PLEASE FRONTIER - I've been asking for YEARSSSSSS. Update blackholes!

[alexzk]

they don't eat nearby stars/planet matter, and are NOT dangerous. PLEASE PLEASE FIX THIS.

Yeh, proper fix would be account ban for 1-2 years once you come close to BH to simulate time shift

P.S. all risks you would meet / notice there is time shift. In case of super massive BH ... it could be next second you see is the End Of Universe. Real way to simulate that is account ban.

 

[Northpin]

Guess someone (re)watched Interstellar and now they cant take another look at a black hole. Again.

 

[Old Duck]

I tried playing black holes on the shader level, but from what I can tell, all the magic happens before being sent to the shader pipeline (at the very least, there's nothing specific to black holes in the pixel or vertex shaders that I could find).

Disclaimer - I'm not a trained shader developer, I just toy around with them using my knowledge of general programming. I've achieved some cool effects doing this, but there very well may be "magic" beyond my understanding that someone else can summon if so motivated.

 

[PANTHER STARFORCE]

This thread seems like the proper place to post this.

One of my favorite past-times in Elite has been black hole hunting. With Odyssey freshly installed I whipped off to Maia to visit the resident BH. It's the closest one to the bubble that I know about.

While I did feel that there was a subtle upgrade in effects such as as an ambient emissive quality as I approached the core... and enhanced gravitational lensing, the feature sadly hasn't appeared to get much love beyond this.

They are still %100 harmless. I pressed the nose of my ship right up against it in real-space and at a distance of 24km I simply stopped moving and was otherwise fine. It was comical. I'm still holding out hope that under the right conditions I will find one with an accretion disk or a gamma-ray 'fountain'. But after my experience in Maia I'm not holding my breath.

While I'd love for them to look like 'Interstellar' (who wouldn't?) I'm willing to place my expectations even lower and ask simply that the gameplay systems around them are revised.

Simple, low-hanging suggestions:

-Set the exclusion zone as the 'photon-sphere'
-Instead of overheat damage, they cut directly to hull integrity. When zero... ship destruction.
-when initiating frame- jump on escape vector the FSD charge should behave just like mass-locking. slow charge rate.

I mean... honestly, a random Type 10 is more of a hazard then a black hole due to simple mass lock

Any way, I did take some pretty screen shots while I was there.
* I run a pretty aggressive ReShade pipeline so players using vanilla Odyssey won't quite have the same visual experience. But these are live game captures. No Photoshop. So it gives me some hope that in the future real-time graphical improvements are possible for the base game.

 

[here_it_comes]

i don't agree with your logic. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

True, but also . . .

Any developer that loves its game and wants its community to prosper will listen to their community when feasible.

Plug FD into that ^

 

[Leadfoot]

I tried playing black holes on the shader level, but from what I can tell, all the magic happens before being sent to the shader pipeline (at the very least, there's nothing specific to black holes in the pixel or vertex shaders that I could find).

Disclaimer - I'm not a trained shader developer, I just toy around with them using my knowledge of general programming. I've achieved some cool effects doing this, but there very well may be "magic" beyond my understanding that someone else can summon if so motivated.

Be careful when toying with the magic of the black holes. Once invoked, dismissing them turns into a problematic situation; it doesn't always just "go away." They invariably ARE beyond your understanding and like it that way.

Not that I would know personally, of course - just stuff I hear in the locker room, you know, guys talk and stuff.

 

[CharlieFoxtrot]

So what you want is the ''Hollywood comic book movie'' version of black holes, and not anything that resembles what black holes actually are. Hah, no thank you.

Spoiler: Black holes are actually pretty boring IRL, too. It's actually a myth that black holes go around eating anything nearby. You also need to get VERY close to one to feel its effects, otherwise it acts like any other object in space. Less Netflix, more textbooks pls.

PLEASE FRONTIER: keep black holes how they are. Thanks.

I'm sure having the current ability to get within ~20km of a blackhole before hitting drop zone is close enough seeing how the average safe zone is 50-70miles, on top of that accretion disks are thousands of times hotter than the Sun

 

[Tremyss]

dangerous black holes would be fun up until some poor explorer lost everything unexpectedly flying too close to one and came here screaming about it being unfair.

If a cmdr "unexpectedly" flies through the event horizon of a black hole, he very much deserves to lose his ship and all data. I mean what do you expect to happen?
Anyway some really unexpected funny things could happen though. With 1% chance it working as a wormhole. 99% chance you are still dead.

 

[Asp1re]

I really loved the black hole in the movie Interstellar... it looked very beautiful and dangerous. It would be great for Elite Dangerous to have this huge black thing with huge spherical lights around it that if you get too close it pulls you in and once in the black hole give you a similar experience as a hyperdrive but darkness with small light grains/fragments hitting your ship(you can hear it also), lights flashing, ship malfunctioning, ship shacking etc. Similar to the Interstellar concept. Just search on YouTube "Interstellar black hole".

 

[myothershipisacobraiv]

I agree with the OP on this subject. Remember neutron stars? Tiny little white ball spinning and just knocking you out of SC if you got too close. It was best just to scan and then avoid them.

Now, of course, we enjoy neutron highways for FSD boosts. So why not something like that for black holes? Give me a prize but make it RISKY to get that prize.

YES!

CG's to jump hole the black holes!

CG succeeds, new fancy-pants black hole that can supersfoo the FSD and allow point-to-point jump between two sfooed black holes, or longer-than-neutron-boost normal jump which maybe has a certain chance to send you in any direction at random!

CG fails, pretty monster thing everyone wants, Thargoids go ballistic and invade all Empire capitals, Hutton switches to sippy cups, Panther Clipper is released and found to be worse than Asp Scout, Frontier release Cobra Mk V as CMDR Braben+Early Birder only, press release that Elite: Dangerous development is being taken over by RSI, Solo is replaced with CQC, other stuff!

 

[Sysmon]

YES!

CG's to jump hole the black holes!

CG succeeds, new fancy-pants black hole that can supersfoo the FSD and allow point-to-point jump between two sfooed black holes, or longer-than-neutron-boost normal jump which maybe has a certain chance to send you in any direction at random!

CG fails, pretty monster thing everyone wants, Thargoids go ballistic and invade all Empire capitals, Hutton switches to sippy cups, Panther Clipper is released and found to be worse than Asp Scout, Frontier release Cobra Mk V as CMDR Braben+Early Birder only, press release that Elite: Dangerous development is being taken over by RSI, Solo is replaced with CQC, other stuff!

So basically inifinite improbability drives. I very nearly approve!

S

 

[Frankymole]

Why would a black hole "eat" anything more than a star does? It has the same mass as when it collapsed.

 

[varonica]

Why would a black hole "eat" anything more than a star does? It has the same mass as when it collapsed.

Most people don't understand how gravity works is the issue here. There's nothing special about black holes until you get to the super massive black holes at the centre of galaxies, they are just another source of gravity, and we know how that works. Most black holes won't have an accretion disc so demanding one for black holes is strange, however special treatment could be given to Sag A* as a special case.

 

[Morbad]

Most people don't understand how gravity works is the issue here. There's nothing special about black holes until you get to the super massive black holes at the centre of galaxies, they are just another source of gravity, and we know how that works.

In this game, you can get a lot closer to a black hole than a star of similar mass.

The exclusion zone around Sol stops my ship at around 750Mm or 2.5Ls, where the gravity would be about 27g. It's a little toasty, but there are otherwise no meaningful effects. Silly enough.

My CMDR has been within a few dozen km of similarly massive blackholes before harmlessly bouncing off the exclusion zone. The exclusion zone seems to be not far outside the Schwarzschild radius, where, from an outside observer not affected by time dilation, gravity should rapidly approach infinity. The utter absence of gravity's effects is fairly absurd and more than a little anticlimatic.

 

[varonica]

In this game, you can get a lot closer to a black hole than a star of similar mass.

Oh I agree there, I am not saying black holes shouldn't be dangerous, I have always said they should, but demand for exaggerated effects that simply wouldn't exist for 99.99% of BH's isn't the way to go. For the most part the only way you know a BH is there would be the gravitational effect on the surrounding objects. Since the size of a black hole is smaller than Neutron star, and it's black, you simply won't see them, fortunately our ships are good at detecting gravitational anomalies so we have plenty of warning. An approach that takes a ship inside the event horizon should simply see that ship destroyed, with plenty of warnings of course.

As far as stars of similar mass, as I said the size of a black hole the same mass of a given star will be in the tens of kilometers, so being inside the outer radius of a same mass star shouldn't technically be a problem, at that distance it's really only gravity you are dealing with, and the same gravity as at the surface of the star, so you should be able to orbit the black hole safely, in an orbit you will only experience microgravity anyway, of course tidal effects might be huge depending on how close you are, got to be careful you don't so close you get pulled apart by tidal effects. The surface gravity of the sun is 28g, and I have landed safely on 45g body, so in the simplified physics of ED you should be able to get quite close, but there should also be a point where you are too close and then you have a problem.

 

[Brrokk]

Science-wise, the only thing ED has really got wrong is the FSD exclusion zones not being big enough around black holes: an exclusion zone should be as big as the one around a star of equal mass.

I suspect this wasn't really a mistake. If we had to stop light-minutes away, black holes would be almost impossible to see. The settings we have simply give us a good view for better gameplay.

Black holes don't eat stuff unless in a gas cloud or in "soft" SF. If you're in an orbit around one it shouldn't be able to pull you in. (Admittedly ED doesn't do orbital dynamics).

The only actual danger from a black hole should be radiation, and we're already flying ships which can scoop fuel from the outer layers of blue-white stars, so I don't think any extra risks are really needed in the game.

 

[Zak Gordon]

I'd be fine with the same kind of damage a Star does, heat shield temp rise warnings etc. Maybe the issue is that a star is very obviously finite, you can see it's corona and know exactly where to turn to avoid it, and maybe that is less clear with a black hole as modeled in ED currently? But yeah some damage and consequence (like getting too close to a Star) would be nice, and not hard to do, as we have it with Stars already.

If you really wanted to make it different but kind of safe (to avoid the calls we already had to scrap damage from Black Holes), have the exclusion zone much further out than with a Star, and have reduced heat temp warning (so it increases more slowly) AND a slow reduction in the integrity of the hull at the same time, enough to let the player know they are too close, but enough time to move out of danger.

 

[Morbad]

in an orbit you will only experience microgravity anyway, of course tidal effects might be huge depending on how close you are, got to be careful you don't so close you get pulled apart by tidal effects. The surface gravity of the sun is 28g, and I have landed safely on 45g body, so in the simplified physics of ED you should be able to get quite close, but there should also be a point where you are too close and then you have a problem.

The game doesn't mandate that we orbit stars. Even in normal space we can hold a fixed position relative to them because the gravity isn't simulated for our ships if the body isn't landable (and even then the effect ends at an arbitrary distance). I can drop out of SC at a range where the orbital period would be extremely low and look at a static skybox because my CMDR's ship isn't actually moving.

The tidal forces at the distance we can approach a black hole should be extreme...and long before that the ship should have broken apart, even one that can happily pull 50g indefinitely.

Science-wise, the only thing ED has really got wrong is the FSD exclusion zones not being big enough around black holes: an exclusion zone should be as big as the one around a star of equal mass.

I'd argue the inability to violate an exclusion zone via any means torpedoes just about any vaguely scientific explanation, but I agree it would be less absurd if the exclusion zone were larger.

I suspect this wasn't really a mistake. If we had to stop light-minutes away, black holes would be almost impossible to see. The settings we have simply give us a good view for better gameplay.

The lensing and distortion can be seen quite distinctly from far further off than the range of a star-sized exclusion zone. It's a bit more dramatic as you close in, of course, but not as dramatic as the absence of any other meaningful effect.

I'd be fine with the same kind of damage a Star does, heat shield temp rise warnings etc. Maybe the issue is that a star is very obviously finite, you can see it's corona and know exactly where to turn to avoid it, and maybe that is less clear with a black hole as modeled in ED currently? But yeah some damage and consequence (like getting too close to a Star) would be nice, and not hard to do, as we have it with Stars already.

Black holes do heat ships, and some of them heat them as significantly as hotter stars do.

However, I don't think this is sufficient for as close as we can approach. Just being within a certain range should be inflicting serious hull and module damage. Something like being in a white dwarf or neutron star jet cone would probably do the trick, as a vague and easy to impliment approximation of tidal forces.

 

[Darth Ender]

damage by black holes was asked to be removed/nerfed i think more along the lines of "black holes dont emit heat (ignoring hawking radiation) so this is wrong from a simulation point of view"

Not in that players wanted a safer game with less risk and danger.

 

[Zak Gordon]

Black holes do heat ships, and some of them heat them as significantly as hotter stars do.

However, I don't think this is sufficient for as close as we can approach. Just being within a certain range should be inflicting serious hull and module damage. Something like being in a white dwarf or neutron star jet cone would probably do the trick, as a vague and easy to impliment approximation of tidal forces.

I'm just thinking of how to make it 'player friendly', so we don't get another chorus of the complaints that made them completely unbelievable and immersion breaking