feel free to program it as they keep telling me

I know Steve "coolhand" Tyler made a really great model for a land crawler. I think this was the sort of thing he had in mind, but I dont know if he is still involved in the project anymore 🙁

There are many topics about this. Most people want it of course but to make it is another thing. Pioneer is being updated by a small team of great volunteers who are doing an awesome job improving the game with bugfixes and extra features but adding the ability to exit your spacecraft, walk around, survey, mine and build is almost like making an entirely new game. I would love to see this too, it would make the game complete but I know it's a LOT of work to get this job done. It's only fair if the volunteers say "feel free to program it".

But Pioneer is gaining popularity and is only in Alpha state. There is lots of time left to add extra features to the game and maybe some day additional talent will join the development team and start looking into this. Know that you're not the only one who dreams of these features but it can only be done with lots of time, lots of patience and a very dedicated team of volunteers.

There are very few barriers to becoming one of the "great volunteers."

At the moment, the surface isn't a particularly suitable thing upon which to drive. Try landing on it with your wheels up; you'll find that it behaves in a very odd manner indeed. It's not just a case of creating a vehicle, it's a case of providing something solid upon which it can travel.

AN idea for a down the track type of thing may be a hovercraft vechile or a walker of some sort or a jetpack type of movement to cope with difficult surfaces. Antigravity hovercraft that sits just above the surface ( at some point in the near or far future of pioneer development) could incorparate some of these ideas

Something like the Mass Effect 2 Hammerhead, is that what you mean ollobrain?

U know i wasnt thinking of the hammerhead idea from mass effect 2 however that would be a possible solution to rough terrian

It's simply a too early stage in developement. I don't know if anyone noticed, but the spaceflight part is still worked on, and that's supposed to be the main thing in the game.

One of the problems is that considering ground vehicles now would open the door very wide for feature creep. First you have to make the thing driveable. No, actually, first you have to make it transportable, and then you have to give the player the ability to switch to it. There's not even an architecture for that yet, so first you'd have to do that.

Then make it drivable. Ok, make a hovercraft that doesn't need to conform to the ground that much, meaning you can spare yourself the pain of doing a local bullet implementation in a global 3dimensional newtonian frame. Maybe even the already existing altitude hook with the horizon alignement (which has to be in there somewhere for the autopilot, I guess) is enough.

With those two things, you got yourself some sort of ground vehicle. Now you need something to do with it. There's no crust composition model yet (I hear it's being worked on), so you have to wait for that to have a meaningful way of distributing resources over the surface. Then you actually have to distribute them (probably some fractal algorithm that uses the crust composition as input will do to distribute several mineral deposits randomly enough over the surface).

Ok. Now we got resources and a ground vehicle. Now we need a way to locate resources. If you space them too close, you break any attempt at balancing the game, because you can just drive around on planets collecting practically unlimited resources. So we have to space them further apart, to not make it too easy for the player to find them. Let's say 1 resource deposit per 1000 km^2 max. To succesfuly navigate the planet, you now need some kind of positioning. Latitude/Longitude is being worked on, but you'll also need to display it on the hud.

Very well, now you got all that. Some smartypants finds out that driving several kilometers around a planets surface isn't as exciting as it initially sounded after you did it a few times, and that you're faster FLYING to the vicinity of the resource deposit. BANG. You just did all the work for nothing, because you notice that it wasn't actually an essential feature for the gameplay.

Of course, smartypants says Ground Vehicles are cool, but driving around the surface without anything happenig just isn't that. All you'd have to do to make it actually fun is to put a bit of boom in there. You know, have a few thresher maws put up their heads every now and then, encounter the local pirate driveby division, stuff like that. Oh yeah, and special weapons and equipement for the ground vehicle would be nice!

And believe me, once you implemented that just because it sounded like a great idea, there will be trouble with that.

That's why people usually have a plan on what the next milestone should include and what not. The overall milestone for Pioneer, as far as I gathered, is to have a feature-complete frontier remake, improved in the areas were improvement must be, but no additional major features. Once that milestone is reached, I guess people will look at it and think about what would be nice to add, and especially how it can be implemented into the current context so that it adds meaningful gameplay elements. As long as the planned context isn't even finished, adding major features doesn't really make much sense.

But hey, this is open source after all, so... yeah, everyone's free to implement it himself if he thinks something is a must have. And everyone's free to see how little sense it makes in the finished game because they just didn't think it through enough in the start. Game design is a bit more than "want, want, want and want!" It all has to fit together in a meaningful way in the end.

Now, go watch all episodes of Extra Credits! It's worth it!

I for one am glad that the devs have a clear and realistic goal in their minds and don't let themselfes get sidetracked from all the shiny stuff I'm sure they would really love to have in, but for which they just don't see any practical way to put it in at this time. Or also features they would love to see, but know they'll never implement because they make no sense in the scope of the game (I'd not say that ground vehicles fall into that category, but base-building and galaxy-conquering certainly are...)

Although I do agree with everything you have just said about getting the core features done first, it would still be nice (at some point in Pioneer's distant future) to have more interaction with the planets beyond just landing at spaceports. But I am realistic enough to realise its far down (or not even on) the priority list. Nothing wrong with dreaming about features like this though.

Heck, I am going to just come right out and say it, I would love to be able to land at some distant low tech backwater world to find some sort of crazy World War 2 going on that you could get caught up in! 😆 Taking on Messerschmitt's in my Sidewinder would be a hoot! Ok I admit it, its Secret Weapons Over Normandy's fault for having a hidden playable X-Wing once you complete the game 😳

Who of us wouldn't? 😉

All I'm saying is that if hands-on planetary exploration is ever to become a worthwhile feature in pioneer, we'll have some mechanical kinks to figure ways around so it actually makes sense. In the current state, the devs would probably not even be sure what those kinks are precisely. Well, by virtue of taking Frontier as a template, we might actually get a good Idea, so let's do this as a little thought excercise for later.

The sense of ground vehicles in a setting where spaceship use practically no fuel to get around is more than questionable, unless we invent in some mcguffin to make ships less usable for getting around on planets. One that isn't utterly ridiculous, too.

Second problem, Mining planets cannot become a fast way to become rich. Solutions that come to mind: Minerals don't get you much so you need a big ship to really make it worth your while, or not have that many resources on planets. Or have something else altogether on planets.

Third problem, driving around on planets without stuff happening gets old fast for most people. How to make it interesting without having to make a whole new game within the game? Starflight showed us right in the beginning of the gaming era how fun exploration in a game can look like, but it's somewhat tougher to convincingly pull of in 3d.

I'd say anyone that thinks about ground exploration in Pioneer should have good answers to these three questions handy before starting anything, or he'll get in trouble... 😕

Most of these problems stem from the fact that pioneer is pretty realistic. Life-sized, galaxy, life-sized systems, life-sized planets, life-sized everything. That is of course what we love about pioneer, but it also doesn't leave much room for abstraction. Without abstraction, many life-sized things tend to get life-sizedly tedious (yes, I just made that word up). Fun planetary exploration was around since starflight, but it doesn't translate well into a non-abstracted setting. If we want to put it in, we'll have to put it in in a way noone has done so before, because no-one has ever had the same pre-conditions and therewith the same problems before. Unless we want to go all-out simulation, someone has to come up with a few pretty ingenious tricks to make driving around on giant spheres of rock for days actually fun...

While I agree with a lot of things UncleBob says, we obviously do not share the same enthousiasm for gameplay. The thing I do agree with, is what I also said earlier: it will be a very hard thing to accomplish, almost like writing a completely new game with numerous issues and problems to sort out and therefore maybe not worth it. And yes, the team should focus on getting the basics done first: a proper Elite clone with good solid spaceflight. So bottomline is that I agree with UncleBob but only because of the work involved. Not because of the gameplay or realism.

If by some miracle the game would be complete with driving, building and mining, this smartypants doesn't think flying instead of driving would be more fun after all. I think gameplaywise I could spend weeks prospecting and surveying the surface for minerals and I think it would/could make sense doing this with groundvehicles. It's science fiction, we could easily come up with a story that it's more cost efficient to use purpose built prospecting vehicles than flying around in expensive spacecraft. If nessecary spaceflight could be made more expensive and groundvehicle use a bit cheaper to make a balance. If in the future there is no use whatsoever for groundvehicles (which I doubt) sci-fi movies and games would become very boring I'm afraid and if we question everything potentially "unrealistic", then what's the point of sci-fi anyways? In that case, you can start questioning everything about Pioneer. But I guess that's just a different opinion about gameplay. I'm also more into simulators but for sci-fi games I think a bit of fantasy isn't a bad thing.

I would reeeeeeally look forward to surfacebased gameplay but I'm realistic enough to know Pioneer isn't run on a multimillion dollar budget 😀 .

Sure, but it's got to be reflected by game mechanics. Sure there will be people that will use vehicles to get around, but it would be a pure "fun"-feature if the gameplay offers a more convienient way to do the same job.

That would pretty much be mandatory, but now we get a problem: We'd have to think about that now, before the spaceflight part is completely finished, or we end up overthrowing the whole balance again. I don't say that the ground vehicle part has to be finished by 1.0 already, but the conditions to implement them must be given, or "pioneer with ground vehicles" might play radically different (more like a pioneer 2). Maybe that's not really an issue for most, it just means doing a lot of work twice.

Hey, neither do I. Indeed I consider it absolutely necessary, you can't have a halfway accesible SF-setting without rather impressive amounts of magitech (for all I know my hyperdrive is powered by a circle of white-robed women chanting in welsh, but that's fine). I'm just saying that features, especially if they require a lot of work, must make sense in the context of the game mechanics.

Those are good points. Nevertheless, I would still be thrilled if groundbased exploration would some day be possible in Pioneer.

Well I guess that must be the reason they call it a "witch drive" 😆 .

Thanks for the responses guys (and possibly girls). Noticed there wasn't a topic like this on the forums, so I decided to make one 😉

And yes, I know it wouldn't make sense.

Just wanted to spark the idea. I personally love how Parkan II and the Precursers allow for some on-foot action, but dream a distant dream of it being on a planetary scale...

I don't have a particular opinion on this topic, but I do notice that there's lots of talk about "the devs" and what we want to do. Just remember that the concept of the development team is very very loose - its some combination of whoever is regularly contributing stuff at any given moment, the people in the IRC channel, and the people with a long history with the project that everyone else will listen to (ie tomm).

Pretty much anyone that wants to get involved can. Read the design process to get an idea of what the process looks like. Throw some stuff onto the wiki and see what sticks.

I have an offtopic question but it has to do a bit with the surface and mesh.

Is possible and natural the addition of object projected shadows over a procedurally generated mesh? I have the doubt.

Its possible, but we don't currently have engine support for shadows. There is work going on in that area though - see issue #849.

I made the question because nor spaceway nor Orbiter Ogla have shadows over the mesh but vanilla Orbiter has shadows over the naked planet sphere. And as Pioneer lacked the shadowing I guessed about the internal nature of the matter.

Thanks for the info.

Actually, I have a hacky surface exploration implementation... it's purely "for fun", just a quick buggy hack which isn't in any way intended as a basis for something mergeable, but I'm putting it on github (rebased to latest master) so anyone who wants to test out what surface exploration might be like.

It puts you in a big sphere (giant hamsterball, maybe?) which hovers springily above the ground (antigrav? invisible legs?) to avoid collision physics unpleasantness.

To activate: land on a planet (being docked doesn't count), press ctrl-e, and switch to exterior view. Use usual keyboard controls to control motion and rotation. Don't use time accel, or you might find yourself knocked randomly into orbit 😉

https://github.com/zugz/pioneer/tree/EVA

Wow nice work Zugz 😀

Spaceway doesn't have shadows yet, and Orbiter terrain is lacking core support. There is nothing intrinsically more difficult in casting shadows on a flat sphere and casting them on a more complex geometry, it's all a question of how the engine handles it.

Well load up another of Zugz' branches and you can have shadows too 😀 (He made some cool branches lately 🙂 )

It is planets casting shadows upon each other and onto the .lua objects. .Lua objects will not cast shadows themselves.

So that gives eclipses and proper night-time (where light does not shine through the planet onto objects).

https://github.com/pioneerspacesim/pioneer/pull/849

Ahem.

That's the first new feature added into OGLA, way back in 2007 🙂

From shadow's point it does not make much difference whether to be cast onto a terrain or onto a vessel mesh.

I recommend not to bother with projected shadows much (other than eclipses/rings), but go straight to mapped shadows.

In Spaceway it looks like that:

And that was added recently:

Wops, I was never able to see shadows in any 3d mesh into orbiter. Perhaps due to my old computer configuration...

I consider mapped or projected shadows in a game like spaceway or pioneer more than a cosmetic option. It looks amazing in a very dark environment as space is, very effective and realistic in planet views and the most important: create sense of distance, aid to navigation etc... in surface flights.

I consider it critical in a flat screen.

Greetings.