Planet exploration ala noctis or Elite Frontier?

[bacontube]

Obviously, I'm not talking a massive thing here. Just simple controls to move about a randomly seeded surface. But, perhaps it'd contain wildlife, one small city which has some things a station would?

Imagine if you will, the ability to perhaps buy a device to take samples from the planet of rare things, and sell them as cargo on a station?

I know this idea is likely going to get me flamed, and I do apologize if it seems too impossible. As I said, was just a flavor idea. But I do think it'd be awesome.

[ClymAngus]

Obviously, I'm not talking a massive thing here. Just simple controls to move about a randomly seeded surface. But, perhaps it'd contain wildlife, one small city which has some things a station would?

Imagine if you will, the ability to perhaps buy a device to take samples from the planet of rare things, and sell them as cargo on a station?

I know this idea is likely going to get me flamed, and I do apologize if it seems too impossible. As I said, was just a flavor idea. But I do think it'd be awesome.

Well not flamed. It is a good idea It's just hundreds of hours of man power to impliment thats all.

Effectively what your talking about is an ingame game that generates planets on the fly enabling you to travel to key areas on that planet. Hell visually that could be handled in a risk like 2d map with clickable areas. Use the pangrove textures as your base and go from there. Still it's a hell of a lot of work..

[bacontube]

Well not flamed. It is a good idea It's just hundreds of hours of man power to impliment thats all.

Effectively what your talking about is an ingame game that generates planets on the fly enabling you to travel to key areas on that planet. Hell visually that could be handled in a risk like 2d map with clickable areas. Use the pangrove textures as your base and go from there. Still it's a hell of a lot of work..[/quote]

Ah, interesting idea on that with the clickable surface map. I understand, and trust me, if I didn't suck with coding, I'd offer to help out myself. From what I know, Noctis remains one of the only freeware games to offer planet exploration, but it's engine is horridly dated. I figured even if the planet surface wasn't seeded, and was the same each time, using a simple vector engine for 3dish exploring would be interesting.

[overmage]

device to take samples from the planet of rare things

this will be the easiest to start with imo

[bacontube]

device to take samples from the planet of rare things

this will be the easiest to start with imo

I figured it'd at least add a bit of use to actually trying to land on a planets surface and exploring. Give folks some incentive, you know?

[toconn]

Maybe where you could fly toward the city and start strafing peoples houses, cattle, crops

[Squeek]

Don't forget ruining planetary economies!

Banks, factories, Stock markets...

[pagroove]

Obviously, I'm not talking a massive thing here. Just simple controls to move about a randomly seeded surface. But, perhaps it'd contain wildlife, one small city which has some things a station would?

Imagine if you will, the ability to perhaps buy a device to take samples from the planet of rare things, and sell them as cargo on a station?

I know this idea is likely going to get me flamed, and I do apologize if it seems too impossible. As I said, was just a flavor idea. But I do think it'd be awesome.

Well not flamed. It is a good idea It's just hundreds of hours of man power to impliment thats all.

Effectively what your talking about is an ingame game that generates planets on the fly enabling you to travel to key areas on that planet. Hell visually that could be handled in a risk like 2d map with clickable areas. Use the pangrove textures as your base and go from there. Still it's a hell of a lot of work..

Maybe expand planet fall oxp with the following thing:

When you fly low you are presented with 2 choices (via a mission screen)

1 just land
2 Use the landing computer (included in the landing package)

Option 1 gives a random location. This is the current Planetfall setup
Option 2 gives a opportunity to land in one of the 8 planetary grids.

Locations could be:

Cities
Villages
Nature locations
Industrial Area
etc

If available there even could be a map to illustrate things. Like this for example (map of Biarge):




On this map cities are red and touristic locations are yellow. I made the names up.

[Lorico]

I was wondering... I am not yet familiar with the scripts abilities to do this or that, however just an idea :

- to have some "buildings" or whatever in 3D on a planet surface, is it not possible to create a "ship" (with the form of a building for instance), and program this "ship" to stay always at the altitude = 0 of the planet and not to move ??

If this is possible, then we only need to create different forms of "ships" (buildings, montains & whatever), and if we fly close to the planet we would more or less have the impression to fly above something !

I don't know at all if this is possible, and if it is a good idea, but I just wanted to participate the debate =)

Cheers

[Thargoid]

Nice idea in theory, not possible in practice.

Four problems:

• Collision detection - your "building ships" would collide with the planet and explode.
• Planetary rotation - either the planet would rotate merrily underneath the building, or the building would have to have some extremely clever AI and scripting to keep it in the same place as it's supposed point on the surface texture.
• Planetary texturing - Given that the texture is just an image, it's quite likely that you'd end up with buildings partly or wholely sitting on top of what appears to be ocean or cloud cover.
• Scale - The age-old scale question, in relation to the scaling of the texturing almost any building that isn't a city in itself would be too small to see.

I did look into this kind of thing when I wrote Planetfall (at least the proper later version of it), and there were a few proof-of-concept test OXP variants written. Have a look in the thread for the OXP and you'll see them. But they never looked quite right for the above reasons, and where they had to be put to avoid collision detection a careful and slow pilot could usually fly below or even underneath them [/color]

[Phoenix4]

How about the concept of a 'floating city' like the Cloud City shown in one of the star wars films?

That way, it doesn't necessarily need to be anchored to a fixed point, and you have the ability to fly towards it once you break through the atmosphere.

Additional docking computers for access could then be required, or try for a manual 'landing' so-to-speak.

Just my 0.02...

Px4

[Thargoid]

Sorta like this?

[Phoenix4]

Yep - like that

I never knew that OXP existed! So if you could land on them....hmm.....

[Frame]

You can Easely "fake" a landing... by just adding a docking bay without sides... however the backdrop of the docking screens, will be standard...

at least until we can set a background picture. at any of the GUI screens...

I would like to put models and stuff moving about, when you are docked... but thats not possible ATM...

[Thargoid]

You can Easely "fake" a landing... by just adding a docking bay without sides... however the backdrop of the docking screens, will be standard...

AKA Planetfall