EVE General Discussion

It could be quite a short animation ; player clicks undock, camera quickly transitions from station avatar to ship, ship aligns down the exit and starts moving, flash of light and you're coming out of the undock.

Not sure how it would work for players with captain's quarters disabled, though

Seems no one has any ideas on how to make the video a SEAMLESS transition into space yet, so I'll give it a go.

* Fade to black is stupid
* got to work for every ship every station
* has to be quick
* has to provide a seamless view from inside the station to outside in space
* When you hit the undock button, your camera can be looking at your ship at any distance, and could even conceivably be looking round the station hanger if your arsing about with the mouse.

So:
Step 1 is to rotate the camera position directly in front of the ship, looking back at it (your back is to the station exit tunnel)
Step 2 is to animate the ship getting ready to undock (lights, steam, pipes dropping off whatever) (step 2 can overlap step 1)
Step 3 is to accelerate the camera away from the ship, still looking at it, down the exit corridor (backwards), hard left (at which point your ship drops out of view as you go round the corner) - your ship may or may not actually move in this bit of the animation it doesn't matter

The camera is now looking backwards down a standard station exit corridor, with open space behind you

Step 4 - the camera swings about 180 degrees facing forward (so you can see the space outside)
Step 5 - the camera moves to the edge of the station undock
Step 6 - your ship flies **through** the plane of vision into space and the camera swings to its default position.

Its a lot of swinging about - might be seasickness... But it could happen quickly, would be seamless and wouldn't have any crappy fade to black stuff. Importantly the (unique view) of the inside of the hanger and the unique view of the outside of the station are never 'in shot' together so the two ends of the animation can be stitched together at a common frame in the middle.

OK - I'm not sold on it, just throwing it out there as a straw-man.
SK

Just make something like engines heating up, and then something like a rocket take off. The longer you take to undock the longer the engines take to heat up and the ship to undock.

Personally don't need to see my ship undock. If this is implemented, I hope it can be turned off. I'm here to watch things disappear from my overview at extreme zoom range, not watch pretty animations of mundane repetitive tasks.

I'm all for a docking/undocking animation, but I think the hangars, in their current state, are not designed in the practical sense for accommodating such a thing. During the art panel, some members of the development team expressed an interest in redesigning the hangars and the experience they provide. This slide was shown. In redesigning the hangars, some exploration can be made as far as redeveloping how ships dock or undock, which can thus allow the possibility of a seamless experience that does not step back from the overall functionality of the current process.

I would LOVE to see hangars redone like this. It would make the undocking animation easier. Plus it gives the perspecive of being in only one docking hangar of a much much larger complex. I also dig the docking arm/clamp.

Tha animation could simply be that docking arm and umbilicals releasing and the ship drifting out to the traffic lanes and starting its engines and joining the station traffic.

Also...the option to turn off/on docking animation for those who are resistant to the whole idea.

The animation can't take longer than the non-animation version if made optional. If the animation is longer and it is optional, most FCs will insist on it being turned off for consistency in operations. And since undock and redock is something most of us do a lot every time we play, making it longer for the sake of an animation will likely annoy a bunch of players.

Make cool animation to give us something to watch while loading the environment. But don't make the animation take longer than loading the environment.

I can see them bypassing this by simply making capitals dock on the outside of the stations.

What I want to see for docking:
- Ship enters the docking tunnel
- Ship grabbed by the tractor beams, and moved to personal hangar

Undocking:
- Ship turns to exit tunnel
- Engines fire up, and ship moves at an appropriate rate to the exit
- Possibly different animation styles for each race of ships;
Amarr ships should be a stately procession to the exit, being heavy gilded barges.
Minmatar ships should shoot out in a blaze of fire, or at least blast engine wash everywhere as you go to full throttle and pull out.
Gallente ships should be somewhere between the two; fast, but SMOOTHLY fast. Elegant, like a Jaguar moving off.
Caldari ships should be efficient and smooth. Not graceful, not blasting the walls with hot plasma, but also not exactly hanging about either.

Nah, dawg.

We need moar immersion and reality.

Undocking a frig should be like stealing you parents' car for a joyride: give it a little push to get it started out of the driveway, then hop in and haul ass quick as you like.

On the other end of the spectrum should be capitals, which take ten or eleven hours of system checks and power up cycles to get moving after being docked. You could begin this process after dinner, and by the time your coffee is finishing up in the morning, you're headed out the undock and ready to do battle. Or you could skip sleep, and watch the excellently rendered, hollywood-trailer-style video of the pathetic ant subcreatures (normal humans) that crew a ship that size go about their prelaunch duties.