Landing Area Mod for More Custom Tiles, Align Boundaries, Increase Max Size

[Kathylady]

13 hours ago, Liriel-666 said:

I think the People that want generated Worlds want every Planet with Live and Vegitation but thats not Space! Space has 99% planets without any live and planets like earth are super rare in this massive Planets list.

And the Space between Planets are Gigantic and Empty. You dont meet every minutes People in this Emptyness.

In our Milkyway we have around 400.000.000.000 Stars and not even 0,1% of it will have Planets with Live.

With 99,9% most of the Planet are Empty Rocks or Gas.

 

Yeah if you find alien life that makes it more extraordinary. In some space games (ED, SC) you can scan a planet from orbit to locate the POI (points of interest). Then you won't waste time flying across unimportant regions. You can also decide to descend for atmospheric flight in any direction. Maybe you'll stumble upon something special. You can fly between the mountain ranges, canyons, ravines, plains, over the ocean, beaches and pick a custom landing spot which is fun too. 

Edited August 31, 2023 by Kathylady

[Liriel-666]

5 hours ago, Kathylady said:

Yeah if you find alien life that makes it more extraordinary. In some space games (ED, SC) you can scan a planet from orbit to locate the POI (points of interest). Then you won't waste time flying across unimportant regions. You can also decide to descend for atmospheric flight in any direction. Maybe you'll stumble upon something special. You can fly between the mountain ranges, canyons, ravines, plains, over the ocean, beaches and pick a custom landing spot which is fun too. 

yeah ED is that now with POI but that was a long time ago not.

There you had no POI and you must search for thing.

I rememberthe time where the Guadian Ruins was found.

You needed the Coordinates and then you musst fly over the planet and find these Coordinats.

and that was a time consuming methode.

[Kathylady]

Some good news: keanuWheeze (NexusGuy999) made a mod called More Custom Landing Sites. It increases the landing areas from 3 (Vanilla) to = 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 20, 30, 50.

 

Mod Description:

More Custom Landing Sites

Installation:
- Simply unzip the provided file into the game's base folder: e.g. "SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Starfield"

Usage:
- Open the console using the tilde (~) key
- Now run "bat lz5", to set the amount of maximum custom landing zones to 5
- The mod offers the following options: 3 (Vanilla), 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 20, 30, 50
- Simply run "bat lzX" to use any of those
- The changes will be permanent (You only have to run it once, even when leaving the game), and don't require manually editing the .ini file

Warning:
I have not thoroughly tested this mod, especially the higher versions.
Use at your own risk.

Edited September 1, 2023 by Kathylady

[Kathylady]

Gepardas said he increased the landing area:

Go to the folder: \Documents\My Games\Starfield . Create a file with Notepad and name it: StarfieldCustom.ini 

Open StarfieldCustom.ini 

 

Add the text and save:

[General]

uMaximumPlayableAreaWorldCoord=4096
fPlayableAreaX=100.0
fPlayableAreaY=100.0
fPlayableAreaZ=50.0

 

------------

These are the default values: 4096, 100, 100, 50. The maximum distance from the ship to the boundary = 5657M (5657 meters).

Modify the values to:

[General]
uMaximumPlayableAreaWorldCoord=61440
fPlayableAreaX=1000.0
fPlayableAreaY=1000.0
fPlayableAreaZ=150.0

------------

The maximum distance from the ship increased to 6789M (6789 meters). So the landing area is bigger. However, something causes a limit, because the area doesn't increase more than this.
 

Edited September 3, 2023 by Kathylady

[Kathylady]

Zombiefruit discovered that you can fly from Mars to Phobos in 27 hours without fast travel. From Charon to Pluto is also possible. However, these natural satellites are in the same "bubble" as the planet.

Zombiefruit said: "In a ship near a planet you do seem to orbit that planet (if you speed up orbits you can see for yourself). I wish I tested it after I flew to Pluto. My guess is that you orbit the planet you're "registered" to, which means the last planet you travelled to. Modern would probably need to update this after a certain distance. Orbits also need to be way slowed down since the planets are by default moving faster than the ship itself (I had to pause Pluto's orbit or it was literally flying away from me faster than I could fly to it)."

Landing on planets directly from orbit is impossible according to Zombiefruit: "There's no wall but you just fly through, there isn't planetary collision. I understand Bethesda not wanting to deal with it when it's not so important to the gameplay but adds a lot of work + engine tweaks."

 

 

 

Edited September 4, 2023 by Kathylady

[Miauzi]

Vor 38 Minuten sagte Kathylady:

Zombiefruit hat herausgefunden, dass man ohne Schnellreise in 27 Stunden vom Mars nach Phobos fliegen kann. Von Charon nach Pluto ist auch ohne Schnellreise möglich. Allerdings befinden sich diese natürlichen Satelliten in derselben „Blase“ wie der Planet.

 

 

 

 

So - 27 hours from the surface of Mars to one of its dwarf moons.

Phobos is really not very far away ... approx. 6,000 km

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phobos_(Mond)

 

In comparison, the Earth's moon -> 384,000 km.

As I have already written elsewhere - all these "space battles" are ultimately only "air battles" from World War I ala "The Red Baron".

Because these "spaceships" are not faster either ... 27 hours for 6,000 km corresponds to the flying speed with which a C. Lindberg flew across the North Atlantic ... before 1930!

Such a "spaceship" will not stay in orbit without continuous propulsion in the direction of the planet's surface - at such a low speed the "box" simply falls back again!

The orbital speed - which an ISS has - or in 1961 Vostok 1 with Yuri Gagarin is -> 27,000 km/h.

That means - in less than 1 hour our present rockets would have flown from the surface of Mars to Phobos!

The game has nothing whatsoever to do with real space travel - but 99% of all players don't care about that.

 

oh - don't forget - the "spaceship" must of course accelerate to the orbital speed of Phobos ... which is 2.14 km/s ... about 7,700 km/h

I don't know what the engine for the "underlight" flight is - but I don't see a fuel tank anywhere on the spaceship construction.

[Kathylady]

1 hour ago, Miauzi said:

 

So - 27 hours from the surface of Mars to one of its dwarf moons.

Phobos is really not very far away ... approx. 6,000 km

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phobos_(Mond)

 

In comparison, the Earth's moon -> 384,000 km.

As I have already written elsewhere - all these "space battles" are ultimately only "air battles" from World War I ala "The Red Baron".

 

Because these "spaceships" are not faster either ... 27 hours for 6,000 km corresponds to the flying speed with which a C. Lindberg flew across the North Atlantic ... before 1930!

Starfield is a space RPG. It doesn't simulate space travel so the speed and distance are inaccurate.

 

See this thread. The people who want a simulation are upset that we got Skyrim in space. The space combat style is quite fun and the weapons are more futuristic than WW1.

Changing the engine is very difficult. Maybe they can add real-time space travel as a separate mini-game. Hiding the loading screens would improve immersion.

 

BrickmasterBen said: "Frankly I think it’s just a UX/Immersion issue.
 

Take Mass Effect, you don’t even have direct control over your ship in those games, and just like starfield you use a Galaxy map menu to get everywhere. Yet, for some reason, it feels so much more immersive than what’s here. Like you’re actually traveling from system to system.

 

I think some of these problems would be fixed if Bethesda hid some of the loading screens involved with flying a bit better:

1. Instead of kicking you to a loading screen after activating your grav drive, you stay in that warped space view for a few seconds before you appear at the other planet.
2. instead of a loading screen to land on the planet, have a first-person view of the ship entering atmosphere while the game loads the planet.

Both of these changes would make traveling feel more seamless while still letting the game load what it needs to."

 

Albatross1225 said: "Yeah they could have just had you walk around your ship in space like in mass effect do the whole fake warp animation outside the ship windows. Boom 2d planet in view in window. Check out planet details in star map. Let's land here/ scan planet. Obscure loading into planet with clouds. That's literally how most space games do it when you land on a planet. Passing through the clouds is the loading screen. Warp drive is the loading screen. Just hide the damn loading screen. Games have been doing this since forever."

Edited September 4, 2023 by Kathylady

[bjornk]

2 hours ago, Kathylady said:

Starfield is a space RPG.

 

How much of it takes place in space?

[bjornk]

3 hours ago, Miauzi said:

As I have already written elsewhere - all these "space battles" are ultimately only "air battles" from World War I ala "The Red Baron".

 

 

Judging by the fact that they still use Colt 1911 as a pistol, perhaps they fight in WWI style for nostalgic purposes. ? To be fair, "pew pew pew!" is what most are interested in, they don't even consider if such space battles are even feasible or even necessary. Same is true for the likes of SC and ED, OFC.

 

3 hours ago, Miauzi said:

Because these "spaceships" are not faster either ... 27 hours for 6,000 km corresponds to the flying speed with which a C. Lindberg flew across the North Atlantic ... before 1930!

 

 

Imagine, the game gives you a ship that can only make 220 KM/h and the NPCs in the game send you on missions on other planets which you would never be able to reach before you die with that speed. Must be another way to say, "Go now and don't ever come back!". ?

 

[Miauzi]

Vor 3 Stunden sagte Björnk:

 

Gemessen an der Tatsache, dass sie immer noch den Colt 1911 als Pistole verwenden, kämpfen sie vielleicht aus nostalgischen Gründen im Stil des Ersten Weltkriegs. ? Um fair zu sein: „Pew Pew Pew!“ ist das, was die meisten interessiert, sie denken nicht einmal darüber nach, ob solche Weltraumschlachten überhaupt machbar oder überhaupt notwendig sind. Das Gleiche gilt für Unternehmen wie SC, ED und OFC.

 

 

Stellen Sie sich vor, das Spiel gibt Ihnen ein Schiff, das nur 220 km/h schaffen kann, und die NPCs im Spiel schicken Sie auf Missionen auf anderen Planeten, die Sie mit dieser Geschwindigkeit niemals erreichen könnten, bevor Sie sterben. Das muss eine andere Art sein zu sagen: „Geh jetzt und komm nie wieder zurück!“. ?

 

 

You can never arrive at such a low speed ... you can't overcome the difference in orbital velocity between two planets, for example... and not even get out of the gravity-funnel of the starting planet.

So for people with a little bit of background knowledge about real space and orbital mechanics, it all feels so completely wrong.

As someone who worked for about 3 years on an airfield as a maintenance mechanic for combat helicopters (that was my military service), I'll keep quiet about the fact that a complete layman can immediately launch such a sluggish crate and land it again with pinpoint accuracy.

The game "The Outer Worlds" avoids this embarrassment - because it lets the ship's computer do these complex manoeuvres ... in "MassEffect" has a top pilot etc.

This makes travelling through space feel much more immersive than in "StarField".

 

Ja - es ist ein reiner Fake-Weltraum ... Reisen und Kämpfen bekommen nicht mal den Hauch von Realismus.

 

None of this would really bother me - but if I get a message about the cooperation with NASA when I start the game - they talk about NASA punk ... then I don't expect the complete absence of science and space travel.

Here too -> the discrepancy between the proclaimed claim (and the price associated with it) and the "reality" in the game itself leads me, as well as quite a few others, to -> rejection or to a poor assessment.

[Kathylady]

WhiteLight506 found that you can see New Atlantis from adjacent tiles. He landed nearby the city by hiding star map markers with a console command. So it's possible, but tricky to get the correct adjacent landing areas. Does this mean that the tiles are aligned? It's difficult to select the correct adjacent tiles as landing areas though.

The theory is that you must use a console command to disable the map markers (city icons), otherwise you cannot click close enough to land at an adjacent tile. So the adjacent tiles are hidden beneath the map markers.
 

WhiteLight506 said:
Question: where did you land your ship in the screens?

"I can't tell, since there's no easy answer. There's no convenient way to show exactly where I landed in the first two screenshots."

"When you're in the starmap and looking at a planet (M key). Write in console ShowAllMapMarkers 0 -> press G -> press TAB. UI refreshed and markers removed. Now you need to land somewhere nearby so that the PLAYER SHIP text doesn't interfere with the tile you want to land on."

Images

 

"Now you have to pixel hunt adjacent tiles by slightly moving this circle on starmap (up/down, left/right), you choose the direction. After landing on adjacent tile, it is necessary to understand in which direction to move. Fly in this direction using tcl and player.setav speedmult 4000. Done."
------------

WhiteLight506 said "I'm saying that you can check tile connectivity on any random place on planet. But after the first landing, the marker will overlap the adjacent tiles, that's why you need to load the game, find the same place and offset your cursor a little bit."

"This post proves that the city doesn't disappear in adjacent tile. The difference between save-load and console method is the way these markers are removed. In one case (with save-load) they are your markers, and in the other (with console command) they are developer markers that you can't remove when loading a save, for obvious reasons."

Use this:
 

player.setav speedmult 4000 (Changes the speed of your character)
tcl (Fly-mode)
 

You don't have to slowly run to the boundaries.
 

And don't forget to save before using console commands.

WhiteLight506 said "I've used CenterOnExterior command with out-of-bounds coordinates. The game freezes almost instantly. I think it's something with the engine itself. And I don't think this mod can fix that. But you can fly out-of-bounds with tfc command, because it doesn't affect rendering."

 

yaosio said "Most likely it's the variable(s) tracking location overflowing and freezing the game. There's no easy way around this which is why we rarely see games with effectively infinite world sizes. It even effects everybody's favorite engine Unreal Engine. They use offsets to deal with very large maps, but I don't know the limitations of it."

 

iguesssoppl said "It only loads a chunk at a time and that chunk is just generated in a sky-box. It doesn't stream more land or anything. So you'd need to take off then choose the region next to it, repeat. What this is showing that it is pulling from the actual world map and it's a contiguous space - after its generated. And not random landscapes."

Screenshots:

 

 

 

Edited September 5, 2023 by Kathylady

[Kathylady]

Marius Nilsen (Profato) said: "Chose to land a couple of pixels next to Akila City after removing the city icon on map with the console command.  Ship is pretty close to the city so its perhaps its the same tile. However I did not select Akila City on the map, I placed my own landing spot a few pixels away from the city."

 

 

 

Edited September 5, 2023 by Kathylady

[Kathylady]

The tiles of the planets are connected

 

WhiteLight506 said "Look at the ship's location indicator. The distances are so large that I wouldn't be surprised if the resource squares you see on the map represent each individual tile. In addition, procedural generator is aware of neighboring biomes."
 

 

 

 

 

"Edit: It looks like the outposts can't be seen from another tile. (!That's my observation!)"
 

"But I will note that the rendering distance of the outpost objects is extremely small. It is so small that they disappear even on the same tile where the outpost is located."
 

"Also I had to note this too: there's still a restricted area between tiles. You can't walk in this area in both tiles: img"
 

"This area is not that big. I should have pointed it out earlier."

Edited September 6, 2023 by Kathylady

[sherrif]

That's actually pretty big if true, if the tiles are ACTUALLY connected in such a way that means that moving from one tile to the next is physically possible.

 

While I understand the limitations of their engine and way that they generate playable areas, it does mean that travel from one tile to the next on the surface is actually physically possible. Likely not going to see "seamless" travel across the surface (unless Bethesda kicks it into gear, which may be possible if they pay attention to the criticisms) but it wouldn't be impossible for a modder to figure out tile to tile movement.

[Miauzi]

Vor 5 Minuten sagte Sherrif:

Das ist tatsächlich ziemlich viel, wenn das wahr ist, wenn die Kacheln TATSÄCHLICH so verbunden sind, dass ein Übergang von einer Kachel zur nächsten physikalisch möglich ist.

 

Obwohl ich die Einschränkungen ihrer Engine und der Art und Weise, wie sie spielbare Bereiche erzeugen, verstehe, bedeutet dies, dass die Bewegung von einem Feld zum nächsten auf der Oberfläche tatsächlich physisch möglich ist. Wahrscheinlich wird es keine „nahtlose“ Bewegung über die Oberfläche geben (es sei denn, Bethesda legt einen Gang ein, was möglich sein könnte, wenn sie die Kritikpunkte beachten), aber es wäre für einen Modder nicht unmöglich, die Bewegung von Kachel zu Kachel herauszufinden.

 

There is a fundamental element missing in the game system to make this possible - introducing it would turn the entire gameplay upside down -> the auto-pilot.

The tiles are -> landing zones ... in them the spaceship lands ... in the middle of the zone

changing a zone is only possible with -> manual ascent into the orbit - selection of the next zone - descent from the orbit

what is discussed here is -> entering a new landing zone on foot and WITHOUT a spaceship ... this is not foreseen in the game concept so far

how do other games do it? ... in "Elite" you can send your spaceship via auto-pilot into orbit and later call it at ANOTHER place and it lands near the current player position

this would be at "Star-Field" -> in the middle of the currently entered landing zone

since you usually can NOT see the location of the spaceship from the edge of the landing zone anyway ... one could also do without the landing animation.

So if the ship has an auto-pilot - who can perform even the most complicated manoeuvre ... take-off and landing procedure ... why does it still need a pilot?

oh - I forgot - the space battles ala "Red Baron"

?

[Kathylady]

Starfield's Planetary Tiles Are Connected - Definitive Proof

Draspian wrote: "It takes disabling Map Markers and millimetric precision on the planet map, but it IS possible to land on a tile adjacent to New Atlantis and see the city in the distance, unreachable. The white dots visible at the southern end of the map are the Activities quest marker and lead directly to the various districts of New Atlantis."
 

Thank you to u/WhiteLight506 on Reddit for the idea and the method. Check his post about it: reddit.com/r/Starfield/comments/169q8xj/you_can_see_new_atlantis_from_the_adjacent_tiles/
 

"For this experiment I kept boundaries on to prove I'm actually on another tile and didn't just fake the distance through my own mod to remove them. Next experiment is to disable them again and run to New Atlantis, if it can be reached before crashing, and see what happens."

 

 

 

 

Edited September 5, 2023 by Kathylady

[bjornk]

17 hours ago, Kathylady said:

Definitive Proof

 

It only proves that you can land on different spots inside the same map and depending on where you land, the playable area in the map is determined dynamically.

 

Think of it this way, when you click on a predefined map marker, you are transferred to a specific predefined coordinate on the map. If you click on a custom landing location instead of a predefined map marker, then you are transferred to a custom coordinate you chose, but you are still on the same map. The playable area is then determined dynamically centering around the coordinate you've landed on.

 

If what you mean by "tile" is the map and its skybox, then you can be sure that you're not inside a different "tile" as long as that city is visible. If the claim here is being inside another map, then it's clearly false, because if it was actually possible to view an adjacent map from within another, then there would be no excuse for the engine not to infinitely stream adjacent cells into memory, there wouldn't be a need for a boundary.

 

 

 

Edited September 6, 2023 by bjornk

[Kathylady]

 

22 minutes ago, bjornk said:

It only proves that you can land on different spots inside the same map and depending on where you land, the playable area in the map is determined dynamically.

Initially many people thought that each landing area (tile) was an individual map, procedurally generated and disconnected from other areas. The tests above show that these landing areas are connected and that we can land in adjacent tiles (landing areas) and see the same topography (mountains, hills, valleys, rivers, lakes, ocean).

 

 

22 minutes ago, bjornk said:

 if it was actually possible to view an adjacent map from within another, then there would be no excuse for the engine not to infinitely stream adjacent cells into memory, there wouldn't be a need for a boundary.

 

If you remove the Boundary Reached message and walk beyond the boundary then the game eventually freezes / crashes, because of a different limitation. This could be caused by a floating point error.

Edited September 6, 2023 by Kathylady

[bjornk]

1 hour ago, Kathylady said:

Initially many people thought that each landing area (tile) was an individual map, disconnected from other areas. The tests above show that these landing areas are connected and that we can land in adjacent tiles (landing areas) and see the same terrain.

 

What you call a landing area is the dynamically created boundary of the playable area inside a map. I can't tell you how many different maps there are for each planet, as I don't have the game. However, when you land on a spot where you can see the cityscape of New Atlantis, you are still on the same map where New Atlantis is. However, that map, not the playable area in it, but the map itself with its own skybox, also has a boundary that you can never travel past, because there's nothing outside of it, it's undefined, most likely programmatically limited as well.

 

Just to clarify, the landing areas are not "connected" because they are literally on the same map. When you land on a specific coordinate on a map, a playable area with a boundary is dynamically created centering around the coordinate you've landed on. If you take off and pick another spot and land again, another playable area is created on the SAME map. In other words, you are switching from one playable area to another, on the same exact map.

 

If you set the boundaries of the playable area to be almost equal but slightly less than the size of the actual map, using the INI settings you posted above, you possibly won't ever see a boundary reached warning. However, I don't know if the map size is identical for all maps, if it's not doing this could definitely be problematic. However, it could be possible to set it up dynamically depending on the map size whenever you activate landing. Not sure if it can be doable with a script, might have to wait for a script extender.

 

When Todd was talking about "tiles" some time ago, I naively assumed that they had divided planets into number of "tiles" that cover the entire surface of planets and then had associated each "tile" with a unique map, some with handcrafted stuff such as cities and landscapes and some generated completely procedurally. Like many others, I clearly was overestimating what they are capable of again, forgetting how incompetent they actually were in the past and turns out it wasn't the case at all.

 

 

Edited September 6, 2023 by bjornk

[Kathylady]

Busylancer created a mod called Cruising Between Planets. Description:

 

This is a very simple text file that can be run in the console, allowing you to easily cruise between planets
You are in space.
1. Switch to third-person
2. Open console with "~" key
3. click your ship with the mouse
4. enter bat c to turn on the cruise

If you want to turn off the cruise
Open console with "~" key and enter bat qc to turn off the cruise

To install the mod move the c.text and qc.txt file into the C:\Users\[Your Name]\Documents\My Games\Starfield folder

 

---------

 

There's some issues: 

1. The screen shakes while hitting boost - busylancer said he fixed it for 1.2.
2. When you reach another planet you can clip through it.
3. The ship speed accelerates, yet it's still slow.
4. Can't get up from the chair to walk around the ship while flying. There's no auto-pilot.

Edited September 10, 2023 by Kathylady

[Kathylady]

Draspian said: "It would appear that (as some have suggested) the cause of the crash isn't much the game not being able to handle what it's loading, but rather it's the unloading process that breaks the game, as our spaceship falling outside of the "existing" area seems to be the breaking point."

"Whether this can be fixed probably depends on how hardcoded this dependence on the ship is, or if it can be forced to remain loaded even if everything else in the world isn't."

"The theory that the game can't handle being too far from your home ship seems to be the correct one. In all of my testing, the game consistently freezes the very moment the Frontier falls beyond the unloaded area."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited September 22, 2023 by Kathylady

[Kathylady]

Real Grav Drive Supercruise and EVA Spacewalk with Hotkeys - created by LeastDegenAzuraEnjoyer

 

Interplanetary space travel, Zero-G EVA spacewalk, improved customization, and settings tweaks. Now with Hotkey Support!

 

 

 

 

Edited September 13, 2023 by Kathylady