Trying to make a point?
If so, try less with the passive aggressiveness.
I like Supercruise, end of. You don't like it? Fine. State the reasons why, except for naming one station in one system of the 400,000,000,000 systems out there.
It just isn't.
- Thread starter bradLP560
- Start date
Trying to make a point?
If so, try less with the passive aggressiveness.
I like Supercruise, end of. You don't like it? Fine. State the reasons why, except for naming one station in one system of the 400,000,000,000 systems out there.
Im really not sure I want multiple clocks on board, it sounds like a complete convoluted mess. If every player was located not only in a different space but time also, how are you going to simulate an economy when technically I can arrive at port after you but buy the stock you just bought, before you got there. My head hurts just thinking about it.
Out of interest what's the difference? I never played Elite or any other space game for that matter. If you could explain more about 'space travel' I'd appreciate it.
Simple, ditch supercruise completely and replace it with jumps to nav-points; basically FD's original proposal but keep the supercruise graphics as a short (10 sec) transition from one nav-point to another. So you still see beautiful star and planetary approaches, but you don't have to alt-tab and spend 20 mins surfing the net while the game gets to where you are going.
Players get dropped at the star nav-point, then jump to planetary orbits where they are dropped further (several km) from a station and have to fight their way to the no-fire zone. Nav-points could be policed, and lots of other interactions could happen there, and each system could have multiple nav-points for planetary bodies and scenic points of interest for exploring. Then it makes sense that you meet other ships at nav-points and all the action happens in normal space, say goodbye to clunky interdiction mechanics and one-on-one fights, no need for complex Wings mechanics to bind people together, and it would be compatible with multiplayer.
Beta backers argued against it because they wanted total freedom of movement, but when was the last time you just pointed in a random direction in supercruise? Everyone has somewhere to go. The key thing is to keep the graphics, showing beautiful arced approaches and maybe even external views during the transition; so we can still appreciate the scale of space but automate it and make it faster. The duration of a trade run would be similar, but more of it would be spent interacting with other ships in normal space.
Supercruise is an unnecessary chore and it spoils the game for me somewhat. There's a better way of doing it; I think it's time for a radical rethink.
Last edited:
If you want to do 'quick-style' SC:
throttle up to max speed; watch the timer on the destination; when it gets to 10 seconds, drop throttle fairly quickly until it reaches 8 seconds. You can turn a 1000Ls journey from a 3 minute jaunt to about less than 1M.
Those figures aren't exact but you can shave a lot of time of an SC journey doing that.
throttle up to max speed; watch the timer on the destination; when it gets to 10 seconds, drop throttle fairly quickly until it reaches 8 seconds. You can turn a 1000Ls journey from a 3 minute jaunt to about less than 1M.
Those figures aren't exact but you can shave a lot of time of an SC journey doing that.
It's the acceleration/deceleration rates that kill it really. If the game accelerated you to the required speed in a couple of seconds and decelerated at the other end just as quickly the whole thing would feel a lot less dreary. As it stands, watching your speed gradually creeping down as the counter sticks at 0:06 and the distance slowly ticks down feels like your in stasis.
Tox Laximus
Banned
The speed could be managed better, on FE2 I used slow down by turning around and using the main engines, it was a lot faster and maybe they could think about doing this because it will shave considerable time off the journeys.
Didn't they also have a timeshift feature where you make the jumps (and indeed docking) go a lot quicker? I suppose the problem there is the time needs to be relative to all the players, although Ash's idea is an interesting thought.
I SC'd some 0.13 light years yesterday. Didn't have enough fuel for jump so I hit the throttle and see where it goes. Not much happened but I managed to clock 1910c on the speedo. It was also nice to notice that the view from the windows actually changed over time, slowly but surely. Really gave the feeling that I'm indeed hurdling through a vast emptiness.
Then the fuel ran out. Then the air. Then I suffocated to death.
Then the fuel ran out. Then the air. Then I suffocated to death.
If you don't like it, then don't use it. Well, at least minimize the use of it.
Point your ship at the station you want, fly there until your close. If you don't see the station, then toggle into and back out of FSD and be happy.
Tox Laximus
Banned
Why have a jump drive?
If the engines went from 0 to 1000000xLS in 5 seconds then you just set the autopilot and your off, granted you could escape a fight really easily and the power indicator would be very long indeed.
If the engines went from 0 to 1000000xLS in 5 seconds then you just set the autopilot and your off, granted you could escape a fight really easily and the power indicator would be very long indeed.
It's simplicity itself - you have your ship's clock which shows your personal time, and also a second clock which shows the time being used at a target location.
Ships' clocks could remain in GMT format, (24/7/365), with personal +/- deviations between individuals depending on their own accrued dilations.
Local timezones would remain specific to themselves, and adjusted to players' own deltas upon arrival.
So there's no contradictions - you'd use local timezones if you wanted to meet another player or NPC, and obviously any such appointments would need to be in both parties' futures. So if your ship clock says it's 6am May 1st 3302, and mine reads 16:30pm July 22nd 3301, we can still agree to meet at Abraham Lincoln station at 12pm November 6th 3302, since it's in both of our futures. The fact that you'd have aged a year older than me would be irrelevant.
If OTOH we mistakenly chose a date a year earlier, 6th November 3301, then i could get there but you wouldn't be able to, since it's in your past. Likewise, if we chose a date in both our pasts then we'd both be late.
So you'd have a time-dependent instancing system. It DOES add a novel layer of complexity compared to our usual timekeeping schemes. But from our computer's perspective they'd just be implementing very simple rules, that we'd quickly get used to.
If an interstellar civilisation ever arises, we'll have to deal with these practicalities anyway - it's hardly going to render business impossible. Compared to the hurdles of insterstellar propulsion it's small potatos.
More to the point, for a game such as this it adds a level of nuance, subtlety and immersion that's entirely befitting, manageable and which broadens the depth and scope of gameplay.
A blanket universal time for all locales, with no individuality, is just cartoonish. It's childishly naive. A minimum of two clocks could work well, without invoking any anachronisms.
Last edited:
Only played the original Elite, so I don't know about FE2. I do remember that the problem involved other ships, possibly hostile ones at a long distance. I can't remember the exact specifics, this old brain of mine can barely remember 30 minutes ago, let alone 30 years, but I remember having multiple ships behind that prevented time acceleration. At any rate, except for jumping out of system, the only way to get to the station was real time all the way in.
Maybe some sort of mini jumps could be nice. Just from a star, close to a station, for example...
Realistically, in 'Classic' Elite, how far apart were the sun and the planet and what scale were both modelled at?
.
And 'nav' points or 'jump' games - please just Gawd NO! That's even more 'rooms in space' than the current implementation. Super-cruise could have lots of additions made to make it better (changes to speeds, stealth, detection, scanning etc.) and more interesting, but the underlying mechanic is sound and pretty much functionally equivalent to the earlier star-dreamer. I'll take super-cruise over the 'warp rail' approach in Limit Theory too.
.
And 'nav' points or 'jump' games - please just Gawd NO! That's even more 'rooms in space' than the current implementation. Super-cruise could have lots of additions made to make it better (changes to speeds, stealth, detection, scanning etc.) and more interesting, but the underlying mechanic is sound and pretty much functionally equivalent to the earlier star-dreamer. I'll take super-cruise over the 'warp rail' approach in Limit Theory too.
SlackR
Banned
Super cruise is a must for a game like this... It just needs more stuff to do whilst it's actually going on, given that it makes up a good portion of your gaming experience.
Hate to break it to you OP, but the original game had the precursor to SC with the micro jumps. It is roughly the same thing on limited computing power. You still hyper spaced into a system and had to travel to your destination, and if something happened to fly near you you dropped out and had to wait. There is nothing wrong with SC.
If you were being mass-locked by a tailing ship you could just spin round and go blast them... if OTOH you were outgunned and running for your life then there was a suspensful air of make-or-break to it that mitigated any possibility of boredom.
Sure it got a little tedious sometimes but back then it was still state of the art so you took the rough with the smooth. FE2 improved on this aspect considerably, and in both games you had the rear and side views from which to fight with lasers and missiles while still pelting towards the safety zone.
The real issue here however isn't comparisons to other games but simply the paucity of stuff to do while waiting, if such long waits are even strictly necessary given the abilities of today's technology. What might've been passable compromises in 8-bit 32K are less acceptible in a 32-bit 4Gb environment.
Last edited: