Planet size issues

[Destro]

Gonna put my thoughts down here, even though many of them echo a lot of what has already been said here, if for no other reason than to reinforce them:

While I agree that planet sizes feel on the small side to me, the sizes itself are something I personally can overlook because of the rest of this beautiful game's appeal. Many people don't realize just how BIIIIIG the universe actually is on the human scale (distances are measured in numbers too great for our little minds to appropriately comprehend). While games like Elite Frontier (and the free remake Pioneer) do very well in capturing just how mind-bogglingly MASSIVE the universe in insanely large distances and sizes, a multiplayer game like EM would be too resource-intensive and too boring to hold onto more than a tiny player base due to the incredibly long travel times. Elite 2 is strictly single-player, and as such you can compress time to cover large distances, but if you did them in real time, it would (no joke) take upwards of days, weeks, or even months just to traverse a single solar system. And travel between the stars, forget it. Even factoring in superluminal travel. The game engine just isn't equipped to handle those kinds of numbers.

That said, while I can swallow the low cloud ceiling and distractingly large horizon curvature just fine, looking up and seeing a station in orbit looking like it's just stuck in the sky lower than a jet liner would be flying does bother me quite a bit. I have no idea how this could be addressed, but some kind of solution would be appreciated, even if it's just "cheating" the game engine by hiding them (or scaling them down visually) while in the atmosphere.

Rather than worry about realistic scaling by making planets huge and stars and gas giants monstrously gigantic, I suggest working more towards giving more life and detail to the existing celestial bodies. Many of the planets feel very similar with just different color schemes, and almost all planets yield pretty much the same resources. Greater variety in minable resources, as well as more specialized locations would be great. That is, make the more developed planets in safer locations be relatively poor in minable resources as most of their deposits would likely have been mined out or exploited already, while having more remote, virgin planets be more plentiful in what they have to offer. Different types of planets could offer more of particular resources either in their crusts or atmosphere as well. For instance, carbon planets could exist that are extremely rich in things like diamonds, carbon, and sulfur, as well as sulfurous gasses in the atmosphere.

I'd like to see more variety in planet terrains as well, having things like volcanically active terrains that are jagged and barely navigable in the walker, or planets with barren, windswept deserts, or planets covered entirely in oceans and/or ice (not necessarily water). Don't limit yourself to Earthlike conditions either - varying sky colors or terrain compositions are even better. The moon of New Hope looks a lot like our Moon as well - pockmarked by craters and lacking an atmosphere - but there doesn't seem to be very many of these in the Evoverse, at least as far as I've found. I know we can't realisitically go crazy with a "real" number of celestial bodies flying all over the place as in a real solar system, but more natural satellites or planetoids with no atmosphere or whose atmosphere has been blown away by solar wind over millions of years would be a nice touch too. That said, there should be a LOT of planets out there that are worthless as well, whether due to extremely hostile conditions making planetfall dangerous or impossible or due to a lack of any usable resources, to make finding a rich world that much more exciting.

Planets within heavily populated systems should also show more signs of being inhabited. Even the core planets feel barren and largely untouched, especially while in atmo. Having different classes/sizes of cities as well as a greater number of them would be a great start. I LOVE the idea of player colonies, though to make sure this doesn't get spammed, doing so should be almost prohibitively expensive and require a constant stream of funding and resources for a good while before they could become self sustaining. I'd even go so far as to say make it necessary for an entire guild to fund them. This would make exploring the universe for new uncharted planets even more rewarding, as an ambitious guild could stake a claim on a virgin world and develop it. Independent mercenaries could set up automated mining stations or gas extractors to temporarily exploit.

In summation, I think everyone would find it much easier to overlook the "unrealistic" scaling of the Evoverse if we spent the effort fleshing out more unique details in what already exists, rather than trying to make it feel bigger. You'd be surprised how much more massive it would feel if there was simply more variety.

EDIT - I'm all for making the TWs MUCH smaller as well.

[Edited on 8-26-2013 by Destro]

[-splosives-]

What Destro said makes sense. I give you the example of an MMO I've been playing named Guild Wars 2.
In GW2, you live in a continent called Tyria. If you would compare Tyria to real life it would be about the size of my home town (Antwerp).
But it feels way bigger than that. Why? because there's just so much to do in a small area. They put a whole lot of content in a small area, therefor making it feel larger. All areas are filled with towns, fortresses, caves, dungeons etcetera, all unrealistically close to eachother. But you don't really notice how close they actually are.
It's just a very smart way of scaling a game to where there's no boring contentless areas like there would be in real life.

There is however a downside to this, which I like the call the "theme park syndrome".
Sometimes, especially when there's lots of players in an area, it can feel like you're walking around in a theme park, going from one attraction to another.

[Edited on 8-27-2013 by -splosives-]

[Destro]

In GW2, you live in a continent called Tyria. If you would compare Tyria to real life it would be about the size of my home town (Antwerp).
But it feels way bigger than that. Why? because there's just so much to do in a small area. They put a whole lot of content in a small area, therefor making it feel larger. All areas are filled with towns, fortresses, caves, dungeons etcetera, all unrealistically close to eachother. But you don't really notice how close they actually are.
It's just a very smart way of scaling a game to where there's no boring contentless areas like there would be in real life.

The Elder Scrolls games (and really anything Bethesda) do the same thing to great effect. I remember when I first played Morrowind how much I was blown away by just how enormous and richly detailed the world felt. Geographic regions had their own unique flora, fauna, and features, and the varied cultures and architectures in one area were vastly different from other areas, so when you strayed far from familiar territory, you KNEW it. When I read somewhere that the island of Vvardenfell measured approximately ten square miles, I didn't believe it. Then sometime over the last couple of years I fired up the game again and installed a few modern mods that updated the graphics and extended draw distances to impressive lengths. I was yet again surprised to find out just how close together a lot of the features actually were now that i could see much farther than the developers originally intended.

In other words, Splosives gives a good illustration of what I mean. More variety in local content will give you more of an impression that you've travelled a long way from your starting point. And it can improve immersion in the game that much further when, after a long sojourn out among the stars, you execute the final jump and smile upon seeing the familiar features of your home/favorite planet once more.

There is however a downside to this, which I like the call the "theme park syndrome".
Sometimes, especially when there's lots of players in an area, it can feel like you're walking around in a theme park, going from one attraction to another.

I could just be (un)lucky, but the times I've played in multiplayer, the busiest server I ever saw had fewer than twelve people signed on at once, and most of the time the majority of them are doing their own thing. Given how huge the Evoverse is, in my view it's unlikely two or more players would congregate in the same place unless they meant to, or it's a heavily populated area that's supposed to have high traffic. I completely get where you're coming from, though; it's just that I think EM gives the players a lot more elbow room than other paid MMOs, and by extension a lot less likelihood they'll crowd one another. The sheer number of places you can go in EM helps reduce the number of bottlenecks or congregation points, but if enough content and variety was fleshed out, there'd be no reason to ever worry about Theme Park Syndrome.

[DaveK]

While I agree that planet sizes feel on the small side to me, the sizes itself are something I personally can overlook because of the rest of this beautiful game's appeal. Many people don't realize just how BIIIIIG the universe actually is on the human scale (distances are measured in numbers too great for our little minds to appropriately comprehend). While games like Elite Frontier (and the free remake Pioneer) do very well in capturing just how mind-bogglingly MASSIVE the universe in insanely large distances and sizes, a multiplayer game like EM would be too resource-intensive and too boring to hold onto more than a tiny player base due to the incredibly long travel times. Elite 2 is strictly single-player, and as such you can compress time to cover large distances, but if you did them in real time, it would (no joke) take upwards of days, weeks, or even months just to traverse a single solar system. And travel between the stars, forget it. Even factoring in superluminal travel. The game engine just isn't equipped to handle those kinds of numbers.

very well expressed!

That said, while I can swallow the low cloud ceiling and distractingly large horizon curvature just fine, looking up and seeing a station in orbit looking like it's just stuck in the sky lower than a jet liner would be flying does bother me quite a bit. I have no idea how this could be addressed, but some kind of solution would be appreciated, even if it's just "cheating" the game engine by hiding them (or scaling them down visually) while in the atmosphere.

I've always thought of them as being really really big - which they are if you fly inside and around one

Rather than worry about realistic scaling by making planets huge and stars and gas giants monstrously gigantic, I suggest working more towards giving more life and detail to the existing celestial bodies. Many of the planets feel very similar with just different color schemes, and almost all planets yield pretty much the same resources. Greater variety in minable resources, as well as more specialized locations would be great. That is, make the more developed planets in safer locations be relatively poor in minable resources as most of their deposits would likely have been mined out or exploited already, while having more remote, virgin planets be more plentiful in what they have to offer. Different types of planets could offer more of particular resources either in their crusts or atmosphere as well. For instance, carbon planets could exist that are extremely rich in things like diamonds, carbon, and sulfur, as well as sulfurous gasses in the atmosphere.

perhaps add extra minerals that are only available on planets that have particular uses or are very valuable

I'd like to see more variety in planet terrains as well, having things like volcanically active terrains that are jagged and barely navigable in the walker, or planets with barren, windswept deserts, or planets covered entirely in oceans and/or ice (not necessarily water). Don't limit yourself to Earthlike conditions either - varying sky colors or terrain compositions are even better. The moon of New Hope looks a lot like our Moon as well - pockmarked by craters and lacking an atmosphere - but there doesn't seem to be very many of these in the Evoverse, at least as far as I've found. I know we can't realisitically go crazy with a "real" number of celestial bodies flying all over the place as in a real solar system, but more natural satellites or planetoids with no atmosphere or whose atmosphere has been blown away by solar wind over millions of years would be a nice touch too. That said, there should be a LOT of planets out there that are worthless as well, whether due to extremely hostile conditions making planetfall dangerous or impossible or due to a lack of any usable resources, to make finding a rich world that much more exciting.

there are some very interesting possibilities here, as long as the coding could be fitted into Vice's philosophy of overall programme size and resource requirements

Planets within heavily populated systems should also show more signs of being inhabited. Even the core planets feel barren and largely untouched, especially while in atmo. Having different classes/sizes of cities as well as a greater number of them would be a great start. I LOVE the idea of player colonies, though to make sure this doesn't get spammed, doing so should be almost prohibitively expensive and require a constant stream of funding and resources for a good while before they could become self sustaining. I'd even go so far as to say make it necessary for an entire guild to fund them. This would make exploring the universe for new uncharted planets even more rewarding, as an ambitious guild could stake a claim on a virgin world and develop it. Independent mercenaries could set up automated mining stations or gas extractors to temporarily exploit.

having 'villages', towns and cities (= outposts, early development settlements and established settlements would be a major improvement) - each settlement class could provide different 'facilities' and newly settled planets would provide a customer base for a different range of merchandise than established planets!

In summation, I think everyone would find it much easier to overlook the "unrealistic" scaling of the Evoverse if we spent the effort fleshing out more unique details in what already exists, rather than trying to make it feel bigger. You'd be surprised how much more massive it would feel if there was simply more variety.

EDIT - I'm all for making the TWs MUCH smaller as well.

at present your TW is about the same size as your ship - there are piccies in the Mercenary technical guide (available at SeeJay's website) of a ship and a TW next to each other

[Edited on 8-26-2013 by Destro]