Hi everyone, In a 2017 post, @Hummel-o-War mentioned the need for colliders to be set up properly as a condition to move freely on moving ships. It is 2022 now, and after trying out star citizen, I re-realized just what a gamechanger walking aboard moving ships would be. And so I was wondering what is the current status of these collider physics ? Could you give us a notion of how far they have advanced and/or what is still in the way of focusing development on colliders to allow us true multicrew ships ? Cheers
I, for one, hope we never get to walk around a moving ship. The distances in EGS are not at all significant enough to require getting up and moving around to occupy my time; everything is a short hop away. If the devs implement walking around a ship, then the next thing you will want is longer distances to make it worthwhile, and that will ruin the game in my opinion. Star citizen is a completely different game and style than EGS. You can play both and get your fix.
I do think the ability to walk around on ships would enable Eleon to expand other areas of the game. I'd like to see further distances between objects, the ability to "super cruise" to destinations while the ship is under AI control (auto-pilot) while walking around and doing other things. While adding distances for the sake of it might seem daft - I get where you're coming from @Stampy, SC can be a bit of a bore in that regard - it can be a bit more content-rich perhaps. I.e. dangerous zones out in space, with additional pirate activity etc. Hidden wrecks and the like for those who like exploring to discover. Currently, we have a lot of this stuff, but it's all crammed in such a small space. For me, I'd just love to be able to apply AI to vessels I own and give them rudimentary orders. Patrol here, fly here, collect cargo X, take me there etc. This then allows the game to have more life as vessels (including HV's one day hopefully) we see moving around actually have a purpose. Seeing that Ore Transporter actually dock with a Station and take on / offload cargo would be quite cool. As would it be to see a CV actually go to a base for repairs, and the Base requiring the relevant supplies to undertake those repairs. I know, that's quite a scope expansion lol. The BIG one for me though when it comes to being able to walk around on ships is boarding. To be able to attack an enemy vessel, then get out of my ship and board a moving vessel to take it from the inside would be cool. Many CV designs given to the Zirax and other factions are a full POI inside, with spawners etc. However, even once a ship is disabled and stationary, we generally cannot interact further with it due to invisible walls and other weirdness. Perhaps this is the sort of thing that will be saved for Empyrion 2, if the devs even plan to do another game in the Empyrion universe.
Walking around on ships is all about immersion, perhaps even 'total immersion' I remember back on the 'old' Elite/Frontier games us solo players would enjoy the trip from jump point to the planet often manually swivelling the ship at the half way point to get the same retardation as acceleration , Elite Dangerous changed all that when we were given only one speed because players didn't wish to waste credit farming time (how many cries were there of "if I'm not making 100mcr/hr it's not worth it" did we hear?) The problem is that there are not enough of us are left who truly want to waste time being uncompetitive for the sake of immersion, and the sales of games in today's world seem almost dependent on delivering many bangs for the many bucks and don't worry about the bugs because the punter is fickle and will move on soon anyway. Elite D didn't bother with walking around on ships and probably never will "you got legs so shut up" and do you really think they'll bother trying to sort out players boarding other players ships and stealing them even though the are only novice rank (did player A sell his ship to player B?) I'd love to walk about on a spaceship in space, watching the stars and planets go by, to set up my own Trade/Mining/Manufacturing Empire, even start a colony and watch it grow... but that's because I can't do it for real, and though at the moment I'm smarter than the 'easy' AI, shooting junk 24/7 ain't my thing. It would be lovely to make the game bigger than big, but with 'big' comes unforeseen problems, the more you hang on a tree the more work you have to do propping it all up. I will say though that I'm thoroughly enjoying traversing a 'very large' planet in 'Reforged Eden' and love the isolation that it brings.
I'd like to hear from these walking-on-moving-ships people what they expect to happen to a gravity-aligned character when the ship they're on banks sharply, and they clip through the walls and ceiling. It's one thing moving around when gravity moves with the floor. It's another when gravity is entirely untroubled by the orientation of a ship or its inhabitants. Suddenly your 2x3 hallway is now a 3x2 crawlway. God help you if you get stuck behind some decorative greeble or piping.
It's not only about immersion. It's also very much about gameplay. Walking on moving ships is an ultimate necessity for the following gameplay aspects: Boarding parties. Obviously, depends on the ability to navigate a moving enemy ship. Both single- and multi- player would benefit. An entirely new gameplay aspect. Crew of any kind. Be it NPC or PC crew, they need to move around the ship to make repairs, fire turrets, pilot fighters, eat, rest, and other activities. Instantly opens up a whole new dimension of teamwork for multiplayer (especially coop!). Another dimension appears if NPC crews are added. Autopilot. There are times when you want to cross large spaces but don't want to sit through the whole journey, and do something else instead. Immersion and QOL boost. I consider those aspects to be important and noteworthy. In games like Star Wars: Battlefront 2 (the old one), or Starmade, or Barotrauma, they definitely were very fun and engaging to me. I really don't see how this feature, if added, would make this particular game less competitive. It's up to the player to stand up or to sit tight during the flight. As I mentioned, autopilot through long journeys is not the only feature that is being held back by the inability to walk around on moving vessels. And, furthermore, there already are distances that are too long to be unskipable. Could you please elaborate on that? How is it implemented, what can you currently do, what bugs are there, and how does that system handle acceleration of the vessel, regarding the effect on the player's avatar? It really is as complicated as you want it to be. Starmade, for instance, has a very simple, yet perfectly fine system. There, a player can 'grab' an entity, after which he is aligned and kinetically bound to that entity. This binding can be released either by the player pressing the same hotkey, or by moving too far away from the blocks of the entity. It is also worth mentioning that if the current "grabbed" structure has no gravity, player can rotate themselves around the view-vector. In Barotrauma, as opposed to this simple approach, a more realistic system is implemented. If a character does not have enough traction to accelerate with the submarine, they are thrown off their feet, ragdolling. Note: gravity is always present in Barotrauma. I think that given the 'survival' in 'Galactic Survival', the realistic friction-applies-acceleration model would fit nicely. In case of zero-g, I think it is reasonable to define a set of "grab-able" blocks. Those blocks, when close to the player (say, closer than 1.5 m), supply them a handle to hold on to. Since the character is using their arms, a reasonable force limit should be set, beyond which the character is no longer able to hold on. For instance, let's say this limit is 200 kgf. This means, that the maximum acceleration the character can withstand, while not seated, is 200 kgf / character's mass. After that, they are "disconnected" from the ship and start flying across the room. As crouching is now implemented, the 3*2 crawlway doesn't sound too bad. As with the greebles – it's all a matter of design and adjustments, – both on Eleons side (greeble colliders) and ship designers'.
Speaking for design, consider the performance profile for your average Empyrion vessel. Most ships are well capable of accelerating in multiple vectors far beyond what a gravity generator provides (I assume 1 G, but don't know). Overly ambitious thoughts of repairing CVs in combat will be squashed flat on every surface, along with any players who got out of their seats while the helmsman tried to dodge, duck, dip, dive, and dodge to avoid incoming fire. This also makes any kind of boarding action against a mobile target impossible. As far as autopilot goes, it would be great. It would have very far reaching implications beyond telling your own ship to take you somewhere. But it wouldn't help long range travel. Getting around the galaxy is a function of the warp drive, not thrusters. Plotting the course is what takes time, not executing it. I assume passengers will still need to be seated during warp, so the ship knows to take them along too. There's not going to be any time to get up and do anything between warp points.
One easy way of dealing with this is to introduce an "inertia damper" device, that reduces the inertial forces affecting everyone aboard by a static amount for a price of high energy drain. More devices = more g's and more power required. On the more 'survival' side of things, maybe, the ability of dodging on many g's should be an exclusive advantage of those SVs (and CVs, why not) specifically designed to be piloted like a fighter, giving them the ability to dodge, reposition themselves around the enemy, and target specific weakpoints. However, as you are bound to your seat, repairs and maintenance can not be performed. On the other hand, less agile vessels, where the crew is expected to survive ship maneuvers, can't dodge as effectively, can have their weak spots pinpointed, and are vulnerable to boarding – but the crew can operate and maintain different systems freely, make repairs, etc., all while in combat. It also goes without saying, that a presence of a limitation in acceleration (due to the needs of the crew) automatically means that much, much more armor should be placed, than before, on a ship of the same size. This would be in-line with a great number of sci-fi universes, where, ultimately, spaceship classes are borrowed from real-life navy and aviation. There, we have large, almost stationary vessels swarming with crew, with a weapon in every direction, and, on the opposite side, a lot of small, agile vessels, that can only rely on their speed as a measure of defense. Of course, just like in reality, there often are intermediate classes of ships. My point is, the effect of ship acceleration would: Help in making the SV-CV polarity paradigm (fighter vs carrier/battleship), that I think devs approve, more pronounced mechanically; Add new interesting challenges for ship designers (out of combat); Add new interesting challenges for pilots, and crew members (in combat). So, overall, I see nothing breaking in the game with introduction of such a system.
If you can walk on moving ships, nobody is going to accept not being able to because it doesn't have the right device. Neither would any helmsman accept their ship flying like molasses so they can. The inertial dampening devices would be practically mandatory on all CVs, civilian or military. If you're going to do hacksy physics anyway, you might as well make the fixing of players' movement vectors relative to a ship a function of gravity generators. Almost all CVs have them already so no retrofitting would be necessary. SV and HV crews can tough it out. You're still not going to have boarding actions against moving targets, though. Jetpacks turn you into a free flying object, but you're still much slower than any ship. Even if you still gained vector relativity, a crew will just strap in and turn the gravity/inertial dampening device off and accelerate to squish boarders like bugs on a windshield. Or maybe the crew will just respawn after the boarders are dead and the devices are turned back on. Repairs don't seem terribly feasible, either. Obviously, no multitool repair is ever going to keep pace with weapon damage, so that's out. Replacement also seems a bit ropy. You have to be sitting in a moving vessel to access or connect to its containers. A ship moving at max speed might bork the distance check, even though you're directly adjacent to it. Hit detection for actually placing blocks in a maneuvering vessel isn't going to be much better. So your safest bet to replace a warp drive or patch a hole in an emergency is still going to be stopping the ship and laying blocks.
No, not at all. For a "fighter" type CV, where everyone sits tight, obviously, it's not needed. In case of a "carrier" type – a limit of 200 kgs, for a 100 kg character, means a limit of 2g, which is roughly 20 m/s^2. That is sufficient for a large, heavily armored ship. Furthermore, said limit of "hold tight" force might be increased if the character wears armor (to compensate for the armor weight, at least). Well, why not. It's an even better solution, maybe. Nonetheless, I still advocate for the increase in power draw, in times when it actually compensates g-forces. You don't need to use the jetpack – a boarding ship might just dock onto the surface of the enemy vessel, and then cut out a hole using some sort of a plasma cutter. Only possible if the crew is drilled and organized like a Prussian regiment in 19th century, or they have absolutely nothing to do. Both cases seem rather fair to me. Besides: if we take only the "throw off feet and hit hard against the wall if it is far enough" aspect of the g-forces, and not the "cause serious internal damage even if seated", then, in most cases, this is going to cause some damage to the boarding party and stall their advance, but not completely, and at the cost of ignoring the external ongoing combat. In case the crew, including the pilot, is so highly trained that it can remain fully functional, and fight back both inside and outside of their ship, well, they earned it. In case they managed to prevent any real damage to the ship, both from the boarder's actions and an ongoing naval fight outside of the ship – yes, that is exactly what should happen. And it absolutely should not keep pace with weapon damage. However, when the barrage is over, for a time, or your pilot manages to turn a less damaged side to the enemy, the crew can at least patch up glaring holes in the hull, to prevent at least some damage to the ship's precious insides, from a less potent source, for example. While I agree that currently moving entities do not make it easy to modify them, the feature "being able to walk inside moving ship" implies that such things also should work in at least satisfactorily manner. So that you don't glitch through hull, for example, and place blocks where you want, not where they do. I also think that these bugs are mechanically connected, in the code, to this collider trickery.
Setting aside that you can't dock to structures belonging to other factions, and that an SV is likely to simply be crushed by a maneuvering CV as it tries to get close, let's think about this boarding scenario. You've got an SV successfully docked against a hostile CV. Guys inside the SV will then try to make a hole in the side of the CV. They'll presumably use personal weapons for this, since docked ships can't use theirs. The only personal weapons that can feasibly damage CV hull blocks are explosive devices, rocket launchers, and plasma cannons. So these guys are going to, inside the close confines of a, SV, use these weapons right on the spot on the CV where the SV is currently docked. At best, the SV is made of small titanium hull blocks. CVs in pvp would use large sathium armor blocks. Those boarders might make a large hole in the side of a ship, but that ship is not going to be the CV.
Allow walking in moving ships , (along with the possibility of sitting in cockpits of docked sv's) would make for a different MP experience with friends. For example, allowing the people on the carrier to board their fighters and engage when an enemy is spotted while still on the move instead of having to completely stop the ship first would make it more immersive. Or maybe running a hauler with a couple of miners on board. instead of having to wait for the ship to make a complete stop people can start prepping when getting close. Would make the game feel more immersive. Heck just even allowing other players to do things in the ship while the captain is flying would make way more sense then clipping through and being shot off out of the vessel when they make a turn if you are not seated.
That might be for now, but not necessarily. Allowing this is just a matter of one line of code, it's not even adding features, just removing software blocks. An even better solution is to add a special device that allows to dock to any structure, but for the cost of a significant power draw. Say, some kind of a powerful magnet or something. How exactly? Given they have a competent pilot, their little ship will have the same or exceeding maneuverability compared to that of the targeted vessel. And if that large, targeted for boarding, "carrier" vessel does some sick moves to dodge both the boarders and incoming fire, they earned it. This, again, is a matter of allowing in code. The whole reason for disabling the weapons of the docked ships is because they become invulnerable upon docking, and the reason for that is because colliders are not set up correctly. Assuming they are set up the right way, docked ships will no longer be invulnerable; as such, docked ships will have every right to fire. After that, it is also possible to add some kind of specialized "blow torch", a very close-range weapon (2-3 meters) with high dps. The "blow torch" I mentioned may also have a much less powerful, but still usable handheld version. I agree that if things remain exactly as they are now, except for the ability to walk inside moving ships, then yes, the scenario you described is accurate, and boarding, while possible, is not practically usable. However, with very minor adjustments, like a couple of added devices/weapons, it becomes a valid and balanced strategy, expanding the combat tremendously.
Nope, that is not the reason why weapons are disabled on docked vessels. The real reason weapons are disabled on docked vessels is because otherwise it allows people to create infinite turret lag machines that destroy anything in their path and/or crash the game. If docked vessels didn't have their weapons disabled then nothing stops a single player from docking 100 vessels to 1 carrier, each with max turrets, therefore having over 100 times the allowed weapons. This is the real reason it is disabled. The whole "docked vessels have no collider/are invulnerable" thing didn't happen until recently (6 months or so). Before that colliders worked perfectly on docked vessels AND they still had their turrets disabled.
And imagine what happens to the POI meta if every player can cut through hull blocks with a hand tool.
I personally like the idea of moving inside a moving ship, as I have said in past posts. We can all talk about what would actually happen about moving in a ship and the ship making sudden turns, but we are talking about a game. A game that allows you to carry four 1x1 meter concrete blocks in a backpack or 3 or more fully grown trees. It's not realistic. The idea is to improve the choices within the game. You don't have to use hand tools to blow a hole in an enemy ship you have docked to. There could be a docking block that could do that for you. Its all down to programming. Change the program to make it better. Give you more choices how to play the game. This is of course if the game or changed program could handle the extra calcs for the change.
Well, this is dumb. Both on my side for not researching deep enough, and on the game design side for making it. I honestly couldn't imagine that such a problem is real. I think that if the game breaks without an arbitrary hard limit that is based on nothing in the games world, it is a serious design flaw. A better approach would be to introduce mechanical reasons, inside the game, why it is a better strategy to make "normal" ships instead of this docking insanity. Like, for example, make the ammunition a limiting factor, not the guns. My own personal opinion on breaking walls in a POI is that a good designed POI does not need unbreakable walls. If it is interesting to explore, if I don't see that whoever designed it wanted to annoy me, or uses every cheap trick against the player, I have no need of breaking through walls. On the opposite side, if around every corner there is a trap and a squad of 10 enemies, then yeah, I'd like to nuke this place from orbit. 'Cause, if the POI creator cheeses me, why shouldn't I be able to do the same? Speaking of the less subjectively and more objectively, cutting through walls is an option already. If the POI is not protected by an admin core, nothing can stop you from brute-forcing your way with, say, 16 gatling guns. I think they break blocks even faster then I would like the "blow torch" to. And if an admin core is present – the "blow torch" would be useless as well.
Wow, there has been some talk on this We need not have a complete physics model. What I mean by that, is we need not have pseudophysics, ie. g forces due to accelerations along different axes. Ship docking can also remain as is. I believe it makes sense to set realistic goals, while keeping in mind that EGS has a team of 5 last time I checked. So, what I would like is simply a status update on the collider physics and whether or not we can expect a more immersive game with friends doing their thing while the CV is flying, instead of everyone just doing their thing or being passively seated. If a complete physics engine is required in any case, then all the better in terms of immersion. That will however require more details such as physics applying to dropped objects, player animations where the player gets thrown to the ground, etc. If necessary, I am down to back an empyrion 2...
I don't recall seeing any patch notes talking about improved collision detection. Maybe it's there to be searched for if someone's interested. I know I've not seen anything about how reconcile ship maneuverability and player momentum. Nor have I seen anything about managing the performance impact of calculating the positions of moving players in a ship well enough that not only are they not jittering around, but they can interact normally with the ship as well. If you want a better experience with friends, use multiple ships. Have a pilot and copilot manage the CV, and send everyone else out to scout in SVs.
I have been playing SE again alot recently - such a breath of fresh air to actually be able to get up and walk around, or for others to run around and repair things while around combat etc, or just run to the hangar and jump in a small ship ready for deployment etc or even abandon the main bridge because it got trashed and head for alternative control room. Oh - did I mention boarding operations? Ram a small ship with breaching charges into the side of a larger ship and enter through the resulting hole? Its made worse by the complete lack of anything useful for other than the pilot to do (well they can fire a single turret and miss instead of the turret ai that may likely hit).
