No useless ships

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Useless NPC ships?

Keep them to make universe seem more busy
114
75%
Leave them out of the game
39
25%
 
Total votes: 153

Falcrack
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Post by Falcrack » Thu, 21. Sep 17, 01:14

Morkonan wrote:Just a note: In X3TC, "prisoner ships" transport "prisoners" to work as, presumably, forced labor at certain complexes. I'm not sure how that's decided. "Taxis" also take passengers places. They're all TPs, I think.

AFAIK, passengers are actually aboard these ships, since I seem to recall watching a prison ship crash into a station and disgorge some "passengers(Prisoners)." I could be wrong, there, but I also seem to remember scanning a prisoner ship when I first saw it and it did have "Prisoners" on it as passengers.

IOW - They were doing something and did have special passengers not found in other ships.
No they were not doing something, as the people they were transporting did not actually serve a purpose as part of a gameplay element. If they were needed to actually make factories work, then you would have a point.
Last edited by Falcrack on Thu, 21. Sep 17, 01:19, edited 1 time in total.

Falcrack
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Re: No useless ships

Post by Falcrack » Thu, 21. Sep 17, 01:15

Nanook wrote:
Falcrack wrote:I would like to propose that for X4, that a ship will not exist flying around unless it serves an actual gameplay purpose. It needs to perform some actual function rather than act as window dressing, or to make the universe feel more "alive". Examples of that from X3 would be stuff like Arena ships, spacefly collectors, and civilian ships in general...
How are these not useful? I can attempt to capture them and use or sell them. That makes them far from useless. :roll:
Useless to all but the player who wants to exploit a mechanic not available to NPCs. Not my personal preference, I want gameplay mechanics that are available to the player to also be avaiable to NPCs. In other words, they need to be doing something more than just acting as targets for the player, or just acting as visual eye candy.

wwdragon
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Post by wwdragon » Thu, 21. Sep 17, 06:17

Gotta keep em in. OP, I disagree about your X3 analysis of pointless traffic.
Those things were the first things you could board, so were totally needed.

In X:R, I NEVER saw a mass traffic vehicle transit goods, so yes those were useless eye dressing.
However, I would not want to get rid of ALL civilian traffic... think about rl when you go visit a friend for birthday or wedding.

You NEED some civies and so called 'useless traffic'.
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Reprisal
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Post by Reprisal » Thu, 21. Sep 17, 09:39

I'm in two minds about it. If we have massive trading ships and no real small trading ships like X Rebirth. Then we need fake traffic.

If on the other hand we have a lot of small trading ships like X2/X3, then we don't.

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Vandragorax
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Post by Vandragorax » Thu, 21. Sep 17, 12:09

I feel that 'fluff' traffic serves a very useful purpose in making the world not seem completely empty. I don't remotely care one bit about inspecting every single asset in the zone I see flying around and expecting it to have a 'job', what it's doing, and all that. It's completely irrelevant.

What matters is that the world doesn't seem totally empty. Imagine a game like GTA where no other cars are driving around on the streets randomly, or Far Cry with no wildlife like birds, fish, etc.

Things that you don't directly care about interacting with (but can maybe blow up if you desire) do help the world to feel more alive. Granted it could be improved upon over X:R's 'traffic jam' style but even that isn't too bad. It all helps to make the stations feel more active.

I vote to keep the fluff traffic, but some improvements to realism in this area would be nice. And by realism I mean their behaviour, not that I care about them having 'real jobs' or 'targets' to go to.

The other advantage to not having them all performing 'real jobs' is that it's way easier on the game to only have to populate fluff and not integrate it into the economy. If every tiny civ ship in the game has to have a real task, the economy has to be taken into account for everyone of them and that is a really big balancing issue. It's undoubtedly easier for Egosoft to only need to account for medium/large ships in this regard, and leave the small fluff ships out of the picture.

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Post by Alan Phipps » Thu, 21. Sep 17, 14:11

I may appear to be arguing against myself here. :wink:

In X3 games, the fluff ships could sometimes become quite annoying by filling up player station docking spaces. Another niggle was them crashing into your station/complex docks or tubes and damaging race rep while you were building and linking up your complexes.

However, once you realised those potential annoyances existed, it became a minor part of the game to divert, drive away or otherwise manage them. Almost an ongoing evolving empire management aspect for mid to late game that required different solutions for different sector circumstances.

Sometimes planning for, resolving or avoiding those problems gave a sense of achievement.
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Post by Beermachine » Thu, 21. Sep 17, 14:53

Voted for option 1.

While having a fully simulated universe with every ship role, no matter how minor, having meaningful mechanics behind them is ideal, it's a lot of work for what I would consider to be minimal gameplay benefits. Far better to concentrate on the important ships (trader, military, pirate, corporate, etc) having real depth to their simulation and the filler ships being more superficial.

Still, completely fluff ships, like the randomly spawning ones to make the highway mini-game work, are a BIG no in my book.

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Post by Falcrack » Thu, 21. Sep 17, 15:21

Here's another point to consider. They say that every ship in the game will require resources to construct. If that also includes the fluff window dressing ships, then that is a lot of resources being poured into making ships which are not pulling their weight and contributing back into the economy or to security.

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Post by Fedora01 » Thu, 21. Sep 17, 15:58

Falcrack wrote:Here's another point to consider. They say that every ship in the game will require resources to construct. If that also includes the fluff window dressing ships, then that is a lot of resources being poured into making ships which are not pulling their weight and contributing back into the economy or to security.
Unless every civilian is flying around in a state of the art military grade fighter craft and constantly suiciding into xenon sectors I don't think this'll be much of an issue. Other than the occasional rampant pirate fleet, civilians will probably not have to be replaced very often.
An actively fighting military force on the other hand would put a strain on the economy (imagine trying to get a ship from Argon Prime or Cloudbase SE if every ship needed to be built in X3)

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Post by RAVEN.myst » Thu, 21. Sep 17, 16:00

Falcrack wrote:Here's another point to consider. They say that every ship in the game will require resources to construct. If that also includes the fluff window dressing ships, then that is a lot of resources being poured into making ships which are not pulling their weight and contributing back into the economy or to security.
Actually, it is often a problem that the games end up lacking sufficient resource sinks, especially in the late game, resulting in artificial ways to address that by having resources magically, spontaneously sunk from game, which in turn can cause imbalance thus necessitating magic spawning of resources and bad guys, too. When resources aren't sunk adequately (as happens in Rebirth, for instance), the economy becomes saturated and opportunities for the player dry up - suddenly, ArmsTech manufacturing goes from lucrative to a big white elephant, as does much ShipTech (particularly Plasma Flow Regulators.) So in fact, by creating market demands, I would say what you cite here is actually a significant advantage rather than the contrary, and thus a strong argument in favour of those ships' implementation...

ADDENDUM: In fact, using production of these so-called "fluff ships" to sink excess resources would be quite an elegant way for them to reflect on the prosperity of a region: If the economy engine or whatever identifies imminent market saturation, it burns off some resources by converting them to civilian ships and signage and what-not - the area ends up looking busier as a result, giving a visual indication of a thriving economy. Places where there is no surplus would end up looking emptier, more barren - think DeVries in the campaign, before scripted events turn its economy around, except that in that campaign that illusion is created regardless of whether the player decides to involve him/herself in developing the area, regardless of whether a single new station (PC- or NPC-owned) pops up.
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DaMuncha
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Post by DaMuncha » Thu, 21. Sep 17, 17:29

I want useless ships.

I liked the lanes of little space cars zooming around stations.

And I'd like to be able to drive one, like drive a taxi to do taxi missions.

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Post by RAVEN.myst » Thu, 21. Sep 17, 19:12

DaMuncha wrote:And I'd like to be able to drive one, like drive a taxi to do taxi missions.
And in its single weapon slot, it can have a hooter (or "horn", depending on where you're from) :D Also, turn indicators.
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Nanook
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Re: No useless ships

Post by Nanook » Thu, 21. Sep 17, 19:50

Falcrack wrote:
Nanook wrote:
Falcrack wrote:I would like to propose that for X4, that a ship will not exist flying around unless it serves an actual gameplay purpose. It needs to perform some actual function rather than act as window dressing, or to make the universe feel more "alive". Examples of that from X3 would be stuff like Arena ships, spacefly collectors, and civilian ships in general...
How are these not useful? I can attempt to capture them and use or sell them. That makes them far from useless. :roll:
Useless to all but the player who wants to exploit a mechanic not available to NPCs. Not my personal preference, I want gameplay mechanics that are available to the player to also be avaiable to NPCs. In other words, they need to be doing something more than just acting as targets for the player, or just acting as visual eye candy.
Really? Then all boarding and capturing of ships should be removed, right? After all, this is a player-only game mechanic. Because if we gave the same mechanic to the NPC's, they, too, could capture your "useless" ships.

BTW, I've seen pirates and Xenon in the X3 games go after these "useless" ships. They served as targets for them, too.

In conclusion, your so-called "useless" ships aren't. :P
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Re: No useless ships

Post by RAVEN.myst » Thu, 21. Sep 17, 19:59

Nanook wrote:Really? Then all boarding and capturing of ships should be removed, right? After all, this is a player-only game mechanic.
And don't forget the campaign, and plots and missions in general - these, too, are only available to ("exploitable by") the player - dump those, too! :D (Couldn't resist chiming in, heheh)
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Post by Kitty » Thu, 21. Sep 17, 22:08

Should I cry or should I laugh ? ;)

There is no useless ship in X3. Boarding has been said. Never tried the "scan cargo for police/pirate" missions ? Does it sound the same when all scanable ships will have something to scan than when there are also tourists ?

Yes, there are civilian ships that may just be tourists. They not only add flavor, they have the use we can imagine for them. This is the way a sandbox works.

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Post by Clownmug » Fri, 22. Sep 17, 05:04

Might as well get rid of all those useless stars and planets too since we'll never be able fly to them. :roll:

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Post by Crimsonraziel » Fri, 22. Sep 17, 09:25

Clownmug wrote:Might as well get rid of all those useless stars and planets too since we'll never be able fly to them. :roll:
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BigBANGtheory
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Post by BigBANGtheory » Fri, 22. Sep 17, 23:03

imho XR advanced the feel of a more living universe something X3 was frequently criticized for, I say keep them whilst they add to that ambience but cull them when necessary for performance.

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Post by Killjaeden » Sat, 23. Sep 17, 00:54

BigBANGtheory wrote:imho XR advanced the feel of a more living universe something X3 was frequently criticized for, I say keep them whilst they add to that ambience but cull them when necessary for performance.
Didnt GTA have amount of civ's and traffic slider as gameplay/graphical option? I think this would be a good way.
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Post by monster.zero » Sat, 23. Sep 17, 01:03

More ships the better.

There should be millions of star ships flying around the 'city'.

Probably 10-20 billion ships in the galaxy.


Heck...Earth has 3 billion+ vehicles.

If you traveled back in time and told some one in 1899 that there would be billions of horseless carriages driving around...they would have called you crazy!

Fast forward to 2017....There will be billions of personal spacecraft flying around in the year 2117.
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