I know this has been touched on before, and I don't really care whether or not this is implemented, but most people on this board seem to think that the ability to land on planets is impossible...

I just want to say that it is entirely possible. This doesn't mean that there has to be an actual 3-dimensional representation of the planet, it just means that there must be a point on the background representing the centre of the planet to be landed on, and there could be a certain 3-dimensional point in space that represents sufficient "closeness" to the planet, and landing would simply be triggered by the activate key. Essentially, landing on a planet could work in almost the same way hypering from a system does. The ship would get tinier and out of view, and appear to adjust it's angle to be parallel to the planet's surface.

Clearly, it isn't plausible for ships to be able to land on gas planets (or maybe it could be allowed, but would result in death!)...

Whatever, I'm just sick of hearing people complain about 1000000000 vertex objects and why they can't exist in an environment that expects more than 2 frames per minute.

http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/7864

(if i hadnt posted it, someone else would have...)

though your idea is along the lines i'd go with to have planets. I always think back to privateer 1 & 2 and how they handled planets...

Nobody's said it was outright impossible, or at least, I don't remember it being said, and if they did they were of course wrong. But at this point I'd say it's more difficult to implement than it's worth. Also, in the fairly recent Gamesome Mac interview, John mentioned landing on planets as something that they could add to the game, although he did qualify it as something that would take about a year to do (IIRC, and of course no promises were made). So don't hold your breath, but eventually I wouldn't be too surprised to see it.

Oh, and if you want to hear the interview, here're some clickies:
http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/1/7796
http://www.macradio.com/monday/Gamesome_Mac_2004_11_29.html

Well, I wasn't going to.

All I was going to ask was whether what he really wanted was a wormhole that took him directly to a station screen? Because, if by 'planet' you mean merely a station without a sector, then sure we can have 'planets'. Such an implementation would be cheesy and pointless, but it could be easily done provided you were happy with being teleported to planets rather than actually landing on them.

If we want to improve on that implementation, then it's worth pointing out a few things though:

1) Objects on the skybox are infinitely far away. No matter where you go in the sector, you never get any closer to the skybox. This also means that objects in the skybox (and the skybox itself) are effectively infinitely large.

2) Even if we assume some distance to an object in the skybox, sufficient closeness to that object is a 3D curve, not a single point in space. If you don't assume a plane rather than a point, you'll inevitable have situations in which you must move _away_ from the planet in order to get 'close enough' to it.

3) To avoid that we could make the object very close (taking up nearly 50% of the sky box) or very far away so that the curve could be approximated by a plane. Such a plane would have to be infinite so that you couldn't go 'around' it, but I suspect we could do that.

Taking #1-#3 into account, gets us as far as this post:

http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/7601#90067

But that doesn't get us as far as actually landing on planets. Because inevitably, as soon as we allow landing on planets, the immediate demand is that we be able to explore thier surface or otherwise interact with them. That isn't impossible either, but its a hell of alot of work.

I think that some of the arguments against landing on planets assume too much detail.

I would be quite satisfied with the following implementation:

1) As you approach a planet, it gradually enlarges until the planet fills the screen.

2) At this point, the view changes, and we see the ship simply zooming toward the planet.

3) Next, we are given a list of cities at which to choose to land. Each city should have the same functionality as a station, except that once we choose it from the list, we briefly glimpse the ship zooming toward a city with a unique appearance, and then being able to guide the ship to a dock within a small (3000 m radius) flight zone. As soon as we attempt to fly out of this zone, the ship automatically turns around, and the message "Your ship is not allowed to fly out of the permitted flight zone." appears.

4) Once we dock, the view changes to station view.

In the future, it would be nice to allow players to walk around stations, at which point we could allow players walking around planet stations to see the sky and the local scenery from within the station.

In short, the planets need not behave like planets, but rather like sets of city-stations, each of which behaves similarly to a space station.

This relatively minor adjustment provides a more immersive experience without requiring modeling of entire planets.

The point is simply to allow players to believe that they are landing on planets, when effectively they can simply be landing on sets of terrestrial stations with terrestrial scenery, each station of which behaves in almost the same way as a space station (except for the local scenery, which would be limited to a 3000 m radius).

I can't understand why this would be prohibitively difficult. It would certainly make Vendetta™ Online much more immersive as a playable universe. The Star Wars® RPG's use a similar system to great effect, and the fact that their planets aren't fully modeled and can't be navigated freely hardly detracts from their immersiveness and appeal.

-- DekuDekuplex Ornitier

It isn't that it is prohibitively difficult, it's simply that it will be time-consuming for our 4 devs who are tackling basic content at the moment. Some of the ideas here are fairly elegant and workable, given time.

Actually walking around would take more time given that the Vendetta game engine is optimized for flight effects, but again, it isn't out of the question for the distant future.

Right now, Vendetta's "hook" is the twitch-based combat. For now, they need to showcase that and get it all balanced (getting closer with that, you'll notice). This isn't to say other content won't be added. Look at mining and trading.

Deku: #3 would require some engine optimizations at the least. You know how much asteroid fields and stations lag? Making a city would require at least twice as many polys to look not cheesy. Anything less would be pointless - it would just generate things like "The cities on the ground look like crap".

Better to not do it than to do it poorly, which is all you can possibly expect from 4 devs doing other things at the same time.

Why not make the planets act like stations? Add a docking station far out in space and provide a station-like environment with a planet bg. If walking were to be implimented, all the better.

The planets dont have to be extremely detailed. nor do you actually have to fly on them in my opinion. However it would add a large layer of depth to vendetta if you could dock with a station near a planet, kind of like in Freelancer, It would be nice to see capital ships/cruisers/ and large ships in general hovering around these areas.

Areas like this could become something more, attracting players away from sedina b-8 to taking on real convoy protection missions in these industrial areas. To take it a step further, perhaps you could run a system like in freelancer, where the player doesnt walk around or fly on the planet, but a scripted landing sequence which swaps out planets/ enviorments/ and ships would land you each time. Moving throughout the station/ base would be just like in space except for you might see a military base, or a city in the distance instead of a space station.

Honestly these areas do not have to be large at all, By limiting the size you can cut alot of polygons and you would have to do that for an online game like Vendetta. It would be nice to have this kind of idea in place, but currently the devs need to work on a better tutorial/( voice acted ) and truely interactive. the mission system needs to be completed and the graphics need to be updated, as well as the interface, and dont tell me ill get used to it because i've been playing since vendetta barely left beta testing.

A short term fix for this might be automatically setting the interface to go to the smaller of the two sizes, and have the tutorial walk them through all the settings and f keys they really do need to know.

What about planet docking style similar to "Freelancer"? Eg. the planet is a like a big spacestation with in/out docking ports?

West of House
You have landed in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.

>

> Open Mailbox

There is a letter in the mailbox.

> Open Letter

WELCOME TO VENDETTA-ONLINE!

Vendetta-Online is a space MMORPG with twitch-based combat and will soon feature landing on planets, the most-requested item ingame!

>

> close letter

i dont know how to close letter

> close thread

i dont know how to close thread

> burn letter

i dont know how to burn letter

> burn white house

quebecers have done that already. *this* white house is fire proof.

> die

i dont know how to die

> get me out!

i dont know how to get me out!

> walk away

front of house
you are at the front of the house of deja vu.
the is a welcome mat here.

Yay to burning the white house! We so kicked your arse!

We need better necromantic wards for these threads. "You're trying to resurrest a thread for no purpose; you're likely to be eaten by a grue".

I have a couple of suggestions for the topic:

1) To further the twitch-combat agenda, a major challenge and component of planetary "docking" that would differentiate from a station would be reentry and atmosphere.

a) Not all ships would be capable of atmospherical flight, so you'd have to be flying something appropriate to land on a planet/moon, however, all ships can skip on atmosphere but could take damage.

b) You'd have to have the skills to perform a reentry maneuver which is probably one of the hardest things to do when it comes to space flight. There are already these "race pipes" and "race mazes", so technically, this could be another type of pipe. You could select different reentry trajectories, faster ones are harder, slower ones are easier.

c) Near-reentry or atmospheric surfing can now become a plausible element combat maneuvers.

d) Gravity would also be an interesting element for both combat maneuvers as well as opening the possibility of slingshots to drastically increase speed temporarily.

2) Why do we need planets/moons, we already have space stations.

a) Planets would in essence be larger space stations. If planets are introduced, perhaps there should be limits placed on number of ships that can dock on space stations.

Limits of number of ships docked at a station could add elements to the trade and economy system of the game in a positive manner.

b) There would be opportunities for different types of missions:

i) Planetary mining/trading. Harder since you need special ships and you may not be able to carry a full payload and still reach escape velocity.

ii) Planetary exploration. Find uncharted planets/moons which could become "safe havens" for player guilds which they could defend, etc. etc.

iii) Terraforming missions. Drop off terraforming equipment at specific coordinates, fly specific courses to seed planets.

iv) "Blow up that asteroid heading for us" and other planetary disaster scenarios.

I am guessing that you were joking when you wrote this post.

Planetary flight and landing have both been labeled as 'cool, but won't happen in any given timeframe' by developers and community alike. As such, discussion whether this or that would fit into the idea of planetary flight and landing is incredibly moot. In fact, trying to describe the mootness would take the rest of this very fine evening here, and so I won't do it.

Please do not re-resurrect this topic.

And, for further reference, I was mostly joking when I wrote this. But not entirely.

Just because you or developers feel that it won't happen in any given timeframe doesn't mean people can't add suggestions.

If there is a goal to stop this discussion and no desire to entertain any more suggestions and ideas, perhaps the thread should be deleted or locked like some I've seen on the forum.

You should perhaps take your own advice and just avoid topics that you don't want to resurrect because you just added one more message.

And no, I don't see any humor in your message, frankly, I find it insulting.

/me passes mouserider a chill pill.

then

/me passes mouserider a "WE WANT LEEBS!" T-shirt.

mouserider:

I can see that my post might have been insulting if taken too seriously. If that was the case, I apologize.

My point still stands.