IMERSION BREAKING BUG: Stations need to be visable in SC

[GerminVermin]

Like most visual features you could switch it off. Which is what I'm going to do with you as your obviously dead inside aren't you Germ?

It's true, I'm dead inside

If you can turn it off, why have it at all? There are so many other things that are higher priority, like fixing mining, fixing Wings and the entire social aspect of the game, fixing ranks showing up for other players, the list goes on and on.

 

[Armour]

I made a suggestion back in Beta that it might be a good idea to get away from the whole realistic representation of space whilst in SC, and go totally abstract. I realise that this would remove any last vestiges of "seamlessness" from the experience, but the variable instancing delays do that anyway, and this way there would not need to be any kludges used to smooth the transition - in fact the more jarring, the better.

 

[Bambi]

I'm kind of missing this feeling while coming out of cruise.

 

[Bambi]

Also, you don't seem to actually accelerate when going into a hyperjump either, planets, stars, stations etc don't fly past at ludicrous speed.

 

[Sacman]

Same old discussion again
Space in ED is not designed to be seamless as real space is out there in our milky way.
Instead it is devided into 'blocks' (=instances) and the transition between them is done by the following mechanisms:
- Hyperjump : transition from block 'Star system A' to 'Star system B'.
- Supercruise: transition within the current star system to all other sub-blocks in it (sub-blocks are: space stations, USSs, asteroid belts and all other points of interests).
The transition causes the feeling of an 'unnatural seam' (=immersion breaking) because it takes some time for the game
to create/load the content of the destination block and to synchronize you with all players currently in that block.
This won't change as it is by design of ED.
Just my opinion as ususal.

 

[Bambi]

Same old discussion again
Space in ED is not designed to be seamless as real space is out there in our milky way.
Instead it is devided into 'blocks' (=instances) and the transition between them is done by the following mechanisms:
- Hyperjump : transition from block 'Star system A' to 'Star system B'.
- Supercruise: transition within the current star system to all other sub-blocks in it (sub-blocks are: space stations, USSs, asteroid belts and all other points of interests).
The transition causes the feeling of an 'unnatural seam' (=immersion breaking) because it takes some time for the game
to create/load the content of the destination block and to synchronize you with all players currently in that block.
This won't change as it is by design of ED.
Just my opinion as ususal.

Everyone knows that, doesn't mean they can't make the transitions more seamless.

 

[Sacman]

Everyone knows that, doesn't mean they can't make the transitions more seamless.

You're sure?

 

[Bambi]

You're sure?

Yes, perfectly sure. There's no reason that your view couldn't fly forward quickly during the transition instead of everything around you simply disappearing. They already did it for the arrival animations.

The other thing to do, which is not unreasonable either is to have little space station models show up at very close range in cruise, to avoid them disappearing and reappearing when you just cruise for under a hundred kilometers.

Instead of freezing your view when dropping out of cruise they could slow it down exponentially so that you still seem to be moving but never overshoot.

All together this would for example solve the issues with dropping into an asteroid field without redesigning anything.

This is not ok:

 

[Boff'in]

The data is projected.

You are travelling faster than light.

I.e. you are seeing things where they are, and not the delayed version of where the light would tell you they are.

These are some of the visual distortions you get the faster you travel and catch up to the light rays themselves,
http://gamelab.mit.edu/games/a-slower-speed-of-light/

But let's face the actual reality here.
we're loading and networking at these points.

Would you like a big fat "LOADING" screen instead?

 

[Bambi]

The data is projected.

You are travelling faster than light.

No it's not and no you're not. The view is real, as evidenced by the fact that you can still see it without a canopy. FSD is a warp drive so you don't travel faster than light, your local frame of reference does.

There are no relativistic effects in Elite.

 

[Veldryn]

Instead of freezing your view when dropping out of cruise they could slow it down exponentially so that you still seem to be moving but never overshoot.

The main issue for SC is the delay. You can't properly time an animation during a "loading screen", because you never know how much time it will take. This is especially obvious when getting out of supercruise a little bit late, at 900 km/s: there is half a second delay between the moment you press "stop supercruise" and the moment the game understands what's happening. So you actually overshoot the station (visually), and the game has to take you back half a second in the past (500km backwards) to compensate.

This can probably be partially hidden somehow, but can't be solved completely, because you can't get rid of network delays.

That's a much more trickier issue than it seems

 

[Bambi]

The main issue for SC is the delay. You can't properly time an animation during a "loading screen", because you never know how much time it will take. This is especially obvious when getting out of supercruise a little bit late, at 900 km/s: there is half a second delay between the moment you press "stop supercruise" and the moment the game understands what's happening. So you actually overshoot the station (visually), and the game has to take you back half a second in the past (500km backwards) to compensate.

This can probably be partially hidden somehow, but can't be solved completely, because you can't get rid of network delays.

That's a much more trickier issue than it seems

Client prediction solves the issue. This isn't 1994. And you didn't read, because I put a solution that would never overshoot no matter how long loading takes.

 

[Boff'in]

Ooh handbags at 10 yards,
ahh only kidding,

Oh the games breaks lots of physics rules, for the sake of gameplay so I'm not really going to put up a fight

I'm not up to speed into the technical side, thanks for the enlightenment.
So the FSD is like riding that space/time distortion thingy that NASA are working on?
The engine that thins out space/time ahead and packs it behind, causing you to literally travel without moving, and ergo bypass relativistic issues.

(but that would explain the cockpit/canopy discrepency and no wibbly wobbly light distortions!! PHEW!!! )

But even so you are still "travelling" AND intercepting light rays that have bounced OFF of an object, detailing the "information" of the object's position of where the object "was" on that final bounce THEN you have to factor into the travel time to where your ship intercepted said photon's trajectory.

That lag of light propogating through the medium of space time is still apparent, irrespective of what fancy tech our ships have to by-pass such issues.

As I said the game breaks a number of principles in the name of gameplay, namely similar to most Sci-fi,
everything is instaneous, sensors and communications, which happens even in Star-Trek (and despite the rubber physics laws of sub-space it still upsets many core principles or relativity).
and so I'm not really going to contest the issue too hard here just for the sake of enjoying the game.

Back to the original conversation.

Yes, the Loading is annoying, and having it more seamless would be better. But I'm content to just have it working at all !

 

[Kramster]

I can the see station on approach, OK it is a dot on my screen but when you you compare the dot to the size of the planet then that dot is in scale at the point of dropping from SC
My gripe is we drop out of SC too close to the station.

 

[beelbeebub]

The dot that represents the station is a new (gamma ish) addition. There used to be nothing.
.
I suspect that FD are working on putting a little model of the station in to replace the dot at some point.
.
MB mentioned somewhere that at the moment your PC doesn't know what the station looks like (it's configuration and orientation) until the player starts the drop procedure and the info starts loading, that is why we have a blue exclamation mark rather than a little model of the station on our target holo. I think the fix was non-trivial, but something they are looking at in the long term. Once your PC has the information to construct the "holo model" of the station I suspect it would be fairly easy to insert this low fidelity "miniature" in place of the current dot.
.

Someone also suggested (and MB seemed interested) making the current animated "loading screen" into a small mini game like interdiction where you had to follow an approach vector (or something). This would further increase the feeling of arrival

 

[NatoNine]

The dot that represents the station is a new (gamma ish) addition. There used to be nothing.
.
I suspect that FD are working on putting a little model of the station in to replace the dot at some point.
.
MB mentioned somewhere that at the moment your PC doesn't know what the station looks like (it's configuration and orientation) until the player starts the drop procedure and the info starts loading, that is why we have a blue exclamation mark rather than a little model of the station on our target holo. I think the fix was non-trivial, but something they are looking at in the long term. Once your PC has the information to construct the "holo model" of the station I suspect it would be fairly easy to insert this low fidelity "miniature" in place of the current dot.
.

Someone also suggested (and MB seemed interested) making the current animated "loading screen" into a small mini game like interdiction where you had to follow an approach vector (or something). This would further increase the feeling of arrival

Yeah, like you said, it's definitely a work in progress (the exclamation mark has all the hallmarks of a placeholder) .

A lot of peoples excuses are not really valid... "You're traveling faster than the speed of light", no you're not, you should be traveling between 1000km to 30km per second... "a 10km object can not be seen from 1000km away", that's like saying you can't see a 1cm object from 1m away (can you see your toes?), in fact a normal person could see a silhouetted object 10km wide from over 8330km away or a bright one from much further (even accounting for pixels you should be close enough) ... "It's suppose to be a simulated view within the game law and it is intentionally left out" nope, it's still like that if you break your canopy (though it would be very cool if they fixed it in the future so this broken view showed significant light cone distortions and blueshift when traveling at relativistic and superluminal speeds) .

Besides just finishing what is clearly work in progress they should change the supercruise drop out area from a 1000km radius bubble (with a 100km inner boundary bubble) to a 2000km long cone aligned to the ships direction of movement (with a small inner emergency stop bubble which marks the closest supercruise approach like the one used for planets and stars to prevent collisions) . Combined with a simplified model of the space station this could allow for a easier to animate transition since the player would not have the chance to lock on if they had passed the station.

To make the mini-game part of it more rewarding instead of showing the ideal speed and distance as two different bars they could show them as a single XY graph with a diagonal sweet area highlighted, the faster you are going the further out you need to be when dropping out but the closer to the station you are dropped into normal space also. Pilots could choose to manually target the station precisely so they emergency drop out super close and suffer a heat penalty based on their supercruise speed (fastest method but risky and conspicuous) , they could minimize their travel time by dropping out further away while traveling faster and arriving closer (most similar to current method) , or they could "sneak" up on the station by traveling slow and dropping out further away (thus allowing for better stealth for smuggling by staying out of the scanning radius before transitioning to silent running) .

 

[trumpet]

+5 for the 'approach vector' mini game.

Interdiction works really well.

 

[dangercrow]

With regards to the viewing angle of the station:
at 1000km a 10km wide station takes up 0.57 degrees - clearly detectable by the naked eye (resolution of over 50 times that at the centre).
at 100km, it takes up 5.7 degrees - DEFINITELY visible, as it takes up a third of the fovea's viewing width,

 

[Uueerdo]

Also, you don't seem to actually accelerate when going into a hyperjump either, planets, stars, stations etc don't fly past at ludicrous speed.

Not that it really bothers me, but I kinda feel like too much flies past in hyperjump. We're jumping between pretty much adjacent systems (assuming economy navigation), aren't we?

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FSD is a warp drive so you don't travel faster than light, your local frame of reference does. There are no relativistic effects in Elite.

That doesn't address how light behaves as it enters the "warp bubble" though. Maybe the abrupt transition is from the "bubble" dissipating.