Fun fact.
OTHER PEOPLE CAN THINK THAT IT IS FUN WITHOUT BEING WRONG.
WHOA! NO WAY!
We are both entitled to our opinions, and I think this way is fine. The mechanic is not changing and you know it, so why bother whining about it?
It just isn't.
- Thread starter bradLP560
- Start date
OTHER PEOPLE CAN THINK THAT IT IS FUN WITHOUT BEING WRONG.
WHOA! NO WAY!
We are both entitled to our opinions, and I think this way is fine. The mechanic is not changing and you know it, so why bother whining about it?
I played the original Elite, and I remember some horrible long flights in to a station because there was traffic that prevented you from using time acceleration. I loved the game, but I hated some of the flights in. I think that people sometimes have selective memory about how the original game played. I much prefer the supercruise concept to the old time acceleration concept.
Besides the example you've given, there's the issue of other ships and stations disappearing when engaging FSD - even if you're just flying a few hundred meters straight towards them. Hence my use of the word "dissociated" - it's the spaceflight equivalent of ketamine.
Orbital velocites are much higher than 500m/s. Slingshotting is fun - particularly with white dwarfs, neutron stars / pulsars and black holes. But you're right - FSD does the opposite of what you'd want, decelerating inversely to field density. It figuratively wees on one's fireworks...
I do see where you are coming from - I also loved FFE, but ED is a different game the same way FE2 and FFE were different from Elite.
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Um, if you introduced time dilation, you would soon have every player playing in a different time. How would you handle a situation where Gamer A visited the system three days ago in his personal time frame, but Gamer B arrives to the same system NOW and wants to communicate? For Gamer A these events happened three days ago. It would essentially not be a multiplayer game anymore.
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This, I agree, is a problem. I wish they develop the system so that we exist in the same universe and are not transferred to another one to travel some day in the future.
Those long- home runs were due to the station being on the other side of the planet. If you'd torus jumped round the side of the planet that was mass-locking you, you'd've been home and dry quick as a cricket.
If you'd played FE2, it was slicker all round in this respect (provided you knew what you were doing).
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hmm I distinctly remember hitting a key to jump within the system on my Commodore 64.
Ahh, here it is.
http://www.c64-wiki.com/index.php/Elite#Controls
, or < roll anti-clockwise or JOYSTICK
. or > roll clockwise or JOYSTICK
S sink or JOYSTICK
X rise or JOYSTICK
Space more thrust
- or /? less thrust
C switch on docking computer
P switch off docking computer
H hyperspace jump
J short jump
CTRL H galactic hyperspace jump
A fire laser or FIRE BUTTON
T place missile on aim
M fire missile
U deactivate missile
E activate ECM-System (if available)
C= (Commodore key) energy bomb
← activate emergency capsule (if available)
f1 view to the front (start)
f3 view aft (start)
f5 view startboard (start)
f7 view portside (start)
You would Hyperspace into a system and you could either fly around in normal space or use the J key to take small, quick jumps with in the system. You have to be careful on your timing, You could blow up if you did the short jumps to fast.
Instead of being close to the star when you hypered in, I remember being toward the outer part of the system and having to fly in to the station.
I prefer SC to this old method.
Yes, that IS a problem. My answer would be to circumvent it entirely (ie. ditch MP), or else institute some kind of system whereby NPC's take over the roles of real players via caching - hence replaying their actions, without contradicting their present-day avatars. Essentially this would mean real players would have NPC versions of themselves flying around in other players' timeframes, and thus the universe would have to allow some degree of branching - otherwise we'd all be susceptible to the grandfather paradox, innit.. Then again, what with so many players spontaneously combusting just for activating their landing gear.. getting killed in the past would be a better excuse for sudden death syndrome... (joke)
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hmm I distinctly remember hitting a key to jump within the system on my Commodore 64.
Ahh, here it is.
http://www.c64-wiki.com/index.php/Elite#Controls
, or < roll anti-clockwise or JOYSTICK
. or > roll clockwise or JOYSTICK
S sink or JOYSTICK
X rise or JOYSTICK
Space more thrust
- or /? less thrust
C switch on docking computer
P switch off docking computer
H hyperspace jump
J short jump
CTRL H galactic hyperspace jump
A fire laser or FIRE BUTTON
T place missile on aim
M fire missile
U deactivate missile
E activate ECM-System (if available)
C= (Commodore key) energy bomb
← activate emergency capsule (if available)
f1 view to the front (start)
f3 view aft (start)
f5 view startboard (start)
f7 view portside (start)
You would Hyperspace into a system and you could either fly around in normal space or use the J key to take small, quick jumps with in the system. You have to be careful on your timing, You could blow up if you did the short jumps to fast.
Instead of being close to the star when you hypered in, I remember being toward the outer part of the system and having to fly in to the station.
I prefer SC to this old method.
You're talking about torus jump. This wan't 'microjumps' as usually discussed here (ie. in-system hyperspacing), but simply SC without the charging period, acceleration / deceleration phases and mescaline-esque dissociation. It was precisely this kind of solution that allowed the kind of spontaneity or "immediacy" to borrow DB's term, letting you set your own pace. Jump, fight, jump, fight, kill, destroy, debase, then base, tranquility, safety, quiescence. Nice.
BTW you're coming across as someone who's read about classic Elite, rather than actually having lived it...
to be honest with the way they scale down speeds and scale up speed they made super cruise nausiatingly dull...real or not its just like watchin your lawn grow......its beyond annoying and they were advised of this many many many times in beta and ignored it...so really id SC is b ad thank the usedcar salesman...who promised everything ...he delivered functionally perfect...and dull
What? No, stop.. reel it back a sec.. does not compute. I thought i was always right, and only my opinions count? Either you haven't read what i wrote, or you're not feeling me for some strange reason. Sounds like a 'you' problem...
Then you would be wrong.
So players should have full control over their own degree of time dilation, I hate to say it to you, but that would be impossible to make into a working multiplayer, to give a simple example, what if one players referance frame was behind yours? and even though he is playing in realtime same as you, how'd you sync that? how'd he ever be able to even communicate with you? let alone for example attack you? it would be extremely complicated to begin to calculate all that for all players, and just not practical or I think would make the game fun at all.
You are essentially arguing the same points that many of us did when ED was in early design phase. Eventually we (realistic simulator / FFE fans) stopped fighting the inevitable and tried to see whether there would be _something_ in ED that we could still enjoy. Personally, I chose to enjoy the exploration - finding new sights, just roaming the galaxy.
Oh, and the supercruise is the compromise that we managed to push through - the original design was simple in-system jumps from one bubble of space to another with no travel in-between. We were perhaps imagining something more connected to the system itself, but I think what we got is still better than the "bubbles in space" approach.
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I know, I meant that interdiction (bar hyperspace Thargoid attack) all took place in real space. It's all interdiction within a system.
I would question the realistic part, and I should probably find and try FFE, but yeah I question realistic because if it was realistic with any form of time dilation, wouldn't it end up being something like.
Eventually we (realistic simulator / FFE fans) stopped fighting the inevitable and tried to see whether there would be _something_ in ED that we could still enjoy.
"See you on tuesday" *zooms off*
*speeds along getting only a very short relative distance and realizing that already two weeks have passed at original place*?
I've answered to half of this issue already in response to Susimetsa above, but with regards to interactions between concurrent players, obviously, instancing would have to be time-dependent to some degree - it wouldn't matter too much if my clock was minutes or hours different to yours - instances could even have their own timezones - but if it was days or weeks then i refer to my previous answer to Susimetsa.
Either way, a single clock just doesn't cut it - each ship should need at least two clocks, and maybe more, allowing multiple timezones to be tracked independently. How can a planet with a 39 hour rotation and a 537 day year be synced to GMT? A single rigidly-enforced universal timezone is itself the ultimate anachronism. ED isn't so much dealing with this inherent difficulty as worsening it by trying to ingore it entirely.
Ask yourself, if ED's backdrop was realistic (ie. if instant hyperspacing was possible) how would we deal with timeframe variations? If you lived on Mars would you still use GMT? If you'd trekked across the galaxy and back would you expect the Solar system to still be there, or plate-tectonics, life forms - much less ship types and economies - to remain unchanged? These are all opportunites for procedural generation - for the galaxy to evolve in time, as well as space.
Time-based instancing might thin things out, but only for the farthest-venturing players. For those remaining in the core systems, clocks would take years to diverge significantly. And besides, it would still be possible to re-sync, by 'later' players waiting at pre-selected locations for 'earlier' ones to arrive, or by earlier players undertaking larger acceleration deltas in order to catch up with later ones. Sorry but this was all covered by Star Trek, if you'd been paying attention..
You are essentially arguing the same points that many of us did when ED was in early design phase. Eventually we (realistic simulator / FFE fans) stopped fighting the inevitable and tried to see whether there would be _something_ in ED that we could still enjoy. Personally, I chose to enjoy the exploration - finding new sights, just roaming the galaxy.
Oh, and the supercruise is the compromise that we managed to push through - the original design was simple in-system jumps from one bubble of space to another with no travel in-between. We were perhaps imagining something more connected to the system itself, but I think what we got is still better than the "bubbles in space" approach.
Yeah i know, like i say though i think we've been lead down the easy path, where a slightly more convoluted solution could've yielded a deeper, more dynamic (if ambitious) result.
Yes, that's what happened insofar as it was possible back then. Each hyperjump you took, took 3-8 days of "real time" that you simply jumped past. You could imagine being pilot who lived through the decades watching the people on the planets he visited getting older and dying while he stayed young.
Of course it was not a multiplayer game, so no difficulties ensued from that design choice.
So...you want it to take real human years to travel from one star system to another?