Ships aren't designed?

[jfhsanseiIII]

Something that has always been a curious thing about warframe and occasionally causes my willing suspension of disbelief to get shaken in game is on ships.  They are randomly generated and often you can walk into a room with windows that show space but the map shows you a room that is in that area.  That has always bugged me. Also, the ships are randomly designed but the corpus and grineer don't seem like groups that would want to waste money and resources on a continuing stream of willy nilly designs especially ones that bend time and space. The corpus because it would be a waste of money and the grineer because it would occupy too much time.  I'd suggest actually creating a few ships that have specific designs for each faction and just open up or close off certain sections of the ship based on mission types, or other factor.  It could open up some new mission types like searching crew quarters or shutting down engines for outside groups, allow for players to explore and get used to designs, and probably tie in well with the new Rail Jack stuff coming out next year.  Also, my willing suspension of disbelief, as I mentioned earlier, is quite delicate.  You could still create a sense of randomness but lets face it there aren't that many unique rooms for the different missions like spy, rescue, and so on.  It's just the path to glory that changes.  You could still have that path change by making players go through different sections of the ships in a different way each time. 

[taiiat]

that does massively, massively reduce the variety of scenery though. sometimes you get dumb stuff that has a Window facing not what should be open space but generally it makes those Missions you're supposed to play a thousand times much less repetitive than otherwise.

a small number of fixed designs would mean you can mostly memorize the number of steps in each direction at each point in a Mission you need to take and that's not healthy for a game that is asking you to play it for tens of thousands of hours. it's fine in games that are looking to have a definite start and end(over the course of playing you memorize locations and use that to your advantage, and then the experience ends later on) and doesn't have you staying in one area without introducing new Terrain too infrequently - but Warframe isn't quite a game like that.

[jfhsanseiIII]

4 minutes ago, taiiat said:

that does massively, massively reduce the variety of scenery though. sometimes you get dumb stuff that has a Window facing not what should be open space but generally it makes those Missions you're supposed to play a thousand times much less repetitive than otherwise.

a small number of fixed designs would mean you can mostly memorize the number of steps in each direction at each point in a Mission you need to take and that's not healthy for a game that is asking you to play it for tens of thousands of hours. it's fine in games that are looking to have a definite start and end(over the course of playing you memorize locations and use that to your advantage, and then the experience ends later on) and doesn't have you staying in one area without introducing new Terrain too infrequently - but Warframe isn't quite a game like that.

The ships are designed quite large.  So, you can still create the variety by randomly locking off doors to areas and make paths differ.  

[taiiat]

4 minutes ago, jfhsanseiIII said:

The ships are designed quite large.  So, you can still create the variety by randomly locking off doors to areas and make paths differ.  

but now you've made basically the same thing as we have now, ala a relatively straight line from Spawn to Extract(for simplicity of Randomization, people probably don't wanna sit around and wait for their machine to chug generating the Mission) with maybe one or two angles in between. but with much less variety in the long run ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

gotta remember that REAL spaces aren't made for variety, but efficiency. so travel in a real place is handled the way Roads are (or the way Roads are supposed to be if they are planned before built rather than the other way round) meaning ABC travel - main conduits with access branches off of that and end destinations or access roads at the end of that.

[jfhsanseiIII]

30 minutes ago, taiiat said:

but now you've made basically the same thing as we have now, ala a relatively straight line from Spawn to Extract(for simplicity of Randomization, people probably don't wanna sit around and wait for their machine to chug generating the Mission) with maybe one or two angles in between. but with much less variety in the long run ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

gotta remember that REAL spaces aren't made for variety, but efficiency. so travel in a real place is handled the way Roads are (or the way Roads are supposed to be if they are planned before built rather than the other way round) meaning ABC travel - main conduits with access branches off of that and end destinations or access roads at the end of that.

Real spaces are often developed for both variety and efficiency.  I’ve never been in a city that had only efficiency in every building.  Also, most large buildings have multiple ways to access the same area. One route is very direct and another not so much.  Ever been to a place that had an escalator or elevator that was out of order and you had to take another route?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

The ship’s data is already downloaded.  Instead of generating the map it just generates which path is open. 

 

Im not opposed to the random paths and variety.  The ships are quite large and I think you can achieve the same thing with designed ships.  This way we can avoid some of the glaring problems of random rooms that are in space, but not...or are they? 

[Xarteros]

the issue could be fixed by room and layout modularity.

Simply, make the map detect what is considered the 'edge' or 'side' of the ship, and have windows in the tiles there. In the same tile, elsewhere, simply make an alternate type of tile that simply has no windows.

I have an idea for making them feel like actual ships (by having more closely themed tile layouts, with more sensibility) that gives us a whole new way to travel, and gives DE a whole load of options for bringing in other game aspects, like the hybrid archwing gameplay that they talked about back in The War Within. However, that idea is far too big to fit in a comment, so I'll go post it elsewhere

[jfhsanseiIII]

On 2018-10-01 at 8:17 AM, Xarteros said:

the issue could be fixed by room and layout modularity.

Simply, make the map detect what is considered the 'edge' or 'side' of the ship, and have windows in the tiles there. In the same tile, elsewhere, simply make an alternate type of tile that simply has no windows.

I have an idea for making them feel like actual ships (by having more closely themed tile layouts, with more sensibility) that gives us a whole new way to travel, and gives DE a whole load of options for bringing in other game aspects, like the hybrid archwing gameplay that they talked about back in The War Within. However, that idea is far too big to fit in a comment, so I'll go post it elsewhere

Sounds interesting as well. I’d be keen to hear more.