You Know What Would be Super Cool?

[DocPossible]

I won't argue that atmospheric planets won't have beautiful vistas. Because they certainly will, and I want atmospheric landings too. It's just that, as with horizons, I think it sounds really nice, but wouldn't necessarily increase the amount of activities to do in the game.



Stay frosty,



Cmnd Fulsom

The thing is that, to a lot of people, these things ARE the activities. Exploring, flying a space ship, mucking about in SRVs are great on their own and a lot of people would enjoy just walking around on a planet or in their ship or a space station. If space legs comes with other gameplay, then great, but I'll be happy just see anything at all come out of it.

ED is a very broad church - to some it's a sim, to others a game. The fact that it can cover everything from Buckyball racers, to Distant Worlds expeditions, to hardened BGS players and hardcore PvP players is an impressive feat in itself, something that most people that post on the forum seem to forget. Lots of it could be improved and my personal feeling is that the 'content' that has been added over the last couple of years has not been as good as the 'mechanics' - so Thargoids <<< Planetary Landings. Surface Bases <<< the missions involving them. Engineers are ok, but they've consumed a vast amount of effort in rebalancing and mat management / gathering.

In other words, I'm hoping they concentrate on the mechanics of Space Legs, the layout of the ships and space stations rather than on content. Get the basics right and the content can come later.

 

[the source 0179]

Boarding actions. I know, space legs probably aren't in the cards for the near future. But let's think about it this way. There are all of two capital ships in the game at current, three Soon^tm Imagine being able to dock with a Farragut and walk around it, jump in a boarding pod and get yourself launched through space onto a hostile majestic, and breaching onto the decks and fighting the crew and automated defenses. It'd be awesome, it'd be a great change of pace from the usual, and, it'd be a lot less work than modeling the inside of every different type of station, since, again, two types of capital ship.



Stay frosty,



Cmnd Fulsom

Just being able to dock at a capital ship would be great. Imagine being in a cz with a capital ship and being able to dock to restock.

 

[GJ51]

[h=2]You Know What Would be Super Cool?[/h]

Liquid Nitrogen

 

[Cmnd Fulsom]

[snip]

Are you honestly suggesting even basic combat scenarios/variations like this are beyond the scope of ED in 2018+?

Explain? Not compatible with the core design of ED? I see no issue with more involved combat scenarios other than the ability and desire to design and code them (instead of frittering time away on the likes of Multicrew, CQC or Generation Ships etc).

Allow me to explain, what you have described is certainly reasonable in concept, and I could imagine it happening in a real world with interstellar space flight, or for that matter, in another game with different core design. However, Elite has a core mission mechanic of randomly generated tasks. What this means, self evidently, is that all the missions on the mission board are generated using random numbers in an algorithm. Which is, fine, it's perfectly serviceable.

What you are suggesting, however, is not feasible within this core design. While I'm sure you could write such a mission in, whatever, C# and put it into the cobra engine. The game fundamentally is not designed to produce such scenarios in a consistently satisfying way. Because you would need to roll the appropriate number with the appropriate faction to get the right mission, have a system in place to intelligently determine which of multiple fail states you have encountered, then roll another number to determine if you get a follow on mission, then roll another to determine what that mission will be, which could be from another separate pool of missions tied to the specific one you're doing, but will not be. So you could roll defend the convoy, or you could roll deliver 12 units of bear, or kill 15 civilian ships in LHS 87428.

Or, such a mission could be hand crafted and scripted. This would allow for the sort of experience I know you have in mind. But, it won't happen. Because despite it being possible to code, moving to such a system would mean throwing out already functional core game pay mechanics in favor another, completely different core game play mechanic. Which isn't to say there will be no missions hand crafted by Fdev, I'm sure there will, but those will be in relation to Frontier's Thargoid story, and won't, in all likelihood, be as fleshed out as even you imagine, nor will they overlap with your personal role playing story unless that so happens to already be related. Which it very well might, and certainly does for some percentage of the game's population. But it won't and cannot be the case for every player in every system, because automating such a process isn't an option.

I'll read some of your other threads, but as for this, the problem isn't programing, I'm sure it can be programmed, the problem is in game design and mechanics. The game has been designed, for, in my opinion, quite practical reasons, to use a system that is antithetical to the idea of hand crafted missions, relating to your personal goals.

To expand more, it isn't as though Elite couldn't have had an over arching story from day one, as told through a series of story missions given by rudimentary quest givers. It easily could have, we could have been prompted to play through the story of Federal President Winter's disappearance and return in the form of a series of missions that would take us through a preplanned story progression. This is easily conceived of and quite possible. But I think everyone here can agree that that would be a completely different game. The merits of such a game as compared to the one we actually did get can be argued at length. However, the point being made is that it would not be the game we actually received.



Stay frosty,



Cmnd Fulsom

 

[Straha Yeagar]

Deep down inside i always got the impression that space legs was intended in adding depth into the environment, whether its from walking around your ship checking damages from your e-drop or latest combat excursion to watching your ship get fueled while going to grab a new mission or cargo from a POC or terminal. To enjoy the view from a viewing deck from an Orbis station...to bring out the beauty of being in space. Not for FPS. Elite is not an FPS and never will be...why do people keep trying to turn the game into a completely different game think it'll make it better? Its clearly not an FPS, if thats what you want go find a different game, or better yet kickstart your own game in the vision you want and see how things go from there, or make a deal with rockstar to make a GTA 6 in space....thats clearly the type of game you want.

And adding in space legs requiring people to walk somewhere to a mission board, or actually have to move cargo manually, fuel manually, pretty much any conceivable activity on or off ship other than FPS combat will very quickly be met with the wailing and gnashing of teeth of how much it wastes their time, cuts into the credits per hour. I keep reading these ideas of what people would like to see with space legs, and always come to the same conclusion...no matter how much stuff is added to do, people might like it for about five minutes until the novelty wears off. Hell, take auto pilot and various other fast travel things people ask for. We have people who can't remotely tolerate flying in super cruise for five minutes at a time, giving them things to do and check out on their ship during the trip will just give them one more thing to about having to do. I really think anything short of a full blown MMO style FPS space legs implementation will be met with the usual "respect muh time" whinging

 

[GunnerBill]

Gads no!

All reasons as in the many previous threads on this subject.

 

[Pville_Piper]

It'd be awesome.. But like being able to walk around our ships, without something to do and interact with, there's not much point and it would get old very quickly. FDev has already said this would take major development and they won't add it until there's something to do beyond being a tourist...

 

[Straha Yeagar]

It'd be awesome.. But like being able to walk around our ships, without something to do and interact with, there's not much point and it would get old very quickly. FDev has already said this would take major development and they won't add it until there's something to do beyond being a tourist...

And where a lot of people are shortsighted in the space legs idea is that with a game where there is no end game, there is no winning, no final level, no final boss, these "things to do" that so many like to talk about and suggest are destined to be just as repetitive and grindy as everything else, so for people who are making these suggestions as a way to add "interesting things" as a way to spice up and move away from the grind they see, and time wasting are absolutely not going be satisfied after the first five minutes. All these "things" to do will just give those players more "things" to whinge about being grindy with nothing to do.

 

[Eloy]

The huge effort necessary for spacelegs doesn´t pay out. It would be a just like CQC, PP, Multicrew ... probably used by only a few percentage of players.

There´s only a little chance for success if FD implements a good reason to walk around besides "good views". This will be no FirstPersonShooter, at least not a good one, ever. The character animations in the other SpaceGame look awful ... let the experts from other genres do that in their games but not here in ED.

 

[ArchEmperor]

It would be seriously cool to carefully navigate our giant battleships for boarding operations.

But lets face it. FD can not handle that amount of new players coming all at once to buy the game. It would be millions of players over night. Servers would crash.

The huge effort necessary for spacelegs doesn´t pay out. It would be a just like CQC, PP, Multicrew ... probably used by only a few percentage of players.

There´s only a little chance for success if FD implements a good reason to walk around besides "good views". This will be no FirstPersonShooter, at least not a good one, ever. The character animations in the other SpaceGame look awful ... let the experts from other genres do that in their games but not here in ED.

Just remove the space ship HUD and you are virtually a spacelegs soldier floating in space. I see no problems at all of making a simple spacelegs adaptation to the game. The spacelegs dedicated content however could prove a huge investment with insane yield in the near future.

The main issue for FD is the visual Player to Player action: It requires Long Hair Physic mechanics. Everybody wants it, but it is hard to understand for a coder with IQ less than 110 how to make the structure work without plenty of calculations. The secret is mathspace. But only I understand what that is ( and a handful of mathematical genius scientists )

 

[Pville_Piper]

And where a lot of people are shortsighted in the space legs idea is that with a game where there is no end game, there is no winning, no final level, no final boss, these "things to do" that so many like to talk about and suggest are destined to be just as repetitive and grindy as everything else, so for people who are making these suggestions as a way to add "interesting things" as a way to spice up and move away from the grind they see, and time wasting are absolutely not going be satisfied after the first five minutes. All these "things" to do will just give those players more "things" to whinge about being grindy with nothing to do.

And I actually agree with this assessment for the simple reason that if it was added/planned from the beginning, people would think nothing of it. Having to watch an animation of NPCs loading, fueling and repairing the ship would be boring. Look at the ships takeoff checklist as an example. It was cool for a little while, but then it got repetitive so I turned it off as I expect most people have done.

Having to do it yourself, if implemented correctly, could be a great addition to the game. But for people are used to the game as it exists... They'd hate it. The engineers are another example, the original implementation of it was deeply flawed. The most recent is much better. Most of the negative comments about it have to do with the implementation of legacy upgrades and in some cases, the extra mats that are required. But as a whole, the engineers is much better for most players than before. I thoroughly believe that if the original implementation of the engineers had been like this they wouldn't have had to redo it.

Which brings us back to adding space legs. It would be a massive undertaking to do it right and completely change that game. For better or worse? Who knows... Consider this, if you add space legs, how much more work have you added to design when you implement landable earth-like worlds... Huge, simply staggering.
​

 

[ArchEmperor]

And I actually agree with this assessment for the simple reason that if it was added/planned from the beginning, people would think nothing of it. Having to watch an animation of NPCs loading, fueling and repairing the ship would be boring. Look at the ships takeoff checklist as an example. It was cool for a little while, but then it got repetitive so I turned it off as I expect most people have done.

Having to do it yourself, if implemented correctly, could be a great addition to the game. But for people are used to the game as it exists... They'd hate it. The engineers are another example, the original implementation of it was deeply flawed. The most recent is much better. Most of the negative comments about it have to do with the implementation of legacy upgrades and in some cases, the extra mats that are required. But as a whole, the engineers is much better for most players than before. I thoroughly believe that if the original implementation of the engineers had been like this they wouldn't have had to redo it.

Which brings us back to adding space legs. It would be a massive undertaking to do it right and completely change that game. For better or worse? Who knows... Consider this, if you add space legs, how much more work have you added to design when you implement landable earth-like worlds... Huge, simply staggering.
​

The solution is to make every addition to the game cumulative.

Which means, in layman terms:
If I add a spaceship to the game, and then add another spaceship. These are two states of the game. But if I add a spacelegs element to the game, there can be two to the power of 3 states of the game.

It is the amount of combinatory states of the game which allows us to replay the game with different outcomes and roads to these outcomes.

Adding enough cumulative additions to the game, will make the amount of "ways for it to be played and experienced" more than we can ever hope to experience in any ones lifetime.

Adding the feature of morphing these states as we go, adds another dimension to this system, making it fractal and thus predictable. But only if we know the seed and the initial state, which for any common player is unknown. But it allows the developers to know, at any given dimensional gamesystem structure of an arbitrary set of scalars, exactly what is going on in the background. The hard part is to keep track of the player driven events and records in the universe but this can be solved by an oblivion method: Where any change by players decay over time, reforming into the way it was supposed to be simulated by the background anyway.

This is far ahead of your common forum reader comprehension. But a skillful coder with high enough dedication understands what I am explaining and can implement this, fairly simplex at its root. Allowing for more complexity using the cumulative model described in the beginning of this post.

For the layman:
It allows you to produce true simulated infinite amount of surprises and a seemingly infinite amount of ways to play and experience the game.

For the child:
It is super cool! And it has dinosaurs hidden somewhere in the galaxy!

 

[M00ka]

Allow me to explain, what you have described is certainly reasonable in concept, and I could imagine it happening in a real world with interstellar space flight, or for that matter, in another game with different core design. However, Elite has a core mission mechanic of randomly generated tasks. What this means, self evidently, is that all the missions on the mission board are generated using random numbers in an algorithm. Which is, fine, it's perfectly serviceable.

What you are suggesting, however, is not feasible within this core design. While I'm sure you could write such a mission in, whatever, C# and put it into the cobra engine. The game fundamentally is not designed to produce such scenarios in a consistently satisfying way. Because you would need to roll the appropriate number with the appropriate faction to get the right mission, have a system in place to intelligently determine which of multiple fail states you have encountered, then roll another number to determine if you get a follow on mission, then roll another to determine what that mission will be, which could be from another separate pool of missions tied to the specific one you're doing, but will not be. So you could roll defend the convoy, or you could roll deliver 12 units of bear, or kill 15 civilian ships in LHS 87428.

Or, such a mission could be hand crafted and scripted. This would allow for the sort of experience I know you have in mind. But, it won't happen. Because despite it being possible to code, moving to such a system would mean throwing out already functional core game pay mechanics in favor another, completely different core game play mechanic. Which isn't to say there will be no missions hand crafted by Fdev, I'm sure there will, but those will be in relation to Frontier's Thargoid story, and won't, in all likelihood, be as fleshed out as even you imagine, nor will they overlap with your personal role playing story unless that so happens to already be related. Which it very well might, and certainly does for some percentage of the game's population. But it won't and cannot be the case for every player in every system, because automating such a process isn't an option.

I'll read some of your other threads, but as for this, the problem isn't programing, I'm sure it can be programmed, the problem is in game design and mechanics. The game has been designed, for, in my opinion, quite practical reasons, to use a system that is antithetical to the idea of hand crafted missions, relating to your personal goals.

To expand more, it isn't as though Elite couldn't have had an over arching story from day one, as told through a series of story missions given by rudimentary quest givers. It easily could have, we could have been prompted to play through the story of Federal President Winter's disappearance and return in the form of a series of missions that would take us through a preplanned story progression. This is easily conceived of and quite possible. But I think everyone here can agree that that would be a completely different game. The merits of such a game as compared to the one we actually did get can be argued at length. However, the point being made is that it would not be the game we actually received.



Stay frosty,



Cmnd Fulsom

You might want to go back and edit your post - the extract you quoted wasn't from me but from NeilF's excellent post!

 

[Cmnd Fulsom]

That's odd, I don' know why it didn't attribute the quote correctly. Thanks for the heads up.



Stay frosty,



Cmnd Fulsom

 

[OHMSS]

Boarding actions. I know, space legs probably aren't in the cards for the near future. But let's think about it this way. There are all of two capital ships in the game at current, three Soon^tm Imagine being able to dock with a Farragut and walk around it, jump in a boarding pod and get yourself launched through space onto a hostile majestic, and breaching onto the decks and fighting the crew and automated defenses. It'd be awesome, it'd be a great change of pace from the usual, and, it'd be a lot less work than modeling the inside of every different type of station, since, again, two types of capital ship.



Stay frosty,



Cmnd Fulsom

I don't think it's imminent. If it was, I think a manageable start would be:
- Limited models so walking around known ships first
- Customizing our own ships (store items - I know I know but FDev are a business)
- Space walk to repair external modules on our own ships that can only be done using this method (new VR feature too with controllers like in "The Climb")
- Crossing to wrecks to find special cannisters, mats or salvageable stuff that can be sold. Perhaps on a tether or via jetpack
- Missions to discover a variety of derelict wrecks (added regularly) with special salvage
- I imagine it slow and steady and mostly silent other than creaks and the short burst of directional thrusters....rather than FPS style shoot outs.
- Perhaps clues could be added for Guardian or Thargoid content

However before any of this is done, it would need to be well thought out and most of all fun and essential to find certain mats and content.

 

[M00ka]

I don't think it's imminent. If it was, I think a manageable start would be:
- Limited models so walking around known ships first
- Customizing our own ships (store items - I know I know but FDev are a business)
- Space walk to repair external modules on our own ships that can only be done using this method (new VR feature too with controllers like in "The Climb")
- Crossing to wrecks to find special cannisters, mats or salvageable stuff that can be sold. Perhaps on a tether or via jetpack
- Missions to discover a variety of derelict wrecks (added regularly) with special salvage
- I imagine it slow and steady and mostly silent other than creaks and the short burst of directional thrusters....rather than FPS style shoot outs.
- Perhaps clues could be added for Guardian or Thargoid content

However before any of this is done, it would need to be well thought out and most of all fun and essential to find certain mats and content.

That is kind of how I envisage the evolution of space legs as well, although some of the actions like space walking and EVA repairs will cause a lot of salt. Why you ask, well people don't think about the situation, there you are outside of the ship, merrily turning a wrench to fix the thingamagiggy - who is defending your ship. What happens if another ship decided to attack you then? Oh you won't be in danger you say. You know someone will do this in the middle of a CZ or RES then jump on here complaining right lol

But back on topic, what you suggested is feasible but these actions aren't what the Op wants, he wants a fully blown, 100% dedicated space shooter, and that ladies and gentlemen, is an entirely different thing