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@ Skeeter: Heh, so basically you disliked the lack of worthwhile exploring in XR, but mainly because you didn't explore enough to find any worth doing.

(Note: I'm laughing with you and not at you!)

Anyway, let's try to get back to discussing X4 gameplay aspects rather than just reminiscing about Rebirth.

All I was trying to say is I expected new stuff from dlc to jump out at me when I explored those areas, I figured half hour looking around would do it but it didn't, I was "hoping" it would make me go " aw cool" new stuff but I didn't. Ah well, probably still would have gave up on it anyhow. Bought the dlc tho so supported them.

Heard there were new weapons but don't think I saw a station sell anything new tho can't recall it's been so long since I played.

I think it doesn't help that, even with the view distance at the max setting, you won't notice anything in adjacent zones. In Cold Star there are flashing nav beacons to guide you to stations, but not always in HoL - and admittedly the Gigurums flying over are easy to miss. Obviously you want to feel like you found something yourself, but there should be breadcrumbs leading you to them as well.

Home of Light itself wasn't very exciting. It was more Toride and Cold Star that were interesting. HoL is a highly populated city sector and was never gonna be a place for exploration. The DLC talks about how you could try to break the Terracorp monopoly, but the way faction rep works and the nature of the XR economy made that kinda unengaging.

HoL was a showpiece for X4-style sector design though. Relatively simple highways, with a mix of stations clustered on the highway and others located far from it.

@Skeeter - I'm pretty sure there is a Toride Explorer gamestart that dumps you in Toride right away. It's a fun thing to do imo.

Skeeter wrote:All I was trying to say is I expected new stuff from dlc to jump out at me when I explored those areas, I figured half hour looking around would do it but it didn't, I was "hoping" it would make me go " aw cool" new stuff but I didn't. Ah well, probably still would have gave up on it anyhow. Bought the dlc tho so supported them.

Heard there were new weapons but don't think I saw a station sell anything new tho can't recall it's been so long since I played.

I was pleasantly surprised recently to find heavy laser and that missile which drops you from boosting which i can't remember the name from those systems. I wasn't actively looking for it though. Time to lightsaber some reivers and blockade some boosting tradeships in AL.

MegaJohnny wrote:I think it doesn't help that, even with the view distance at the max setting, you won't notice anything in adjacent zones. In Cold Star there are flashing nav beacons to guide you to stations, but not always in HoL - and admittedly the Gigurums flying over are easy to miss. Obviously you want to feel like you found something yourself, but there should be breadcrumbs leading you to them as well.

Surely this is what the long range scanner is for?

The pings are the breadcrumbs But apparently lots of people found this system too childish and hand-holding and would rather see visual indicators of where interesting stuff might be, so they can be intrigued to fly over to whatever it is and take a look.

I'm down with that, like seeing a huge energy storm in the background and going towards it to see what is there, or a moon that looks close enough to fly at and investigate.

The problem with this though is that it could be difficult to show to the player which features can be flown to/interacted with and which are simply background skybox type things. I think the scan ping system does a good job of showing us where there 'might' be something interesting.

Maybe the next logical step is to combine the two: you see something interesting in the background, then perform a 'ping' and after pin-pointing something of interest, we can perform a deep scan which takes some time aiming at the target direction but would come back with some actual information about the object, like some description of a nebula cloud, or a large asteroid, the site of a previous battle with salvagable wreckage, or something mysterious out there. Thus prompting us to go take a closer look.

For me I would love to see say visual things to explore. Say in a sector there's a nebula, you go in explore it and could find a old X 2 ship with say a crate next to it or if possible a scan ship feature and you have a chance of finding in it some old tech like maybe a gamma ire laser which u can equip and it fires just like they used to, same FX and audio etc.

Maybe in a asteroid field u can find a old working relic ship, maybe one my favs from X tension a pirate Bayamon I think it was, it had a cool cockpit and shape iirc.

Little prizes for exploring.

Maybe a hidden boron outpost near some planets atmosphere that's hidden behind something and inside sells a few old boron ships. Borons not there but ship still had a few docked ships for sale in it for example so no boron NPC's to worry about but let's x4 players have some ships that they crave.

id like to add diplomacy

Skeeter wrote:For me I would love to see say visual things to explore. Say in a sector there's a nebula, you go in explore it and could find a old X 2 ship with say a crate next to it or if possible a scan ship feature and you have a chance of finding in it some old tech like maybe a gamma ire laser which u can equip and it fires just like they used to, same FX and audio etc.

Maybe in a asteroid field u can find a old working relic ship, maybe one my favs from X tension a pirate Bayamon I think it was, it had a cool cockpit and shape iirc.

Keep in mind that with X-Rebirth Egosoft managed to increase the size of... everything. That includes nebulas, asteroid fields etc. There is absolutely no way to "find" something in space that scale by just looking for some visuals.
The increased scale makes designing exploration much more difficult.
I like your examples but how can it realised?

Perhaps rumors that NPC's talk about could start the exploration. So you were given either cords to start with or a area to investigate to start you off. Then using sensors and visual cues like sensors beep faster as you close in on a unknown signal and the visuals could be a huge asteroid bigger than the rest, so as ur getting nearer ur thinking hmm my that's a oddly oversized roof over in that direction and my sensors seem to indicate something maybe over there in that general direction. Etc etc.

Or by pot luck you can just explore and be lucky finding something, random drops of derelicts here there and everywhere, they give a radiation signal. If u have god sensors and are within 30km u can detect the signal and try zeroing in on them.

Or by missions with subplots. Let's say you escort a convoy of refugees from a to b to c. During the mission you fly through a uncharted region of space, you fight off few pirates and after u detect a faint radio transmission and you can either investigate and maybe discover something cool but fail the mission if you leave the convoy for too long or ignore it and finish ur mission and miss ur chance of discovery.

Few examples.

A good adventure starts with a good clue. Imo.

Skeeter wrote:A good adventure starts with a good clue. Imo.

And good clues require hand crafting... not procedurally repeating the same voice line over and over, except for different objects and locations. My opinion...
Almost all good and exciting exploration ideas mentioned so far rely on developers handcrafting and placing exciting stuff, making plots and so on. It just doesnt work as procedurally generated and ever-repeating cycle.

Or by pot luck you can just explore and be lucky finding something

if this was a design goal you would be bored to death as player if its done properly - or you would be showered with stuff., because if you build something on players expectation of luck by actively chasing it you must as game designer make sure that he doesnt draw blanks all the time -> there is a predetermined pattern how likely you are to find something. If you dont (as game designer) players will do that luck thing once and then never again, when they realized the chances are actually way too small and the universe too large for this to work like they expect.

quoting you out of context: "when I explored those areas, I figured half hour looking around would do it but it didn't" - this is what would happen with randomly placing objects in large space. Space is a very very bad environment for hiding things - because you only have distance to hide something in most cases. The only exception are dense asteroid/debris fields with complex formations (tunnels etc). Complex formations require handcrafting (modelling of the asteroids).

Oh I agree hand crafted exploration would be great. I would prefer that to randomly generated ones. I only gave some examples to the other poster of how they might do some things.

@Skeeter
And I think that would work.
This would solve the problem that space is way to large for visual clues as an entry point for exploration.

I guess its the same as freelancer's cue. I remembered the best weps were salvaged off from a wreck.

Vandragorax wrote:Surely this is what the long range scanner is for?

The pings are the breadcrumbs But apparently lots of people found this system too childish and hand-holding and would rather see visual indicators of where interesting stuff might be, so they can be intrigued to fly over to whatever it is and take a look.

I'm down with that, like seeing a huge energy storm in the background and going towards it to see what is there, or a moon that looks close enough to fly at and investigate.

The problem with this though is that it could be difficult to show to the player which features can be flown to/interacted with and which are simply background skybox type things. I think the scan ping system does a good job of showing us where there 'might' be something interesting.

Maybe the next logical step is to combine the two: you see something interesting in the background, then perform a 'ping' and after pin-pointing something of interest, we can perform a deep scan which takes some time aiming at the target direction but would come back with some actual information about the object, like some description of a nebula cloud, or a large asteroid, the site of a previous battle with salvagable wreckage, or something mysterious out there. Thus prompting us to go take a closer look.

Ha! I guess you've got me there, because I didn't know the LRS could get pings from another zone. I just thought of it as the gateway to the silly lockbox minigame.

Skeeter wrote:Oh I agree hand crafted exploration would be great....

I wouldn't. Handcrafted missions are one shot deals, exploration-wise. Once you've discoverd it in your first playthrough, you always know where it's at. Or someone else posts it on the forum/internet and everybody knows where it's at. That ruins the whole concept of exploration. Look at the difference between TC and AP regarding abandoned ships. In TC, they were 'handcrafted', i.e., fixed. Everybody knew where they were, because of the above. In AP, they were randomised in both location and type of ship. It actually made exploration meaningful. We do need clues, though, for help in finding them, because as was pointed out "space is BIG".

I think a neat addition might be if you extend systems indefinitely via procedural generation. Space is enormous, so give us the chance to fly in any one direction for a looooong time.

Each system/area could have its own parameters for what is generated past the "designed" boundaries - it doesn't have to be terribly interesting (which is fine, since it is supposed to be unoccupied space!) but it would be neat if you could go on mining runs or find the odd wreck, or run into something very dangerous off the beaten path.

Kind of like UFJD sectors grafted on to the side of existing sectors, indefinitely.

"I think a neat addition might be if you extend systems indefinitely via procedural generation."

Exactly.

We have terrabyte hard drives...fill them up with asteroid/derelict/loot folders!

It's a single player game. Don't have to consider multi-player problems. I'll buy an extra HD to expand the gameplay.



Scatter these trillion objects through out the system. asteroids, salvage debris, derelicts, loot, gas mining...etc.

Have scanners able to locate hundreds of objects in a sweep....it would still take the rest of your life to hunt down a trillion objects. They would be so spread out that you wouldn't have to draw all the objects on the screen at once....maybe a cluster of 500 objects at the most. computers could handle drawing that amount of objects.

Tag and mark a good/great locations on a zoom-able orrery map.

Getting back and forth would be the problem...but I'm willing to leave my computer running overnight or even while i'm at work! to make it back to a spacestation(or just build my own at a really nice asteroid spot).

Some of you seem to be forgetting that a key feature of the game is that the whole universe goes on existing, with ships flying around doing what they do and stations manufacturing things the whole time you're playing. We are very careful to minimise the performance impact of far-away objects when you are not nearby, but they still have an overhead and they can't just sit idly on your hard disk. There are therefore limits to how big the game universe can be, and more importantly how much it can contain, regardless of how the map is generated or designed.

Procedural generation is not a magic solution to this; all it does is provide a way of randomising things, albeit in a semi-predictable manner. As has already been stated, we have chosen not to do this with the map itself, because we want to exercise control over the design of the structure of game universe. We are, however, generating some of the content of that space in a manner that would probably be considered "procedural" in the sense that people are using the term.

I see why Egosoft decided not to implement procedual generation for the X (series) game universe, but it would be nice in the future for Egosoft to consider a X based game that was procedually generated.

or

maybe put enough support in the game engine that people with the resources could mod the game to be larger/procedual to starting sectors/races/stations ect.

Regards
Flea