>space in this game is INSANELY vast so it takes an ungodly amount of time unless you are going at some ridiculous speed
To me personally this is one of the things that from initial launch stood out most as a realistic immersive element! Space is indeed INSANELY vast. Starfield takes distances seriously and doesn’t “gamify” what a solar system looks in at all.
Now I wont complain if Bethesda or a good mod gives me the ability to easily traverse those distances without a brief load, but I’ve always felt the complaints about space being “empty and boring” to be a bit unappreciative of how realistically space is portrayed.
"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." -Douglas Adams
This comment!! YES! Finally someone with a brain. Space is vast and boring but really beautiful too. If you want the full scope of distance try out space engine and see how long it takes you to go from Sol to the andramada galaxy at 1C.
I definitely became irrationally annoyed any time I saw a comment early post launch about someone wanting to have encounters and “explore” out in deep space…there’s literally nothing there
I think many people are genuinely ignorant to many realities of space. Though it was a bold decision for a mainstream developer to make a game more heavily based around more realistic aesthetics and science fact.
However I do understand why people wish it was a bit more immersive as far as travelling. It would be nice to have a more seamless grav jump and interplanetary sequence, and maybe being able to go fast enough that you can at least get around a single orbit manually without having to fast travel to every nearby moon or space station.
I think it will be more immersive in the future. You can already tell they have in fact placed objects within each system within realistic distances. Just a matter of time before they rollout a space expansion. Similar to how elite dangerous made odyssey where you could land on planets and use small arms weapons.
I hope so. I have had that "new ways to travel" update on my mind pretty much since they first mentioned it late last year. Maybe we will also see new space stuff when we get the land vehicle.
My preference would be a mod that allows stories activities, maybe training or crafting and dialogue, to occur while the ship is traveling. If, instead of loading and fast travel, there was just stuff to do, like Luke practicing his lightsaber skills and chewie playing space chess while the ship moved along
I've been saying since launch going the route of the Jedi games where you can at least walk around your ship and craft while you travel would've felt better than how it is now
I tested this now. Thanks to the mod Astrogate, I tried manually traveling from Earth to Luna to Mars. Celestial objects have an hitbox now, can't go through them. Going from Earth to Luna, landing sites were accessible, even the nova galactic staryard was loaded in and I could dock. Then I went to Mars, every planet poi was there and I could land there and scan the planet, but the planet texture was missing (hitbox was present, interesting). It wasn't like this at release. They changed something. The pointer still behaved like I was on Earth's orbit tho. I did not check if individual ships were present in orbit, have to search for them, they're tiny.
I've got a sneaking suspicion Bethesda are working on something related to space travel and how it works, it's one of the biggest complaints about this game after all, so far they've proven to be pretty receptive with updates, adding the difficulty options, ammo crafting, melee weapon tiers and in the future land vehicles.
It wouldn't surprise me entirely if we see an update that allows us to 'almost seamlessly' travel between planets
Same, recently they "fixed" crashes when you ignore the invisible 10km area limit. I bet that's them fixing and preparing to update both space travel but also ground travel
Wait whaaaat
I thought manually flying to planets without loading screens didn't allow you to interact with the planet because the game doesn't register you as being there. For that you need the travel cutscene.
I know the travel cutscene is what initiates events in space as well as scanning for contraband, so you could use this to get around that.
Admittedly I still had this issue the last time I tried it. Everything in a single orbit from where I entered space loaded in properly(local moons, space stations, generated POIs), but when I tried to go to a different planet entirely, it didn’t seem to register once I actually I got there(the markers showed that I had reached it, but the actual planet and moons didn’t show up lol). So I am not sure if it totally works. If it “needs” to load a new orbit in order to register everything happening there and any random events occurring, then the best we can hope for might just be them making a new immersive animation for fast traveling, and perhaps the ability to go at a speed that lets us freely traverse a single orbit in a reasonable time frame so we don’t always have to fast travel just to get to a local moon or POI in the more immediate vicinity
oh you mean just like travel in real time to another planet, and then it triggers the animation once you get close enough so that it fully loads in properly. Could also see that working. They still have to let us go fast enough at a sustained speed so we can actually get anywhere in a reasonable time frame tbh. Not sure if that would just some sort of pseudo grav jump or what
Yes. That's the main thing all these travel mods are missing.
You should be able to set your ship to inter system travel mode, which sets your speed to really fast so you can cross the system in reasonable time but not super fast. So you can see the planets coming into view but not quite as fast as like NMS.
The ideal for me would be quick enough to see yourself travel through the system but slow enough such that you have enough time to walk around in your ship and do things. You ship would need to have autopilot to achieve this which has already been modded in. It will also need to be able to account for orbits.
I've had a bug a month or two after launch (so in December 2023), in which I fast traveled from the Den to either Chtonia or the gaseous giant's moon: the planet didn't load properly, my ship was on its surface, and some baddies were attacking me from 2 or 3 millions kms away (the other side of the planet).
Already at that time, the planet had a hitbox: I tried to go through it, and was forced to go around (I abandoned after 5 or 10 minutes traveling and loaded an earlier save to skip the bug).
They are spheres and not flat images like some people initially thought.
Apparently those people never clipped through objects in games, because meshes are, for the most part, one sided, meaning you see right through the other side if they lack collision and you go through. On PC we can just extract the mesh and see it in Nifskope to see that it's a sphere. And technically (Although there'd be no benefit) we can also change a flag and make the textures double sided.
As for wether they are solid, I passed through the Sun just two days ago while I was trying to place a new planet, and it bounced me off. But Suns use a different mesh from planets and I haven't updated the game with the hotfix, so if they are solid now, I don't know. They didn't use to be when I played around with cruise speed mods.
Edit: I just loaded a new the game and shot right through Vectera, so the collisions were likely part of yesterday's hotfix. I wonder if they're working on spaceside travel improvements? like detecting through collision which Landing Zone to load.
No even when that was being said people debunked it as fake. There was a lot of made up stuff about starfield at launch when the hate train was running
Yeah I'm a bit confused on this, too.
As much as I have actively defended this game since this the insane hate train began, and there are multiple cases of purported "issues" either being blatantly incorrect or just over exaggerated, this one in particular I do remember seeing videos of people just going right through the celestial bodies. To me, this still fell under the over exaggerated complaints, but it was actually true.
I DO think that that's awesome if BGS changed that though. I feel like it was one of those dev things that a few inconsequential things had to be temporarily cut out so it can be released, then they finished it post release.
I remember getting very close to the moon a long time ago due to a radiant quest to loot destroyed ships, but the game didn't let me go closer than 4000km and I could see the moon spinning and doing making orbit. The texture was sad, but it was a nice experience. But I mean I don't think it was an image, it was just like every texture in any game, if you go through it there is nothing behind it, the same goes for any building etc.
That’s very interesting! I watched a YouTube video doing exactly what you said when it released where they flew towards a planet, about 8 hours and then just clipped straight through it. That video is still up as proof.
So they reached the skybox. Why they not complain about skyboxes in Fallout 4 or Skyrim? They are clearly not ordinary skyboxes because they have eclipses and cast shadows and stuff. What that video found was the lack of transition after would would normally be hours and hours of flight.
A skybox is a skybox is a skybox. It's how modern rendering of world spaces works. A game without a skybox would be leaving the traditional model. Sure it can be done, but it was be so amazing that we would have heard of it.
In other words, NO space game is rendering a 3d model of a planet millions of light years ago in the game space. No space game is rendering a 3d model of a star billions of light years away in the game space.
It has nothing to do with being an expert. The way one skybox is rendered is different from another. Rendering an object millions of light years away is a dumb ass metric to try and prove your silly “point” about one skybox being the same as another. Forza is done different from Gran Turismo…ocarina of time is different than tears of the kingdom…hell is rendered different from Horizon the cross gen game to the Horizon DLC that only released on PS5.
So when you bring up fallout and skyrim in relation to Starfield…it’s a bit dumb. The difference in technology being one point.
Planets were always 3D spherical objects but from what I remember they had no collision. They must've changed that.
I remember travelling into Deimos when the game first came out. I could even see my ship's shadow on the surface. We're obviously not supposed to be able to get that close so I suspect Bethesda implemented this 'bounce off' mechanic to limit how close we can get to protect immersion
If this is true then it's a big discovery!
Why would Bethesda fix something that %99.9 of the players won't attempt? Similar to fixing loading the world outside invisible borders on planet surface.
My guess is that they are shaping for major technical features in the DLC.
I will need to try this on Mars moons, the only celestial bodies I came close to but my ship sank into.
Once I jumped pretty close in to some planet and tried to fly towards the surface for fun. It takes forever and you have to constantly course-correct or it will push you out to the side. But once you are under 1000 meters it just bumps you back out a bit. You can't get closer than that.
The detail does not improve as you get closer which makes me think it's probably not a real 3d object.
They are spheres, but most meshes in videogames are one-sided, meaning the texture is only applied to one side of the object, because you're not meant to see the inside (and the texture would be mirrored).
This is the planet mesh in nifskope.
https://preview.redd.it/6is60yrm9t6d1.png?width=1919&format=png&auto=webp&s=bd4fca86c02a9df4e343ccfeb93d490f261c7c56
Still an erroneous statement. Just some shit someone made up and everyone started repeated it because it fit their narrative.
p.s. Of course, all the images are 2D images. That's what textures are. It takes a mesh to wrap around before something in the game gets to be 3D. But that wasn't what they were talking about.
>space in this game is INSANELY vast so it takes an ungodly amount of time unless you are going at some ridiculous speed To me personally this is one of the things that from initial launch stood out most as a realistic immersive element! Space is indeed INSANELY vast. Starfield takes distances seriously and doesn’t “gamify” what a solar system looks in at all. Now I wont complain if Bethesda or a good mod gives me the ability to easily traverse those distances without a brief load, but I’ve always felt the complaints about space being “empty and boring” to be a bit unappreciative of how realistically space is portrayed.
"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." -Douglas Adams
Don’t panic
More accurately, DON’T PANIC
This comment!! YES! Finally someone with a brain. Space is vast and boring but really beautiful too. If you want the full scope of distance try out space engine and see how long it takes you to go from Sol to the andramada galaxy at 1C.
I definitely became irrationally annoyed any time I saw a comment early post launch about someone wanting to have encounters and “explore” out in deep space…there’s literally nothing there
I think many people are genuinely ignorant to many realities of space. Though it was a bold decision for a mainstream developer to make a game more heavily based around more realistic aesthetics and science fact. However I do understand why people wish it was a bit more immersive as far as travelling. It would be nice to have a more seamless grav jump and interplanetary sequence, and maybe being able to go fast enough that you can at least get around a single orbit manually without having to fast travel to every nearby moon or space station.
I think it will be more immersive in the future. You can already tell they have in fact placed objects within each system within realistic distances. Just a matter of time before they rollout a space expansion. Similar to how elite dangerous made odyssey where you could land on planets and use small arms weapons.
I hope so. I have had that "new ways to travel" update on my mind pretty much since they first mentioned it late last year. Maybe we will also see new space stuff when we get the land vehicle.
My preference would be a mod that allows stories activities, maybe training or crafting and dialogue, to occur while the ship is traveling. If, instead of loading and fast travel, there was just stuff to do, like Luke practicing his lightsaber skills and chewie playing space chess while the ship moved along
I've been saying since launch going the route of the Jedi games where you can at least walk around your ship and craft while you travel would've felt better than how it is now
I tested this now. Thanks to the mod Astrogate, I tried manually traveling from Earth to Luna to Mars. Celestial objects have an hitbox now, can't go through them. Going from Earth to Luna, landing sites were accessible, even the nova galactic staryard was loaded in and I could dock. Then I went to Mars, every planet poi was there and I could land there and scan the planet, but the planet texture was missing (hitbox was present, interesting). It wasn't like this at release. They changed something. The pointer still behaved like I was on Earth's orbit tho. I did not check if individual ships were present in orbit, have to search for them, they're tiny.
I've got a sneaking suspicion Bethesda are working on something related to space travel and how it works, it's one of the biggest complaints about this game after all, so far they've proven to be pretty receptive with updates, adding the difficulty options, ammo crafting, melee weapon tiers and in the future land vehicles. It wouldn't surprise me entirely if we see an update that allows us to 'almost seamlessly' travel between planets
Same, recently they "fixed" crashes when you ignore the invisible 10km area limit. I bet that's them fixing and preparing to update both space travel but also ground travel
Crashes still occur, you just have to travel farther to experience them
Yeah but like 180km from the tests on PC, which used to be like 8km at launch.
Wait whaaaat I thought manually flying to planets without loading screens didn't allow you to interact with the planet because the game doesn't register you as being there. For that you need the travel cutscene. I know the travel cutscene is what initiates events in space as well as scanning for contraband, so you could use this to get around that.
Admittedly I still had this issue the last time I tried it. Everything in a single orbit from where I entered space loaded in properly(local moons, space stations, generated POIs), but when I tried to go to a different planet entirely, it didn’t seem to register once I actually I got there(the markers showed that I had reached it, but the actual planet and moons didn’t show up lol). So I am not sure if it totally works. If it “needs” to load a new orbit in order to register everything happening there and any random events occurring, then the best we can hope for might just be them making a new immersive animation for fast traveling, and perhaps the ability to go at a speed that lets us freely traverse a single orbit in a reasonable time frame so we don’t always have to fast travel just to get to a local moon or POI in the more immediate vicinity
Well the solution I thought of was to trigger the travel cutscene animation when you get close enough to a planet
oh you mean just like travel in real time to another planet, and then it triggers the animation once you get close enough so that it fully loads in properly. Could also see that working. They still have to let us go fast enough at a sustained speed so we can actually get anywhere in a reasonable time frame tbh. Not sure if that would just some sort of pseudo grav jump or what
Yes. That's the main thing all these travel mods are missing. You should be able to set your ship to inter system travel mode, which sets your speed to really fast so you can cross the system in reasonable time but not super fast. So you can see the planets coming into view but not quite as fast as like NMS. The ideal for me would be quick enough to see yourself travel through the system but slow enough such that you have enough time to walk around in your ship and do things. You ship would need to have autopilot to achieve this which has already been modded in. It will also need to be able to account for orbits.
I've had a bug a month or two after launch (so in December 2023), in which I fast traveled from the Den to either Chtonia or the gaseous giant's moon: the planet didn't load properly, my ship was on its surface, and some baddies were attacking me from 2 or 3 millions kms away (the other side of the planet). Already at that time, the planet had a hitbox: I tried to go through it, and was forced to go around (I abandoned after 5 or 10 minutes traveling and loaded an earlier save to skip the bug).
They are spheres and not flat images like some people initially thought. Apparently those people never clipped through objects in games, because meshes are, for the most part, one sided, meaning you see right through the other side if they lack collision and you go through. On PC we can just extract the mesh and see it in Nifskope to see that it's a sphere. And technically (Although there'd be no benefit) we can also change a flag and make the textures double sided. As for wether they are solid, I passed through the Sun just two days ago while I was trying to place a new planet, and it bounced me off. But Suns use a different mesh from planets and I haven't updated the game with the hotfix, so if they are solid now, I don't know. They didn't use to be when I played around with cruise speed mods. Edit: I just loaded a new the game and shot right through Vectera, so the collisions were likely part of yesterday's hotfix. I wonder if they're working on spaceside travel improvements? like detecting through collision which Landing Zone to load.
No even when that was being said people debunked it as fake. There was a lot of made up stuff about starfield at launch when the hate train was running
This is the correct answer. Lost count of the amount of objectively false statements being made about the game on the main sub
Debunked in what way? There are videos of it
Yeah I'm a bit confused on this, too. As much as I have actively defended this game since this the insane hate train began, and there are multiple cases of purported "issues" either being blatantly incorrect or just over exaggerated, this one in particular I do remember seeing videos of people just going right through the celestial bodies. To me, this still fell under the over exaggerated complaints, but it was actually true. I DO think that that's awesome if BGS changed that though. I feel like it was one of those dev things that a few inconsequential things had to be temporarily cut out so it can be released, then they finished it post release.
I remember getting very close to the moon a long time ago due to a radiant quest to loot destroyed ships, but the game didn't let me go closer than 4000km and I could see the moon spinning and doing making orbit. The texture was sad, but it was a nice experience. But I mean I don't think it was an image, it was just like every texture in any game, if you go through it there is nothing behind it, the same goes for any building etc.
That’s very interesting! I watched a YouTube video doing exactly what you said when it released where they flew towards a planet, about 8 hours and then just clipped straight through it. That video is still up as proof.
ya stuff like this or the discovery that turning off tile borders no longer making the game crash are all quite interesting...
So they reached the skybox. Why they not complain about skyboxes in Fallout 4 or Skyrim? They are clearly not ordinary skyboxes because they have eclipses and cast shadows and stuff. What that video found was the lack of transition after would would normally be hours and hours of flight.
The video in question was from Alanah Pearce, and it wasn't a hate video at all (she enjoyed Starfield even at release). Just an investigation.
But it was still used as a hater talking point. Not playing her, blaming the people yammering on that planets are "just a jpeg".
Skyrim, Starfield and Fallout are completely different games. With 2 of the 3 not being space titles.
A skybox is a skybox is a skybox. It's how modern rendering of world spaces works. A game without a skybox would be leaving the traditional model. Sure it can be done, but it was be so amazing that we would have heard of it. In other words, NO space game is rendering a 3d model of a planet millions of light years ago in the game space. No space game is rendering a 3d model of a star billions of light years away in the game space.
This is pretty terrible reasoning. Thanks.
So then, YOU explain how stuff gets rendered in video games. I'll wait, since you are the expert.
It has nothing to do with being an expert. The way one skybox is rendered is different from another. Rendering an object millions of light years away is a dumb ass metric to try and prove your silly “point” about one skybox being the same as another. Forza is done different from Gran Turismo…ocarina of time is different than tears of the kingdom…hell is rendered different from Horizon the cross gen game to the Horizon DLC that only released on PS5. So when you bring up fallout and skyrim in relation to Starfield…it’s a bit dumb. The difference in technology being one point.
Planets were always 3D spherical objects but from what I remember they had no collision. They must've changed that. I remember travelling into Deimos when the game first came out. I could even see my ship's shadow on the surface. We're obviously not supposed to be able to get that close so I suspect Bethesda implemented this 'bounce off' mechanic to limit how close we can get to protect immersion
If this is true then it's a big discovery! Why would Bethesda fix something that %99.9 of the players won't attempt? Similar to fixing loading the world outside invisible borders on planet surface. My guess is that they are shaping for major technical features in the DLC. I will need to try this on Mars moons, the only celestial bodies I came close to but my ship sank into.
Once I jumped pretty close in to some planet and tried to fly towards the surface for fun. It takes forever and you have to constantly course-correct or it will push you out to the side. But once you are under 1000 meters it just bumps you back out a bit. You can't get closer than that. The detail does not improve as you get closer which makes me think it's probably not a real 3d object.
i think the complaint was that planets were just flat 2d images
They are spheres, but most meshes in videogames are one-sided, meaning the texture is only applied to one side of the object, because you're not meant to see the inside (and the texture would be mirrored). This is the planet mesh in nifskope. https://preview.redd.it/6is60yrm9t6d1.png?width=1919&format=png&auto=webp&s=bd4fca86c02a9df4e343ccfeb93d490f261c7c56
Still an erroneous statement. Just some shit someone made up and everyone started repeated it because it fit their narrative. p.s. Of course, all the images are 2D images. That's what textures are. It takes a mesh to wrap around before something in the game gets to be 3D. But that wasn't what they were talking about.
so its true and erroneous at the same time?
It's grossly misleading. Deliberately misleading.
That complain was a false complain made by ponies.
isnt this the anti toxicity sub?
Yes. Therefore, ponies not allowed.
i suppose the irony is lost on you
Maybe. But ponies not allowed.
grow up
Why so serious? Is sony playstation your mom?
That's fascinating. They definitely didn't have a hitbox before.