Why is 'space legs' so technically difficult?

[Cheapchips]

I have no idea what you think that video shows but I can 100% guarantee they did not unify the first and third-person perspective because there is no gaming engine that is capable of doing that without extensive customization. All existing fps engines other than StarEngine (i.e., Star Citizen's modified CryEngine build) relying on "cheating" where they show a highly distorted first-person view for the fps perspective and a completely separate third-person view to other players. In order to unify the two views requires a tremendous amount of work and literally no one other than the Star Citizen development team has even tried to do this.

Most games just don't bother trying to unify first and 3rd person animation. It's enough that what the player experiences in first person and what other players see is roughly similar. SC has to do a whole load of image stabilization to make the first person view palatable to the player. It sort of makes you wonder why they went through that effort.

There a whole raft of ways FDev can choose to implement their spacelegs first person view. Having your gun/hands in view generally requires some sort of 'cheat'.

Destiny for instance does a few interesting things. The centre of the image is slight offset, which broadens the FOV without fisheyeing the whole image. The player head/torso are attached to the camera. Only the player sees that version. The legs are not actually 'attached'. These are common to the player and other players (I think). There's a different 'common' torso that's viewed by other players.

These are the kind of things FDev have to iterate just for the straight forward walking around, before they even get to zerog/low g decisions.

 

[Julio Montega]

not that difficult egosoft is a small german software company look whats in the next parts of x comming this year, a view bugs will come too but they allways great at fixes.

If egosoft can do frontier can if they want

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuIeKMYaIAk

Did you play the origin of these "space legs" X-Rebirth?
It was so laggyly animated and didn't add anything to the game,
apart from eating your time, that later on menues got reintroduced
to not leave the ship.

It seems people want this as a feature, but what does it add?
Even if you do something like freelancer did, how often will you
look at your avatar walking to a bar or something before you want to skip animations?

Do you still enjoy not being able to skip the retraction animation of
hardpoints when you sell them?

 

[Devari]

Most games just don't bother trying to unify first and 3rd person animation. It's enough that what the player experiences in first person and what other players see is roughly similar. SC has to do a whole load of image stabilization to make the first person view palatable to the player. It sort of makes you wonder why they went through that effort.

There a whole raft of ways FDev can choose to implement their spacelegs first person view. Having your gun/hands in view generally requires some sort of 'cheat'.

Destiny for instance does a few interesting things. The centre of the image is slight offset, which broadens the FOV without fisheyeing the whole image. The player head/torso are attached to the camera. Only the player sees that version. The legs are not actually 'attached'. These are common to the player and other players (I think). There's a different 'common' torso that's viewed by other players.

These are the kind of thinks FDev have to iterate just for the straight forward walking around, before they even get to zerog/low g decisions.

For most games there's no need to even try to unify the first and third-person perspectives but I think many players have no idea how difficult this actually is from a technical perspective. Star Citizen struggled for several years to do this because Chris Roberts insisted on it and wasn't going to compromise. Until they achieved it the requirement was dramatically bottlenecking progress but it was absolutely essential for Star Citizen to work properly. It was the same issue with overlapping physics grids and that is something that Star Citizen has made a lot of progress on but hasn't yet solved completely. It's also something that most games don't even bother doing because it's much easier to "cheat" in some way but again it was absolutely essential for Star Citizen to function properly.

For Elite they wouldn't have to fix any of those challenging development hurdles, they would just need to animate the holo-me avatars, set up a basic hitbox and fps UI. It really wouldn't take a lot of effort but there would need to be a deliberate decision by FD to put the resources into developing it. I think it would more than pay for itself simply from the potential for cosmetic items in the store and in that sense I'm rather surprised it isn't a priority for them. For many Elite players simply walking around the ship's cockpit and around the station landing pads would be enough to justify cosmetic purchases.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

My point here is that there is really nothing in the trailer to suggest this. All we know is that they appear to have used the Krait bridge and holo-me avatars but beyond that we have no reason to believe they used the game engine to render the cinematic trailer at all.

And no reason to think otherwise.

You seem to be rejecting any evidence that goes against what you personally want to believe here. That's hardly an objective or logical position to take on the issue.

There is no real hard evidence, only snippets of facts that can interpretted in different ways. All we are doing is guess work and speculation.

 

[Noddie]

With respect, there's an assumption in the question that may not be correct. Space legs wouldn't be technically difficult and i'm sure the talented folks at FD could do it. They're just chosing other things right now;

I'm guessing it's three things.

1/ few assets from the existing game could be re-used. Essentially you'd be making an entirely new game. Of course you could just allow people to walk around the existing ship interiors - but then that wouldn't be much fun. And if they did that, many people would moan that it wasn't that brilliant and they'd been ripped off and so on and so forth.

2/ It's a space-sim, not an FPS. It's a game about flying space-ships. A lot of vocal people want space legs, but i'm not sure that many players do and the time invested into space legs would not be better spent on expanding the ship-flying game play. If they make space legs a thing it can only be at the expense of not improving or implementing other things.

3/ I think people imagine that space legs would make the game like actually being there. But you must remember the game is procedurally generated with only limited assets who's variability must be constrained to avoid unforeseen problems. So you'd probably end up with something remarkably like no-mans sky where you essentially replaced the current menus in the stations with a walkabout. Rather than clicking on things in the menus you'd walk down a corridor to a office for some potted dialog - which would become tedious after the first few times you read it (like "Tasty, Tasty Cargo") and most players would quickly roll back to the menus.

As I say, I'm sure they could do "something", but I don't think they want to either bolt on a FPS or replace menus with a walkabout. The Walkabout is going to get tedious and if people wanted an FPS they'd have bought one.

 

[Devari]

And no reason to think otherwise.

It's much easier to use the 3d model assets and create a separate cinematic trailer than it is to try to get the game engine to render a cinematic trailer if the capability doesn't yet exist in the game. That alone should tell you that the Krait trailer most likely has nothing at all to do with space legs.

There is no real hard evidence, only snippets of facts that can interpretted in different ways. All we are doing is guess work and speculation.

I'm sorry but a quoted interview by Braben and every single video he's made about Elite are not open to "interpretation" and don't require any "guess work and speculation" to understand. They are what he has literally said about the game and can be very easily understood.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

It's much easier to use the 3d model assets and create a separate cinematic trailer than it is to try to get the game engine to render a cinematic trailer if the capability doesn't yet exist in the game. That alone should tell you that the Krait trailer most likely has nothing at all to do with space legs.



I'm sorry but a quoted interview by Braben and every single video he's made about Elite are not open to "interpretation" and don't require any "guess work and speculation" to understand. They are what he has literally said about the game and can be very easily understood.

Again, more black and white thinking.

 

[Devari]

Again, more black and white thinking.

It's called Occam's Razor.

 

[Marra Morgan]

With respect, there's an assumption in the question that may not be correct. Space legs wouldn't be technically difficult and i'm sure the talented folks at FD could do it. They're just chosing other things right now;

I'm guessing it's three things.

1/ few assets from the existing game could be re-used. Essentially you'd be making an entirely new game. Of course you could just allow people to walk around the existing ship interiors - but then that wouldn't be much fun. And if they did that, many people would moan that it wasn't that brilliant and they'd been ripped off and so on and so forth.

2/ It's a space-sim, not an FPS. It's a game about flying space-ships. A lot of vocal people want space legs, but i'm not sure that many players do and the time invested into space legs would not be better spent on expanding the ship-flying game play. If they make space legs a thing it can only be at the expense of not improving or implementing other things.

3/ I think people imagine that space legs would make the game like actually being there. But you must remember the game is procedurally generated with only limited assets who's variability must be constrained to avoid unforeseen problems. So you'd probably end up with something remarkably like no-mans sky where you essentially replaced the current menus in the stations with a walkabout. Rather than clicking on things in the menus you'd walk down a corridor to a office for some potted dialog - which would become tedious after the first few times you read it (like "Tasty, Tasty Cargo") and most players would quickly roll back to the menus.

As I say, I'm sure they could do "something", but I don't think they want to either bolt on a FPS or replace menus with a walkabout. The Walkabout is going to get tedious and if people wanted an FPS they'd have bought one.

Very much this, I agree on all points!

 

[Cheapchips]

For most games there's no need to even try to unify the first and third-person perspectives but I think many players have no idea how difficult this actually is from a technical perspective. Star Citizen struggled for several years to do this because Chris Roberts insisted on it and wasn't going to compromise.

I was leaving to open to you to run over what the gameplay benefit of this actually is. It seems a bit unnecessary? Especially at the moment, from a shooting and movement perspective, other games have a much better feel (although SC is fine).

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

It's called Occam's Razor.

That would be fine if that was the case. But it seems that people have to jump through mental hoops to come up with their hypothesis. Hence the reason why you have to explain it so much. It isn't the simplest thing that you are coming up with. It's the most negative.

 

[Devari]

That would be fine if that was the case. But it seems that people have to jump through mental hoops to come up with their hypothesis. Hence the reason why you have to explain it so much. It isn't the simplest thing that you are coming up with. It's the most negative.

With FD the simplest explanation also happens to be negative because of how FD has been developing Horizons and Beyond. That doesn't mean it isn't a correct explanation. You need to look at how FD has been designing the game in the past 3.5 years since launch and take all of that information into account, you can't simply treat FD as if they're in some sort of vacuum as if we have no perspective on how they operate.

 

[Imo]

Space legs in the current state of the game make absolutely no sense to me. Too many things have not yet been constructed to walk around. Space stations for example. A lot of things are still looking rough and blocky from a closer view.

 

[valbarr]

Space legs in the current state of the game make absolutely no sense to me. Too many things have not yet been constructed to walk around. Space stations for example. A lot of things are still looking rough and blocky from a closer view.

That is what space legs mean, it doesnt just mean walking about, it means, making it so that you can walk around the space stations and planets and bases and your ships, and do stuff on them, thats what it means.

and as for it being difficult, there are thousands of games where you can walk around millions of different enviroments and interact with the things, there are games made by one person alone (pavlov vr, for example) , that do more gameplay wise than frontier are currently doing, and frontier apparently has 300 employees, im not saying your just snap your fingers and a space legs appears, but to say its not possible is utterly stupid, there are games everywhere on every platform that have people walking about.

 

[Devari]

That is what space legs mean, it doesnt just mean walking about, it means, making it so that you can walk around the space stations and planets and bases and your ships, and do stuff on them, thats what it means.

and as for it being difficult, there are thousands of games where you can walk around millions of different enviroments and interact with the things, there are games made by single man teams, that do more gameplay wise than frontier are currently doing, and frontier apparently has 300 employees, im not saying your just snap your fingers and a space legs appears, but to say its not possible is utterly stupid, there are games everywhere on every platform that have people walking about.

Exactly this. There are cheap indie games on Steam that offer far more than people are asking from FD to implement for space legs. The idea that FD somehow "can't" find the resources to develop at least a rudimentary version of space legs is utter nonsense. It's simply that Braben and FD want to put the absolute minimum amount of resources into Elite and unfortunately that means we aren't going to see space legs even though it would require a modest amount of development effort from FD.

 

[Drelthar]

David Braben said something like -

It's easy to get the player running around, with the graphics and the animations and all of that - it's all the things they are going to do that we want to get right.

So, it's not technically difficult, it's a design thing.

 

[Lucian667]

David Braben said something like -

It's easy to get the player running around, with the graphics and the animations and all of that - it's all the things they are going to do that we want to get right.

So, it's not technically difficult, it's a design thing.

Almost every mechanic in this game is little more than a shallow, empty placeholder with the only real exception being combat. Why should space legs be any different? They can give us the spacelegs graphics and the animation now and provide the actual gameplay later, same as they've already done with 90% of the rest of the game.

 

[ilo]

Almost every mechanic in this game is little more than a shallow, empty placeholder with the only real exception being combat. Why should space legs be any different? They can give us the spacelegs graphics and the animation now and provide the actual gameplay later, same as they've already done with 90% of the rest of the game.

so you can keep complaining it is shallow? you really need another new reason or the current ones are not fulfilling your need to whinge enough?

so, bad if they do, bad if they don't.

 

[Lucian667]

so you can keep complaining it is shallow? you really need another new reason or the current ones are not fulfilling your need to whinge enough?

so, bad if they do, bad if they don't.

ED is shallow in terms of structured gameplay (other than combat) but that just means you have to provide your own goals and entertainment, which most people - including myself - do quite well. And the same could easily apply for space legs. I just dont understand FD's sudden obsession with not releasing a particular game feature (space legs) unless it has fully featured, deep, detailed gameplay when almost all other mechanics in the game have already been released for years in a bare-bones skeletal state with no concern at all for engaging gameplay. It just seems incredibly hypocritical.

I'd be more than happy with basic no-gameplay space legs and would use it to provide my own entertainment, same as I do with the rest of the game. So no, Good if they do, bad if they dont, you wont find me whinging if they implement it, structured gameplay or not.

 

[knowles2]

Almost every mechanic in this game is little more than a shallow, empty placeholder with the only real exception being combat. Why should space legs be any different? They can give us the spacelegs graphics and the animation now and provide the actual gameplay later, same as they've already done with 90% of the rest of the game.

If you haven't noticed already, they are adding a substantial amount of mechanics to other areas of the game this year. Especially the big Q4 update.