Project discovery allows players to submit material to CCP which they then hand off to a 3rd party for the various campaigns that have been run over the years. This tool could be used to shorten development time for specific things that have low technical requirement, like what I’m going to propose in this post.
What is the purpose?
If CCP is going to make a shooter that allows us to fight in ships and structures, they need the geometry for those things mapped out ahead of time.
Designing the interior geometry in a way that will make sense will be time consuming for CCP to manage, but there is an easier way to go about this by crowd sourcing the design of the general layout to the players.
The Implementation:
CCP will create list of required subsystems for each ship and structure. Cargo bay, engineering (governs powergrid,) capacitor banks, shield relays, navigation, cpu core, command and control (bridge), capsule, gunnery, drone control, drone bay, hallways, captains quarters, crew quarters, escape pods, mess hall, ect. This is a process designers would have to do anyway to accomplish this goal.
Its important to remember internal components such as the cpu core and capacitor, wont be rendered in game, but those locations still need to be accounted for to have a realistic interior space.
CCP will create the low poly wireframe geometry for each subsystem (textures are not needed at this time) and color code them based on their function for ease of use. Once again, making these wireframes is something they will have to do anyway, but the development time should be significantly faster due to the simplicity of the task.
The Interface:
Within the new Project Discovery Ship Designer (soon™) CCP will create a drop down menu for all the ships or structures in the game that CCP wishes to make interiors for. This could be an incremental thing, only having players design interiors for what they wish to focus on at the time, but it would make sense to me to have everything available at the start so they have time for a library of assets to build up. CCP can then make use of the user created assets on their own time.
When the player selects a ship or structure, the selected option will appear in the center of the player’s screen, looking somewhere between a cell shaded cloak effect at 100% transparency and the simulation effect in the fitting window at 0% transparency.
Once the players have chosen an object to design, an interface will appear around the previously selected object. This interface will have information pertaining to the required number and type of subsystems, as well as the various subsystems in question that were created in part 2 of this post.
The player will be able to drag and drop those subsystems into the wireframe of the ship or structure.
The interface can use a reskinned probe exploration control interface for positioning of the subsystems in 3d space.
Once the required number of subsystems are achieved, no subsystem geometry is clipping through any other geometry (either other subsystems or the larger geometry of the ship / structure hull,) and the player is happy with the layout, the player can then submit it to ccp.
Asset handling and rewards:
A base reward, similar to the current project discovery, will be paid out to players who meet the requirements listed for the ship or structure. Higher rewards (paid out from specific empire ship building corporations) should be given to players for ship designs that are able to cram as much stuff into the interior (without the geometry clipping into each other) which will incentivize players to not only meet the requirements, but puzzle out how to fill those ships to the brim.
CCP can then take those top submissions and use them for the ship and structure interiors.
3d assets can be skinned by CCP with empire themed skins, much like what was done with the captain’s quarters, when the interiors get implemented into both EVE and the shooter CCP is working on.
Other interior skin packs could also be sold for plex as well.
What should CCP do with the ship interior designer after CCP receive all the assets they need?
Keep it around for players to customize the macro-geometry of their structure and ship interiors that was discussed above.
The builder interface could even be used by players to create and submit interior room geometry like mess halls, barracks, engineering, the bridge, cargo bays, drone bays, gunnery stations, ect. This is more or less the type of fidelity players are used to in Star Citizen, except far more performant since EVE would only be rendering the interior space and nothing outside.
Customization of personal spaces once CCP creates the assets that would be in those rooms. (Possible isk / mineral sink.)
The framework for the ship builder could also be used for a sim city station builder and management, as well as the terrestrial locations when CCP gets around to playing with planets again.
Overall, I believe this addition will speed up development time by outsourcing part of the workload to the player base. Also, when game balance updates hit, (just as a nerfed or increased cargo hold) CCP can push out a redesign request to the community through the ship interior designer to avoid having to spend development resources on it.
Honestly I think the level of effort you have put into this is fantastic.
AND
I’m totally sure there are several hundred eve pleayers that are completely capable of creating new environments for the game.
BUT
CCP removed the captains quarters. A fully realised environment on it’s own. While there are people capable of creating these environments, CCP have pretty much made their views known that in station environments are VERY low priority.
Personally i really liked being able to view my ship from a balcony and sit n a sofa and watch new eden TV. Seemed better than ship spinning. I totally understand CCPs view that the game is about spaceships though.
CCP removed it because very few people used it. Very few used it because it was a laggy mess that had no content attached to it.
CCP is working on a shooter; they have a bunch of unreal devs on the payroll. So we will be seeing some sort of fps / 3rd person game play at some point.
He wouldn’t drop that teaser if there weren’t plans to bring it back in a meaningful way considering the circumstance he’s referencing.
Give us a station environment that runs on the unreal engine so it’s actually performant, with actual content attached to it, and we’ll see a lot of people wanting to make use of that gameplay. The missions that make you “see the agent in person” will likely make you actually walk an avatar to the agent’s office, otherwise you’ll be able to accept and complete missions remotely.
Here’s the thing. There’s no reason for it not to be. I wasn’t really intending this feature to cater toward people who like the sims, (sim city is a much different game than the sims nor is a feature that takes development load off of the developers,) but if the interiors for structures and ships are created for the other planned fps gameplay, we very well could have a game play mode like the sims set in the eve universe.
Of course there’s that whole, #IWantDevelopmentFundsToBeSpentOnThingsIPersonallyCareAbout that everyone who trashes on ideas says, but a sims gameplay feature is adjacent to what CCP already has plans for. And binging in players that enjoy different genres of game is a good thing for the IP, as long as it can be done in a way that wont tank the company.
They’re working on a first person shooter? Well, what they should do is; because their entire player base is heavily PC oriented, they should totally make it a console exclusive. ZING!
Things get tricky in this department :] you have to consider intellectual property as well, CCP would have to require the complete hand over of all ip on submission for it to work, also the type of people that would do it and take it seriously would not need ccp to create tools they would just use blender/max/maya or w.e and submit obj/fbx.
CCP developing tools for inside eve to do this would be very time consuming.
But besides that point, I mean if CCP had a separate team working on first person so I can dock in an enemy station get out in first person get weapons from my ship and go raid a station hell yea Im going to enjoy that but captains quarters no. But then you have to think CCP’s engine was designed for space craft in space if you want a shooter unreal 5 is the place to go.
A super technical question is it possible to swap engines mid game as you get out your ship in first person lol… I don’t think so but not 100% sure.
If not then maybe your save game progression (or start from scratch if no eve account) from Eve can be used in a stand alone shooter(on pc obv) you drop the first person equipment off in eve and then its there ready to go in the shooter a type of combination :D. The shooter can use your eve char and same wallet / standings, could be interesting but im just rambling at this point.
That goes without saying. Anything submitted to CCP, would be their property. The most you could possibly do, would be some sort of quazi nft thing, where people earn in game assets (like lp, or those proposed interbus credits) for designs players made and then other people used. But the easiest thing is just to handle it through the project discovery system, giving better rewards for people who do a better job.
Hopefully the new fw standings situation will prevent people from docking in enemy stations. Perhaps you could drop assault clones off in your enemy station (like I propose in this post) once that enemy station hits structure. It’s a pretty decent way to handle sov capture. Mix up that structure grind a bit.
I think it probably is actually, though the load time would be a bit long. Kind of like when you initially load into a game. The client is starting up the game engine. You could of course keep both engines running, but I think that would lead to performance issues.
What I expect CCP will end up doing, is moving over to unreal 5 for the entire game eventually. That will allow them to have dynamic wrecks that actually look like the ships they came from without having to actually design the individual wreck, and destructible asteroids that break apart in a logical way.
There is no way of eve going to unreal 5 to rewrite all that code would be a nightmare. Also UE5 I don’t think will handle 10000 player battles as well as CCP’s engine funny enough. They have been designed for different things. Geometry/nanite wise sure but on the network side is probably a different story. Obviously I don’t know for sure I’m not an engine guy with all that technical knowledge.
For playes to be able to contribute in some way to speed up Eve’s development would be amazing for sure, especially if you can earn some cool ingame items for it.
I have been asking for ship design community challenges and I would enter for sure but I just don’t see them.
That doesn’t get the assets into CCP’s hands in a timely way that can actually be used. The beautiful thing about this type of proposal, is it offloads the tedious grunt work to the crowd sourcing environment that’s already been developed.
That’s the thing right here, most of the work for the development has already been done. All they have to do in reskin project discovery, add in some code from Jessica and the probe exploration system, and then develop assets they would have to do anyway, (which would mostly just be colored boxes, sized appropriately.)
It’s true that most people wouldn’t take it seriously… but a few would. And CCP only needs one serious asset to make use of.
And once the ship interiors are in game, and people can customize their ship interiors even more? There will be many more assets for CCP to pull from that are actually seriously designed.
That’s a good point that I didn’t consider. I guess that’s something for their research department to figure out.
In that case, It would be better for CCP to create another client strictly for the fps portion of the game, that starts up when the EVE client initiates a start up trigger. On top of the full integration aspect, they could include a dust style battle arena, so it can stand on its own as a game in its own right.
Haha, yeah. I remember when CCP initially announced dust, and the community members kept hounding Hilmar to put it on pc. I understand why they did it, Sony paid for a lot of (or maybe even all of) the development, so for CCP, it was more or less a testbed to see if a shooter was viable.
That said, I do believe its been mentioned somewhere it will be on pc this time.
It should also be noted, CCP should still have the assets from the racial Captain’s Quarters too… so there should be minimal work to get those assets available to use in ship and station interiors for the above conceptualization.
For those who haven’t experienced CQ and would like to take a gander, you can find a basic walk through here: Minmatar, Caldari, Amarr, Gallante.
Notice how they all are using the same basic geometry, just reskinned with the racial skin packs.
no. But then you have to think CCP’s engine was designed for space craft in space if you want a shooter unreal 5 is the place to go.
but im just rambling at this point.