Hyperspace duration

AradanKir

AradanKir
Fairly new to ED, so this may already be the case, but from what I've seen, it doesn't seem to be. Anyway, was thinking that the length of time you're in the hyperspace tunnel whilst journeying between two worlds should relate to the distance between them.

So a 1.5 LY jump should appear much quicker than a 9 LY jump. Perhaps there's a physics reason why the distance travelled does not eqate to time, but just feel it would give more of a sense of the distance being travelled.
 

nexxo

N
Anyway, this is hyperspace. Talk to any experienced pilot in the local station bar, and they will tell you: nothing makes sense in hyperspace. There's no distance, no speed, no time. Hell, there's no there, there. The time you spend in hyperspace has nothing to do with the distance travelled. Sometimes you spend minutes in hyperspace only to travel a few lightyears. Sometimes you jump a mere few seconds and you travel over twenty. There's some older guys who will swear that once or twice, when the ship chronometer re-synced to the nav beacon on re-entry, they'd jumped back in time by a few milliseconds, and arrived at a time just before they'd left! But whether that's true or just time discrepancies sneaking into the systems-wide clock beat due to local gravity ripples, no-one knows.
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And then there's the stories of the whispering... the things seen fleetingly in the twilight (and where's that light coming from anyways?)... but that may just be old space cowboys tripping, when they've been out there too long on their own, and the sensory deprivation finally starts to play tricks on their minds. Or perhaps they're just playing a joke on us new guys. Or they're just drunk, and playing to an audience for a free refill of the glass. But when I look into their eyes, I don't think so. I don't think so at all.
 
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MrVibrating

MrVibrating
If the galalxy was truly seamless then it'd be a great mechanic...

Unfortunately though, as Nightdragon says, it depends upon loading screens, and doesn't really model a lifesize seamless galaxy like Noctis or Space Engine or, uh, like Frontier said it would..
 

nexxo

N
And guess what? There's a reason for that. Because in Space Engine it's just you moving about. In Elite Dangerous, it's you and thousands of other players, not just moving about, but flying about, at different speeds, vectors and orientations, and interacting in dogfights with all sorts of hitpoint dynamics. Put all that in a single, massive arena and you've got server meltdown. Not even Eve Online with its massive shard servers manages to cram all players in a single huge arena.
 

MrVibrating

MrVibrating
Just as with graphics, stuff that's out of sight shouldn't require resources. Instances could be entered and exited seamlesly along with systems - it's not as if loading screens are the only way to do it.

I suspect you may be partly right though, but also that ED does it this way because this is how every previous version of the game worked. It was actually high on my wish list of E4 enhancements long before ED was announced.. ho hum.
 

Bambi

Bambi
It would be interesting if the galaxy was completely seamless and rather than having a difference between cruise and jumping you just would accelerate to an unlimited degree and go as far as your fuel would allow.
 

nexxo

N
MrVibrating said:
Just as with graphics, stuff that's out of sight shouldn't require resources. Instances could be entered and exited seamlesly along with systems - it's not as if loading screens are the only way to do it.
Click to expand...

That stuff does require resources server-side, because it still needs to be kept track of --if only to decide whether or not it is close enough to the player to require rendering or whether it can be ignored. And of course most of that stuff is other players, for who the same decisions need to be made relative to them.

Creating an instance on the fly takes a huge amount of heavy lifting (and again: it's not about the environment. It's about all the players and NPCs and trade, mission and event dynamics that go about inside it). Neither servers or bandwidth nor our PCs are quite powerful enough yet.
 
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MrVibrating

MrVibrating
Surely flying seamlessly between stars would take more time than hyperspacing, allowing more time for all your 'heavy lifting'?

I rather think the reason ED can't do it is because DB never worked out how. The best he could manage is to draw the skybox based on real star positions, but they're nonetheless painted dots, not real distant stars as in Noctis and Space Engine. In this respect ED is built the same way as past Elites, from the ground up. Star systems were always lone 'instances' even before MP was thrown into the mix...
 
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