Why is 'space legs' so technically difficult?

[ilo]

Yes, i'll ask why they haven't introduced 0g into their wild west game. ������������

Carefull, they might answer you it is not a 'spaceships' game..

You're boring me. Ignored from now on.

If you wait 5 more minutes I can give you the answer you are expecting!!!

 

[Bunkerkind Anni]

given how difficulty it was for FDEV to implement Multicrew with telepresence, and seeing how WELL they did it,
i doubt that "walking around" is far from an easy task, no matter how trivial it may look to some here

 

[TheMegaTurnip]

I cannot beleive this same dense question keeps being repeadtedly asked. It would involve building a whole new game engine and making that stable and fuctional, then having to go through the arduous task of trying to tie it into the current engine. No matter how you look at that its a big task. Especially when the project has coding that is suspected to be tangled, at best.

If they do it, it'll be paid content because otherwise there is simply no way they could justify the time and effort of doing it.

Personally I'd rather see a stable game with what we have, including atmospheric landings, long before space legs. If you want space sims, Star Citizen might be more up your street. Without essentially a whole new game being bolted into it, I don't see "Space legs" being a worthwhile addition in the least. More than likely it will just end up as a social lounge and yet more timesink tripe where it becomes mandatory to walk for 15 minutes accross the station to reach the dock. Yeah. No. This game does'nt need any more meaningless filler and thats likely all it would turn out to be.

 

[Vardaugas]

What we may see in the foreseeable future is NPCs ambulating around places as background addition, breathing some life into the environments. Then we'll get loads of threads about "if they can walk, why can't we?".

 

[Rafe Zetter]

I don't get it. It's not as if walking around with a first-person view ground-breaking in the video game industry. I would have thought by 2018 most developers would be able to do it quite easily.

It's simple.

Right now most of what you see in the verse is 2d.

It might LOOK 3d, but in reality apart from collision boxes, it's all just 2d representations, they have no "depth" - they are all empty boxes.

Spacelegs would require that all those things you can see, that can be interacted with, be made whole - having an "inside" that corresponds to the visual you see outside.

To be done to any degree that players would resonably accept - all small ground based structures would have to be built from the inside out - all space stations would have to have a resonable amount of explorable areas, and far more than just the landing pad and a trading post.

Larger ground based structures such as MIGHT arrive IF atmospheric landings ever appears would also need a good sized area to walk around in.

All of those assets takes a considerable amount of time, skill and more importantly resources to develop.

Anyone who's familiar with SC's dev diaries regarding this would understand why I doubt FDev will ever produce anything significant to make "space legs" anything other than a very basic experience.

I've said elsewhere I doubt they would do much more than allow you to leave your ship, but only have the landing pad and a trading post area to walk around, and all of the rest of the enourmous space stations remain completely off limits.

 

[Ralph Vargr]

I think the real reason why certain players are suggesting it's "too difficult" or "requires too much content" or similar claims is quite simply because they have finally realized that we're not getting space legs, in any form, and it's easier to pretend it's not feasible than to admit that FD simply isn't willing to develop Elite properly. Unfortunately the idea that it couldn't easily be done isn't a remotely logical claim as FD could develop a minimum viable product version of space legs for relatively little effort, especially since they already have cockpit interiors and holo me avatars, but it's been repeated so often about the "technical challenges" on the forums that some people have come to accept it as credible.

Heretic! Burn the (redacted)!

It ain't worth the money and dev time, for the return they would get.

 

[Ralph Vargr]

I think legs failed in EVE because it's a lot closer to an RTS that it is to an FPS. EVE players are used to moving groups of units around, so being confined to moving just one person (not even a single starship) would feel extremely limiting to them. Elite is different, because even though there's no practical difference between the ship and the pilot, you are always in control of your own unit and only that.

Please ask CCP how much they spent on legs, and then why they cancelled it.

And Elite will never give the player agency that EVE does.

Fair comment.

I suppose what I really meant was that the ability to participate in stuff like that would indicate that space-legs had "arrived" as a mature technology.

The thing I find frustrating is that FDev really should be able to implement all this stuff (any stuff) incrementally and players should be happy to see it happen.
The problem is that FDev do have a habit of implementing "MVP" things and then failing to develop them meaningfully afterwards, so players have learned to be cynical about an initial implementation that isn't superb.

As I've said before, if all FDev did was create interiors and doors for the buildings of the generic surface outposts and then gave us missions which required us to search those buildings and retrieve a randomly placed datapad (or whatever) I'd be okay with that as long as I could be confident that was just an initial implementation of the feature.

I think there's a couple of different things to consider with space-legs and, ironically, the vast majority of it would be really easy but there's a tiny minority of things that would be overwhelmingly difficult.
What I mean is, most of the galaxy is "dead" or, at most, only includes tiny surface installations.
It's going to be fairly straightforward to allow a player to walk around in those places - although creating things for them to do is a different matter, of course.
But then there's space-stations and large surface installations.
Just mapping those is going to be tough and getting to a point where a player could be walking around inside one while another player, outside, could look through a window and see players inside is going to be a total nightmare.

And then there's the issue of populating these places, where a similar issue arises.
With most of the galaxy being dead, and most locations being deliberately abandoned, there's no need to worry about providing NPCs.
At stations and functional outposts (even the tiny generic ones) there probably should be NPCs around.
We don't even have NPC SRVs in the game yet so there's probably a loooong way to go before FDev might even think about putting animated NPCs into the game.

Long version: Frontier will not spend the money for hand-created content.

 

[Cosmo]

Please ask CCP how much they spent on legs, and then why they cancelled it.

And Elite will never give the player agency that EVE does.

Long version: Frontier will not spend the money for hand-created content.

CCP cancelled it because of all the backlash when it was first introduced. Eve Online fans never asked for EVA. When they implemented the basic walk around in and outside the station apartment, they didn't bother to develop it any further.

CCP didn't completely abandon EVA, because they released Dust 514 which is a team-based shooter. Now they're working on a sequel. The unfortunate part is that is not fully integrated with Eve Online. There's no seamless transition.

The player base of Elite Dangerous is different. Because many people want EVA and it's a planned feature as per the Roadmap of Frontier.

Many people who play ED once played or followed Star Citizen. Lots more would switch from SC to ED if we had EVA. A substantial amount of people haven't bought ED, because they're waiting for EVA.

 

[Ralph Vargr]

I never said 'easy'.

Planetary landings were rolled out 3 years ago. I sincerely hope it's still not in progress as that really would be a poor indictment.

How long was everything Beige?

Just a question: If FDev did state the reason why Space Legs haven't appeared yet, would you believe them?

Harcourt Fenton Mudd approves of this statement.

 

[Ralph Vargr]

This thread has proven to me that FDev have done am awful job of explaining why they are taking this long to introduce certain developments. I'm sure there are reasons why they can't release it yet but no-one actually knows the answer. Everyone is guessing and making it up as they go along. No-one has been able to give anything close to an answer that actually resolves the question. That's fine - i don't know either. But the combination of wild conjecture with some just being rude and confrontational is a slightly disheartening insight into much of the ED player base. The fact there have been people prepared to disagree or offer thoughts respectfully does instils some faith though.

In summary, no-one knows why and ED won't tell us.

It's the eighteen minute hum on the tape that gets me...

CCP cancelled it because of all the backlash when it was first introduced. Eve Online fans never asked for EVA. When they implemented the basic walk around in and outside the station apartment, they didn't bother to develop it any further.

CCP didn't completely abandon EVA, because they released Dust 514 which is a team-based shooter. Now they're working on a sequel. The unfortunate part is that is not fully integrated with Eve Online. There's no seamless transition.

The player base of Elite Dangerous is different. Because many people want EVA and it's a planned feature as per the Roadmap of Frontier.

Many people who play ED once played or followed Star Citizen. Lots more would switch from SC to ED if we had EVA. A substantial amount of people haven't bought ED, because they're waiting for EVA.

If you say so, sir.

(Anyone who was ever in the military will understand)

 

[Ralph Vargr]

CCP cancelled it because of all the backlash when it was first introduced. Eve Online fans never asked for EVA. When they implemented the basic walk around in and outside the station apartment, they didn't bother to develop it any further.

CCP didn't completely abandon EVA, because they released Dust 514 which is a team-based shooter. Now they're working on a sequel. The unfortunate part is that is not fully integrated with Eve Online. There's no seamless transition.

The player base of Elite Dangerous is different. Because many people want EVA and it's a planned feature as per the Roadmap of Frontier.

Many people who play ED once played or followed Star Citizen. Lots more would switch from SC to ED if we had EVA. A substantial amount of people haven't bought ED, because they're waiting for EVA.

Did we ask for Engineers?

 

[Lightspeed]

The longer FD can keep the tease going about Legs, the longer it will.

We've seen enough already to know it's coming, but if they introduce it too early, the tease has gone and there are howls of derision about how there is no game play.

So, they either continue to develop it quietly, behind the scenes as it were, or we get a placeholder that too many will complain about. But now they are confident enough to show work in progress, aka Krait Cinematic Short.

 

[mmm]

The combination of space legs / planetary legs and a huge procedurally generated universe is the challenge. In my opinion, no game has yet done that right.

Because you don't need it. Just moving around on a planet is easy. Walking around in the ships is quite easy aswell. You'd just need to flesh out some rooms of the ship, add some animations for elevators and steps and that's it. The problem is the gameplay itself.
In my opinion, FD should start with just walking around and EVA. Then add some instanced rooms to the stations (bar, hangar, offices, black market dealers etc.pp. We don't need to physically go everywhere. That's the CIG approach, but it's way too much. Games have been cheating with instanced levels/area for years. No need to stop here. Remember freelancer? That was just pictures and it worked well.

But seeing FD struggle with implementing actual gameplay, I see where the problem is. It's not that it's technically difficult to do.

 

[Devari]

Ok, I think it's generally accepted that technically space legs are relatively simple to implement and it's the making it a meaningful, compelleing etc. experience that's the harder part.

But even with the most basic outline of it described above seems like an incredible amount of bucks for very little bang.

When people say "I just want to walk around in my ship..." that's not one ship; that is, as it stands today, 30 odd unique ship interiors (and possibly quite a few more by the time space legs does arrive) ranging from about the size of a house to absolutely huge that need to be created plus damage models for every interior... my mind is already starting to boggle.

When I look at the amazing job that has been done with the Krait cockpit (I think probably the best in the game as of now, great job FD) extending that amount of work and attention to detail to the interior of every ship seems like a monumental task all on its own, and that's just for walking around in, we haven't even got into adding any kind of interactivity or gameplay to it yet.

Doing all of this and not adding "any real gameplay to go with it" just seems like a total waste of time IMO.

I agree that making interiors for all the ships would be a massive undertaking, but I don't expect FD to do that either. I would just expect them to allow us to walk around the areas that have already been designed, i.e., ship cockpits, landing pads at stations and planetary locations. Essentially they would only need to animate the holo-me characters and allow them to move around areas that are already being rendered by the game engine. In fact the mobility that players have while in VR shows that they can move the player's camera anywhere within the cockpit as needed so we know it's feasible with the existing game engine already.

From a financial perspective the only real "investment" would be in creating the rudimentary fps model (which is basically just a laser pistol, health bar and hitbox) and design the system to create a "personal" instance for an existing ground or space station area where the player can walk around. Then FD would print money from players buying cosmetic items such as space suits, weapon skins, various types of gear that just has to look cool and so on. Players would of course complain about the "lack of content", and they would be right, but at least we would have space legs in some rudimentary form and FD would be making large stacks of cash from the store. It really would be a win-win situation for everyone. Unlike some of the earlier trailers the recent 3.1 cinematic trailer involving the Krait looks like it was made entirely using in-game assets (Krait bridge and holo-me avatars) so it definitely feasible, the only issue is whether anyone at FD could convince Braben that it would be profitable.

 

[Ralph Vargr]

Unlike some of the earlier trailers the recent 3.1 cinematic trailer involving the Krait looks like it was made entirely using in-game assets (Krait bridge and holo-me avatars) so it definitely feasible, the only issue is whether anyone at FD could convince Braben that it would be profitable.

If DB was at LaveCon, I'm sure he had it pitched to him by someone, right after they described their D&D character.

 

[Devari]

If DB was at LaveCon, I'm sure he had it pitched to him by someone, right after they described their D&D character.

The character's voiceover work in the trailer was actually surprisingly well done. Really evoked a classic Star Wars theme for the main character which seems to be exactly what they were going for. The best part here is that it didn't directly lift anything recognizable from another sci-fi series, it just evokes the theme quite heavily, and that is actually rather hard to do properly.

 

[Han Zulu]

I don't get it. It's not as if walking around with a first-person view ground-breaking in the video game industry. I would have thought by 2018 most developers would be able to do it quite easily.

Technically, it's not that difficult. Every game engine comes pre-loaded with first-person view. And Frontiers Cobra engine supports it as well and has been used in other games they've made.

The problem is rather:
1) content - all that design of things and objects, textures, bump-maps, and whatnots. It's quite a bit of work to do. And it has to be done for all the ships interior, all star ports, all land bases, etc. So it's not a short list of things.
2) game play - should it be just walking around and no interaction with the environment, other players, and/or NPCs, or should there be some actual things you can do besides walking around and looking? That takes a bit of thinking, planning, and working on as well.

--edit

3) VR - first person view in VR isn't always successful. There's still a lot of development going on to improve the experience in VR for first person games, and it's probably best to wait until the major issues are resolved (like nausea).

 

[zarrazee]

OP

Developing space legs might be "easy" for skilled programmers but it still takes an incredible amount of time, human resources and money. Not to mention all the gameplay that needs to be added.

 

[killminster]

I agree that making interiors for all the ships would be a massive undertaking, but I don't expect FD to do that either. I would just expect them to allow us to walk around the areas that have already been designed, i.e., ship cockpits, landing pads at stations and planetary locations. Essentially they would only need to animate the holo-me characters and allow them to move around areas that are already being rendered by the game engine. In fact the mobility that players have while in VR shows that they can move the player's camera anywhere within the cockpit as needed so we know it's feasible with the existing game engine already.

From a financial perspective the only real "investment" would be in creating the rudimentary fps model (which is basically just a laser pistol, health bar and hitbox) and design the system to create a "personal" instance for an existing ground or space station area where the player can walk around. Then FD would print money from players buying cosmetic items such as space suits, weapon skins, various types of gear that just has to look cool and so on. Players would of course complain about the "lack of content", and they would be right, but at least we would have space legs in some rudimentary form and FD would be making large stacks of cash from the store. It really would be a win-win situation for everyone. Unlike some of the earlier trailers the recent 3.1 cinematic trailer involving the Krait looks like it was made entirely using in-game assets (Krait bridge and holo-me avatars) so it definitely feasible, the only issue is whether anyone at FD could convince Braben that it would be profitable.

A rudimentary, minimum viable effort implementation designed to fill the pockets of the company is a win-win (for FD I guess)? I didn't realize the bar was set that low.

Actually, when you look at the competition...

 

[Asp Explorer]

A rudimentary, minimum viable effort implementation designed to fill the pockets of the company is a win-win (for FD I guess)? I didn't realize the bar was set that low.

Actually, when you look at the competition...

You have to peer down a very deep hole, and if you listen carefully, you can hear the faint noise of digging.