Why no free roam in space?

[AxelStorm]

Or atleast space combat ? Space combat missions feel more like a roller coaster ride and not actual combat. I can see limitations w game engine etc with just 'open space' (no instance / zone) but not sure why they chose to make it arcade like with the combat missions...

Are there plans to change this?

[SteveTheCynic]

Or atleast space combat ? Space combat missions feel more like a roller coaster ride and not actual combat. I can see limitations w game engine etc with just 'open space' (no instance / zone) but not sure why they chose to make it arcade like with the combat missions...

Are there plans to change this?

The problem with "true" open space is that, well, space is big. (Snip quotation of HGTTG.)

 

Just getting to low orbit (the arrival orbit is *not* low orbit, seeing as how it is 40000 kilometers or so (see certain planets in the Inquisitor story)) would take several minutes, and going any further would be *extremely* boring.

 

A free-flight version of the railshooter space missions might be interesting, but seeing as how the railshooter missions have been essentially unchanged since the game released, something tells me that there's not going to be anything new there, like, ever.

[AxelStorm]

Agreed space is big but its just empty space. On the client side, theres not alot to render.... black enviroment drop with some stars and maybe a planet, moon or space stations thrown in. EVE online has largest 'world' of all mmos , sure it could be done here... but then again, this could be game engine limitation....

[MadDutchman]

Agreed space is big but its just empty space. On the client side, theres not alot to render.... black enviroment drop with some stars and maybe a planet, moon or space stations thrown in. EVE online has largest 'world' of all mmos , sure it could be done here... but then again, this could be game engine limitation....

 

It's not that it couldn't be done (see GSF after all), it's that BW obviously does not feel it would have a decent ROI

 

Space combat isn't really this game's "thing". It's not EVE or Star Citizen, and it cannot be expected to be able to just drop key features of those kinds of games into SWTOR.

 

Now, I'd absolutely love an EVE style game set in the SW universe (learning from some of that game's mistakes of course), however to be done right would require a whole separate game, or a game that never becomes a game (see Star Citizen trying to be everything...)

[ThanderSnB]

That's the big complaint with the space missions. They're just too shallow, not enough to them to maintain player interest after beating them once. Plenty of things they could do to improve them including the mentioned free roaming controls, a score system with high scores and rankings, a story campaign that connects them together more, more depth to the upgrades, etc. I was surprised that GSF was PvP-only. Players complained about space missions (PvE content), so they added a PvP mode. Doesn't make sense. Sure, there were players that wanted PvP space missions, but the vast majority just wanted the existing space missions to be overhauled and made good like other Star Wars flying/simulation games (X-Wing, Tie Fighter, Rogue Squadron, etc.)

[WaywardOne]

SWG and STO are the better space games. Very sad.

[xordevoreaux]

Fly your United Federation of Planets starship around in TSO. Open, navigable space during ship-to-ship combat.

It's been done.

 

Agreed space is big but its just empty space.

But you're confusing nature with computer game geometry.

Depicting the nothing of "empty space" in a computer game requires a geometrical shape.

 

It takes (practically) no more computer storage to represent a cube that's 1 meter x 1 meter x 1 meter than it does to represent one that occupies 1 light year x 1 light year x 1 year year. It's just an order of magnitude, which even 32-bit MMO 3D engine cores and client-side applications can handle... mostly.

 

For example, when I resize a 3D mesh in Sims 4 to be 2x the original, the resulting file size is no bigger than the original. I just played with numbers. The storage burden is the same.

 

For SWTOR, after that a simple resize is computationally significant, both on the server and the client.

• Tracking your position and everything in that massive cube.
  
• Textures high-resolution enough so they don't look like The Jetsons cartoon night time sky.
  

 

I'm sure the devs could add tons to that list.

In Everquest 2, you can fly a dragon (disc / propeller gizmo / your bat wings) from one end of a huge zone to another nonstop. Takes a while, but you can do it. So yes, free flight in a large open space has been done by more than just one game.

 

TSO is probably heavily kludged to fake the hugeness of that space.

But it's not just empty. It would tug on the server capacity.

 

Edit: The easiest kludge would be to create a box barely larger than your ship and you sit still while textures cycle past you. You won't know the difference.

Edited December 31, 2021 by xordevoreaux

[Pricia]

What would be the point? Spending time, money and resources for... what? Roaming in the void?

[NDNCreek]

SWG and STO are the better space games. Very sad.

This. SWG was Star Wars it had the Best Space adventures battles mining and PvP.

Fact is it was the Best MMO with housing open world's crafting the PvP when you wanted to more missions than you could ever do the Interaction with rebs and imps and the Market for selling what you made ...had hoped BW was going to use some of the Best ideas and content with the better graphics...But instead we got this thing.

So much that they could have done and they just don't Listen and I doubt Any of these Companies Ever will just like SOE not hearing what the Customers wanted before they shut down the Best MMO and SW game Ever.

[xordevoreaux]

This. SWG was Star Wars it had the Best Space adventures battles mining and PvP.

Fact is it was the Best MMO with housing open world's crafting the PvP when you wanted to more missions than you could ever do the Interaction with rebs and imps and the Market for selling what you made ...had hoped BW was going to use some of the Best ideas and content with the better graphics...But instead we got this thing.

So much that they could have done and they just don't Listen and I doubt Any of these Companies Ever will just like SOE not hearing what the Customers wanted before they shut down the Best MMO and SW game Ever.

 

Not to totally derail the thread, but I was lost in SWG when I first started. Just roaming around, getting a quest here, getting a quest there, wondering what to do next. Amazing and refreshing to have a fully voiced story line and major questing path delivered starting minute one in SWTOR. Massive improvement over any other MMO I've ever played.

[SteveTheCynic]

Fly your United Federation of Planets starship around in TSO. Open, navigable space during ship-to-ship combat.

It's been done.

It has, and STO's implementation of notionally free-flight space combat, well, it sucks.

But you're confusing nature with computer game geometry.

Depicting the nothing of "empty space" in a computer game requires a geometrical shape.

 

It takes (practically) no more computer storage to represent a cube that's 1 meter x 1 meter x 1 meter than it does to represent one that occupies 1 light year x 1 light year x 1 year year. It's just an order of magnitude, which even 32-bit MMO 3D engine cores and client-side applications can handle... mostly.

Indeed, but the "space is big" thing refers to the fact that that cube *is* very large, and contains almost nothing. Distances and scales in STO are *completely* unrealistic. See that ship that's almost a quarter of an orbit away? Well, the scanners show that it's only 90 kilometres to get there...

 

But anyway, back to "space is big"...

For example, when I resize a 3D mesh in Sims 4 to be 2x the original, the resulting file size is no bigger than the original. I just played with numbers. The storage burden is the same.

 

For SWTOR, after that a simple resize is computationally significant, both on the server and the client.

• Tracking your position and everything in that massive cube.
  
• Textures high-resolution enough so they don't look like The Jetsons cartoon night time sky.
  

 

I'm sure the devs could add tons to that list.

Actually, the main problems as seen from the outside would be how you'd even *see* another player. Let's take a different example, from the world of off-line gaming, but also from the world of 1993, where 640K RAM was all that anyone would ever need. The specific example is Frontier: Elite II. It had a more-or-less realistic depiction of distance on an interplanetary scale, and a "real-time" (not time-compressed) treatment of the game would have left players having to leave their PCs running for a couple of weeks just to get from Earth to a space station orbiting one of Barnard's Star's planets. Fortunately, it had a variable-ratio time-compression tool that could shorten the time that stuff took, bringing it down by 10000-to-1.

 

Such a tool would have to be at a fixed ratio in a "shared" online space world, or distances would have to be artificially compressed, or both, because it's a shared world and everyone would have to use the same factors.

 

So no, free-flight space isn't going to happen, but some sort of mutant space- and time-compressed version of it might be feasible, with other players' ships shown (as it was done by Jetfighter in 1988) substantially above their correct distance-scaled size.

[Darev]

Not to totally derail the thread, but I was lost in SWG when I first started. Just roaming around, getting a quest here, getting a quest there, wondering what to do next. Amazing and refreshing to have a fully voiced story line and major questing path delivered starting minute one in SWTOR. Massive improvement over any other MMO I've ever played.

 

Yeah, SWG was like that at first. Personally I love that game, it's the MMO I "grew up" on.

 

However, to the OP's point, to me it seems what they're looking for is SWG's space game, JTL.

Free roaming space.

PVE space missions.

PVP space zones

Multi Passenger space ships

A very in depth addition to SWG's amazingly intricate crafting game.

First person / 3rd person ship views.

Flight Stick controls.

 

If they hadn't cancelled that game I'd still be playing it.

[merovejec]

Or atleast space combat ? Space combat missions feel more like a roller coaster ride and not actual combat. I can see limitations w game engine etc with just 'open space' (no instance / zone) but not sure why they chose to make it arcade like with the combat missions...

Are there plans to change this?

 

The only other thing you get is GSF.