Ride Along.

derkojote1

In Star Wars Galaxies, *R.I.P. * You could bring player characters up to your ship and they could ride along sharing in your Space adventures. Me and some friends where taking some down time, sitting in the lounge of my Odyssey Class and I recalled how exciting it was to see the action from the view of the passenger or crew. I brought it up and the idea took hold fast. How cool would that be to be able to witness first hand battles from inside some ones ship. Sitting in the lounge and witnessing the entire fight from that prospective. I think it would offer a new avenue of adventure for the game. Just a thought;

crappyturbo

Sadly, If I remember correctly, the game engine itself will not support this function.

Bridge Commander like controls were asked for near launch, I think, and a dev answered that this function was not possible.

captainoblivous

crappyturbo wrote: »

Sadly, If I remember correctly, the game engine itself will not support this function.

Bridge Commander like controls were asked for near launch, I think, and a dev answered that this function was not possible.

^ What he said.

jbmaverick

Specifically, the problem lies with the fact that both your playable Captain and your ship are two separate entities linked to which control scheme you are currently under. It's difficult to have both on-screen simultaneously. The featured episode where you help Sela and your ship appears on the viewscreen behind your Captain was said by a dev to be a rather hacky workaround because it was in a cutscene. It's not something that could be used to support the request.

Another problem is the issue of scale. In order for your captain to be able to be inside a ship in combat, the ships themselves would need to be several orders of magnitude larger than they currently are, and larger ships need bigger models, which means more vertices because the smaller details are more noticeable and therefore a LOT more rendering work for your graphics card.

The alternative would be to have one room for the ships to actually fight in and a second room for the observing passengers that reflects the combat taking place in the first room. The issue here is that the second room would be a static environment and wouldn't be able to accurately reflect the relative positions of the opposing ships because the room itself cannot move. Each player ship would need its own "second room" separate from all the other "second rooms" which would create a lot of extra network traffic for each battle. Final nail in the coffin is that I doubt maps are dynamic objects that can be updated on the fly, even if syncing up the battle wasn't a nightmare to consider to begin with.