No, the engine can happily drop you out of supercruise at any point in space. You can try it by slowing down to below 200km/s anywhere and pressing the supercruise button. It will place you in an existing instance if there is one at that point or spawn a fresh one. This shows clearly seen when you get intercepted only a few kilometers from your destination. I was ambushed 30km from a mining site once and could fly the rest of the way on conventional drives.
E3 2014: Elite: Dangerous Developer Demo
- Thread starter Tinman
- Start date
No, the engine can happily drop you out of supercruise at any point in space. You can try it by slowing down to below 200km/s anywhere and pressing the supercruise button. It will place you in an existing instance if there is one at that point or spawn a fresh one. This shows clearly seen when you get intercepted only a few kilometers from your destination. I was ambushed 30km from a mining site once and could fly the rest of the way on conventional drives.
The 'sphere' around each point of interest is essentially an instance within the game (32 player cap etc). Hence this transition between SC and disengaged flight. Hopefully the seams will become less apparent down the line. Space does not appear to be wide open, and I doubt it is (currently) even possible to travel between celestial bodies without entering/exiting the SC mechanic.
Its sad, but this also means you can only ever be solo or with grouped fleets in SC (i.e. you cant enter SC to chase down someone fleeing etc, even if they were on a linear course away from you).
It does explain how the procudural engine can support every system simultaneously without your cpu melting though - every sector state can be broken down into a simple alphanumeric string like saved game codes of old
This isn't accurate.
The main servers keep track of roughly where everyone in the game is positioned inside a system. If two players are near to one another they will be matched together by the server. After being introduced to one another by the server your computers will then talk to each other directly through P2P networking. The transition isn't done because you are transported into another world, it takes place because the server can only approximate each players position which means there are some fudging going on when putting you together.
You can indeed fly between planets, other celestial bodies or areas seamlessly during normal flight, it will just take a really really really long time.
This was possible even back in Alpha 2 when people realized that two scenarios was positioned relatively close to one another. If you flew away from Area A you where eventually disconnected from that instance when far enough away and as you approached the other area you connected to that one instead. If I don't remember wrong there where even two players who tried to meet each other halfway between the two instances and that worked! Adding to this, an instance isn't necessarily decided by world position either. If you group up with other players (later when that is implemented) and create an Alliance the other players will basically "reserve" a spot in your bubble to secure that you will matched up correctly when trying to meet at a given location.You will also be able to see, chase and catch other players and NPCs in supercruise eventually. Basically this works by creating an "supercruise instance". If another ship flees into supercruise you can try to align your ship along their trajectory and engage supercruise yourself. If done properly you will then be matched with them and can give chase.
Not to forget: Somebody recently flew in about 19 hours from one star to the other in supercruise only (No hyperspace jump). The only side effect is that the star where you arrive is only there, no planets or stations. He managed to get thos back with a trick, don't know how he did that.
So YES! The space between the stars exists.
So YES! The space between the stars exists.
That is assuming that the 1000km speed/ 1000km target is what is intended for release. I'm sure it isn't. The 'drop where you are' thing is much more in keeping with the game. In comparison to that the current drop within 200km to end up 20kms away is the simplification. People currently patting themselves on the back for managing to hit the 200km target may well end over 150km away from the station.
I really enjoyed this video and have watched it several times already. The new space station looks great and I can't wait to see it for myself. Its good that there will be at least 1 other new system to travel to in the next build which is something that people have been asking for. The only slight criticism of the video I have would be that I wish David had chosen his words a bit more carefully. I am referring to his sneezing remark. As soon as he said that I had the image of floating snot running around inside my head and I fear it will be there for a few days yet. Thanks for that David
Hehe - I think I'm expressing what I mean quite poorly!
If they both have 1G at their outer perimeter, then they can't both have the same 0.1G in their docking area. The larger the diameter of the outer perimeter the slower rotation has to be to generate 1G there, so if the docking areas are of the same diameter (which it appears to be in this video) then the slower rotation of the orbis is going to result in lower gravity in the orbis docking area (compared to the coriolis).
Dammit... I think I'm making it worse! I'm becoming ever less lucid as the day progresses!
I understand what you're saying, and you are correct.
Angular velocity = SQRT(a/r)
If a (acceleration due to gravity) is constant at 1G, then if the radius goes up, the angular velocity must go down to compensate.
Therefore in the docking bay, if it's the same radius in the Coriolis station as the Orbis station, at that radius it will be rotating slower meaning a lower centripetal acceleration.
I think it is actually. I was supercruising just outside the warzone yesterday, turned and flew back on normal thrusters to go afk a minute. Was quite surprised to find myself back in the zone when i returned.
In my experience, you don't even have to slow to 200km/s to drop out of sc. When I hit the sc button at speed, it says I'm moving too fast, then tells me to hit the button a 2nd time to initiate emergence drop out. It's worked every time. Very cool indeed. Although tbh, I've never checked to see if my ship took damage... that would be an awesome mechanic. Imagine being chased in sc, and deciding it's worth a bit of damage to suddenly drop out and have your pursuer overshoot by many km.
It's meant to do damage when doing that (or when going stright in towards a planet to fast becoming mass-locked), but this hasn't been implemented yet.
Emergency drop off will eventually have a likelihood of damage, the faster - the greater.
Not quite, 15 minutes until the livestream starts. Frontier will be showing Elite one hour later though. So we have to wait a little bit longer...
It's starting real soon!
We're on !!!
I could listen to DB all day about space and Elite ... So passionate about both.
Haha talking about shards.......(northern lass voice) "you know nothing, gamespot journo"
Emergency drop off will eventually have a likelihood of damage, the faster - the greater.
Sweet! These devs always seem to have the bases covered with their plans for future implementations of the release. FD... ya gotta love 'em!