Supercruising to another star system reveals design flaws

I'd never do it even if you could and I have a feeling that if they changed it now it'd cause more problems than it's worth. I almost got tricked into going to Hutton Orbital by a guy trolling newbies but I was aware enough to look it up and find out how far it is and I'm not willing to sit in supercruise for that long, in fact the 130k Ls stations bore me enough as it is. I wouldn't be against it if you could do it, but since you can't it feels like wasted resources to me when there are other things that aren't working properly at all.
 
Space engine. Completely seamless. You can zoom in to the milky way from 5 galaxies over and land on earth with no noticiable interruption.

Space Engine is Max 4 players in MP?

Completely different technical problems and design. Completely different game. Poor comparison IMO.
 
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why can space engine do it but this can't?

Because Space Engine only has to keep track of one player, not several thousands.

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Space engine. Completely seamless. You can zoom in to the milky way from 5 galaxies over and land on earth with no noticiable interruption.

Space Engine. Single player. Does not need to keep track of the position and vector of thousands of players in the same instance up to the second.
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Seriously, WHO ARE YOU PEOPLE?!? Don't you know ANYTHING about how computers work? I'm surprised you even managed to turn the thing on and run this game!
 
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Space Engine is Max 4 players in MP?

Completely different technical problems and design. Completely different game. Poor comparison IMO.
Wasn't making a comparison. Just pointing out that it's absolutely possible for computers to do that. I won't speculate about the technical challenges that Frontier may or may not have that prevented them from reaching that level of seamless interaction, but the man making space engine seems to think that it's entirely possible to make an mmo on the engine.
 
Wasn't making a comparison. Just pointing out that it's absolutely possible for computers to do that. I won't speculate about the technical challenges that Frontier may or may not have that prevented them from reaching that level of seamless interaction, but the man making space engine seems to think that it's entirely possible to make an mmo on the engine.

Yeah? I'll wait until he does. Because Eve Online didn't manage to, and it has a hugely advanced server with all players in the same virtual server space, £5 million per month revenue and a massive team of coders. And it has been at it for a decade. So I won't hold my breath for SE.
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Again, people just seem to have no idea about how code actually works.
 
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Seriously, WHO ARE YOU PEOPLE?!? Don't you know ANYTHING about how computers work? I'm surprised you even managed to turn the thing on and run this game!

You really are full of yourself aren't you. You clearly have no idea how computers work but want to pretend you do to make yourself feel superior.

This has nothing to do with Multiplayer. This is all about the skybox - I can bet money on it.
 
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Because Space Engine only has to keep track of one player, not several thousands.

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Space Engine. Single player. Does not need to keep track of the position and vector of thousands of players in the same instance up to the second.
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Seriously, WHO ARE YOU PEOPLE?!? Don't you know ANYTHING about how computers work? I'm surprised you even managed to turn the thing on and run this game!
Multiplayer is planned. You seem to be vastly overestimating the limiting factors of having multiplayer. Space engine is no more demanding than many multiplayer games out there and runs in average machines. Please tell us in detail why it would be as impossible as you think it is, without throwing around meaningless buzzwords, since you're clearly so computer literate.
 
Years ago we brought our games that came in BOX , now we have digital downloads , that gives as Universe that never allows us to leave a BOX to travel to that distance system anyway we want

I like the idea of point an fly in one direction forever until I run out fuel & inertia one day gets your ship to the system you saw so long ago, immersion , is the journey , those who see this as just boring don't get the exploration feel been alone in the wilderness.
The USS ships when I first saw them , wondered, where did they come from, where are they going, but now I realise it doesn't matter , their in a BOX .... like me So it can just happen for no reason at all , nothing is connected , We are all in the perfect bubble of a delusion.

Now when I see the stars out of my ship thinking lets go there , maybe I find something. I now know its just glowing stars on the ceiling way above my head, forever out of reach



............... My bubble has burst :( and once again I'm just in BOX staring at the ceiling wishing
 
Other games have this feature (Space Engine, Noctis (and that's an old DOS game)) so it's not a technical limit - it's perfectly do-able.

FD just don't know how.


And no it's nothing to do with instancing - any system can have multiple instances already.

Reasons for having it are obvious:

- fulfilling the "no limits" paradigm of total freedom in a seamless gameworld. The realisation that the skybox is actually a glass wall gnaws at you, like the un-reachable backdrops in other games... it's inimical to suspension of disbelief and lasting immersion.

- the moving skybox could be used in the hyperspace animation, instead of a generic one.

- interstellar space is cool in its own right, and not entirely empty; there's rogue bodies like brown dwarfs and planets, dust clouds and various types of debris fields... A USS in interstellar space could be far more convincing and enticing than those routinely found around stars.

- stealth; to avoid hyperspace footprints, or being intercepted in hyperspace by Thargoids.

Probably a fair few others i'm overlooking, but contrast with all the good reasons for NOT doing it:

- it's apparently tricky to implement (even though an old DOS game managed it)..

Can't think of any others - it's all pros and no cons. Please don't see this as an attack on ED, but it IS dissapointing that Elite still has this restriction.

Finally, the line between 'fully seamless' and merely gving that impression could be a very grey area - i don't care how it's implemented or what tricks it employs. I'm all for never looking a gift horse in the mouth, provided it looks like a real horse, and not a pair of drama students in a donkey costume.

Thank you for this comment. Exploring interstellar space, as opposed to merely the region closest to a star, combined with the possibility for making a stealthy approach towards an adjacent system, both could benefit the gameplay mechanics of ED immensely. Furthermore, it is exactly the way you put it - whether they make the galaxy be fully seamless or just appear fully seamless is basically the same thing, as long as the appearance is believable enough.

I'd never do it even if you could and I have a feeling that if they changed it now it'd cause more problems than it's worth. I almost got tricked into going to Hutton Orbital by a guy trolling newbies but I was aware enough to look it up and find out how far it is and I'm not willing to sit in supercruise for that long, in fact the 130k Ls stations bore me enough as it is. I wouldn't be against it if you could do it, but since you can't it feels like wasted resources to me when there are other things that aren't working properly at all.

I appreciate where you are coming from, as everyone is suited to their own playstyle. However, if it were possible to actually implement a solution without using up too many of FD's resources, would you be against that? I am referring to the many examples that have already been suggested here by fellow commanders concerning the way a more believable transition could be made to occur, e.g. by using an automatic jump somewhere on the border between two star systems.
 
Because it's engine was written 10 years ago?

What does that have anything to do with it? If it's possible, it's possible. Especially with their server.

Because a realistic simulation of the galaxy/universe isn't one of their goals, like at all? What a ridiculous question. Might as well ask why Freespace 2, or tie fighter didn't.

So Eve Online decided that it wouldn't be cool for everybody to be able to fly in one, huge simulated galaxy? Given that they went through real trouble to make sure that the perspective view on background nebulae would change realistically as you jumped from system to system?
 
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I am extremely disappointed.
I wanted to leave my computer running for 3 years with my ship pointed in one direction.

I'd prefer they work on all the things they need to work on first ...and then do planetary landings and EVA content .....and then maybe in 2025 when they have nothing left to do, MAYBE look at extreme long distance super cruise content.
 
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Because it's engine was written 10 years ago?

Years ago we brought our games that came in BOX , now we have digital downloads , that gives as Universe that never allows us to leave a BOX to travel to that distance system anyway we want

I like the idea of point an fly in one direction forever until I run out fuel & inertia one day gets your ship to the system you saw so long ago, immersion , is the journey , those who see this as just boring don't get the exploration feel been alone in the wilderness.
The USS ships when I first saw them , wondered, where did they come from, where are they going, but now I realise it doesn't matter , their in a BOX .... like me So it can just happen for no reason at all , nothing is connected , We are all in the perfect bubble of a delusion.

Now when I see the stars out of my ship thinking lets go there , maybe I find something. I now know its just glowing stars on the ceiling way above my head, forever out of reach



............... My bubble has burst :( and once again I'm just in BOX staring at the ceiling wishing

Dude, all computer games are an illusion.
 
The thread just shows, how people are unaware of not only current but past-decade technology. I blame the mass-appeal of games in the past 10 years, which were tailored specifically for inferior consoles and had to have a "mass appeal" (Mass Effect, Dragon Age 2 etc) with little content as possible to rake in a higher margin of profits.
An entire generation is grown up, unaware of their computer's computing power and who things can be programmed to create advance AI far superior to whatever they dare call "AI" in current games.
It's sad and I blame "cow milking" endless expansions and copy/paste same games (call of duty, medal of honor) re-sold as something new by adding no more than a few shader effects and asking $50.00 for it.

Graphically seamless - randomly generated- universe is possible - with stars/planets/comets/whatever - since the 1980s, but in the past decade with the multi-core CPUS and large amount of RAM is barely utilitized , while graphics cards pushed to the limit with giant texture files.

To say it in another way, we are driving Ferraris with wooden wheels, and nobody seem to care.
 
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Other games have this feature (Space Engine, Noctis (and that's an old DOS game)) so it's not a technical limit - it's perfectly do-able.

FD just don't know how.

Really? Is that really the only possibility? You don't think that maybe if it were as easy as "Space Engine does it, QED" that FD couldn't have figured out a way? Or hired someone who could? You don't think that maybe the reason Space Engine is called Space Engine might be because it is an engine, not a full game, running on today's hardware, using a complex flight model, AI, p2p networked combat, collision detection, evolving economic and political models, and all the other stuff that you probably don't even know E: D is doing under the hood?

Yes, it is technically possible to have a seamless interstellar graphics engine. But that doesn't come close to implying that such an engine would be technically feasible within the scope of everything else built on top of it.

Sheesh! How did we ever get this hubristic?
 
For somebody who likes to yell about people allegedly not being literate in this subject, you seem remarkably clueless. Eve hasn't done that because it has NEVER been their goal.

That's not what they seem to say. Everything they have been doing: how they improved the skyboxes to creating more seamless jumpgate effects points to a desire to create the impression of one seamless space.
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OK then. Let's assume a single galaxy, with, say, 10000 players moving about in it. No problem for the server. But how do you convey the position and vector of each of these players to, well, each of these players, second by second? You don't of course; you set some visual range for each player, and for each player cull all the other player data that is out of range (players too far away to be relevant) and only pass on to each player the positions and vectors of players nearby. But to do that, you need to process 9999 positions from the perspective of each of the 10000 players: 99990000 comparisons per second. 100000 players? 9999900000 comparisons per second. On top of all other game processes. Of course each gamer's computer has to push its position and vector up to this huge table in a timely fashion to do this.

If there are ten players within range of each other, that is 9 sets of data per second of each other player's position and vector and status to pass on to each player's PC. If there are 100 players, 99 sets down the pipe: position, vector, ship status etc. 1000 players close enough together? 999 sets of data, per second, for each player. That's quite some bandwidth. And let's keep it all up to date otherwise we get rubber banding. Then there is interactional data between those players as well, as they may be fighting and communicating.
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In Eve Online you had systems like Oursulaert which would have a couple of thousand players passing through every hour (it was on some jumpgate crossroad) and it was severely laggy. And Eve Online ships move more like chess pieces than dogfighting jets --much less dynamically and with an almost turn-based fight interaction. There is much less position and vector data to handle. In the end Eve Online changed the jumpgate routes because the system became unplayable. I hear Jita has the same problem. Massive battles between hundreds of ships? Became so laggy that Eve Online had to introduce the handwavium of "time slowing" to give the server time to catch up.
 
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