This is something that has been requested and will continue to be requested for the entire life span of this game. Being able to walk about your ship while its flying about. Now we know there are about a billion technical reasons why this is not possible within the game. Here is an idea that may be possible within the limits of the engine and game and still provide the player with the desired immersion and sense they are walking around on a moving ship. This however does not solve the problem of walking around on a ship moving within a playfield and will only work while the ship is 'warping' between playfields. When you warp, you get the warp animation but otherwise almost instant travel to your destination. My suggestion is to enable to player to warp to any star they can see and providing they have the required Pentaxid in the tank it will warp them to it, whether it is 10ly or 700ly away. But instead of instant travel, the game calculates a travel time, the further away it is the longer it takes to get there, you could base the time on how long it would otherwise take you to get there with the current method of warping so for example, if it takes 10 minutes to cross the galaxy now, this new method will also take 10 minutes to do the same distance. But, instead of just holding the player on the warp animation it teleports them into a private, time limited playfield instance where the ship is actually stationary and cannot be moved. If possible the playfield would have a warp animation effect to make it look like the ship is at warp speed. Meanwhile the player is free to move around the ship as they normally would when the ship is stationary. Once the time limit is up the ship and player are teleported to their targeted playfield via the existing warp out animation. There are some problems I can see with this method however; - what if the player is walking about or even jetpacking around the outside of their ship when the time runs out? - what about the exploration part of the game where you explore the solar systems on the way? - what if the player launches a docked SV/HV etc during the warp and does not re-dock before the time runs out. Firstly if possible I would disabled any docked vessel from being un-docked while the ship is warping. Second give the player a warning 30 seconds before the time limit to return to their seat. If they fail to do so then the game can teleport them and their ship to the destination but the player may arrive several KMs from their ship or some other penalty that encourages them to get seated before exiting warp <insert science reasons here>. As for exploration, well if you want to explore you will explore, just do shorter jumps. I would maybe just revert to the current warp routine if the game calculates less the 2 minute travel time too. I know this is unlikely in the current stage of development for the game but it may be something not thought of before and may be a good enough compromise for the players to enjoy the sense of walking about their ship while its 'moving' Another 'would be nice' addition if this actually went anywhere would be for the icon on the galaxy map to move between the point of departure and arrival in time with the travel time, just as another way to simulate the travel.
No thank you. The warp animation its just decoration. Warp is supposed to and does happen immediately. Right now I often use detector to scan the destination playfield BEFORE the animation ends. What you propose adds extended time which makes no sense at all. What if nobody wants to do anything but just jump? Should they wait x minutes doing nothing? You want to walk around? Do it before or after a warp. Also the penalty you propose can perfectly turned into an exploit, and only a players imagination i.e attacking enemy on PvP playfield after warp spanning rapidly ships after warp km away from the CV (decoy) that were into while initiating war, etc etc. Just to forcefully justify walk on moving ships. What you actually want is to be able to move in ships they are cruising on a playfield exploring, for example. This needs time and in multiplayer games makes sense to occupy one player as pilot and let the others do crew business in the vessel. Just wait for the controller to be replaced with something suitable. If ever.
As i said, if the jump is short then just revert to the current method, no change. If a player wants to warp across the galaxy, currently they have to plan a route through the galaxy map, which is a pain to do and a repetitive bore, with this they can select a destination and it takes X time to get there. I'm not sure how being flung KM out of your ship on warp exit could be an exploit in PvP but it was just an idea of a way to encourage the player back to their seat. Walking about while cruising is the ideal solution i agree but that wont happen in anyone's lifetime.
I am not a fan of anything that increases transit times. I was playing space engineers a bit recently, and I have to say, not being able to get out of a seat while a vessel is moving once I had got used to be able to do so again in SE was a significant piss off when returning to this. Actually it is boarding actions that make the big difference to gameplay, but also handy for someone to be able to get up and do some repairs etc too. Even the stupidity around having to wait for a tiny hover bike HV to stop swaying around before the damn thing will let me out of the seat quickly gets annoying. I think all SE does is continually add the vector of the vessel to the player vector so that the play ends up moving with the ship (in relative damping mode) and that seems OK so long as the ship doesnt drastically change vector (in which case someone may go splat). A cheap hack, but for the most part workable. When using the jump drive, you do need to be seated again else you will get left in space when the ship jumps. I know some people blame unity for this, but I have played multiplayer unity games that seem to have no problems keeping players moving with a host vessel while they walk around even when the thing is being tossed around (Valheim for eg). The 'technical issues' seem to be biological in nature.
They can add walking in moving ships. It's possible to do, but they just need to do the work to add it. Depends on if the devs feel it's worth it or not. Nothing is impossible (within reason), given enough time and resources. I just don't know if the devs want to spend the time to it versus working on other issues.
Yeah... no. This isn't a solution to being able to walk on moving ship. It's something different, it's creating a problem and then delivering the solution to it. The underlying problem of why people want to walk around their ships while moving isn't even that they wanna walk around their ships. It's that they wanna do something other than staring at the slowly ticking down distance next to the target you're moving to for several minutes. On the other hand what do you wanna do in 3 minutes except overshoot your target? Simple things like a multiplayer-capable logistics system that let's several people at once work with it, or simple tasks you could semi automatically do, like moving a robotic arm across a 3x3 field somewhere else in your ship to harvest and replant crops. Maybe open up all armor related things to the logistics menu, so while you're underway you can already prepare your armor or a spare one you got in another cargo container. Access to our F5 drone and a multitool while we're seated so we can conduct repairs on the CV while travelling? A (probably expensive) way to send probes to neighbouring playfields, planets, moons or maybe even systems to get intel and plan your next jump/target/look for whatever? And one of the most read reasons for people wanting to be able to move around the ship: doing small tasks around their docked vessels, either repairing or tweaking. I do agree this would be nice but i also think EGS can accomplish this another way. Basically a "virtual" creative mode, a part of the factory that let's you design ships and then you can save them etc., bonus points for being able to actually change the ships that are docked (maybe via a connector block) and if that is not possible then a disassembly block that works similar to the repair bay but recovers all used blocks of the vessel parked above it. Could also help people spend more time in survival than creative. All in all i don't think that moving around in a moving ship is really needed. But its either walking in moving ships or providing so much other usefull stuff that people simply stop complaining about it.
Agree with most of this re automation etc as alot of it is needed regardless, but still not really a substitute. One of our most common reasons to move around on a moving ship in SE is a boarding action on a hostile ship (used to also be repairs, but nanite build and repair system mod fixes that). Of course that also ideally needs a means to grip onto a hostile ship which isnt the way landing gear currently work in this (also annoying) along with colliders to actually work on something that is moving (ie the currently broken PVs) - yet another huge related annoyance. All of these contribute to making it pretty much impossible to round up my friends to play this despite there being so much more to do in EGS than in SE for co-op, and yet they all much prefer SE even with its extremely limited NPC mods that attempt to add some life to the SE universe.
Actually that exact same idea was explored a few years back prior to v1.0, in one of the numerous "Walk on Moving Ship" threads : use the warp delay to spawn the ship in an instance where it will be static so players can move and do repairs, while the skybox plays a "warp" animation. But you can see problems yourself from what I read. This reminds me of an old Bethesda game, "Daggerfall", where the player can acquire a ship to store excess inventory and use as home. The fun part was that when "opening the ship (inventory)" it would spawn the player in a parallel universe with the ship and white, bland land everywhere around it. Player could be in the middle of a busy town, he opens ship-inventory and poof! he's standing on the deck of a huge vessel with nothing around but snowy goo on the ground. There was a night/ day cycle too even while within the inventory, and creatures would spawn at night time and attack the player... on and around his ship. So we could litterally get killed within our own inventory. That was soo cool and weird... I feel the best solution for "Walk on Moving Ship" would be to NOT try to emulate normal gravity/ motion when a ship is moving, but just fix the colliders inside the ships so players can jetpack around and bump into walls, just like in our actual space station and shuttles. Players could get smashed into walls/ ceilings when the ship rapidly rotates or accelerates, but that would be expected because they're floating in the void with the ship. On planets they could stay subjected to the playfield's gravity, and in space artificial gravity would only work when the ship is not moving. If players had paid a little more attention in the past, they would have seen the opportunity to pave the way for "Walk on Moving Ship" when the "Merge Blocks" suggestion thread was alive. This would have allowed for simplified geometry and much better game performance and less glitches, but many players just wanted to stick to their contemporary view of things and wanted all blocks to remain individual all the time, unable to see the wider picture of what the feature could have allowed at some point in the future.
I'm almost willing to bet that if they did add walking in moving ships it would still require you to take a seat before playfield transitions and warping. And if that does end up being the case I just don't see any point in them spending the time on it. Playfield transitions are still so rough after all this time that I just feel it will be a requirement to be seated for them no matter what. If that's the case walking on moving ships is mostly just a gimmick. Hope to be proven wrong...
I agree this would mostly be a gimmick, the more i read through the discussion here the more I see this suggestion as just another way to get around the galaxy map than the current way of doing it. Perhaps I miss-titled the thread because the discussion has grown beyond my suggestion. If Eleon could or wanted to allow a player to walk about a moving ship in a playfield i feel they would have done it by now. This however is not walking on a moving ship, it is the illusion of it while traveling long distance. The travel time is no different from manually setting the course yourself and jumping several dozen times yourself. So I struggle to see why there is resistance to this idea based on "adding travel time" there is no addition to time here, its just another way of traveling. I made a suggestion in a video a little while ago that I wish the galaxy map could plot a route for you so you didnt have to reverse engineer a route on the galaxy map and plot one jump at a time from point A to B. This got me thinking, If i want to explore then I just plot one route at a time as is the current method, but If I want to get somewhere far away, quickly, without the fuss, then why can I not just pop 2000 pent in the tank and tell it to go there. Well that would be OP right. So this idea is a compromise, its not instant travel across the galaxy, its not manually plotting a route one jump at a time, its a set travel time from point A to B and you can fart around in your ship and do what ever you like while it travels, thats it. Personally I would use the time to walk the halls, admire the posters on my wall, tend to the garden, chat to the crew, sort inventory, craft stuff or alt-tab and do something else knowing that when I return to the game I will be at that destination 700ly away. TBH, I would be just as happy if the galaxy map plotted a route for you i think.
This is as request by some players already. Myself have posted a request twice iirc, among with auto-warp all playfields between source and destination.
Yes, presenting the idea without mentioning walking around moving ships would have lead the discussion into a different direction. Though i also think the ability to autoplot a route would already be a major deal. And unlike one big jump a lot of tiny jumps have the added benefit of discovering systems underway. Maybe we find something that is worth checking out on our way back?
Solving this problem isn't to difficult from a programming standpoint but the required data is private to the devs. When you open the galaxy map you can see all the stars and their relative positions in X/Y/Z space. If you move through the galaxy the names of the systems and the star type becomes visable and if you float over a star it's X/Y/Z coordinates are displayed in the lower left. With the name and these three numbers you can create a data structure called a graph and there are algorithms that can navigate these graphs to find the best path. Unfortunately the info isn't available anywhere a mod developer can access it. The SQLite database (global.db) has a list of places you've been as well as systems required as starters and scenarios. I wrote a small python script that runs as a console program to solve the retrace my steps issue (including figuring out better ones than I originally travelled) but without the ability to easily select and record system names and the coordinates the problem becomes it can only help you with places you've been.
For travelling, I wanted to change the warp system so that the current jump range applied to unexplored systems only. However, once you have visited a system, then you could be able to jump into it from a *much* longer range. Navigation plotting is easy to calculate given the data, so that is certainly something Eleon could look at. There is more work involved in the UI update and jump sequencing than calculating the route. However, the other way to avoid the tedium is just edit the config files to extend the jump range.
But if players still want to use that possibility for short jumps, problems might arise, right ? Time required to be seated to exit the (short) warp, which means the "warp end" has to be delayed to allow this, or the players simply suffer random ill effects when ship is back into normal spacetime. If it's the latter, this means Eleon still has to fix "players MOVE in a moving ship" because the pilot might not be back in his seat, for example. In fact even for long jumps this "end of warp delay" will end up with the same problem. This points to Eleon having to fix the "back to normal" ship interior collision mechanics, and if they can do this then why go to the trouble of making this illusion thing ? And if the game "waits" for all players to be seated, then players can use the warp as evasive cheat and stay in warp state as long as they want ? Obviously this would generate discussions and require another set of arbitrary limits to avoid exploits. The part that interests me the most is rather the ability to control "transitions". I would love to be able to set transitions tied with basic scenarios, or even playfield changes. This would allow to play animations while the change occurs, or display some text and images for the less animation savvy modders, etc. I would also love to be able to make my own skyboxes, and Pantera told us some time ago that may become a thing at some point. This would allow to view fancy stuff in space while on a planet, while now even if we make a 5 km station in orbit it will not be seen from ground. But I'm drifting.
How should ELEON 'fix' a feature that has not even been programmed yet? First they have to 'fix' the Avatar before they are even able to start to think about programming this 'to be fixed' feature. But I get the point anyway.
Well... how should I put this... When developing ideas, players may want to make the pill as easy to swallow as possible for the developers, which may ask questions anyways for all gray areas of the suggestion. It helps flesh out the idea before trying to get players into a poll or similar methods to promote the idea. So players suggest a somewhat rough sketch of a feature, and problems can be foreseen and already addressed at that early stage. This can lead to new ideas and modifications, new problems, etc. If some players just want to show they can have ideas and want a pat on the back, would be best to be honest about it so other players interested don't waste their time trying to find problems at the suggestion stage to prevent these from happening later down the road and generate patches that break savegames a few more times, etc. Obviously here it's not "one feature" but a compound of many features, and the main one is what the devs have told us many times : they have to fix the way colliders work prior to anything allowing players to move inside a ship in motion else bug/ glitch reports will flood them. This "motion freedom" would appear when the warp is done and players are not seated, or there has to be a way to prevent this, and this should not be up to the players to decide when the warp is over, etc. And now with the ability to plot a route through the galaxy, it's starting to look like a pretty complex feature compound with many very different pieces to glue together.
Anybody have a clue why you can n longer use the logistics mechanism while ships are in motion? I thought the reason that feature was added was to reduce the sit on your hands pain during A-to-B travel in normal or subspace.
Are you sure? I haven't tried it recently - and not in 1.5 - but I recall that you have full access to the control menu (P) and thus you have access to constructors, containers etc. What happens if you deactivate breaking with 'I' key and hit F4? My general take on being able to walk inside ships while they fly is: There must be an exceptional good gameplay feature added in EGS to make it worthwhile, I cannot even imagine a good example, maybe something like your ship getting invaded and you have to quit your seat to defend your ship going in different rooms which means: FPS combat in your own ship. If now you think that's lame I completly agree...But feel free to give some better example! In all these similar threads (and there are tons of them surprisingly, why the heck...) I haven't seen a single good example why this should be in the game. Anyway, I support Spanj's idea to go in a 'virtual' flying mode that allows you to walk inside your ship while warping, if you want to interupt do it at any time and you would see a fixed point camera sequence of your ship fly-by and you reach the new playfield as usual. This would be nice if the exterior view would adapt realistically, if the destination sun or gas giants would get bigger and bigger etc. But in absence of such a feature there is no real reason IMO to add that walk-while-flying mechanism, for every other smaller duty you can simply stop the ship or doing your stuff just before flying (and in all cases I have thought of, the ship could auto-stop when you leave your seat, so it's never necessary to keep it flying). Also there wouldn't be great immersion if they added it, think about it, you'd need to watch out of a window to notice you are flying, and what would you actually see? Nothing except the relative movement of some decor asteroids etc, not a big deal. Only during warping like Spanj proposes there would be kinda of fun watching some visual effects. But apart from that, should the devs make a lot of work just to allow you to look out of a window and to go into some sort of contemplation state?! I think not. Then, the other big problem - adding to an overall no-go I think - is that THE PLAYFIELDS IN SPACE AREt TOO SMALL to make this practicable. It's not like in X4 Foundations or X-Rebirth, if I'm not mistaken the playfields are about 50 km in size only, you would quickly reach the boundary, and what happens then? Now, I know that in MP the experience would be different - probably much better, but I cannot talk here, I play SP only.
Dang. My bad. It must be some weird bug that I keep hitting but isn't actually commom. I've run into it a lot and was taking for granted it had been broken intentionally to prevent some sort of exploit so I just gave up trying. Just tried it in SP and MP and it works as you would expect. Sorry to go off topic. As far as walking in a moving vehicle subject to changes in acceleration and direction, in most circumstances the way the game plays it is the way real world physics would require- try taking a walk down the aisle of a city bus taking a corner or watching how people in space die in crimson pools of deceleration ten minutes into "Fallen World", the S3E11 episode of The Expanse. Star Trek overcomes the issue with the rubber science of inertial dampers that always seem to fail at dramatic moments as actors heave themselves across the set. I certainly appreciate why people would want to move around but doing so implies holding a vector without any radical changes in speed or direction. Nifty idea. Maybe tie it to requiring the player to build some sort of BA (with offline protection in an MP game) in the target playfield that has some sort of ansible beacon device to guide ships- faction only or public shared like regular map bookmarks. The rubber science of Empyrion starts around the idea that some sort of rare but predictable situation in our own galaxy enabled the wormhole like jump of the fleet to Andromeda; fleshing out that could be a way of thoughtfully introducing new devices and behaviors. I'm surprised that interstellar jumps are linear in their pentaxid usage. Using some sort of log curve could let ships jump farther with less as distances increase and, without a beacon to guide them, potentially less accurately. This sort of thing could let people make arbitrary jumps and use a few empty space playfields similar to what @spanj was describing to represent interstellar space; from the POV of the player avatar in a CV a small number of playfields could be used to create private nothing space but in the map view you could position a ship's "you are here" in the correct X/Y/Z places in between the stars. Such curves would also explain away why it takes so much pentaxid to make AU intersystem jumps (in a suns gravity well) compared with the LY distances between stars.
