I think that what most of space sims lacks today is proper planetary scale gameplay.
I love space simulations like frontier elite 2 (or the open source remake Pioneer) because they make you feel the vastness of space and the wonder of exploring new planets from the orbit to the ground.
So what convinced me to pledge money in this project was the fact that the game seems to have landable planets. (as seen in the gameplay video on kickstarter)
So i hope that this feature will be properly developed and rendered in a seamless way.
Also it would be extremely cool to travel between star systems in realtime, jusy by pointing at a certain star and starting to travel with an hyperdrive engine.

If I remember it right from Frontier times, it still had a bit of transition when you approached a planet. At some point your ship velocity was calculated relative to the planet itself. While I agree that planet activity and landing should be in the game, I think we can live without seamless transition here. If the game has to have some sort of [Loading] message when entering planet atmosphere, that would be totally fine with me.

I think this needs to be an option in the stretch goals poll.

Seamless Planetary Transition can be more than just an alternative to the loading screen as it could open up a new playing field for combat, exploration, and gathering resources.

Some examples you are out numbered you see a planet with an atmosphere which disrupts sensor targeting so you dive in enemys might follow or not to try to bombard you from above but you were able to destroy the faster ships and escape thanks to that planet.

Your ship is configured to withstand the pressures and radiation of gas giant which holds valuable gas pockets deep within the clouds you can go in and leave with valuable trade resources.

Josh has indicated that this as far as work load goes would be in the same ball park as doing multiplayer, i.e. big workload.

Personally I would rather this in a future release than having to be rushed in this one.

Don't get me wrong guys, I love them as much as everyone else - but as stretch goals/features go, seamless planetary transitions are just a whole new world of development pain!!

Vlastan, thanks for your support, but I hope you realize that seamless transitions are not planned for the game as of now...unless we hit a future stretch goal (which will be quite high), it's going to be a cut between space and planets!

I rekon if done one day it should have bells and whisltes on. i.e. flying through clouds, rain, lightning, fog, wind effects (depending on ship type), flying through valleys, seeing wildlife such as horse like creatures or such running below, the chance of an encounter with hostiles, other landing traffic, responding to air traffic control, parking in a hanger...

Jason Schupfer wrote:I rekon if done one day it should have bells and whisltes on. i.e. flying through clouds, rain, lightning, fog, wind effects (depending on ship type), flying through valleys, seeing wildlife such as horse like creatures or such running below, the chance of an encounter with hostiles, other landing traffic, responding to air traffic control, parking in a hanger...

Yeah, I agree.

And the most important one, turning your ship into a fireball on re-entry
Makes for so much awesome graphics effect to have a tail of flames as your ship plummets through clouds.

You could have planets with different density in the atmosphere making re-entry more or less difficult. All the way from planets without atmospehere (everyone lives in domes), to planets with so dense that you can hardly see through it.

Planets with different gravity could effect your descent in different way, perhaps even with the possibility of disaster if you try to land a cargo ship fully loaded with metal cargo on a planet with very high gravity. Landing with broken engines from previous space combat also not advicable!

No one should get their hopes up for that because not even EVE has space to planet transitions! They had to create a whole different game just to implement taking over planets with other people on the planet's surface. (DUST 514)

JoshParnell wrote:Don't get me wrong guys, I love them as much as everyone else - but as stretch goals/features go, seamless planetary transitions are just a whole new world of development pain!!

Vlastan, thanks for your support, but I hope you realize that seamless transitions are not planned for the game as of now...unless we hit a future stretch goal (which will be quite high), it's going to be a cut between space and planets!

I see what you did there.

Yeah guys you need to think realistically, the thing is that what Josh is promising from the get go is already absurdly complex and hard to do, making a system to generate a universe and ships procedurally is one thing, making so there's actually good gameplay, AI, missions (specially considering his ambitious plan of procedural missions based on the happenings of the game world), economy etc to take advantage of that system and create a great game is another thing entirely.

Besides I invite you to take a look at a game called Evochron Mercenary(there's a demo on the official website), it's a great space sim, plenty of things to do and it has seamless planetary landing transition, the thing is that it doesn't add anything at all to the gameplay, it's neat yes, you'll be amazed the first 2 times you land on a planet but after that it becomes quite stale because you come to realize that the planets are not alive, there aren't a lot of cities populated with NPCs that you can talk with or anything like that, all of the planets are pretty much barren and still, and there's 1 city that serves the exact same purpose of a space station.

And that's because that, like LT, Evochron is made by 1 dude, a brilliant dude like Josh yes, but still just 1 dude, and populating those planets with actual life, making them fun and meaningful would be a undertaking even greater than making the seamless transition itself, That's why I think Josh's current plan of a Freelancer style planet landing with fixed locations is the best possible option.

Henrique Vignon wrote: And that's because that, like Lthe thing is that it doesn't add anything at all to the gameplay, it's neat yes, you'll be amazed the first 2 times you land on a planet but after that it becomes quite stale because you come to realize that the planets are not alive, there aren't a lot of cities populated with NPCs that you can talk with or anything like that, all of the planets are pretty much barren and still, and there's 1 city that serves the exact same purpose of a space station.

T, Evochron is made by 1 dude, a brilliant dude like Josh yes, but still just 1 dude, and populating those planets with actual life, making them fun and meaningful would be a undertaking even greater than making the seamless transition itself, That's why I think Josh's current plan of a Freelancer style planet landing with fixed locations is the best possible option.

Indeed, I agree fully.
Josh even has very ambitious plans to include multiple locations per planet as it is.

In the future when the game is complete and this can be expanded even further with perhaps 5 orbiting space stations and 20 ground locations on busy planets (some known, some hidden) + all NPC traffic in between these, then we could start thinking about requesting atmospheric flight as an actual gameplay feature.

Once the planet generation algorithms are diverse and beutiful enough to generate all that landscape.
Once we have generation of cities, facilities and all other ground locations that make them all look different + traffic between...

THEN ask for this feature, not before. A feature without a gameplay use no matter how beutiful is not well spent developer time.

Henrique Vignon wrote: And that's because that, like LT, Evochron is made by 1 dude, a brilliant dude like Josh yes, but still just 1 dude, and populating those planets with actual life, making them fun and meaningful would be a undertaking even greater than making the seamless transition itself, That's why I think Josh's current plan of a Freelancer style planet landing with fixed locations is the best possible option.

Ixos wrote: In the future when the game is complete and this can be expanded even further with perhaps 5 orbiting space stations and 20 ground locations on busy planets (some known, some hidden) + all NPC traffic in between these, then we could start thinking about requesting atmospheric flight as an actual gameplay feature.

Yeah, after some thought and reading, I agree with your sentiments entirely now. Considering what Josh is trying to do with this game, atmospheric flight and seamless re-entry really aren't that important - the focus is on exploring the galaxy, not exploring the surfaces of planets. To make such surfaces interesting and to make them actually have a purpose would be a lot of time and resources Josh could better spend elsewhere.

However, since Josh is making planet surfaces procedurally, I still think he should show them off a bit - I think he could do a cut-scene showing your ship flying from the lower atmosphere down to land at the city, sort of like Freelancer did. I think he could do this for each and every unique planet because the surface (and atmosphere color, I assume) will be procedurally generated already. He just needs to code it so a similar sequence can be rendered regardless of what planet you land on.

in pioneer planet generation took a lot of doing,, not sure how many devs really work on that game now, but many have full time jobs and only work on the game part time, but that game is still in development, but progress is a bit slow, but yeah, doing planets would be a lot of work, I would still love to see seamless planetary transition at some point if at all possible, but we are again talking about a one man dev team, so it really will be a lot of work, so maybe later, but no rush, I think exploring the stars and systems will be fun enough

It's a shame that this won't be a thing, but what really gets me is this:

Lynx wrote:

JoshParnell wrote:Don't get me wrong guys, I love them as much as everyone else - but as stretch goals/features go, seamless planetary transitions are just a whole new world of development pain!!

Vlastan, thanks for your support, but I hope you realize that seamless transitions are not planned for the game as of now...unless we hit a future stretch goal (which will be quite high), it's going to be a cut between space and planets!

I see what you did there.

Who were you, Lynx? What did you see?