Inter-Stellar/Planetary Travel

General
68

To understand the movement system a bit better, I looked on YouTube and found a guy doing “hyperspace interdicts”. Fly around in hyperspace (fast speed), waiting for ships to show up on the sensor side panel. Select one (to highlight it, I suppose) and then you can fly towards it. The initial distance was 0.33 light seconds or about 100,000km. He maneuvered and closed to 1,000km at which point his “interdiction tether” was “established”. He had a Frame Shift Drive interdictor module on his ship for that. Then he did some more maneuvering to complete the interdiction and the two ships apparently dropped into normal space for their encounter. His target had been tackled.

But it doesn’t end there, EVE Online style. The aggressor has difficulty closing with his target and the target ship jumps away. The aggressor pursues and retackles him. And so it continues. But I won’t tell you who won.

I think that the whole system is structured around two different coordinate systems per star system. The first is the hyperspace coordinate system where ships go zipping around as nothing more than locations, unable to interact. If they want to interact, they have to drop into normal space, where their game engine allows normal interactions at manageable scales.

Per the above, I think you’re right. For now. Code can always be rewritten.

The only time anyone experienced the PDWS was in Irashi’s flash animation and in the warp prototype, both of which were 2D, third person. Irashi’s animation didn’t really treat the problem of scale, and the prototype made understanding scale fairly straightforward because of the various visual cues.

A 3D game would probably require some sort of third person navigation display that could deliver the same visual cues. Nobody is going to want to manage an intercept through all those orders of magnitude of scale in first person.

In general, Elite:Dangerous’s movement system seems to be focused on players doing specific things. Get to destinations where they can interact with game content, and interdict each other while traveling between destinations. I see EVE Online gameplay.

1 Like
69

Yes, that’s because you could see the distances on a map. That made it easy to comprehend scale and see the interactions of the different parties. To compare both, you’d need to show the same to the player in 2D, to what he would see in 3D. One way to do that is to zoom very close to the 2D ship and representing all points of interest with arrows on the edge of the screen. Showing the name, distance and time to at current speed.
I think then both suffer the same problem.

My first though was, instead of just displaying distance to target and time to target at current speed, a non logarithmic map, may it be 3D,2D or even 1D, or if someone can convince me a logarithmic map with a bar,arrow or point representing the point the ship would come to an halt relative to the system if it fired full trust retrograde at that moment.

E:D has a 1D logarithmic representation on the left of the Navball. The problem there is, it is relative from the target and not from the ship. It also misses the overshoot representation. Though people found a workaround, the 6-7 second thing.

70

I’m not quote following you here. Imagine a 3D sphere projected before you. You see a series of concentric spheres, centered on your ship, each labeled with a range. You’re looking at your ship in third person. Scrolling the mouse wheel smoothly and continuously zooms in and out logarithmically on the display, allowing you to choose the scale that you want to see your environs (according to sensor data, of course). Objects that your sensors allow you to see would be displayed in their appropriate locations in the spherical display. If a given object is outside the current set of spheres, the object is not shown. If an object is selected and outside the display, then some ‘off display’ rendition is used, such as an arrow and name.

This is just the 2D representation used in the warp prototype mapped to a 3D representation.

The nice thing about it is that the player can continuously alter the scale of the display in order to see whatever chunk of his ship’s environment that he wants. If 3D dot trails are used as they were in the 2D prototype, then they can be used to understand how other ships are moving.

The spherical display can either be oriented such that the ship is always pointing straight ahead, with the universe rotating around it, or the display can be stable, with the player’s ship changing orientation. The latter would be visually more stable if the ship is maneuvering, and is the display that I would prefer.

As far as being able to arrive at a destination without overshoot, the 3D spherical display should give plenty of information for players to simply fly by the seat of their pants - as they can in the 2D warp prototype. You can see your range to a planet by just zooming in on your ship, so all you have to do is start slowing down when it looks like you’re close enough. Relying on a first person display to judge arrival at a destination while moving at extreme relative speeds is just awful. There’s nowhere near enough sense of motion, forcing players to watch range countdowns and such. That’s not the experience I would want for my players. A third person display is critical - a third person display with a smoothly-adjustable scale.

71

“Problem” is that E:D has something similar implemented. It works best in a target rich environment and just falls apart in super cruise. In the options you can alter from Logarithmic to Linear and there are buttons that allow you to switch trough, I think, 5 different zoom levels. It isn’t a sphere but a flat plane with “sticks” indicating vertical displacement, I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. The orientation is fixed to the ship, which makes it great for aliening to a target but bad for orienting inside a solar system.

But again it has the problem of changing scales. That’s what I’m trying to get across. I played E:D now for quite a couple of hours and the only way I can manage to rendezvous with anything is with the HUD target data.

And even though I like space, there’s something really uncool about looking at numbers go down, I rather navigate by map as you described. But haven’t been able to in E:D.

What I’m trying to say is that I’m over challenged to grasp the space, the scale in a natural way. Without reference points that isn’t possible. I think navigation inside the Infinity:Battlescape solar system should be as fluid and natural or at least similar to navigating your car or walking around. Only that way will navigation be incorporated into the fight. This is due to the player having options instead of just: Fly to that target. If he can “feel” where everything is situated, even when piratically blind, he can make more interesting and fun choices.

For that to happen there needs to be at least “some” kind of universal reference. The size of objects, the distance between a grid space, the maximum speed of your ship … all are variable in E:D … it drives me crazy.

A map could solve that problem. But for that it must be much better and have some kind of size reference. A fixed grid or something.

The biggest problem is. Once the planet is out of view you are practically blind. At that stage there needs to be more then just a bunch of appearing and disappearing brackets, a list and a dysfunctional display to navigate.

And in my opinion 3D displays on 2D screens have a limit. I haven’t seen one where I could quickly identify the position of a target similar to a 2D minimap. With quickly I mean under half a second. Finding the target mostly isn’t a problem, but then I have to find the base plane and inspect the height of the bar. You didn’t say how vertical displacement is visualized in your example.
There’s one exception. In case I can rotate the sphere by rotating the ship, target position acquisition time is fast enough. They do work well in such cases. But those vertical bars always deny me the ability to truly know where everyone is relative to me, even in a hectic situation. They clutter the display and distract me when I try to track a target on the map.

I think a map that is relative to the solar system instead of relative to the ship is better when navigating. I would even prefer a set of 2D maps. One XY and another XZ. It’s old school I know, but I think determining where everything is in all 3 Dimensions is faster that way.

72

[quote=“Lomsor, post:71, topic:455”]
“Problem” is that E:D has something similar implemented. It works best in a target rich environment and just falls apart in super cruise.[/quote]

I don’t believe Elite:Dangerous is interested in actual navigation all that much. I just watched a video of a guy demonstrating how to efficiently approach a space station in an effort to foil pirates. In that video, he relies entirely on the HUD. I watched the video several times, trying to follow along in the radar display and was unable to make heads or tails out of it.

I attribute that to two things. You identified the first.

I completely agree with that.

The second major problem is that the radar is small. The warp prototype was entirely about navigation, so the navigation aid filled the screen. If I was navigating in Elite:Dangerous, I’d want a navigation display to fill my screen.

It may be that the five steps in zoom would be sufficient if the above two points were addressed, but the warp prototype provided dozens of zoom steps, allowing the player to intuitively understand how the zoom steps related. That is, no change of scale was so great that the player lost track of their sense of things. If anything, it was the reverse, with it being a bit tedious to get to the desired scale.

Doesn’t one of the scale choices include the entire planetary system? This is why there were so many zoom steps in the warp prototype - I couldn’t possibly know what scale is important to you. In fact, there was an intercept aid that dynamically adjusted the zoom so that your selected destination remained at the edge of the map. Most people didn’t care for that, probably because they would quickly lose their sense of what was going on. That’s why having a map making lots of changes tends to be a bad idea. Maps should be stable.

A combat radar and a navigation display (a map) are two very different things. I haven’t given a lot of thought to a combat radar. That depends on the combat system.

As for vertical displacement in a map, that’s just something to play with. Perhaps shade each translucent sphere a different color and have the icons color according to how close they are to that sphere boundary. Perhaps lines to the surface of a sphere. Perhaps lines to a fixed plane set by the ship. Perhaps lines to a fixed plane set by the planetary system (your ship would have a line). Perhaps some depth cueing with fog or translucency or some such thing. There are many possibilities. Then there’s VR, where there would be reduced need for such things.

I’ll observe that the Elite:Dangerous depth-cue lines are far too noticeable. Such things should be subliminal. Which is why I talk about icon tinting and fogs and such.

[quote=“Lomsor, post:71, topic:455”]
I would even prefer a set of 2D maps.[/quote]

I think that would cover a lot of ground for navigation in a lot of planetary systems. But as one video observed, traveling in the plane of the planets is the best way to get picked off by pirates. Ships need to leave that plane. I suspect that just having a stable map would provide you with most of what you’re after.

73

I meant if you hadn’t any technical help. Compare that to a walk on earth. Once you put your map away you still have things you can orient yourself to. A star or gas giant is a good analogy, you can orient yourself to that. But once that gets too far away, in space, there’s nothing else left … maybe the rest of the stars, navigation by the stars is possible, as shown by sailors hundreds of years ago, but requires skill.

No, not that I noticed.

Yeah you are right. That’s why I’m emphasizing the importance of it, especially if you want awesome chase situations while travelling at very fast speeds.

I don’t know. I would need to try that out. I could artificially make E:D radar stable by stabilizing the ship in certain axis.

With a set of 2 2D map leaving the plane is no problem. The X series used such a system:
Had to go ingame to take some screenshots … couldn’t find any:

XZ

XY

Now. I don’t know if looking at a map is any better then looking at empty space. If it is essential for navigation it needs to be accessible, but it also needs to be not distracting from the rest of the experience …

74

You’re not going to make me go off and implement a 3D version of the warp prototype are you? I’ve got woodworking projects to finish up…

2 Likes
75

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHGGG!!!

*breaths*

:stuck_out_tongue:

1 Like
76

Explain yourself :open_mouth: !

From the discussion from New blog post: Elite Dangerous and other space games:

Made me find this blog post that is related to the current discussion: http://enemystarfighter.com/blog/2014/7/6/you-are-here

77

You are talking to somebody who would be embarrassed to say how many thousands of hours he has poured into that game…

And I’m sick of pouring over those menus. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

2 Likes
78

Space Engine allows free flight in a planetary system, and it also allows you to show or hide orbit lines.

I think that the display with the rings is an obvious improvement in feeding my ability to understanding my place in the system. It is the size of the rings that allows me to figure out what’s going on. The planets themselves are too small, but the rings are vast and easy to work from.

A little inventiveness should uncover other structures in a planetary system that could be displayed in an effort to help with navigation, orientation and such. Gravity fields, warp disruption fields, magnetic fields, stellar winds, etc. Some of this stuff was in the warp prototype, but because navigation was fairly straightforward there it was used more to understand how far out various fields had an effect.

In EVE Online, skybox nebulae are used to help with a general sense of orientation at a given destination.

Another thought is allowing the player to artificially inflate the scale of bodies in the system. If every object in the system was scaled up by 50 or 100 times, the player would be able to navigate by those great spheres in the night sky. That could be true in both the first person cockpit view and the third person navigation view.

Again, VR offers the promise of dramatically better situational awareness.

2 Likes
79

This is a good point about using VR instead of a map, and one that has always bothered me with space shooters, actually.

Instead of (or maybe in addition to) tactical radar, a VR overlay can give info about what is where (varied icons changing size/transparency depending on distance).
But then, what for the elements outside of the current field of view? There are two option, I would say:

  • We can have the VR use a fish-eye-like view, where what is on the side or behind you is displayed on the borders of the screen, as if they were on a 360° view. So if a slightly deformed icon is near your left, it means the object is at 90° on your left. If a very deformed icon is arcing around your entire right side, it means that the object is at 175° at your right, almost behind you.
    Some flight sims use a simpler model where the icon is stuck at the border of your screen, but this doesn’t indicate how far behind you the object is. Some even include an arrow to show how far behind it is, but I personally feel it isn’t as optimal a solution as fish-eye VR.

  • Or we can have a second set of icons representing what is behind you. So if something is at 120° at your right, you will see it at 60° on your right, on your screen, but with a different icon. This is what Shattered Horizon used for its combat radar, and apart from the problems inherent with a separated combat radar, it worked pretty well. They used plain circles for what is in front, and hollow circles for what is behind.

Also, I had advocated in the past for making system-wide structure appear as warp is going faster (and you are moving away from celestial bodies), to give a better impression of speed and movement. But you are right, this could actually work as a settable display for interplanetary navigation.

80

I’m just going to bring something up. How long would it take in infinity battlescape to cross the whole solar system? If I’m not mistaken, the ships and assets from battlescape will be reused in the MMO, where there is a whole galaxy, not just a solar system. If travel times need to be different for the two games, then how will it be explained? technically and lore wise. Sorry if this is a stupid question.

81

I’m playing through Freelancer (again), and I’ve been bumping up against this issue of target icons just sitting on the screen border. They’re triangles in Freelancer, which would translate to this idea really easily: the more obtuse the angle, the more “behind” they are. Distance could then be represented by opaqueness.

Agreed. I’m more than a little embarrassed that I didn’t think of that myself. Displaying the orbit trails very quickly gives you a sense of position in the planetary system. Planet icons could also appear on the HUD once they’re too small to resolve.

82

I meant VR hardware. Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear, etc. The ability to casually look around would add tremendously to a player’s ability to maintain situational awareness.

[quote=“lolsparta4, post:80, topic:455”]
If travel times need to be different for the two games, then how will it be explained? technically and lore wise.[/quote]

I would assume that the movement system will be the same. The only reason to change it is if Infinity:Battlescape has some sort of issues. If there is a change, then the MMO can explain it by saying that the drives have been upgraded because of improved technology or downgraded because of safety issues. Or just ignore the change because nobody really cares that much.

Note that traveling between stars in the MMO is expected to use a different travel system referred to by Flavien as jumping.

[quote=“Kichae, post:81, topic:455”]
I’m playing through Freelancer (again), and I’ve been bumping up against this issue of target icons just sitting on the screen border.[/quote]

I cannot stand those icons, regardless of where the target is. I’d really like to be able to play a space game without having to spend all my time tracking hexagons. Particularly the ones that slide around on the edge of my screen.

One simple solution to the problem of seeing icons instead of ships is to just artificially inflate the ships. Put enlarged, translucent ship models on top of the actual ships. That way I can spend my time looking at ships.

For something like a space shooter, I think VR hardware may be the only practical way past those awful offscreen icons. Given that, players would be obliged to do their own tracking by turning their head. If their ship has a blind spot, it’s up to them to deal with it. If the blind spots are not manageable, then the game designers have screwed up.

83

Oh, sorry for the confusion.
VR hardware would certainly be a boon, and I’ve heard that flight/space sims were some of the genres to gain the most from VR hardware. But we can’t expect it to be commonplace before at least a few years, so there must be solutions that work on a screen.

Apart from the screen border issue, icons are what is used by actual military on HUD and HMD. Though both have limited FoV due to hardware limitations. They are efficient, and that’s probably why they are used so much in space shooters.

But having an inflated ship displayed instead could be a great idea, that should definitely be experimented on.
Instinctively, I would go with a translucent model with a simplified wireframe and/or a silhouette to help fast identification of model and orientation by shape, though other options may work as well. Ideally, this could be set by the user.
Another advantage is that it would help give I:B a distinctive look, something that shouldn’t be underestimated.

You were suggesting the same thing above for celestial bodies, which is in fact used by other games like Kerbal Space Program or Sins of a Solar Empire when you zoom out far enough on the map - and it works pretty well.

1 Like
84

I abhor it when a game requires me to be efficient. That removes the fun for me, and turns the experience into something as serious as warfare itself. That’s just not something that I’m interested in, though I know there are plenty who want as much of that harshness as they can get.

As a mental exercise, what happens when the icons go away? Let’s include the idea of inflated ships so that so long as a ship is in your field of view (and at a range of consequence), you can see the ship.

What tools could the player have available?

  1. A button to keep the view centered on the player’s target. From there, the player has to figure out how to maneuver his ship to get it pointed at that target and/or maneuver relative to the target.

  2. A button to keep ‘ship forward’ centered on the target (within the limits of the ship’s capabilities).

  3. Related to the above, a mode that tells my ship to maneuver relative to the target. If I’m always pointing at the target, then if I press W, I should move closer to the target (within the limit of my ship’s capabilities). S, farther away. D and A orbit right and left. Q and E orbit up and down.

  4. A mode that tells my ship to maintain station-keeping with the target (within the limits of the ship’s capabilities). As the target maneuvers, my ship maneuvers to stay at the same general location. So I can then maneuver relative to the target.

  5. A button to keep the ship’s selected weapons on the player’s target, turning the ship as needed.

  6. Some free look mechanism, such as a modifier key to allow the use of the mouse to look around. Alternately, a set of look-around buttons, such as the numeric keypad.

  7. An on-demand combat radar that can both fill the screen and be stable so that the player gets a sense of everything around his ship - that can be seen by his ship. It’s essentially a third person view with restrictions.

  8. A combination of any of the above,

I figure that there’s more than one way to skin a cat, and that icons are not necessary. Personally, I find that they just produce a mess on the screen. I want to preserve those beautiful visuals that the INS team is working on by not cluttering the screen with a bunch of HUD crap. HUDs are not beautiful. The universe is beautiful.

85

You’ll note that I considered the inflated ship as an interesting alternative idea that should definitely be experimented on. That said,

It is not the game that is asking you to be efficient, it’s the players (and designers) that are asking the UI to be efficient. A good measure of efficiency of the UI is how much you think about it, for example, the less the better.
This is why FPS HUDs look more like Half Life’s than Doom’s, for example.

Icons (when done right) are good at giving the important information fast without obstructing the view. Look at a fighter’s HUD: while primitive by game design standard (many are at least 20 years old, and militaries tend to be conservative on top of that), they don’t obstruct view that much or look that cluttered.
With modern game design and aesthetic experience, you could get a pretty transparent UI (as in, you don’t think about it) that shouldn’t hide the game proper (and its great looks) much.

Now, let’s come back to this inflated ship idea. In essence, they pretty much are evolved icons. Instead of drawing an abstract or stylized shape representing the ship, you draw the ship itself.
What information does it bring?

Like icons, it tells you there is something there, and where it is (I’m assuming both are done in a way that shows the order of distance).
Like icons, it tells you what it is - for icons by identifying the shape and remembering what it is associated with, for ships by direct identification. Note that identifying a ship can be harder than identifying the simple shape of an icon, because a ship is a more complex object that require more effort to analyse. This is why I recommended drawing its silhouette and/or simplified wireframe on it as well - the simpler shapes would give a fast identification, while the ship itself would still be visible.

Unlike icons, it shows its orientation in 3D, simply by looking at where it is pointing.
Unlike icons, if there is visible damage or visible activity, you can identify it. So you know if it is fleeing you at full-speed, or if one of its engine has been blown.

As a disadvantage, though, it may make harder to see what’s happening with several close targets, as overlap would be worse. When you see a bit of a triangle, you know it’s a triangle. When you see a bit of a ship, it can be harder to guess what ship it is.
Another disadvantage is that you cannot rely on icon shape to identify friend and foe - and colour may or may not be relied upon, as it must be playable by colour-blind people.

86

The game is asking me to be efficient because the game designers want it that way. Nothing is preventing game designers from coming up with inefficient UIs. ARMA 3 has an inefficient UI. You are required to look around if you want to understand your surroundings. The same is true with every simulator of aircraft prior to modern HUDs. They are inefficient, and require the player to make up the difference.

I prefer the ARMA 3 approach because it does not empower players to excess. That is one of the great tragedies of modern game design: empowering players. Everyone has the same information - they have all information. So everyone ends up making the same decisions. The result is what I consider to be trivialized gameplay.

The upside is that with trivialized gameplay comes accessibility. If the game is simple to play then anyone can play it and succeed. If a segment of gameplay relies on a player’s skill to maintain situational awareness, then only players who can keep that sense will find success. Then there’s success in the hangar, but I don’t want to even consider that side of things.

The ships themselves are evolved icons. Note that the inflated ship approach was intended to eliminate off-screen information. If you’re chasing a ship and it gets out of your first person view, it gets out of view. I can imagine having tracking aids for your target, but not for everything in your vicinity.

[quote=“ThornEel, post:85, topic:455”]
When you see a bit of a ship, it can be harder to guess what ship it is.[/quote]

You’ve just described two awesome advantages. Now there’s a reason to fly in close packs, and to send scouts to find out what’s going on in those packs. Also, to have players communicate with each other.

87

I wouldn’t call it inefficient.

I haven’t played ARMA 3, so I will assume it is the same kind of UI than Red Orchestra 2: one with very little information, to be closer to what a soldier would perceive in this situation. So no helpful icon telling you “there is a machine-gunner hidden behind this wall”.
This UI is actually pretty efficient: it doesn’t take a big part of your screen like old FPS, nor does it requires you to constantly look at an UI element or another to get the information you need while you should be focusing on enemies around you.
Oh the other hand, it gives you very little information, as part of the game is precisely to look at things “with your own eyes” and remember how many bullets are left in the magazine. But that is not an UI choice, it’s a game design choice.

I personally feel that the game should give the player awareness of their surroundings, which includes if there are ships behind them, or what is the composition of a nearby ship pack.
Not only I feel that having all the capital information displayed on screen is better, particularly in such an environment and gameplay where it is very easy to be disoriented (no up and down, constant changes of orientation and speed…), but I feel that it would give a far too big advantage to those with TrackIR or VR helmets.
And again, this isn’t an UI design choice, but a game design choice that will then drive UI design choices about how to display the remaining data. It is also a game design choice that about all space shooters I played went for (if with inefficient UIs such airplane-like combat radars) and IMHO for good reasons.

An inefficient UI is practically never a good thing in a game. Once it is decided what data should be showed to to the player with how much precision (and how obfuscated), the UI has to be as efficient and transparent as possible (‘efficient’ include things like aesthetics here).
UI design concerns may also force game design choices, but in an opposite way: if it is impossible to display the chosen data efficiently, game design may have to be changed to account for it.

1 Like