The transition for the planetary landings

[Javert]

So... it is the matchmaking that is instanced, but normal space is not.

Okay - so thinking about this logically, that means that you could have, say 32 players in an instance, some way from you in normal space, and you had thirty players around you in your space, all thirty odd players could head in the same direction until they met the other 32 players, since normal space is not fractured in any way.

This breaks what we know about the game, does it not? I don't mind being wrong, Tinman, but the logic of what you are saying does not make sense.

The 32 players you were with, if you all stayed together, would stay together and you would not see the other 32 players because your instance is already "full". You would all arrive in the same place, but since your instance is full the other 32 players would be in the same place but in another instance. This is exactly how it works today for example when we do events like the Hutton convoy where there are several different instances full of players all in the same physical location.

Of source it's not quite as black and white as that ,because there are other things that come into play like your network bandwidth or quality which may change over time, and also who is on your friends list, so in reality it's unlikely to get 32 players in a single instance - this is only in the ideal network conditions. I think I've seen 25 once or twice but not more.

 

[CMDR Sheehy]

Okay....

 

[W4rSkuLL]

Orbital cruise is simply super cruise with an altimeter projected on the canopy. The thing is, if you say, take off from a station in orbit, point to the planet, boosted and went FA off, provided you have Horizons, you should be able to land on the surface without any transition. It'll take forever though.

I can't believe I'm saying this but, they actually designed the transition between flight modes so badly, they shot themselves in the foot by trying to give the shortest possible transition while looking for instancing matches. This of course leads to the seeming 'non-seamless' space flight where actually there's no such thing.

Apparently loading of assets as I thought before has nothing to do with it. The Cobra Engine is pretty capable of rendering assets on the fly based on distance and it can really calculate real life system distances of light minutes.

Instead of what we have now, had they implemented a slow down period of, say ten seconds, with a countdown and gotten rid of the blue hue, we would not be having this conversation because it rarely takes more than 10 seconds to actually drop into stations. Once we hit disengage, it would go 'preparing for safe disengage (about 2 seconds). ship controls locked (about 1 second later than the first sentence, itself taking 2 seconds). 4-3-2-1 disengage' as it searches for possible matches, no one would cry not seamless. The same with normal flight to SC, which usually takes even shorter. Get rid of the blue hue, add in the prompt 'ship controls locked' and 'ship controls unlocked' after the transition to make sure everything is rendered correctly because of the abrupt distance change the engine doesn't have time to render nearby assets properly.

Okai, so we can expect the "blue hue" when dropping out from orbital cruise into normal flight. I can settle with that. I could also settle with an animation of some sort while instancing is going on. Maybe this can replace the "blue hue". Well, lets hope David shows us the "seamless" transition soon. But we can all agree that this is a seamless discussion going on Everything seems so seamless these days

 

[CMDR Sheehy]

Okai, so we can expect the "blue hue" when dropping out from orbital cruise into normal flight. I can settle with that. I could also settle with an animation of some sort while instancing is going on. Maybe this can replace the "blue hue". Well, lets hope David shows us the "seamless" transition soon. But we can all agree that this is a seamless discussion going on Everything seems so seamless these days

Reminds me of the Canticle:

Tell her to make me a cambric shirt
Parsley sage rosemary and thyme
Without no seams nor needle work
Then she’ll be a true love of mine

Talking about asking the impossible. I think he doesn't want her back, really.

 

[VR Mr Teatime]

Whilst I understand the player centric bubble/island technology there's always been a couple of niggles about why the supercruise to normal flight transition is modelled in the way it is currently. A couple of factors I've been thinking about are:

as one poster pointed out (Tinman?) - the delta in speed between the slowest supercruise and normal flight is actually huge e.g. 30Km/s to say 300m/s, which is 30,000 m/s to 300 m/s. That would be a delta that would take some skill (more than our reflexes are capable of?) to achieve and hit a target body vicinity (i.e. station or other object) without many "loops of shame" or require a deceleration period that would take many more minutes/hours when flying towards a destination and still maintain enough control. So this could be a gameplay decision - that might also be at the bottom of the comment about "flying into planets" a day or so ago.

There is also the location/co-ords translation that occurs from say 900Km to <10Km, which again would feel a bit bizarre if you saw that i.e. hit normal flight button and watch stuff woosh by as your camera is shifted to the new location.

Then there is what I have always assumed to be 2 separate spaceships/cameras involved, which is why for a long time many parameters didn't carry back and forth between supercruise and normal flight as the spaceship you are sitting within in normal flight is essentially a different one from the "ship" you are within in supercruise. A bit like the 1st person and 3rd person views you see in FPSs where you see the whole model of other players when they are in 3rd person, but your own (if you detach the camera in game) has no head and other parts you cannot normally see when in 1st person view. Thinking as I type the 3rd person view in supercruise i.e. other players do not have models at all perhaps - just the shiny comet entity?

I'm pretty certain (Mike Evans iirc revealed when I asked about floating point positional errors) that whilst the space between stars is modelled, the assets for stars and planets in each system needs hyperspace to load in, but more importantly the coordinate system keys off of the main star in each system i.e. Sol is at 0,0,0 and your position is worked on a transform from there using double precision floats iirc. What this means is that in order to place you in a new system (with all its associated bodies) your camera needs to undergo a shift from a coord system with Sol at 0,0,0 to one where say Alpha Centauri is at 0,0,0. As an aside I'm sure one of the devs let slip that stellar forge models orphaned bodies e.g. planets that have been thrown out of a system, but that they were thinking about how we might get to them.

The P2P matchmaking and handshaking is obviously another factor, which I'm not sure could be got rid of until the internet improves generally (too much poor infrastructure out there) and I guess you could have a split experience where the blue haze is very short (or gone altogether) if there are no other players near your "drop out" location and the normal blue haze period where there are other players and the network needs to be established...... (client-server wouldn't get rid of this either as server sessions would still be transient and need to be dropped/created).

 

[who?]

I'm actually intrigued by the fact you can fly between destinations in normal flight. I wonder if all normal space locations in a system (space stations, RES, signal sources, or anywhere else you drop out of supercruise) are contained within one instance* - and the only reason you can't see ships in a RES from a station is because they're far, far out of range.

The alternative is more interesting though - the game can seamlessly** move players from one instance to another suitable instance based on their position in the system. That sounds very complex to me - what would happen if you had two ships travelling from station -> station in normal space, do they both switch instances simultaneously? At different times? If so, do they disappear in a puff of handwavium?

I do understand why they need supercruise though. It'd make throttle control pretty awkward without it, if your range was 0m/s -> 2,001c. Plus without the jump you'd have an easy exit from any dogfight.

(* one instance, until you hit the player limit, or there are no geographically suitable instances available etc.)
(** no really seamlessly this time)

 

[Cynaqq]

The alternative is more interesting though - the game can seamlessly** move players from one instance to another suitable instance based on their position in the system. That sounds very complex to me - what would happen if you had two ships travelling from station -> station in normal space, do they both switch instances simultaneously? At different times? If so, do they disappear in a puff of handwavium?

This is exactly what happens. If all goes well, you'll jump instances together happily and end up together always. If all doesn't go well though, say, one of you have network hickups, then one ship may disappear in a puff essentially. Totally possible. The matchmaking server tries to prevent this though so people seeing each other continue to do so if it's possible.

 

[ratchet5000]

Well, the mach 1 cap is kind of weird, I hope some day we will at least get it to mach 2 or even 3. They also need to get the sonic booms right when we get into an atmosphere.

There is no speed of sound on an airless planet. Plus, even on planets with atmosphere the speed of sound is a function of the atmospheric pressure - more dense = higher speed of sound.

 

[CMDR Sheehy]

There is no speed of sound on an airless planet. Plus, even on planets with atmosphere the speed of sound is a function of the atmospheric pressure - more dense = higher speed of sound.

Plus, without any kind of aerodynamics, would you really want to be going faster than Mach 1?

 

[VR Mr Teatime]

I'm actually intrigued by the fact you can fly between destinations in normal flight. I wonder if all normal space locations in a system (space stations, RES, signal sources, or anywhere else you drop out of supercruise) are contained within one instance* - and the only reason you can't see ships in a RES from a station is because they're far, far out of range.

The alternative is more interesting though - the game can seamlessly** move players from one instance to another suitable instance based on their position in the system. That sounds very complex to me - what would happen if you had two ships travelling from station -> station in normal space, do they both switch instances simultaneously? At different times? If so, do they disappear in a puff of handwavium?

I do understand why they need supercruise though. It'd make throttle control pretty awkward without it, if your range was 0m/s -> 2,001c. Plus without the jump you'd have an easy exit from any dogfight.

(* one instance, until you hit the player limit, or there are no geographically suitable instances available etc.)
(** no really seamlessly this time)

Not sure if its my interpretation of your post, but I'd read some of the preceding posts to understand that instances are not tied around objects in the game (e.g. planets, stations, moons, RES etc.) but are around every player and merged/de-merged together based on proximity and the 32 player limit (plus matchmaking). The fact that objects may (or may not) be there when this happens is largely irrelevant i.e. whether a station is in the vicinity is "just" a matter of circumstance e.g. two players meet in deep space and there's nothing there, but they are in a instance together vs. two players meet near a station and they are in an instance together, but there's a station there because that's where they happen to be i.e. next to a station.

Proximity checking also occurs in supercruise (you used to be able to see it in the network logs), but I expect the distance parameters are different due to the speeds involved i.e. less fidelity required given the distances traveled every second.

 

[who?]

This is exactly what happens. If all goes well, you'll jump instances together happily and end up together always. If all doesn't go well though, say, one of you have network hickups, then one ship may disappear in a puff essentially. Totally possible. The matchmaking server tries to prevent this though so people seeing each other continue to do so if it's possible.

Not that I'm doubting you - but do we know this for certain? There has been a whole plethora of posts/threads about the transitions lately so I've probably missed something.

If you have two ships - one a good distance ahead of the other - flying between two normal space locations, does the first one disappear if its first to be moved to the new instance? If the system is smart enough to detect the two ships are within sensor range of each other, move them both simultaneously.

If so, and you knew the threshold distance at which this instance-swapping occurs, you could try another experiment. One ship is travelling towards the destination, another is nearby but stationary. If the moving ship is moved to the new instance it'd be odd, since it'd just disappear. If both are moved, it'd also be odd, since the stationary ship would find lots of new contacts spontaneously popping into existence around it.

 

[Javert]

Not sure if its my interpretation of your post, but I'd read some of the preceding posts to understand that instances are not tied around objects in the game (e.g. planets, stations, moons, RES etc.) but are around every player and merged/de-merged together based on proximity and the 32 player limit (plus matchmaking). The fact that objects may (or may not) be there when this happens is largely irrelevant i.e. whether a station is in the vicinity is "just" a matter of circumstance e.g. two players meet in deep space and there's nothing there, but they are in a instance together vs. two players meet near a station and they are in an instance together, but there's a station there because that's where they happen to be i.e. next to a station.

Proximity checking also occurs in supercruise (you used to be able to see it in the network logs), but I expect the distance parameters are different due to the speeds involved i.e. less fidelity required given the distances traveled every second.

Sort of, yes. If you are travelling on your own and there is nobody nearby, you are still in an instance, but the instance only contains one player (you). As soon as your instance overlaps with another instance of another player(s), the matchmaking will then decide whether those instances can be merged or not.

Technically, I believe that there is one player who is effectively the "host" of that instance, and the instance is running on that players computer with the other players as guests there, plus the matchmaking server as a kind of referee. Therefore when you meet another player, your instance will be terminated and you will be added to theirs, or vice versa. Each instance of course could already contain more than one player, so there is a lot of matchmaking to do there, and all without the player noticing anything.

On top of that, if the player who is the instance host loses their connection, I think it then has to instantly switch to another host PC to avoid everyone just disappearing. It's actually quite clever.

 

[OamodSias]

Pretty much as I expected. But I think this will be badly received.

I'm fine with it. It's the transition from space into the planet that was important to me.

Badly received is an understatement I think.

This is seamless:
( skip to 6:48 )
[video=youtube_share;xQB8GfPJhNU]https://youtu.be/xQB8GfPJhNU?t=408[/video]

This is not:
"When you drop from orbital cruise to normal flight there is a short transition, as with dropping from supercruise."

 

[jabokai]

There's a lot of debate that boils down to the fact that we do have a "seamless galaxy" but we do not have a "seamless transition" - people using "seamless" without reference to what is/isn't seamless and then others taking it the wrong way!

 

[Ydiss]

Badly received is an understatement I think.

This is seamless:
( skip to 6:48 )
https://youtu.be/xQB8GfPJhNU?t=408

This is not:
"When you drop from orbital cruise to normal flight there is a short transition, as with dropping from supercruise."

NMS has the benefit of being, basically, single player. It doesn't need to use instances at all.

ED would be that way if it was single player only. NMS is not a game I'm excited to play because it isn't designed for me to play with friends.

It's also got really average scale. Basically, the developers said they did this deliberately so it all looks cool. So it takes a few seconds to enter the atmosphere, land, launch, leave the atmosphere and fly to another planet. All at normal speeds.

I'll take 2 seconds delay transition over all that, any day.

 

[Cynaqq]

NMS has the benefit of being, basically, single player. It doesn't need to use instances at all.

ED would be that way if it was single player only. NMS is not a game I'm excited to play because it isn't designed for me to play with friends.

It's also got really average scale. Basically, the developers said they did this deliberately so it all looks cool. So it takes a few seconds to enter the atmosphere, land, launch, leave the atmosphere and fly to another planet. All at normal speeds.

I'll take 2 seconds delay transition over all that, any day.

Hey, ydiss, I have repped you too many times apparently. I have an idea though ...

Since people are repeating the same arguments over and over again while other people are repeating the same examples over and over again, we see an endless loop of explanations vs NMS and I: with space engineers thrown in as examples of ultimate seamless perfection.

So my proposal is, I will comment on complaint posts linking to your explanations, you link to Tinman, Tinman links to Javert and he links back to me. This way we'll create an infinite loop of explanations vs arguments and have our own little singularity experiment

what do you say?

 

[OamodSias]

NMS has the benefit of being, basically, single player. It doesn't need to use instances at all.

I know the reasons, but I wish they'd stop saying seamless all over the show when it's not.

NMS is not a game I'm excited to play because it isn't designed for me to play with friends.

Up to four player multiplayer (not sure if available at launch or not, but Hello! Games have said they'll add it.

It's also got really average scale. Basically, the developers said they did this deliberately so it all looks cool. So it takes a few seconds to enter the atmosphere, land, launch, leave the atmosphere and fly to another planet. All at normal speeds.

Be that as it may, it's still seamless. Another seamless example is Infinity: Battlescape which (unless I have my games mixed up) is going to allow dozens upon dozens of players playing simultaneously without transitions and completely seamless.

[video=youtube;sglhi_PIEX4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sglhi_PIEX4[/video]

I'll take 2 seconds delay transition over all that, any day.

I don't mind the transition, but, again, I wish they'd stop saying seamless.

 

[Ydiss]

I know the reasons, but I wish they'd stop saying seamless all over the show when it's not.


Up to four player multiplayer (not sure if available at launch or not, but Hello! Games have said they'll add it.


Be that as it may, it's still seamless. Another seamless example is Infinity: Battlescape which (unless I have my games mixed up) is going to allow dozens upon dozens of players playing simultaneously without transitions and completely seamless.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sglhi_PIEX4



I don't mind the transition, but, again, I wish they'd stop saying seamless.

Yeh I get you.

That does look great, btw. Shame combat looks awful.

Hey, ydiss, I have repped you too many times apparently. I have an idea though ...

Since people are repeating the same arguments over and over again while other people are repeating the same examples over and over again, we see an endless loop of explanations vs NMS and I: with space engineers thrown in as examples of ultimate seamless perfection.

So my proposal is, I will comment on complaint posts linking to your explanations, you link to Tinman, Tinman links to Javert and he links back to me. This way we'll create an infinite loop of explanations vs arguments and have our own little singularity experiment

what do you say?

We'd probably cause a stack overflow error and crash the internet.

 

[Sashenka]

I know the reasons, but I wish they'd stop saying seamless all over the show when it's not.


Up to four player multiplayer (not sure if available at launch or not, but Hello! Games have said they'll add it.


Be that as it may, it's still seamless. Another seamless example is Infinity: Battlescape which (unless I have my games mixed up) is going to allow dozens upon dozens of players playing simultaneously without transitions and completely seamless.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sglhi_PIEX4



I don't mind the transition, but, again, I wish they'd stop saying seamless.

What this guy said. I don't mind it that much but it isn't seamless.

From what I understand, the engine supports it but because of the tackled on multiplayer this can't be done. Oh well, for the moment that's all we have, let's hope some improvements to the NPCs in season 2 will add more life and remove the feeling of 'rooms in space'.

 

[cpbtrading]

Badly received is an understatement I think.

This is seamless:
( skip to 6:48 )
https://youtu.be/xQB8GfPJhNU?t=408

This is not:
"When you drop from orbital cruise to normal flight there is a short transition, as with dropping from supercruise."

This is seamless too.
[video=youtube;XS0S9Fulg-Q]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XS0S9Fulg-Q[/video]