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Sounds like Hoth to me

Or Kessel. Or Bespin.

For some reason while I was falling asleep, or just waking up - it was all a bit hazy - I had an idea for atmospheric flight. It's pretty simple: desolation planets.

Say that the "ground" planets are heavily monitored by the local authorities and don't allow ships outside of the normal space lanes. Desolation planets, however, are different.

Basically, a desolation planet will be a space zone but with a large, physical "ground" area on the bottom side and a transition to a "real" space zone on the upper side. There will be multiple landing sites through which players can access large areas that are, effectively, POBs. From there players can look outside and see what the action is like on the desolation planet. The logic for not allowing players to actually walk around on the planet is simple - it's a desolate wasteland where nothing could survive. Some of the POBs could give limited access to terraformed land areas of the planets, but on the whole the ground areas would be indoors. With some modified physics for flight, I think this type of thing could really work.

Any thoughts?

Message Edited by ValiantHalibut on 05-14-2005 01:00 AM

Hoth was the first planet I was thinking of, but I'm sure that there are others in canon that would work. I just think that it's a way to solve the problem while maintaining the integrity of both the ground and space games. You can't have any direct involvement because the ground game is character skill based and the space game is player skill based. This way, though, you get close.

Also, it would be awesome to be sitting at a cantina and looking out of huge windows at a giant reb vs imp battle over a planet's surface

Kessel would be perfect for this I think. It could be a huge real obejct in space. not just a background, and you could also have something like a starport where you could land and look out the windows.

They could even use the interior for instanced adventures too!

Sounds good, but think of the people that have lag in open space now, and throw a huge graphic (land) in there.

I, personally, don't have space lag...but the graphic pull of a zone like that would be harsh. If you ever played Earth & Beyond, when you flew down to the atmospheric areas, your ping went through the roof.

I was thinking of something similar awhile back ValiantHalibut. However attempting to create an actual round ball out of what planets we have seemed absolutely nuts. perspective would be so odd on the grould you'd feel like your walking on a ball. for all those familair with Dragon Ball Z thing of king kie's home.

So the next best thing to try is faking it. My idea was to have the space back ground fade out as you got closer to the planets surface. the planets ground would eventually block out anything beyond so it would be possible to use a blurred out image of the planets ground until the ship actually got to the surface. once relatively close to ground the basix geographic anatomyof the ground game surface would be visible stripped of most of the detailed flora, fauna, and only have generic outlines of housing and cities. ships would only be able to fly only so low until they picked a place to land and would be given a housig footprint to occupy.

That was all I could think of when it came to atmospheric flight.

All of these ideas are solid. Basically, everything that the game needs to create this type of atmospheric flight already exists, minus the art assets. Static POBs shouldn't be an issue, nor should creating a distinct "ground," nor "looping" the map.

mka - I think that ground collisions should be a real and dangerous aspect of atmospheric flight. If we take wandering ground PCs out of the equation, then there's really no reason why players shouldn't fear crashing into the deck if they take their ships too low to the ground. It would really add an edge to combat as well.