Will we have better ship interiors in X4?

[Ezarkal]

Or you can take a look at these ships:

http://bbs.deeptimes.org/data/attachmen ... 93qrgx.jpg

Woah... these look seriously sweet. What mod are they from?

[spankahontis]

I hope not. It would mean they will again waste time and resources on Walking in Stations.

The only proper interior you need to see it the cockpit or bridge of your ships, nothing else.

Goes completely against the exploration aspect of X Games in general.. Space Sims are heading towards station interiors, Star Citizen, Mass Effect and Elite:Dangerous for example.
To ignore that is just ignoring a whole new audience of X Fans that Rebirth needs in order to expand the franchise and improve on the previous titles.

Not everyone wants to sit in the back of a Freighter and shoot at oncoming pirates.

Walking around in Station interiors are the future i'm afraid, Egosoft simply made a mess of their first try.. A year this month has passed since Home of Light came out so a year of working on a much better version of Rebirth's Engine will see allot of interesting developments, not to mention they will be announcing what X4 will look like now they can put away the bad release of Rebirth.

And for goodness sake, put the merchants/traders in little shops rather than having them hang out in bars and bunkrooms. That makes no sense.

I always wandered why NPC'S have space suits inside of stations I think it would be also fun to have space walks outside of ships/stations.

Would be better if the space suit NPC's were placed in the appropriate parts of the station, like in space docks as if they've just landed on the station.

I agree that it always frustrated me that there was a showroom on shipyards with ship models on display when you enter the station, but the ship dealer was sitting on a bed when he could of been sitting in that showroom, selling ships.

[monster.zero]

What I hated the most, was no windows! really killed the immersion of being at that spaceport

I wanted to look out a window and see the Skunk, stars, space traffic...it would make me feel like I was there....Not just some added on loaded level separate from the main game.

[Silla]

What this game needs is functionality like a well modable UI that works well with the game and is fast.
Secondly it needs fresh ideas that go beyond what we had in the X-series had and are actually finished. It needs more core game besides sending containers from A to B and back and some stationbuilding and I'm not talking about minigames... I recon this over any shiny ship interface.

[Nanook]

Silla, this thread is about the interiors of stations and ships. There are other threads devoted to "things this game needs". Please use those and keep this one on topic. Thanks.

[sd_jasper]

Considering how popular the Capital Bridge mod is, I would be surprised if ES didn't have some sort of ship interior to move around in. Then again, maybe if we are going back to player captaining capital ships, we might just get a "cockpit" view.

As far as station interiors, if the plan is to keep them I'd like to see:

1) A sense of scale. View ports, docking platforms that move you into the station interior or docking tunnels.

2) Smart layouts. Scale is great, but I don't want to be wandering all over looking for some vendor. Maybe different docks for Ship Services, Cargo Dealers, and Station Ops... and that actually look like this is what goes on... and don't require much running around to get to everything (looking at you OL stations).

3) Better humans. Models, animations, faces, the whole shebang needs some work. If this is going to be a big part of the game, it needs to look good. A huge part of why I didn't pick up XR when I first played the demo was b/c if the way everyone looked.

And I'd rather see a more stylized look for NPCs than photo realistic. Avoids the uncanny valley and gives more of a unique flare to the world IMO.

[Graaf]

Considering how popular the Capital Bridge mod is, I would be surprised if ES didn't have some sort of ship interior to move around in. Then again, maybe if we are going back to player captaining capital ships, we might just get a "cockpit" view.

Because it gives you another setting than the default cap ship hangar.

On the other hand, the NESA-mod was practically made official within 6 months after launch. It provided the ability to almost skip any interior gameplay. So why would they again waste resources on interiors if we have the ability to bypass it?

[ZaphodBeeblebrox]

Having interiors opens up many new options for gameplay. Here's just a couple off the top of my head.

Boarding:
Imagine taking part in a boarding operation aboard the target ship. I don't mean actually leading your marines, but this could also be possible.
So you launch your marines and their first target is to clear the docking area, allowing your ship land. Then while the marines take
on the crew you have to help out by disabling internal security systems, sabotaging the internal defenses, lowering shielding.
Finally accepting the surrender of the captain and his remianing crew.

Derelict Alien Spacecraft, Derelict Alien Space Stations.
Explore dangerous environments, to get unique alien artefacts to enhance your personal ship. So add in all the ususal RPG elements.
Puzzle solving, dangerous traps, locked doors and possibly even fighting dangerous aliens. Add in the fact that finding these requires
exploration, new missions etc.

There are so many possibilites opened up by having interiors to ships and stations.

[BigBANGtheory]

Personally I'd much rather walk around several of my own ships and station HQ and that be a good experience than being able to walk around lots of stations/ships etc with little to do. If in doubt go for quality over scale imho...

Star Citizen and Mass Effect get this right by giving the player purpose and RPG but these are massive games in there own right Egosoft can't possibly deliver this type of experience on a large scale and should not attempt to.

Elite we don't really know what they are planning I suspect they will do something around multiplayer interaction and station hacking. It would be no bad thing for ES to watch what Frontier do and assess their own approach based on how the ED community recieves it.

[sd_jasper]

Having interiors opens up many new options for gameplay. Here's just a couple off the top of my head.

Boarding:
Imagine taking part in a boarding operation aboard the target ship. I don't mean actually leading your marines, but this could also be possible.
So you launch your marines and their first target is to clear the docking area, allowing your ship land. Then while the marines take
on the crew you have to help out by disabling internal security systems, sabotaging the internal defenses, lowering shielding.
Finally accepting the surrender of the captain and his remianing crew.

Derelict Alien Spacecraft, Derelict Alien Space Stations.
Explore dangerous environments, to get unique alien artefacts to enhance your personal ship. So add in all the ususal RPG elements.
Puzzle solving, dangerous traps, locked doors and possibly even fighting dangerous aliens. Add in the fact that finding these requires
exploration, new missions etc.

There are so many possibilites opened up by having interiors to ships and stations.

That sounds like a whole lot of new gameplay systems that will need balancing, animations, VO, etc. Not sure that would be the best use of developer time/effort. Unless we stick with the current "click on thing, play timing mini-game"

I'd rather see incremental improvements to a lot of these systems (boarding could be a bit more involved... maybe add a scanning element to it), and most of the big changes come in dealing with the problem areas that XR has.

[Nanook]

... Not sure that would be the best use of developer time/effort....

Don't you think that's up to the devs to decide? Our focus should be on presenting ideas, not worrying about 'developer time'.

[Graaf]

... Not sure that would be the best use of developer time/effort....

Don't you think that's up to the devs to decide? Our focus should be on presenting ideas, not worrying about 'developer time'.

No. Not until they have delivered that real X4 they told us about.

[ZaphodBeeblebrox]

Capital ships need a lounge where all of my favourite people and personnel can hang out.

Here's another idea, after I have the money/reputation/rank/whatever ... I hire a Shipping expert to reside on my favourite capital ship.

I then develop templates for the vessels I like to buy.

These include weapon systems, drones, and crew etc.

When I need a whole bunch of ships I go to my shipping expert and tell him the list of stuff I require, and where the ships should hang out when finished.

I supply the expert with all the money required and wait for a message to tell me all of the ships are now ready and waiting.

Not more tedious mucking about in hyperspace.

[BigBANGtheory]

Capital ships need a lounge where all of my favourite people and personnel can hang out.

So you need to be a little careful and think this one through a bit because you have the vision of a Mass Effect experience that might turn out to be low poly character models hanging out and doing nothing with dialog to show their wares.

Here's another idea, after I have the money/reputation/rank/whatever ... I hire a Shipping expert to reside on my favourite capital ship.

I then develop templates for the vessels I like to buy.

This makes a lot of sense an NPC or system that you can build ship templates to then order up, construct or o find the base parts/materials. That could work well on a carrier or a player HQ... its something we've talked about before probably worth capturing in the Idea's forum it will just get lost in this thread.

[ZaphodBeeblebrox]

Another room I want on my Flag Ship is the Trade Hall.

This is where all of my Trade Managers can be found.

A Trade Manager specializes in a particular area, such as energy, water, low tech, high tech, pharmaceuticals etc.

I give the Trade Manager trade ships of the correct type, plus some fighters for protection and off he goes.

I can make him responsible for repairing and or replacing ships as needed as well as restocking lost equipment / drones.

Basically when I get fed up with Manually Operated Remote Traders (MORTS) (Thanks to CBJ) I can hand them off to an employee to carry on with.

[spankahontis]

Or extend Item Trading for smaller M Class Freighters, with Zaps Trade Managers idea you can tell them what to buy and sell and they go from Station to Station (Depending on Range) to deal with traders, the better their rating, the better the deals and profits made.

M Ships consisting of a Pilot and a Trade Manager.

[plynak]

Every game that came with interiors ended with it being a waste of resources. STO ship interiors are usless as well as EVE online interiors or Rebirth interiors. This is not an RPG. Moreover even today you do not have to go to every person if you need something from him/her. We have phones.
What would be acceptable and would not cost resources better spent elsewhere would be something like Freelancer or beforementioned Privateer where planets and stations were pre-rendered screens where you could meet and talk to NPCs.

[Alandauron]

Every game that came with interiors ended with it being a waste of resources. STO ship interiors are usless as well as EVE online interiors or Rebirth interiors. This is not an RPG. Moreover even today you do not have to go to every person if you need something from him/her. We have phones.
What would be acceptable and would not cost resources better spent elsewhere would be something like Freelancer or beforementioned Privateer where planets and stations were pre-rendered screens where you could meet and talk to NPCs.

While I disagree wholeheartedly that "Every game with interiors...waste of resources" I must say that I agree that in the standard X games this is something that is less necessary than other things. I would rather see attention and care given to fixing AI pathing over making new ship interiors for X4.

That being said I would love to see a return to something akin to X: Rebirth in a followup game where the focus is still mainly empire building but with some RPG elements and fancy ship interiors maybe even interiors for stations.

[mr.WHO]

The problem with XR interiors was not the idea, nor the concept nor even the actual quality of the interiors...the problem was bad execution and terrible game mechanics.

I mean even with all the parts that XR it is possible to have some meaningful interiors, but you have to remember that in 1.0 you was FORCED to go to station walks for almost everything. It end up terribly repetetive and when you had to see the same ugly face and hear the same crappy NPC voice line to the same crappy mini-game you just snap altogether.

Yet we have lots of station interiors parts that could be easilly kitbashed and expanded to have to proper station and ship interiors. NPC models and voice acting can be fixed (mods with Galactic dress code and "Shut up Ren" are the examples).

The only weak point is to find some real, not forced, meaningful reason to actually do something in these interiors.
To me only ideas so far is carrier management for capship, or Player HQ.

The last, but not least the little kid in me would love to walk inside the hangar of the carrier and see all it's fighters on their holding racks or even walk on the docking hangar of my Player HQ to see all of these fighters, transport and the docked capship outside the window.

Yes I do know it's just a vain eyecandy, but that's why I play X-Games to have a massive empire, so I can actually experince these MASSIVE SPACE BONER moments.

[UniTrader]

While I disagree wholeheartedly that "Every game with interiors...waste of resources" I must say that I agree that in the standard X games this is something that is less necessary than other things. I would rather see attention and care given to fixing AI pathing over making new ship interiors for X4.

[sarcasm]Great, with this its decided - Lino shall now work on the Pathing instead of Modelling Interiors or working on new Ships/Stations. Expect to see first results in a few Years when he learned enough about Programming to get a Ship moving straight forward. will look a bit blocky though because the Modeller had other stuff to do.[/sarcasm]

seriously: please stop prioritizing between diffrent Jobs. Egosot is not a 1-Person-Company, so its never a question of better Pathing versus Better Interiors because both are done by entirely diffrent People.
For things like better/more Interiors, Capships, Small Ships and Stations you can favour one of them (and semi-related the amount of Flyable Ships also falls into this, because they need a fitting Interior/Cockpit if you dont want to settle fore "one size fits all").
On the other hand Pathing could be prioritized over implementing/changing other Game mechanics like how Drones work, or maybe implementing actually working Monitors, maybe implementing Multi-Monitor-Support and things like this.

and just in case: all aforementoined examples are just that - examples. nothing more.