@PMYA I kind of left my "omg this is cancer" thing with no explanation, so here's a basic:
You should be able to "land your ship in the docking bay of a 3 square kilometer capital ship, which is actively moving and orbiting around a planetary body, then immediately disembark and join into the FPS like you would dropping out of a Galaxy Carrier in Planetside." People who are inside of the capital ship would be able to look out of windows on the ship and see space battles going on outside of the ship, and vice-versa, ship pilots could see inside and see the FPS battle going on inside. Also, note that there would be no loading screens when going between piloting your ship, docking in the moving capital ship and disembarking into the capital ship to engage in FPS combat.
To counter this retardation, I would do this:
- The 3 square kilometer mobile capital ship or space station would be stationary. You could counter-act this a little bit by having a proper coordinate system heirarchy (global -> system -> local) sort or notion, which say Star Citizen can't do because they just made "floats" to be "doubles" because they have the worst fucking setup possible for large-scale worlds/universes. If 200,000 objects in a huge cruiser have to update their position every frame, while having windows in them that could see players interacting with them from outside spaceships a few dozen meters away, then you can't do anything at interactive framerates. Imagine if the ship was made of a glass exterior, then all 1 million tiny objects inside would either have to merge with the internal objects or individually update their positions every frame while you're trying to shoot down that bounty hunter who just FTL'd in and is attacking you.
Basically, you can't have it all, and some of the games want some stupid fucking game design and the executives don't understand the viability, so they will waste time trying to do something to help this for a few tech demos then ultimately fail. Guess which of the 3 I'm talking about.
Anyways, the ideal sandbox will have restrictions, but will be mostly viable. Elite Dangerous actually has a lot of loading screens, but they hide them amazingly well with gameplay. Others want that instant response...no.
I'm with you on the campaign based space games. Starfighter and Jedi Starfighter were the shit, I recently found them again when I was digging through some stuff and started playing both of them.
Maybe it is a bit of a loaded question to suggest that they are all aiming for the end result, but that is the holy grail of space games imo. I think it is interesting to consider the tech involved behind the creation of the space sims because there is so much involved in making them. Space Engineers, for example, has a ton of stuff going on with building and physics that you don't really see in any other kind of game.
My main issue with sandbox games is anything randomly generated ceases to be fun eventually, because it isn't truly random. It's the same shit in a different order. No Man's Sky is probably the best example of that. Other games, like FTL or Binding Of Isaac, managed to get the randomisation/actual content level right, but in the realm of sandbox games the ones that get it right are few and far between.
Given that this is one of the major problems, would it be a good idea to crowdsource the content for space sandbox games? Having actual content made by actual people could make the games way better. It wouldn't necessarily need to be made by people who know how to write changes to the game, like mods or something. If there was a builder in the game that was simple enough to use, but with enough variation, we could actually have what was promised in No Man's Sky in a fairly short amount of time.
FTL is "Solve this puzzle this way" using a method you maybe didn't use before. You did XYX and it finally worked, so fuck that, do something else now.
The Sandbox games are just "hey You made a character, now make your game!". Well you can't beat it really, try something else. Oh wait, it didn't work even though that was obvious? huh?
Seriously loaded question...maybe I can do an AMA on it some day if people are curious about my thoughts. I'll summarize a bit here.
1) WHERE THE FUCK ARE THE NEW GOD DAMNED CAMPAIGN-BASED SPACE SIMS? We used to have X-Wing/TIE Fighter/Wing Commander/Descent(in a way)/etc, and now all we have are a few very small budget indie campaign games that will doubtfully have anything approaching the story/campaign/love that those older games of the genre did. I hate that we have 3 sandboxes in dev/released and no real campaign games.
2) There is a lot more to it than the specified basics that will determine if either of the 3 games (Elite Dangers, No Man's Sky, Star Citizen) can achieve the real imagined goal. Is it viable? Sure, absolutely; however, as will all game developemnt trade-offs must be made to sacrifice game concept/game design for performance/simplicity/viability. Each game as it exists today has some fundamental fucking flaws that either make the game not viable, too expensive to develop or too open to RNG affecting the RPG aspect.
You should be able to "land your ship in the docking bay of a 3 square kilometer capital ship, which is actively moving and orbiting around a planetary body, then immediately disembark and join into the FPS like you would dropping out of a Galaxy Carrier in Planetside." People who are inside of the capital ship would be able to look out of windows on the ship and see space battles going on outside of the ship, and vice-versa, ship pilots could see inside and see the FPS battle going on inside. Also, note that there would be no loading screens when going between piloting your ship, docking in the moving capital ship and disembarking into the capital ship to engage in FPS combat.
That sounds fucking cool, right? This game design idea may be a serious goal of at least one of the listed games. To someone who has not made large-scale games, that sounds perfectly reasonable. As someone who has done game engine development professionally for over a decade, that's a fucking horror story.
Ugh I'm getting a bit tired...maybe I will just do a gamedev AMA this weekend. I wrote some shit then that led to more shit..so yeah.
TLDR; VIABLE, Star Citizen took the wrong starting approach will fail IMHO, NMS wanted to base 100% of their gameplay on a mixture of SPORE + sandbox and hope that the game worked, Elite Dangers is doing it right, and fuck everything where is my updated campaign-based space sim?!?!?!??!?!?!??!