Airship as small FC house now that we can fly in 1.0 areas

Now that we can fly in 1.0 areas, why not just have an Airship that can serve as a small FC house? It doesn’t need to be complicated. It can use multi-person mount as the base, just make it a bit larger, the shape of an airship, a small deck for people to stand around, and some other small amenities you can install.

All members of the FC can have a tracker on map of where the airship is located, but they will need to use their mount to get to it and to climb aboard.

That’s it. No need to be complicated. 4 person mount already exist, this can basically just be 10 person mount. It will help alleviate some housing urges for smaller FC.

Maybe some features:
- It comes with furnished, preset furnitures already, and you cannot add more stuff (because it will stress the servers since this will be overworld). Maximum maybe change textures/colors of furnitures/flags only.
- Maybe can set officers/FC Lead only to be able to steer the airship
- The airship maybe should despawn if all members of FC are offline.
- If you are concerned with many airships hovering over quest areas, crystals, blocking view, blocking sunlight, ruining overworld immersion -- maybe the airship can only be allowed in oversea area, not overland. You know the big oversea open area just outside Limsa.

Of course in the future if the airship gets bigger, you can have a small garden on the deck. A bed below deck.

I'd love this, though I doubt they'll literally add it to the overworld.
We have that airship flying around Kugane though, and everyone hates that eyesore for perma-photobombing them. You gotta use NG+ to make it go away.
But that we have that airship makes me wonder if it wouldn't be possible to fake it in some way. Though no, I doubt we'll ever get something like this literally within the zone.

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Originally Posted by Hycinthus

It doesn’t need to be complicated.

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I think you are massively underestimating the inherent complicatedness of this idea.

We've only ever had one mount that is customisable, and nothing so much as a dye option for anything else - even single-player mounts.

No mount has ever had "amenities" attached to it, or the ability for passengers to move freely while riding it. You're locked into a pre-designed position with no ability to even change your pose.

It would also be huge. The gondola would be scaled to fit ten Roegadyn and furniture and amenities, plus the balloon on top, and then you want the whole thing to be able to park wherever you like - or to require a whole new system of programming to only let it fly in very limited areas that nobody actually needs to travel across.

(As a clue to how big a mount can actually be, and if I'm remembering correctly, the designers were originally hesitant when asked about getting the chocobo carriage as a mount and said it would be too big or complex. We ultimately got it but with one chocobo pulling it instead of two on the "setpiece" carriage, so that may indicate the limits of the model.)

FC airships could be an interesting form of instanced housing, but I doubt they can be made to appear in the actual game world, nor can the actual game world be observed from inside the instance (just a static copy of it).

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Originally Posted by Iscah

I think you are massively underestimating the inherent complicatedness of this idea.

We've only ever had one mount that is customisable, and nothing so much as a dye option for anything else - even single-player mounts.

No mount has ever had "amenities" attached to it, or the ability for passengers to move freely while riding it. You're locked into a pre-designed position with no ability to even change your pose.

It would also be huge. The gondola would be scaled to fit ten Roegadyn and furniture and amenities, plus the balloon on top, and then you want the whole thing to be able to park wherever you like - or to require a whole new system of programming to only let it fly in very limited areas that nobody actually needs to travel across.

(As a clue to how big a mount can actually be, and if I'm remembering correctly, the designers were originally hesitant when asked about getting the chocobo carriage as a mount and said it would be too big or complex. We ultimately got it but with one chocobo pulling it instead of two on the "setpiece" carriage, so that may indicate the limits of the model.)

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Let’s for a moment take away the amenities and furniture and everything else.

Let’s just keep it a 10 person mount but the passengers don’t need to be seated. They can walk around on the deck.

Isn’t it already similar to ocean fishing where a vehicular body is moving through a space and passengers can do activities onboard? There’s even an NPC selling items on the deck right? I’m not sure but previously airship to other cities were also not just a cutscene but realtime, but maybe it was 1.0.

Would it be still farfetched than the current system? Or would it still be a server overload problem?

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Originally Posted by Hycinthus

Would it be still farfetched than the current system? Or would it still be a server overload problem?

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It is def a big enough task that they couldn't add it easily.
And since it would take a lot of work they'd really need to justify the addition. So far on this thread we have only really talked about potential logistics, but SQEX would also have to answer the Why question.

Why would people spend time in the airship?
What do they do there?
So far it's just a big mount you don't drive anywhere, so... what is its function?

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Originally Posted by Hycinthus

Let’s just keep it a 10 person mount but the passengers don’t need to be seated. They can walk around on the deck.

Isn’t it already similar to ocean fishing where a vehicular body is moving through a space and passengers can do activities onboard? There’s even an NPC selling items on the deck right? I’m not sure but previously airship to other cities were also not just a cutscene but realtime, but maybe it was 1.0.

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It isn't the same thing at all.

There are fixed cutscenes of the boat in motion, with characters performing pre-programmed emotes. The boat might not even be "moving" but remaining static while the background is moved past it, if that gives a smoother effect. (Certainly that seems to be the case for other instances with complex stuff on a supposedly moving platform like the large lifts in the Praetorium for the Gaius and Ultima fights, and the Aetherochemical Facility autolift where you have enemies spawning - both are in an isolated chamber where the floor seems to move but is really static while the walls slide up or down around it. You could particularly see the difference when there were movement glitches happening on actual moving platforms within a larger zone, but didn't happen in those instances.)

So anyway. There's a cutscene boat that moves (maybe) and is all preset, and then you load onto the entirely static boat that you can run around on, fish from and access a shop. That boat never sails anywhere; there are simply a number of instances with their own version of the boat sitting stationary in it. Continuity tells you it is the same boat, but it's like a film using a miniature for a wide shot then cutting to the actors on a stage that looks like the deck.

I expect a moving platform would require the game to be constantly calculating where you are moving and how to keep you in an apparently constant position as it moves. Times ten people, times however many airships are in flight.

Also, mount programming would mean it vanishes as soon as the driver dismounts.

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Originally Posted by Iscah

The boat might not even be "moving" but remaining static while the background is moved past it, if that gives a smoother effect.

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This. There's at least one instance with actual moving platforms, and that's in Copperbell Mines. When you ride the lifts, you can see other players rapidly jittering up and down because the game's movement code can't keep them in sync with the platform. I can't immediately remember any instances of platforms which move sideways.

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Originally Posted by tdb

This. There's at least one instance with actual moving platforms, and that's in Copperbell Mines.

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Also the Praetorum.
Same jittery problem.

As for elevators that move people to the sides, its impossible to know.
You've got the diagonal elevator in the Praetorum, but who knows if that's actually moving or if the room is.
Theres a duty in... stormblood? (Castrum abania?) where you're on a big platform that moves up to walls and enemies spill forth. But again, who knows if the platform is moving or if the room is. That section ends with your characters riding a conveyor belt to get to the next room, and as soon as you step on it your characters are locked in place.
Whenever they add true horizontal movement it seems to take the form of Sonic style grinding on rails (like in the Alexander raids).

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Originally Posted by ItMe

You've got the diagonal elevator in the Praetorum, but who knows if that's actually moving or if the room is.
Theres a duty in... stormblood? (Castrum abania?) where you're on a big platform that moves up to walls and enemies spill forth. But again, who knows if the platform is moving or if the room is. That section ends with your characters riding a conveyor belt to get to the next room, and as soon as you step on it your characters are locked in place.

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I'm fairly certain Praetorium's bossfight on the diagonal elevator, as well as the big moving platform in Baelsar's Wall are actually static and the scenery is moving around them. The corridor where Praetorium's lift descends is also most likely looping, so it can end just after the boss is defeated. Same thing with the opening sequence of Anamnesis Anyder.

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Originally Posted by tdb

This. There's at least one instance with actual moving platforms, and that's in Copperbell Mines. When you ride the lifts, you can see other players rapidly jittering up and down because the game's movement code can't keep them in sync with the platform. I can't immediately remember any instances of platforms which move sideways.

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They seem to have fixed the jitter now. Something broke around the release of 5.1 and it got really bad, but it was much better the last few times I've run duties that have lifts.

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Originally Posted by tdb

I'm fairly certain Praetorium's bossfight on the diagonal elevator, as well as the big moving platform in Baelsar's Wall are actually static and the scenery is moving around them. The corridor where Praetorium's lift descends is also most likely looping, so it can end just after the boss is defeated. Same thing with the opening sequence of Anamnesis Anyder.

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Anamnesis Anyder I can really feel it’s the scenery moving around them.

Agree logistic wise it is a big undertaking.

I’m just thinking it’s better overworld rather than instanced, but instanced might be what we will get if they want to implement. As to the Why: i think it’s just because Airship is a common housing for FF series, towards the end of any FF game we will usually get airships with NPC stores onboard, you can sleep, drive etc so why not for housing, that’s all.

And maybe if they wanted to implement instanced housing that does not require revamping the current neighborhoods or apartment, this might be a good solution.

Having said that, I have played other MMO such as Archeage where there is no problem at all rendering multiple players on a multiple ships on a big ocean. Are we back to spaghetti code limitation for FF for doing the same?

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Originally Posted by Hycinthus

Having said that, I have played other MMO such as Archeage where there is no problem at all rendering multiple players on a multiple ships on a big ocean. Are we back to spaghetti code limitation for FF for doing the same?

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I think we're passed the issue of spaghetti code and into the realm of PS4 limitations. FFXIV (as far as I know) is unique among MMOs in allowing console and PC users to play together on the same servers. The others that I know which support both keep them segregated on different servers. Trying to make certain that the servers can function for both player types has got to cause its own set of problems.

A game like Archeage, which is PC only, doesn't have that concern.

Never having played Archeage, I checked out some naval battles videos on YouTube. I'm not seeing why you think that's more complex overall than what we have in this game, especially in a zone with a hunt train or S rank spawn going on. Perhaps the videos I found were not good examples of zone congestion in Archeage.

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Originally Posted by Jojoya

I think we're passed the issue of spaghetti code and into the realm of PS4 limitations. FFXIV (as far as I know) is unique among MMOs in allowing console and PC users to play together on the same servers. The others that I know which support both keep them segregated on different servers. Trying to make certain that the servers can function for both player types has got to cause its own set of problems.

A game like Archeage, which is PC only, doesn't have that concern.

Never having played Archeage, I checked out some naval battles videos on YouTube. I'm not seeing why you think that's more complex overall than what we have in this game, especially in a zone with a hunt train or S rank spawn going on. Perhaps the videos I found were not good examples of zone congestion in Archeage.

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Got your point on the PS4 limitation.

For Archeage, I was mainly referring to the argument regarding difficulty in FF of rendering vehicular motion with multiple people on board. And basically how in Archeage they were able to do it with Ocean battle in an open world MMO.
Here’s a sample.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AYbFo7UNj58

That's very similar to one of the videos I had watch, perhaps even one of the same ones. That doesn't seem complicated to pull off - the open water is just textures, there's nothing else in the zone other than the ships the players are fighting on so ship position and combat actions would be all the game needed to communicate to the player clients. But it's also a primary content focus for Archeage so I'm sure their development team is sinking a lot of their resources into creating it.

I don't see SE giving airships that sort of heavy focus in FFXIV so any airship content would be pretty limited in function. How long would players stick to using FC airships if all they could do is walk around on a choice of prefab ship while they fly in some featureless zone? There would also be the issue of how FC members would be able to get to the ship if other members of the FC had already taken it out for a voyage. Would the ship have to return to dock at a location to pick them up? What if two dozen other FC ships were trying to do the same thing at the same time?

They probably would do better as a form of housing than as a general transportation form but as housing they would have to be stationary so players could board and disembark as they desired, and probably would also have to be instanced or we'd run into the exact same problems we already see with housing wards.

I think SE would be better off creating a new game (not necessarily a MMO though obviously multiplayer) that revolves around airships so they could focus all their development resources on doing it right and making it engaging content rather than try to insert them into this game after an afterthought among all the other content they add.