This is really what I am getting at. I don't have an issue with wheels being added. However, Eleon has made it pretty clear that wheels aren't happening. Given this response, I am assuming that there are some engine limitations or otherwise challenges associated with the implementation make it a prohibitive addition. I would rather that the time and energy be devoted to other improvements that would be easier to implement rather than waste a bunch of time so we can have wheels.
Yeah, if it's not part of their vision for the game and it's hard to implement for whatever reason then I'm fine with it. I think it would be cool and add additional gameplay and progression opportunities, sure, but the game does need it to be fun. My personal preference for development time would be more along the lines of refinement of the current hover physics if they're doing a revisit of the code in that area. That and working positional sound, which appears to be another issue they cannot solve. As with many things, it may well be that some fundamental change made to support future features might make the implementation of wheeled transport more viable.
If we consider the Motorbike a wheeled mechanic then further wheeled vehicles could be created by modders... the problem there though is that it's makeshift, and makeshift does eat into ones enjoyment of anything. We/I can only hope that at a later date, with the introduction of planned features and stabilisation the devs might look at opening up the 'bike' mechanic to allow modders to do what they do best... make more and different. It's still (relatively) early days yet
Wheels on the ground sounds to me like going into the "Moveable Parts", "Collision" and "Walking/Running in Moving Ships" direction(s); those are definitely a plus. And if nothing else it add's to the options we all have. Consider being stranded..... really stranded nothing Hi Tech at all to work with.
Like I wrote previously : it went from being an item on a planned features list/ survey, through a long silence with a few players asking for news, to a sudden "We have already said NO many times". I don't want to sound stubborn, but that's not what I call "pretty clear". Let me remind you the cool story of the "Universal docking" feature we have : at some point after we got the first test versions, it was a bit buggy and flaky and the guy who was working on that specifically at Eleon said at some point he didn't want to hear anything about it anymore, let it go, etc. That is what was reported to us on the forums. Well players just did not stay silent : we send sincere support, empathy and chEers to get the guy to just take a break and come back to it with a fresh mind, there was no urgency, we could wait, and we greatly appreciated the true efforts and were confident he would find a solution. And now we have the feature and it's pretty solid compared to that time. I also remember the time when the forums used to get spammed by some asian language bots posting tons of threads all night. We got the " can't do anything about it" answer up until the time someone gave hints about a quite obvious solution. The next day the problem was solved. The "green walls at the pole" were seemingly another difficulty, making 32 x 64 km planets also, and they did it. The idea, and not just for game developers but for anyone, is to grow and learn. And because it's a game, it's all about illusion : wheels don't have to "drive" the vehicle, we just have to "believe" they are working wheels. Actually HV goes pretty fast and can be very close to the ground. I had some fun on my "roads" shown in the pictures I posted previously, but even on flat roads my HV would sometimes hit some invisible obstacle and stop right there, from top speed to zero, in an instant. Wheels can be deco, rotation as a relation to speed, height of the vehicle a relation to wheels dimension, and that's it. Direction can be driven by mouselook (like in Borderlands series) so no need to get into intricate controller mechanisms. Imagin a tank with tracks : it's just an object lying flat on the ground, with an animation of the tracks, and it simply follows terrain, no "elastic distance" like hover engines. I can hardly accept that doing any flavor of "wheels" would be so difficult that Eleon just refuses to try, why they never shied away from other challenges and got through them, even if far from perfect for some parts but we don't ask for this, and we never did. My faith in this game relies heavily on my perception of the developer's will to tackle challenges, solve problems and use creative solutions.If they can solve hard, they can fix easy. If someone gives up without trying, ten what can we expect for the next difficulty ? We know there are long standing issues : what if we get the same kind of "we already said NO many times" ? In any case, lazyness is not a virtue. .
Other than looking nicer, removing the green walls at the poles didn't really add anything, the pole area is still effectively no man's land, empty of features, cannot be built on and even traversing it can see you turned around. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad the visual effect it gone, but in reality it changed little for me gameplay-wise. Same for the old East / West divide where the ends of the rectangular map join. There's no visible wall there now, but assets still clearing load in on traversal and my HV's still plummet to the ground / soar into the sky when I cross - with the former, it regularly causes my HV's to sink. So, I'd argue that perhaps they didn't fix the fundamental problem, but covered it up as a quick "win" yet arguable achieved 80% of the desired result. My main concern is that as the game has expanded - and it's expanded A LOT, no doubt there - that perhaps the devs have coded themselves into a corner, so to speak, in regards to future features. I.e. the way certain things are implemented, restrict other things unless prior stuff is totally rewritten, which impacts other features which then need their own rework. I personally would love to see fully spherical planets that are "real" from space, but that is likely sooo incompatible with the current code base that it's become an Empyrion 2 dream. I suspect the colliders work necessary for walking around on moving vessels falls into the same category. Wheels, I feel, could be added but I suspect the implementation would not be physically accurate and subject to similar quirks we see with hover physics currently. Hence my comments regarding hover physics needing some work, though I don't know what that might involve. I think there's an element of time spent for features added. I mean, I'd be over the (fully realised and 3d) Moon if planets were proper spheres and not just rectangular flat maps projected onto a sphere for the space view. However, after a moment of being impressed I wonder how much the gameplay once I'm on the planet would actually change for all that work? I mean, seeing surface features such as POI's and player bases - even parked CV's - from space would be bloody epic, as would flying down to them in real time with no obvious transition. The likely massive effort and fundamental changes I suspect that would require though make me shudder. That said [Palpatine Voice]Do It![/Palpatine Voice] lol.
The realisation of walking about on a moving ship has eluded Elite Dangerous so far, and Empyrion are probably wise to ignore it for the time being, the forums at Fdev are full of cries for ship interiors so they can play 'pirate' and board another players vessel, but the reality of players moving round in a ship while the ship moves around space along with perhaps a couple of dozen other ships doing the same and even some diving into and through the atmosphere is probably quite heavy on the server, and as Empyrion already has 'more complete' ships than Lord Braben that players build out of blocks it might very well be even heavier... especially as (if what I've heard is near true) Eleon have perhaps only a tenth of the staff of ED. But technology is moving still at an incredible rate and there's time in my expected lifetime for something along those line to raise it's head. As for the planets, well, wrapping a flat sheet of paper round a ball is always gonna cause a problem, and I guess that the stitching got covered with tape for the great divide, So perhaps the next updates are hoping to generate some readies through new sales so a planetary rewrite can be made, because I'm sure it won't be a quick and cheap job else it would have been done much earlier. Dreams for the future.
Here, post #14 : https://empyriononline.com/threads/v1-7-5-patch.99517/ @Scoob : like I said, it's all about "illusion". I doubt that making "working wheels illusion" could prove more complicated than "making real planets illusion" and same for walking on a moving ship. For that last one, the last developers statement I got was that it would force re-work of all colliders, but they never said "NO" they just said "MAYBE". And then again, just "containing" players inside moving ships would be way more realistic than glueing them on the floor like the ship is not moving. Here, "realism" would be easier to implement than the "illusion" since realistically if the ship moves around then players inside will bump against ceiling/ walls - normal inertia.
I'm left not being sure what paired quotation marks are used to indicate when you use them; your last post has eight and I'm not sure anyone actually said any of them and the search in this place sucks. Maybe the rules around them have changed since my 9th grade English teacher flogged us with Strunk & White.
I use quotation marks for more than one reason, but for the precise case of your previous question it's to isolate a paraphrase (same meaning, different wording). I'm a french writer/ speaker and I think it's the same in french and english. So I paraphrased something you will find in post #14 of the link I gave up here to answer your question.
I may get yelled at but I think and I said a while ago that we have reached a point where a fresh start is needed, the game has become so dense and complex, adding one new feature breaks ten other things and requires a massive amount of reworking and reshuffling, it's just not worth it anymore. Maybe this is exactly what they're doing right now, polishing up Empyrion and planning for a new game, and it makes sense business wise.
Like I thought, the rules changed. In my day they were reserved for direct quotation with the convention being to place any rewording in square brackets to isolate the voice of the author from that of the original source to avoid confusion and misleading the reader.
I don't know what rules you are referring to. I did part time legal transcripts a few years ago and we always used the normal quote marks, never used the brackets, and specifically to isolate different "voices" from the original source. We had canadian and US clients, same rules but different quote marks styles ( french is << this >> and english is "that" ). I doubt they could solve problems in another product that they were unable to solve here.
AP, MLA, S&W ... those all are pretty clear that quotes are for a direct quote. If you can cite a single authoritative source that suggests that it's okay to put a paraphrase in quotation marks without a citation to the original text I'd be interested.
Personally I like to see this expanding Empyrion adding more facets to what the players have to work with and environments they have to explore, build with and add options. If they are adding "Wheels" I'm good with that.
lol... WTF is this about ? This has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Eleon, via one of its representatives, just recently announced that they already said many times they would not do wheels, and you asked to see the source of that information and I provided the link and post number and it's quite easy to find and see. Here, some illegal quotes : """"""""""". So what ? We have a saying in french : " La lettre tue l'esprit "...
The fact I am trying to persuade a Frenchman that having rules around language is important doesn't elude me. Strawman much?
