Hello all! I ask this question with respect. As it seems to be a sore spot for some in the community. I have played empyrion since it's release onto steam, and it is one of the few games that have drastically improved in almost every way since it's initial release. The dev's have done such a good job and I hope they are aware of what their hard-work has done for this game. I am posting to ask if anyone (or a Dev) has heard any news on players being able to walk about in a CV while the vehicle itself is moving. I have read through several threads: #1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #6 #7 On a side note, I can't seem to find a roadmap for 2020? It looks like it was meant to be discussed once the February survey results came in? But that was in February? Anyway, I am asking because in this post, a DEV Taelyn mentioned that the feature was planned but had no ETA. I know developing is tricky and that features can get pushed back or removed entirely. I have been waiting since 2015 - can we potentially get some official word on this feature? I don't care if the feature has been cancelled, I just want to know at this point. Thank you for your time, Genesis
As of now there isn't any change on what has already been said https://empyriononline.com/threads/walking-around-on-ships.86127/#post-363449
Fair enough, but I am curious how this changes with the game leaving early access. Or if the games development will change out of early access Cheers!
We have basically been assured that pretty much nothing is going to change once it leaves EA. Don't hold your breath for walking in moving constructions. It's dead hard and the dev team is tiny. There are approximately 40bajillion other things to make better before being able to walk around during a journey gets to the top of the priority list.
From the same answers you saw, it looks like "walking in a moving ship" can be done but only after all other pre-requisites are satisfied. Imagin the following scenario : A mid-size CV goes top speed, then turns abruptly. It has a large open hangar door at the back, and a player is standing there at the edge of the floor, facing empty space. What should happen : should the player be propelled in the void by centrifugal force, or should he just stand there unaffected ? If the player should normally be "ejected" then why not also be ejected on walls or closed doors ? If a player can get a broken leg from falling at X speed, should he also suffer similar damage when he gets thrown in random directions because the ship moves ? If on the contrary the player is "glued" to the ground notwithstanding the ship's movements, then dozens of players could stand in the previous example's opened hangar door with rocket launchers while the ship turns rapidly. In this scenario, they could as well output as much damage as a a few additional turret on the ship, and the physics engine also has to keep track of proper projectile trajectories. This would be a performance killer, but surely a common scenario, especially for all the "boarding" attacks. Also imagin a player outside a ship that gets hit by the ship's exterior wall : should he suffer damage and be thrown away like if he was hit by a baseball bat ? If yes, then why would players inside the ship not suffer the same treatment when the ship rotates ? This is just to illustrate how complex such a thing can become. Normal physics would only allow for players to try, as best as they can, to "survive" free motion in a fast moving ship while trying to jetpack their way around. And collisions with walls past a certain velocity should be fatal, but I guess players would never accept this despites this being physically accurate.
Like what? Players walking on a moving ship is something new players will expect when the game full releases next month. If its not possible now, the game should change the behavior and not just make the player clip through the ship geometry, because it just feels like a bug or glitch, there should be a way to tell players that they can't walk on a moving vessel.
I am more than tired of hearing about how players somehow want walking on moving ships above and beyond other more important features. No, other things need to done first before that is even broached again as a topic.
In response to your scenarios: I would not do ANY momentum calculations. That sounds too CPU heavy...I just want relative movement to a ship...nothing crazy. Tracking of projectiles of players firing while on a ship could be handled by the net code - with some optimizations - I am sure. If a player turns too fast and the players end up hitting their own ship, that's the players fault. It would require coordination. Your second scenario - the player being hit by the space craft - I would avoid this all together, and leave it like it is. Or the game could just simply have him enter that ships relative space and he could move freely around. Perhaps a toggle, server side, for how slow a ship has to be going before outside players can safely enter the ship. I think you are thinking of a realistic approach. This is not what I am asking for - nor would I want that. I want a fun game, and mechanics of running around your CV with your friends doing repairs, jetting out into space, or getting onto SV's would be a lot of fun. Not to mention hopefully allow AI CV's to have AI aboard them. I would respectfully disagree - I think relative movement to a ship would add many new mechanics that would be engaging for players, and potentially open up the door for more interesting AI interactions in ships. I think Empyrion has made many create leaps and bounds in many many areas, and this is the one area to me that still feels...outdated. Of course, this argument is rather mute...as this is just subjective opinion at this point. I have no control over what the Dev's do - but I am sure they are more than capable of handling this if they decide to tackle it. As a side note, I think there may be a split in the community of hard-core Empyrion players and more casual players...and it's interesting to see that. There may be issues that more hard-core players want vs what more casual players would want.
This is unrelated to the fact that "walking in a moving ship" is very hard to make work without major collision, synchronisation and performance problems. Like @russak wrote, "It's dead hard and the dev team is tiny". Even if you and other players suggest that there is no need for fancy calculations and a simple motion relative to a moving ship would suffice, even the most basic function, like I described in the last paragraph of post #5, would require a great deal of work and still open the door for lots of glitches and de-sync issues. All this has been discussed in the numerous threads you showed in your first post up here, and the devs have repeated many times that it can be done, as everything is possible, but will most probably not be done (IF it is) before everything else is top notch (mainly collision). There is really no point repeating all what was already discussed. Even if 100 % of the player based asked for this, it would still have to be pushed back after all prerequisites are done. This is very logical and simple to understand. We can't have a rocket go to space if we can't build a rocket, and we can't build a rocket if we can't build some of its parts, and so on down the chain. So in reality, when players ask for "walking on a moving ship" they are asking the developers to fix all the prerequisites, and when the developers tell the players they have to do that the players reply saying "it's not what we want, we just want a simple "walk in moving ship" feature"... It gets old...
Like the tutorial. Like the solar collector bug. Like the CPU values for inert blocks. Like the derpy rules for what weapons work where/lack of vision about how combat (systems PvP and PvE) fit together. Like absolute device limits. Like the frankly shocking mission system. Like the placeholder Unity assets (a Beretta? Really? FFS.) Like the identical creature assets. Like the sound design. Like damage bounding/mitigation for "splash". Like enemy AI and terrain modification capability. I thought I'd do 10, but I turned it up to 11. A new player (assuming they're using all the game systems) is going to hit these things and bounce off to another game *way* before they worry about needing to move around inside a moving ship. Okay, they might not grok the combat-dynamics vision thing, but they'll for sure be posting "Why can't SVs have turrets?" and "Why do CV weapons not work in atmo when they're the same as BA weapons that do?" questions. Sure, some of these don't take the same programmer resource that moving on ships would take, but there are countless other bugs and flaws in the game which do, and making moving on ships work plausibly is a non-trivial programming task. Larger dev teams have spent probably orders of magnitude more on that one task than Eleon have spent on the entire development of the game. And for Empyrion it's mostly an edge requirement anyway. If you're in a seat, there are probably turrets you can P into so you can see out (and contribute from in a fight), and if you're in combat, you've probably got a shield up, so you can't use damage control parties. So what practical purpose does being able to wander about while you're taking a five minute hop serve? Sure, Eleon need to manage expectations, but that's true across the piece including in far more front-and-centre fields than walking-in-moving.
If I were a betting man I would put the likelihood of this actually happening, even though it is a major want by much of the player base, just below annihilation of all human life by a meteor made of cheese. That drops even lower with the release of 1.0.
Sorry, but I really want to weigh in on this thread. I would truly love to be able to have my coop friend make parts, or food while I fly but that said, there really isn't anything to do while the ship is flying that can't be done from the P menu. Don't feel like peeps are ganging up on you. I was the biggest complainer of this when I first started EGS, because I was free to do it in other games. Now I understand why this is an issue. You can do a lot of stuff while the ship is flying. You can get to the storage boxes from the F4 menu, and although I'd love to see it easier, you can also get to all of the constructor devices from the P menu. We grouped it so it would be really easy. OK. So unless you're a nerd like me, you can stop reading right here and go on with your life... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I wanted to see if I was correct. "Was this an easy task to do?" "How come I can do this in other games?" "It can't be that hard, right?" I've been is software development for almost 35 years, and since now I'm learning different game engines for fun, I decided to run an experiment. I built this in the Unreal engine because that's my development platform of choice. No offence to Unity which holds a place in my heard as my first. I started a new project and added a large flat cube(ship) with another smaller cube(FP Player) on top of it. Next I set up the smaller cube with a controller where I could move it about. That part was easy. Then I moved the larger cube about the world to see what happens to the smaller cube. (puke) So what did I learn? From a first person perspective, it's hard to control using world coordinates, so I tried using local coordinates, and referenced the larger cube as the parent of my moving world. That means the smaller cube would always follow the larger cube, and its coordinates system is tied to its parent. This helped a lot but didn't solve the problem of what happens when you step off the large cube (ship) and go to another large cube (ship). The game would need to break the parent and re-parent you to the other cube. This took some extra calculations because you need to transfer to world coordinates first and... In the end, I wondered what would happen in MP while this mess was happening, * X number of players. What happens when (not if) the games got out of sync. I will admit I haven't played with learning MP yet. (It's coming). Latency would be a huge issue to solve and bandwidth would need to be an issue. (my assumption) In the end, I'm glad I'll never have to deal with this, but it was a really fun experiment. And I'm sure I prob. dumbed it down a lot and could have done it with classes and objects. Cheers, devs. I won't ask for this again... almost.
I haven’t played multiplayer for quite a while but I’m quite sure that any passenger can access a vessel’s control panel, select a device from the list and craft things while the pilot flies. The only thing you can’t do is pick your crops from the growing plots. While I recognise it would be a cool to have feature, I’m certainly not getting hung up on it and there are much more important features to be added to the game such as a dynamic economy, basic commands for NPCs, proper faction diplomacy and the list goes on and on. I could probably think of a couple of dozen features I want before walking on ships becomes possible.
I play Empyrion with my wife and son often and not being able to move around in a CV while it is in transit (I.E. thrusters are idle but the ship is moving in a straight line on a set heading) is problematic. I want to clearly state that the progress this game has made in the past few years is AWESOME! Now for the constructive criticism: For instance, when we are on asteroid mining runs transiting from rock to rock, the travel times can be 4-5 minutes between asteroids. Or (like in the starting system) the moons of a planet can be 20+ KM apart. for passengers, this gets very boring. I don't think the game producers want the game to be boring for multiple people.... I know they have stated the game engine does not play well with players moving independently around a moving vessel, but what about instituting a "Transit mode" for CVs only? kind of like when you fly as a passenger in a 747, the "Fasten seatbelt" light turns on and passengers are not aloud to move about the cabin. While in transit mode, The CV can not engage any additional movement past the direction it is already moving in. If this was done, characters could move around inside the ship because the ship isn't dynamically moving, just moving in a straight line. This would require the set limitations for player movement to be removed. 2 items that play into this: 1, The warning that "There is a not docked ship in your ship. Flying not possible" and your ship being completely unable to move is silly. I have no idea why this restriction was implemented but a simple warning is more than enough, the ship's movement doesn't need to be restricted. This has cost me an entire save's worth of work because a Zirax Destroyer rendered my CV to dust because I couldn't escape due to an HV not being locked down. I would have abandoned the HV in a second to preserve my CV. In the games current state, players are VERY vulnerable to surprise attacks where they can't run away due to this restriction. 2, If a secondary player is sitting in a parked SV or HV inside a CV, it prevents the CV from moving. I don't know why this is a thing at all.... I would love to be able to hot drop SVs / HVs while in upper atmosphere while my CV is on the move but in the game's current state, this is not possible. Also forcing all players to sit in designated chairs while in motion prevents the individual players from really having anything to do. At least (if the mothership was allowed to move) the player could sit in their personal SV and run the portable constructor, check ship systems, manage device groups ect... I would love to find the game code responsible for the above 2 restrictions and disable them by constructing a mod, But I have no idea what DLL or config file is responsible for these limitations...
I found a file with the syntax "igmFlyInside" and "igmFlyRestriction". The file is called Localization.csv and it is here: Empyrion - Galactic Survival\Content\Extras I'm curious to know what trigger this points to and as to whether or not I can disable these triggers. If so, Would it only effect the game client or can I mod it to effect the Server as well? Server moding would be needed for multiplayer as single player mods don't often work due to this game launching a separate server instance for multiplayer activities. I love this aspect of the game but it does present interesting challenges for modding...
How hard would it be to create a toggle that could turn off "igmFlyinside" and "igmFlyRestriction" ? I know it is there for a reason, but you could put a warning on the toggle that says "This could cause game instability and is for multiplayer scenarios only. use at your own risk."
Also, a possible exploit for multiplayers battles between 2 factions could be to crash an SV into your enemy's ship so they can't run. These 2 lines of code basically make it so multiplayer battles are pointless.
You are partly incorrect. Only 1 person can access a ships control panel at a time. You get the message (This panel is occupied). I disagree that there are much more important features to be added to the game, If you look at the player base for this game, it is basically dead. This is very sad as Empyrion is a great game. The reason the player counts have jumped off a cliff is because this game isn't tailored to multiplayer concepts. The fact that the 2 lines of code are right next to each other that restrict player movement means the game coders are actively forcing this feature. Gaming parties often create their own Discords and jump from game to game. They party up and love to play different games as a group. These players sometimes are toxic, but being that game owners are allowed to run their own servers, this really doesn't become a problem for Empyrion as it doesn't really have hosted servers. The player count for this game (and ultimately money to improve upon it) would be drastically increased if some of these forced stops for multiplayer activities were removed.
