Jump to content

Trains Feasibility


FALCmods4all

Recommended Posts

Some other threads on vehicles, but thought it would be worth discussing specifically the feasibility after creation kit of converting ship rooms into train cars.

Train Types:

Terrestrial — Ridable hover trains from outpost to outpost.

Interplanetary — Ridable ships using autopilot between player space stations. Don’t necessarily have to look like conventional trains, just modular towing of some sort, too bulky for grav drives.

Interstellar — Streamlined space trains autopilot with grav drives using gates or beacons for specific secure routes between large settlements or cities. 
 

Subways, Skyways, Submarineways — ridable modular version of Atlantis train system (possibly just as train interior worldspace) for travel between districts or adjacent settlements.

 

So, experts. Think we’ll be able to turn ships or vertibirds into auto trains or restricted to odd worldspaces?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Quote

Terrestrial — Ridable hover trains from outpost to outpost.

Planet tiles are generated on the fly, and forgotten as soon as you leave the tile unless there is a Landing Area or Outpost marker on them. This would mean the game procedurally generating every tile, potentially hundreds or thousands of them, between your two outposts, and then saving that information in your save.  This would vastly increase the size of save files and load times, and that's before taking into consideration the FormID storage limit.

Additionally you'd have to solve the problem of building across tile boundaries.  Currently you can't even walk through them, much less route a train through them.

Not saying I don't like the idea, but unless the CK reveals that our current knowledge of how planets are generated and stored is completely wrong, it's not technically feasible.  You could add a train station, but you'd have a fast travel loading screen when you used it.

Quote

Interplanetary — Ridable ships using autopilot between player space stations. Don’t necessarily have to look like conventional trains, just modular towing of some sort, too bulky for grav drives.

The game treats space stations as "moons".  Yes, the records say "orbital", but the placement and travel mechanics are identical to how other orbiting bodies, planets and moons, work.  Again, this means you fast travel between them, rather than actually flying.  The only exception to that I've found is when the Crimson Fleet captures the Vigilance, and you can the fly between the Vigilance and The Key. 

At the moment everything dealing with player built space stations (or orbiting star ships, which are for all intents and purposes space stations) is incredibly unstable, and we don't know if multiple player built stations around the same planet are possible, or if they'd be considered in the same "space", allowing flying between them.

Quote

Interstellar — Streamlined space trains autopilot with grav drives using gates or beacons for specific secure routes between large settlements or cities. 

Again, this is just fancy fast travel.  There wouldn't be any "train" experience to it, just the door closing on one location and opening on another.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Quote

Planet tiles are generated on the fly, and forgotten as soon as you leave the tile unless there is a Landing Area or Outpost marker on them. This would mean the game procedurally generating every tile, potentially hundreds or thousands of them, between your two outposts, and then saving that information in your save.  This would vastly increase the size of save files and load times, and that's before taking into consideration the FormID storage limit.

Additionally you'd have to solve the problem of building across tile boundaries.  Currently you can't even walk through them, much less route a train through them.

Not saying I don't like the idea, but unless the CK reveals that our current knowledge of how planets are generated and stored is completely wrong, it's not technically feasible.  You could add a train station, but you'd have a fast travel loading screen when you used it.

I need to amend this.  It's possible to have multiple outposts in the same planet tile, and you definitely could have trains between those.  That is possibly achievable with the current tools.  There are a couple of problems that would have to be solved, namely expanding the outpost build radius to encompass an entire tile and allowing it to ignore restrictions due to POIs.  The CK, and especially the source for the builder scripts, would be a great help here, but it might be doable without those.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Posted (edited)
On 3/7/2024 at 11:58 AM, aurreth said:

Planet tiles are generated on the fly, and forgotten as soon as you leave the tile unless there is a Landing Area or Outpost marker on them. This would mean the game procedurally generating every tile, potentially hundreds or thousands of them, between your two outposts, and then saving that information in your save.  This would vastly increase the size of save files and load times, and that's before taking into consideration the FormID storage limit.

Additionally you'd have to solve the problem of building across tile boundaries.  Currently you can't even walk through them, much less route a train through them.

Not saying I don't like the idea, but unless the CK reveals that our current knowledge of how planets are generated and stored is completely wrong, it's not technically feasible.  You could add a train station, but you'd have a fast travel loading screen when you used it.

The game treats space stations as "moons".  Yes, the records say "orbital", but the placement and travel mechanics are identical to how other orbiting bodies, planets and moons, work.  Again, this means you fast travel between them, rather than actually flying.  The only exception to that I've found is when the Crimson Fleet captures the Vigilance, and you can the fly between the Vigilance and The Key. 

At the moment everything dealing with player built space stations (or orbiting star ships, which are for all intents and purposes space stations) is incredibly unstable, and we don't know if multiple player built stations around the same planet are possible, or if they'd be considered in the same "space", allowing flying between them.

Again, this is just fancy fast travel.  There wouldn't be any "train" experience to it, just the door closing on one location and opening on another.

It sounds like as far as the departing tile and the arriving tile fully functional trains are somewhat feasible. We would just need fast travel at or before tile border.

This should also allow for some train based radiant quests, such as attacking or defending a train.

in the way planet generation forgets map tiles, would we be able to have randomly generated liminal backgrounds for train travel world spaces that would not congest save files? So while riding train upon terrestrial map border or space station map border, train enters own world space for a set amount of time before entering destination world space.

The main purposes being to make custom travel durations, hide loading screens by loading a very small between world space, and have a custom land or space based interior location for random events that feels like part of a larger planet or solar system.

Last question. Has anyone figured out autopilot. Making ships move without the player in the cockpit?

Edited by FALCmods4all
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...