Aighun
Zumari Force Projection
Caldari State
666
   |
Posted - 2013.02.01 14:24:00 -
[1] - Quote
It is the only way to do it.
After listening to the recent podcast and hearing this idea mentioned as one option for determining how to generate the district maps for planets, I wondered why do it any other way? Why not build this shared world as completely as possible from the beginning? Better that than trying to go back in make everything match up at some later date. Many players will invest days and weeks and months and years into this game and anything that seems arbitrary and half assed will become even more glaring and more noticeable over time.
As a Dust merc in the war barge, or an Eve pilot, I want to be able to fly by a planet and think, ok, we've got a fight going on down there. Time to get involved. Part of making this work could be giving us a view of the individual planets as they exist in Eve as we fly near them in our Dust war barges. I have seen this idea kicking around and hope to see it implemented.
And I really want to go to that place on the planet. If it looks like a coastal lowland or a long expanse of plains from low orbit, that is what I want to encounter when I go down to the surface. If I were and Eve pilot I might want to see video of what my orbital strikes looked like on the ground, after wrapping up an epic conquest.
This will really give us a sense of place and also a sense of wonder as we immerse ourselves in the game. |
Aighun
Zumari Force Projection
Caldari State
666
|
Posted - 2013.02.03 16:40:00 -
[2] - Quote
Was just looking at some vids on youtube of footage of Orbital bombardments from space and the same bombardment from the ground.
In the Seeding the Universe presentation at last year's fanfest, CCP mentioned that planets in EVE did not rotate. And that the code was so ancient and so deeply buried in the bedrock of EVE that it would be a huge undertaking to go dig through it and give the planets rotation.
So, in the Orbital Bombardment footage you have a battle on a district in the day to night transition zone (closer to full night time) but when you see the view of the strike from the planet it is almost full daylight. This is very disappointing. There is no relation between the districts, the battles, in DUST, and what we see from space in EVE save the very minimal animation of the strike itself.
THe TL; DR is tha twhen you see an orbital from EVE and the same orbital from Dust it just looks silly when the one view is the night side of a planet and the other view is full on daylight.
Way back when the first planets of New Eden were coded into existence, it wasn't really a big deal if the planets rotated. There was probably no in game reason to do anything that elaborate.
But in the long term, we are now at a point where the living breathing Universe EVE and Dust are said to offer isn't anything we really see in the relationship between between the two games. Maps in Beta in faction war, even though they are supposed to be matched to a district and planet in EVE, might as well be random and totally arbitrary. Why share a market if the districts don't match the planets they share with EVE? Why have player controlled Orbital bombardments where an EVE pilot has to fly all the way to a specific planet when you could just completely simplify the entire process and have it done a pull up menu from the safety of the capsuleer's quarters on station? Since the planets as seen from space don't match the maps in Dust.
Well, what we want is this epic game world that has room to grow and room for increasingly huge epic battles. And it all totally falls apart when it is daytime in DUst and night time in EVE. ANd that is how the game is actually working now. Today. THe time to change that is now. Today.
So, either you have a situation where you can dig into the old code and make the planets rotate, or do something with the planet shaders have so they move a non spinning planet, or have districts tied to stationary point on the planet so it is always the same time of day to match EVE, or just have no relation at all.
And any of the other options are so much better than just having the Dust maps random, and thrown onto the planets here and there no matter what they look like.
With Eve, a number of initial design decisions that made a a lot of sense in the beginning now make it much more difficult to expand on the game world.
WIth Dust, there is still time to create that synchronized and harmonic relationship with EVE, so that the universe of New Eden really does look, and feel, and play like a universe, and not just a bunch of stuff heaped together for no discernible reason. If Dust is to have a 10 plus year lifespan then the world needs to be built for year 10, not just for the next few months. If we are actually fighting on the real, already existing planets in EVE, well, see topic of this thread. Years from now this perhaps seemingly simple design decision could continue to amaze and wow people.
THe TL; DR is the topic of this request/ feedback thread |