatbox? Draw weapons and shoot each other? Perhaps - but I expect the station would take umbrage and vapourise you with the main station guns - you and everyone else in the bar, just in case
Get incredibly blootered and attempt to outdo the Drunks of Sol at single malts? You'll have a fuzzy screen shader, an empty wallet, and wake up in a Starter Sidey in Eravate with your controls reversed and your screen inverted for a week
It could certainly be done, and it could certainly be fun, but the development required would be essentially making a whole new game.
Well, it's obviously feasible, the real question is not "can it be done?", but rather "what would they do with it?". If it's not serving a practical application, then Frontier probably won't be putting the time and resources into developing it. As much as I'd absolutely love to wander around my ships, and believe me I'd be the first one to celebrate the ability to do so, there needs to be a game-play reason beyond "oh look, how cool is this!".
This is the thing I find most frustrating.
Obviously we'd all like, ultimately, to take part in large-scale FPS battles inside the habitat ring of an Orbis station, raid pirate stations or get involved in ED's version of "Alien: Isolation" inside a surface base but if there's one thing FDEv should know about their customers, by now, it's that we're a patient bunch.
If they create the mechanics for basic FPSing and then bung in some basic gameplay involving, say, creeping around surface bases to steal datapads out of offices, shut down a sensor array or whatever, I think the majority of players would be happy with that... as a first step.
Course, if there's one thing we should know about FDev, by now, it's that they have a habit of implementing "placeholders" and then not really improving them afterwards.
FDev would need to gain the trust of the community that any primary implementation of space-legs was just a first step and it would continue to evolve.
Drink Space Beer.
No one who actually plays Elite would ever believe this because we have never seen FD actually do this with any gameplay feature in the 3.5 years since launch. We haven't gotten any expansion of the SRV gameplay whatsoever, and it's a very popular feature that many players use regularly. We haven't gotten any expansion of the multicrew features whatsoever, and it has been complained about regularly on the forums. Basically every single gameplay feature has been frozen in minimum viable product form. Whatever we get in terms of gameplay when a feature is launched is basically as good as it's going to get other than possibly minor bug fixes (if we even get those). I don't think anyone expects space legs to be "developed" in any meaningful way. They just want to see it implemented in some form, any form, that would add to the immersion and overall gameplay experience.
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This is mostly true so far, but we do know that exploration and mining (and along with them, multi-crew) will be receiving some major love soon.
It remains to be seen what FD considers an "improvement" however. The redesign of C&P and the Engineers rework in 3.0 were both terrible. They didn't actually develop or add to the existing gameplay, they simply replaced basic boring game mechanics with slightly more complicated but even worse game mechanics. The issue here is that FD seems to confuse "complexity" with meaningful gameplay and the two generally have nothing to do with each other. Some of the best gameplay mechanics are often elegant and straightforward while some of the worst gameplay mehcanics are often complex and unintuitive. If FD can actually improve exploration and mining, that would be great, but I have zero faith in this happening after seeing what they recently did to C&P and Engineers. I suspect both exploration and mining will become more complex but I have zero expectation that they will be better and would not be surprized at all if they ended up worse than they currently are.
Fortunately I have been really enjoying the Krait so at least there's that.
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How many game developers have to deal maps size of planets times about a trillion, all procedurally generated, all of them have to hold up to looking good in first person, all of them having to work 100% perfectly, you got have collision box and scale sorted out well? There Hello world and that it and there a lot of fudges in that game.
You also need detail models of all the ships interiors. You need to produce detail layouts of interior station, outposts, cities on the ground. These will need to add another layer of procedural generation on top of those so they don't all look the same.
I could go on and on and on and on and on about what needed for just version 1 of legs, in fact a design document for this could easily run into 20 or 30 a4 pages and you still probably wouldn't be done. It technically complex, it design, artistic resource extensive, it nearly a whole other game one that many would consider more complex than a space simulator.
You don't think they simplified the engineering process?
NMS is the far better game at the moment though, and it stands to pull even further ahead when NEXT releases in July.
Space legs has been considered from the very get go. They even designed the interior of the ships with it in mind.
No, I don't think they've simplified it at all. Compared to the prior system they've made it needlessly complex instead of building on some of the strengths of the original Engineering system. You now need to progress each individual mod through all five grades, collecting separate mats for each, every time you want to generate a G5 roll. I have a stockpile of G5 efficient beam lasers (legacy mods) and each of them took only a single roll to craft. That is dramatically simpler and more elegant than incrementally progressing through G1-G5. There's also the issue that the progression uses RNG to determine how much of the progress bar you fill at each grade. Plus there's a separate set of mats for experimental effects, some of which duplicate prior legacy mod experimentals and some of which are entirely new. Even their attempts to add "useful" features were terrible and far more complicated than they needed to be. The mat brokers could have been great but the upward trading ratios are excessive and you have to locate three separate brokers because they can each only trade a particular type of material for you. That requires travel time to visit each type of broker, plus you need to guess how many mats you might need for each type since the G1-G5 upgrade path uses RNG to gate progression through the grades. They even gave us a nearly useless feature by adding the ability to use a pinned blueprint to generate mods remotely but limited it to Engineering rolls that don't involve experimental effects, which basically makes it a useless feature for almost all mods you would actually want to craft.
Engineers is currently a complicated, ridiculous mess of a system and other than some G1 power plant mods and the new power distributor on my Krait I've avoided using it entirely since 3.0 launched. I still use legacy mods on all of my ships because I can't be bothered to start a new Engineering grind all over again, only to wonder when FD might nerf, change or replace it in some way. At least my legacy mods are going to be left the way they are and there are some mods I have that actually provide certain advantages over the current system. Overall my ships are less powerful than they would be if I re-engineered them but I honestly can't be bothered to put any significant amount of time into Elite any longer. The only reason players have "accepted" the new Engineering system at all is simply because the new blueprint ranges are ludicrously powerful and strongly favor new players who have a much shorter guaranteed grind path to upgrade their ships. Players who used the older legacy system have been thrown under the bus with second-rate mods and now have no real incentive to throw any more time into a new grind. If FD had simply made some basic improvements to the existing system, such as adding the materials broker to help with obtaining certain mats, that would have built on the prior system instead of reinventing everything and would have preserved the massive efforts that players had already put into the prior system.
The problem here was that FD insisted on adding an entirely new grind and mistakenly thought they were "improving" a system without even properly understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the system they were replacing. I expect that it will be the same with exploration and mining as I seriously doubt that anyone at FD spends any time actually doing either of these activities. In fact I would be shocked if anyone at FD has actually been to SagA and if they haven't even done that they have no business trying to "improve" the existing exploration gameplay. They will probably rely on "metrics" to help determine how players "should" be playing the game instead of properly understanding how the gameplay needs to be improved.
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Space legs isn't difficult.
As with almost everything that's proposed for this game, it seems extreme examples are the most prominent used in argument, however.
Either it's Space Barbie with no "meaning", or it's "Second Life in Spaceships". Seems there are a ton of people who can't seem to think in shades of gray or various flavor.
It's OK though, because once it becomes reality I'm sure it will be optional gameplay for them regardless.
As with almost everything that's proposed for this game, it seems extreme examples are the most prominent used in argument, however.
Either it's Space Barbie with no "meaning", or it's "Second Life in Spaceships". Seems there are a ton of people who can't seem to think in shades of gray or various flavor.
It's OK though, because once it becomes reality I'm sure it will be optional gameplay for them regardless.
The reason for this is because every new "feature" we've gotten from FD so far has been on one extreme end of the spectrum, i.e., a "minimum viable product". So really any discussion of space legs that doesn't start with the assumption that it will be a minimum viable product (and also assumes that this is how the feature will remain indefinitely after launch) isn't a particularly useful discussion. Suggesting that space legs could be anything else would basically be ignoring the past 3.5 years of "development" effort we've seen with Elite so far since launch.
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It is t the legs, OP. It's making sure that there are interesting things to do with them.
Having little imagination, myself, anything outside of pew I can't really think of
Having little imagination, myself, anything outside of pew I can't really think of