Read by Council Holotanks/hologram blocks

[FraggertheBoss]

Greetings fellow players!
I am unsure if this idea has been posted in the past but it is worth mentioning the idea of having holotanks or hologram blocks that allow players to display a person, galactic/system map, or a scaled down ship without having to actually fly a distance to see that person or ship. The hologram blocks can be linked together creating a holotank of any dimension. A 3D image of a ship of any size can be rendered in a holotank, but in order to be rendered, the tank has to be of certain length and width. For example if a ship with the dimensions of 300x50x100, would have to be scaled down to about a 1:18 scale so the dimensions of the tank would be 17x3. Height would not be a matter unless the ceiling of your CIC is really low. Holographic projectors could provide not only a tactical display of the galaxy, system, ship, or player, but could also be programmed to display a 3D sign that could rotate. I understand that the game programming involved to create such a thing would be time consuming, but the outcome could be worth it. I hope this idea implemented in the future!

 

[Jaaskinal]

That seems like it would be pretty demanding on the graphics card to render a whole other ship just because of a couple blocks.

Pretty cool idea anyways.

 

[Lord_Greyscale]

I'm all for this.

Aye, it would be fairly intense on the graphics card.
On the other claw, so are planets.
On yet another claw, get "enough" forcefields together and the graphics load gets fairly intense.

Most of these "graphics" loads are a result of either lack of sufficient optimization, or that they aren't the type of graphics load the cards were designed for. (most "modern" cards are more for textures, specularity (how shiny said texture is), Bloom and fog, rather than the mass rendering of basic shapes)

Or, and I really hate saying this one as I myself used to be in that boat, the load is due to your PC as a whole just not being good enough.
(I was soooooo happy when I got a gaming rig)

 

[Captain Tankman]

It's already doable

Crystalarmor/glass + rotating docked entity

 

[nightrune]

That seems like it would be pretty demanding on the graphics card to render a whole other ship just because of a couple blocks.

Pretty cool idea anyways.

Now rendering the same ship twice and scaling it, I would not imagine is a big deal. Especially if you swapped out the textures with the glass texture like Captain Tankman's example.

 

[jayman38]

That seems like it would be pretty demanding on the graphics card to render a whole other ship just because of a couple blocks....

Not really, unless your video card struggles with transparent textures. From the game's point of view, it's just a copy of and reference to a ship that is already in memory. (Assuming that the holograph block will be used by the typical builder to display the ship you are in to simulate damage control, or to display a ship attached to a dock to simulate docking control.)

Shadow and Lighting calculations could be skipped or simplified to make it less demanding than a "real" copy of the ship. Unless the ship is already a game-breaker in size and detail, it should be fine.

On the other hand, if you have a builder that builds a "trophy case" with dozens or hundreds of holograph blocks in the same vicinity, that could get overwhelming, especially if holographs implement translucency. Theoretically, the devs would put in a server-configurable holograph hard-limit in the universe (E.g. No more than 1000 holograph projections loaded at one time.)

Now rendering the same ship twice and scaling it, I would not imagine is a big deal. Especially if you swapped out the textures with the glass texture like Captain Tankman's example.

Copying and scaling the ship is no big deal for the computer. Using translucent textures might make the graphics card groan under the strain, especially if there is circuit boards or glass nearby.

The real issue might be that the game cannot really determine "inside" versus "outside", so the holograph has to render all blocks with a visible face in the ship, not just the surface, including all interiors.
1. If you just straight-up display a translucent copy of the ship with every block inside, some ships might show too much "detail" to make an attractive holograph. It will be a messy jumble of surfaces, making it hard to see details at the scale we are talking about.
2. If you pre-render the ship using holograph lighting and shadow rules, without transparency, and then render that result with translucency, it might be much more attractive, at the cost of an extra rendering step.

 

[Sven_The_Slayer]

The thing about rendering a holographic version of the ship is the game would actually have to render another version of the ship. This may be a possibility when the game gets a LOD system so it can render the ships with fewer details. Rendering the galaxy map may be much more viable and rendering players would be a really interesting thing if the game ever got in game voice coms.

I'm sure I've seen other suggestions for other holographic displays so it is something players want.

 

[Red_The_Hunter]

In my opinion, I dont really mind if the scaled down miniblocks in the hologram are all the same colour, eg, just all red or green or blue etc (perhaps by linking coloured blocks to them like with weapon systems) so it would not have to process " oh this is a cannon module" "this is a storage block" but rather just only care if there is a block, and not the type.

Also, going on a stretch, would it be possible that if you link it to your ship core, it could give you a (semi-)active display of your current ship, and display what blocks are still attached?
Eg, chunk of blocks get destroyed, the hologram ship displays the ship with those blocks just dissapeared.

 

[Darkkon]

The game doesnt use the graphics card much at the moment period. Everything is piped to the processor from what I've heard. That being said, the issue of performance still stands. I definitely like the idea of an extra rendering step so that it maintains that attractive hologram look no matter what is displayed. We do have a basic LOD system as well, as shown by the recent block additions so it shouldn't be too difficult in theory to extend that to a holographic display. The issue I see is the shrinking of the block size to create the hologram. Lets ignore for the moment the posibility of simplifying the shape down. Lets say your ship has 500 blocks in it. The hologram will be another 500 blocks, shrunk down into a smaller space, likely the space of one block to maintain collision boxes. Now lets say your ship is 30000 blocks in size. Those same 30000 blocks would be shrunk down to the size of a single block. With this system, block count would be doubled for any ship that has a hologram displaying itself, let alone other holographic displays.

Alright, so lets try something else. I believe it was suggested in the chat or in another thread the idea of linking emitters together to create a larger area for the hologram. So instead of the hologram being limited to one block, maybe its limited to 9, 18, etc. Hell we could even do something similar to the cargo system where you place blocks where the hologram is allowed to exist. This would let you define the total physical size of the hologram, but it still does nothing for the block count.

So lets hit that block count issue. With LOD, it can simplify the general shape to a degree, but it still has to deal with the sheer amount of blocks at some level. The other option would produce more lag the first time its rendered but likely provide better performance afterwards. That option would be to simplify the shapes into blocks themselves. Not sure how to describe it, but similar to the gif posted earlier, the blocks would be the same size as they are now. This would remove surface details like greebling and probably turrets, doors, etc. But it would be much easier to render and wouldn't require some sort of sub-grid. Unfortunately that would also mean the holograms would require more space. Including the sub-grid would eliminate the more space requirement, but it would also be rather interesting to code in I imagine.

Anyway thats my two cents. Hope it all made sense.

 

[jstenholt]

Nice idea, but let's be real: nobody here really has the skinny on whether or not this will work. Luckily, this idea has come up so many times that I'm positive the devs are aware of it. If they deem it doable, maybe we'll see it some day. But I wouldn't hold my breath.

 

[Darkkon]

Nice idea, but let's be real: nobody here really has the skinny on whether or not this will work. Luckily, this idea has come up so many times that I'm positive the devs are aware of it. If they deem it doable, maybe we'll see it some day. But I wouldn't hold my breath.

Thats the glory of computer technology, anything is technically possible. But whether its feasible is another matter entirely.

 

[MacThule]

Greetings fellow players!
I am unsure if this idea has been posted in the past but it is worth mentioning the idea of having holotanks or hologram blocks that allow players to display a person, galactic/system map, or a scaled down ship without having to actually fly a distance to see that person or ship. The hologram blocks can be linked together creating a holotank of any dimension. A 3D image of a ship of any size can be rendered in a holotank, but in order to be rendered, the tank has to be of certain length and width. For example if a ship with the dimensions of 300x50x100, would have to be scaled down to about a 1:18 scale so the dimensions of the tank would be 17x3. Height would not be a matter unless the ceiling of your CIC is really low. Holographic projectors could provide not only a tactical display of the galaxy, system, ship, or player, but could also be programmed to display a 3D sign that could rotate. I understand that the game programming involved to create such a thing would be time consuming, but the outcome could be worth it. I hope this idea implemented in the future!

I LOVE this.

It's ambitious, but it incorporates one of the more frequent all time suggestions/requests I've seen - display blocks that can be linked to cameras. Going the way of mass-able holographic blocks would solve that and much more.

The coding would be very daunting, agreed. The block would be a challenge. Plus it would almost certainly need a control/computer block that allowed players to interface with the holo-display (set it to display a portion of galaxy map, link it to a camera block, or anything like that). It would be a killer feature though, especially if it incorporated the ability for whoever was in the control/computer block to draw on the display (i.e. circle or highlight objects, draw lines, etc). One other thing that I've desperately missed in MP faction play has been the ability to "ping" locations or entities on the fly so my wing-mates or subordinates are able to respond quickly to an issue I've noticed.

If I had a nice 5x5 strategic holoscreen on the bridge of my flagship, and if my faction mates could be allowed to link their holoscreens to my control computer from any distance.... OMG. I could show them things I wanted them to see without talking about it for 10 minutes.

Allowing holoscreens to be linked at any range would also open up the ability for scouts to transmit live camera feeds back to HQ during recon missions, or bored players to broadcast entertaining holo-programs or whatever. Players could show each other new ships and station - in game - without all that travel time. Could be an amazing, very unique feature.