Supercruise - Why?

  • Thread starter Deleted member 94277
  • Start date
That's a nice bit of handwavium for the view explanation, repped for fake science!

I'm good at fake science; my fake scientific discoveries have allowed me to create several entirely fictional corporations selling imagined devices of extraordinary usefulness which have funded my entirely unreal billionaire's lifestyle of hypothetical majesty.
 
Micro jumps or whatever you call it, cheapens exploration.. and makes lite of such runs as Hutton orbital..

the 84' way of doing it wouldnt cheapen it, because you would be dropping out along the route when you encounter anything (traders, convoys, pirates etc).

ps - exploration was cheapened the day they added the advanced scanner module.
 
Last edited:
I love supercruise. One of the coolest features in the space genre in 30 years. When I'm trading I love skirting gravity wells and lining up for approach. I even love the manual landings but to each his own. Supercruise is easy to learn but hard to master. You can continue to learn things for quite some time :) Eventually you will fly like the crazy AI always zooming ahead. Hell I think I'm still improving after a year and a bit :) Supercruise def is one of the most impressive aspects to the scale of the galaxy. Most of the beta did not want fast travel and neither did the devs. In fact so many games have been utterly ruined by fast travel. When I first saw Supercruise I was in awe. You could always jump to wing beacon instead of local star if need be.
 
SC is almost perfect IMHO the only things I would like to see is
low poly models of stations and maybe tiny asteroids for the cluster (I know the chances of seeing them is fin but still would be a nice addition) maybe see other ships in full model instead of a over blown blob (that or you also become a blob in debug camera)

anyway supercruise captures the wonders of a real universe , to be able to loop around a planet is one of my dreams in modern gaming and elite dangerous does it so perfectly
 
This!! So much this!! The painfully slow acell, decell is awfull IMO.

This I think, is indeed the issue with SuperCruise, and this is actually what one spent most of the time doing.

15 years ago, IWAR2 did "supercruise" properly, with acceleration and speed only being affected by the quality of your LDS, and with LDSi missiles for pirates, police and bounty hunters. You'd still have the same sense of scale without the painfully long travel times (with a decent LDS), and without the horrid stellar masses-affected acceleration.

Why Frontier hasn't done it that way is beyond me. The fact I could watch an entire anime season within a few days while supercruising is just wrong.
 
the 84' way of doing it wouldnt cheapen it, because you would be dropping out along the route when you encounter anything (traders, convoys, pirates etc).

How would you encounter anything though? If you just dropped into the star, then micro-jumped to the station, how does anyone interdict you? Even if you spend 30 seconds watching a micro-jump animation that doesn't give any other players time to lock on and pull you out realistically. It also removes the cat and mouse game of taking the more scenic routes to stations to avoid CMDRs or just the sheer beauty of some of the fly-bys when out exploring.

I wouldn't mind binary/tertiary star jumps where there's a 300,000ls difference as a minimum, but even then I'd probably prefer it if SC just scaled faster when you were well clear of any gravity wells. Perhaps when you get 100,000ls out from the nearest object you can activate a SC boost, as someone mentioned earlier I think.
 
I like SuperCruise a lot and as has been mentioned in earlier posts it's an important part of the game to experience the 'bigness' of space, it's here to stay.

But ... I hate the count-down sequence and feel there's scope to improve (shorten) that part of the SC process.
 
Like serveral in this thread, I too quite like supercruise, but find it incomplete. I'm fine with only being able to lock onto the most massive object when coming into the system, it fits the setting -- as the only (debatably) safe way to jump in. Micro-jumps and even jumps to planets seem a bit questionable, but being able to in-system jump to other stars and stellar remnants (anything massive enough to at least be a dwarf should have more than enough mass for the FSD to lock onto) above some minimum distance (10k ls or so?) from the nearest star-mass object, provided your ship knows they're there (thus having to honk first or be in a populated system that comes with a map) would really fit the description of the technology better than the extant system, and bring much needed trade to those poor folks at Hutton.
 
Like I said, I preferred the Elite 84' method. A series of 'mini hyper jumps' that you drop out of when there is an object in the vicinity. In a crowded system it could take a long time to get to your destination, in a quieter system, not as long.

That is what made Riedquat so dangerous in the original, you had to fight your way to the station and you wouldnt always make it!, on the other hand, Lave was mostly a breeze.

with SC, you miss all of that juicy gameplay opportunity out and when you do get interdicted, its easy to get away anyway.

I wouldnt want to click a button and be right at my destination!, that would be boring!

What you're proposing is a literal game of hokey cokey and a very tiresomely circumlocutory way to get wherever you want to be. You jump in, you jump out. You jump in, you jump out. In-out-in-out-shake-it-all-about. I don't find that good gameplay, I just find that annoying. In supercruise, I can go where I please. This alternative system is just moving pieces square-by-square on a game board, and I've got Monopoly in the cupboard if I'm in the mood for that.
 
I see no real alternative to supercruise. It might be far from perfect but any other means of travelling in-system mentioned so far is even worse from a gameplay point of view.

I just sometimes wish we had an autopilot feature for supercruise for some of the more tedious routes.
 
Wow, this is such a different view than I have. I love Supercruise, it's soooooooo much better than just micro jumping all over the place. Have you ever been interdicted? or interdicted someone else? as a trader it's fun because I have to watch my back as I supercruise to a staion, it add tension. It gives such a sense that I'm actually in a place, I can travel from one object to the next, or stop at any point in between. It gives the game a feeling that you aren't just loading the next area of space, that's what jumps feel like, like it's just an excuse to load the next area in the game. I've had people trying to avoid my interdiction by trying to fly me into the sun, that's so cool! it add a danger to exploring too, there's a real risk of getting too close to a sun, how would you do that if we just micro jumped all over the place. As for realism and photons hittting the glass of the ship, Who cares? you know there's no sound in space too, micro jumps would break just as many laws of physics. It's a game and it's supposed to be fun, supercruise is fun. It's the first time I've come across such an idea in a game too. How would your micro jumps do USS? I'm glad that the game devs are pretty smart people though, I'm certain they're smart enough not to listen to your daft ideas.
 
Without supercruise you'd have to bin half of the established game mechanics, it's an essential feature of the game....the idea of micro-jumps sound extremely limiting in my opinion.
 
Honestly, I don't care much for anything else. I know that it's impossible to be realistic in everything, I get that. It's just that I dislike travelling at superluminal speeds as if they were subluminal; I dislike travelling at + 50 c and still being able to look out my cockpit window. That's simply unreal and unimmersive to me.

On a side note, maybe it's just me but this conversation is making me see that this game would benefit greatly of being single player offline only.

You do realize there is an in-game lore explanation for what you're seeing during supercruise, right? You're not actually seeing what's out there because you're right - the human eye wouldn't see the photons. Read up on the in-game lore sometime - a lot of it is intriguing and explains many of the nuances that is the Elite universe.
 
Exploration in Supercruise with a head tracker is a joy.

It really is - a head tracker is almost essential kit in my opinion.

- - - Updated - - -

You do realize there is an in-game lore explanation for what you're seeing during supercruise, right? You're not actually seeing what's out there because you're right - the human eye wouldn't see the photons. Read up on the in-game lore sometime - a lot of it is intriguing and explains many of the nuances that is the Elite universe.

Got a link? I'd be curious - my own theory earlier was just what handwavium made sense to me. I'd like to know how close I am to the lore ;)
 
First of all, I love this game. Seriously. I've played nothing but ED in the last few weeks and I cleared my save today just so I could enjoy the early game hours again. Of course I know many things can be improved and that eventually with more gameplay content being added this will be a great universe to get lost in. Even though it saddens me that those will probably come as paid expansions/DLC (and because this game is REALLY expensive here in Brazil) I understand that such are the times we live in and I'm kind of looking forward to it - I'll gladly pay for them. Also, despite a bunch of design choices I disagree with, I learned to enjoy even those, as they fit together nicely in ED's universe and setting.

Except for supercruise. I hate it. Hate, hate, hate it.

If one day I stop playing ED, is because of supercruise. As I bought the game after launch I didn't followed the developing process but I seriously cannot understand how supercruise ended as the mandatory way of travel in-system. At first I thought that there was some design reason behind it, I even found this little gem in older posts that gave me some hope, but after hours digging in the forum to try and understand why this atrocious thing was left in the game to no avail, I was baffled. Of course, I can understand some players liking it, hell, it even makes sense that explorers have to do it (even so the way that Supercruise is presented is ridiculous: you can't see things normaly travelling at the speed of light or above it, photons that hit your retina travel slower than you - but I digress) but I cannot believe I'm the only one who wish that it was possible to simply jump in Hyperdrive to discovered planets/stations. I get that some players like sightseeing; fine, then explorer ships could be lighter and faster, able to reach really high speeds that are not FTL, and they would sightsee the hell of the galaxy, leaving us, BH and traders to jump around. Hell, I don't know. Anything would be better than Supercruise - literally, even if SC was to be stay exactly as it is, with micro-jumps, it would be better. People always go on about how there's no perfect game and such, well, I feel that ED could be perfect when all promised content are added - and supercruise removed.

But I didn't created this thread just to rant. I honestly would like to ask the community why? What gives? Does the majority of players like Supercruising around? Was there, at some point during development, any questioning about it, like someone saying that it was boring, lacking realism or anything? I mean, it does break many of laws of physics. Is there any plans to add the possibility of micro-jumps or (what I feel would be better) free jumping between celestial bodies? Can I hope for one day being able to jump directly to a station in my jump range or should I just resignate myself to how things are now?

Just have to add my 2 cr worth. I love supercruise, love seeing the light pollution fade from the sun as you travel away and the galaxy, stars, nebula's all become so vibrant. How else are you supposed to get around? micro jumps? oh that's like the crybabies on other games who complain about having to run out to the quest giver and back...insta port... no thanks...
 
Yep, I love supercruise. It offers a fast way to travel huge distances without making us lose perspective and it makes me feel like a space pilot, which is the intention and purpose of the game.

Instant jumping to all other planets and stations as the op proposes is just horrible in my mind. I hate that kind of modern instant gratification which pollutes so many modern day games.. It would kill the traveling in a game that is about space travel. For me supercruise is one of the fundamental experiences I enjoy in this game. Removing supercruise would be disastrous.

I do hope however that FD will introduce the option of micro jumps within a system to another star in that system. This would make many systems more accessible and several stations would see more visitors because of that.

Nevertheless I like it that some stations are just far away and take a long time to travel to. I am the one who chooses if I want to travel to such a station. Very often I do not, sometimes I do.
I hope that FD will make it more interesting to travel to such stations. Perhaps they could pay more for certain goods or have special modules and weapons on offer, or interesting missions.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top Bottom