I have faith in FD and I hope FD read this.

lysander

lysander
I tried to explain this to the the funders but they did not have the patience to understand me.

I am writing this post to FD, but in the open, in public.

I must first address the people who matter most:

The Engineers (dev,test,design,art,math,whatever.. you are artists aren't you ;) you just need to treat your work as a piece of art) - you know who you are you brave souls - don't think about the money - you are the most important people in this.

I want to believe in relativity. It's been proven to be quite correct so far by our finest scientific minds.

The problem this game has is that relativistic time effects need to be suspended to make it as true to the progression of the games (elite, elite2, elite3.. ED).

Time dilation - either relativistic or manually compressed.. must not be present to make this game playable or the universes that each player inhabit will become desynchronised.

If you are trying to build a atmospheric (ww1/ww2) trading sim in space - which is what elite was - you knew no better you startup-minded students you! Braben! Bell! :p Well, that just wouldn't be progress.

You need to find the best compromise that is logical progress.

It is this.

This game is going to take its universal clocking very seriously if the universe we are to have fun in is to maintain its state between players. The moon must always be in the right position for everyone in the game if they want to play MP.

This game is going to rely on a technology called NTP: http://www.ntp.org/

You should all know it already if you want to be true.

Most of the public don't take timing that seriously but I have been taking it seriously since at least Jan 1st 1970 00:00:00.

And lastly, sadly, as you know FD wants to IPO.

To the Finance and Management deperatments:

I think the stock market can be a good thing as long as investors are "true believers" rather than "speculators" and "hostile takeover sharks". I respect the decision to take the company public. It will mature you to reality.

The reality is that investors want to make a quick buck and push shoddy games that they never play. I am a funder and I may never play the game.

I want you to make this game so good.. so forwards-compatible.. that it will still be playable long into the future.

No compromise to the vision of a game that will inspire kids to fly to the moon and beyond.

Because that is what it did for me.

We're going to space.

We need a generation of space pilots who know what they are doing.

Make it as realistic as possible while fun enough to play.

This is the game ender would have been playing.

You need two games in the same universe - a strategy game for tacticians and a game for those who prefer direct combat - the commanders. But it should be easy for both to switch at whatever time they want. We all want to taste a little responsibility once we have tasted the blood.

I'll see you at the launch, whenever that is.

And most importantly - don't worry about the money - there is no shame in asking for more funding.. if you need it. Rekickstart this game if you have to. Just make it excellent. And don't worry about wingcommander :)

I'll buy your game no matter what decisions you make.

I trust you all to make the right ones.

You may need to read this a few times to understand it.

You have to come to your own conclusions.
 

psykokow

psykokow
Hi Lysander,
There has been a lot of discussions on the points you have raised, and I felt I should write here to give confidence to you that a lot of that has been dealt with wether or not in the public forums I don't remember.

Time advancing not going to happen - We have new Drives Frame Shift will allow for fast travel in system in a really cool way.
Planets will orbit, and so you will have to take account of the orbits when trying to find the stations etc.. so thats really cool.

The investors were described as behind the project and interested in it, and I am paraphrasing here... but the feeling I got was shared interests so the liklihood of any nefarious intentions are non-existent at this time.

As for making the trade offs between fun and realistic.. its clear they are doing this well so far, and the DDF is involved to keep the fun in mind and also realism when it is so required..

Wait for ALpha sir and you will be able to put all your concerns behind you..

It will be awesome, it will be atmospheric... It will take over peoples lives and give them future ambitions..
 

Voyager_NL

Voyager_NL
Question: how do you plan to sync a game that is set in 3300AD to current NTP?

Other than that... your post is quiet incomprehensible. Maybe you could elaborate on what exactly you are affraid of and what exactly your whishes are?

Cheers!
 

Zplintz

Zplintz
Frontier Developments funding model and its IPO has nothing to with the players of Elite Dangerous or the public in general. It is their business to make sure they stay in business. Not ours. The IPO is for Frontier as a company not Elite Dangerous as a game - people investing in Frontier get no say in how a game is developed.

ED is also not the only game they produce under their label or indeed develop and test for other companies. The funding model is far more than just ED alone. They are indie for this title, but they aren't a group of 5 guys in someone's bedroom trying to throw out their first title.

From what I can see they are doing an excellent job so far especially considering the amount of time and effort they are putting into responding to the backers (more than any game I have ever seen before).

Do you have access to the DDF archives on the Private Backers forum? I think a lot of your concerns have been adequately explained in those posts some time ago. If you haven't read them, its worth Jonty-ing up to do so.

To be honest (and it may be that you haven't been party to the development notes and changes so far since KS finished) your comments seem a little condescending.
 
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laforge

L
Time dilation effects are completely out of question; not only would you have to include space contraction effects to make everything consistent (so write a brand new 3D engine), but the FSD is the only drive which would get you close to these speeds to see any effect. And the FSD is pure sci-fi in its nature, so there is no theory in what way time dilation and space contraction will have an effect on ships driving with FSD. So it is pointless to include special relativity in the game. We could be happy if we get Newtonian physics for 'low' speeds.

edit: i think it is impossible to implement sr in a game consistently, because at sufficiently high speed wrt. the stars your ship could travel through the entire galaxy in a few minutes of your eigentime (because the distances are contracted in your frame), but you still travel at close c through the galaxy from the view of someone at rest and therefore need several thousand years in his frame. How should this be incorporated consistently in a game?

The only effect of special relativity which currently come to my mind which may be included in a game are the visuals when you exit or enter the FSD. The starfield you will see when close to relativistic speeds (relative to the stars) will shrink to the forward view. At the same time, stars who were in forward direction are also blueshifted, while stars in the back are redshifted. The subject is complicated enough: http://www.exo.net/~pauld/stars/PD_images_relativ.html
 
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Zplintz

Zplintz
FD have already stated that there will be no time-dilation in-game. It's a non-issue.

(I am sure I could fit in more '-'s into that sentence somehow ;).
 

lysander

lysander
Voyager_NL said:
Question: how do you plan to sync a game that is set in 3300AD to current NTP?

Other than that... your post is quiet incomprehensible. Maybe you could elaborate on what exactly you are affraid of and what exactly your whishes are?

Cheers!
Click to expand...

ROTFLMAO

This one made me think.
 

Bounder

Bounder
If it's any consolation i also wish relativity was implemented, however i think it would be ideal to go the whole hog, time dilation, the works...

Rationale:

Instancing could be based on players' respective clock synchronisations.

The manuals could give noobs a brief primer on relativity, and ship computers could also give the pilot alerts, to ensure players understood the consequences of accelerating to very high speeds.

This way, they would be making an informed decision, knowing fully well that their clock was going to drift compared to everyone else's, and by how much.

So time-travelling players would know they were reducing their chances of meeting other players, and opportunities for PVP etc. However presumably there'd be enough people doing so that there would still be some probability of crossing timelines with other adventurers.. Such encounters would be all the more engaging given the circumstances.

Best of all, the whole galaxy would be able to evolve procedurally - across decades, centuries, milllenia up to stellar epochs and beyond... Hence the sights to be seen and discovered would depend as much on when you were, as where...

This i believe has to be the logical conclusion of a fully procedurally-generated environment.


I'm sure only the dullest sycophants would think that was anything less than ubercool.

I suspect, though, that we may have to wait for the next iteration of the game.. or else, someone other than Frontier, to make it...
 

Bounder

Bounder
laforge said:
It is unfortunately impossible to implement SR in a multiplayer game.
Click to expand...
Obviously the EM interaction can be largely skimmed over, but when i say all relativity i mean GR too, the whole shebang. Instancing can be based on relative clock syncs, and ditto for causal branches. And anyway, i think most folks would be willing to overlook a few fudges or plot devices if that were necessary to enrich the MP density - the extra depth added by being able to also explore the time dimension would be worth any concessions to strict causality, imho.. so for example each individual game could keep a cache of history to share and base MP instancing upon, and NPC's could replace player avatars without impinging on the actual player's status.


Yes, it gets complicated, but the rules are simple enough... and computers are good at this stuff, even if we're not..
 

Aewarin Jameson

Aewarin Jameson
lysander said:
This one made me think.
Click to expand...

Please do .. and consider starting the post again as to me it was just random.

Bounder said:
Yes, it gets complicated, but the rules are simple enough...
Click to expand...

I presume when you hit relativistic speeds your clock would slow down ? (Presuming this due to the analogy of going to Alpha-C and back and your younger brother is now older than you - I understand what Relativity is but not it's finer details)

If I travel around to a couple of star systems whilst my friend is waiting in space dock .. would that mean he would have to wait around even further for my clock to catch up so we could group once I get back ?
 

Styggron

S
It is a pity that on Single Player offline there is no star dreamer. It would be nice to watch sunsets, orbits etc like I do on FE2.
 

Aewarin Jameson

Aewarin Jameson
Styggron said:
It is a pity that on Single Player offline there is no star dreamer. It would be nice to watch sunsets, orbits etc like I do on FE2.
Click to expand...

Hold the faith Styggron .. Single player will be reverse engineered by some clever people and a mod released to add one - almost guarantee it ;)
 

laforge

L
Bounder said:
Obviously the EM interaction can be largely skimmed over, but when i say all relativity i mean GR too, the whole shebang. Instancing can be based on relative clock syncs, and ditto for causal branches.
Click to expand...
Implementing SR is impossible and i am not even talking about GR, because you can not implement time dilation. You can sit on earth and your friend would be traveling at high speed in 5min through the galaxy in his eigentime, but you would have to wait 100.000 years in your eigentime on earth until he would reach his destination. On his PC he would already be there, but you could - lets say at day 3 of your eigentime - get bored and start your engines and accelerate to a higher velocity to catch him, finally you catch him in - lets say day 10 - of your eigentime and shot him down. So he would never have reached his destination. But on his PC he is already there. So it is impossible to implement SR in a multiplayer game because you can not implement time dilation.
 

roryscarlett

roryscarlett
I think in Relativity terms, you would see your clock still ticking away at 60 seconds per minute just as it always has. Everybody else (from their point of view) would see you clock speed up/slow down! I don't want to get too bogged down in special Relativity, but its all about from where you are watching from.

The classic analogy is of two twins on Earth. One is an astronaut, one is not. The astronaut twin flies off into space travelling at very high speeds. On Earth 5 years pass. In space the Astronaut also EXPERIENCES 5 years, but because he was travelling much faster, less time has passed for the astronaut compared to his twin on Earth, the twin astronaut is younger, relatively. It's all relative you see :D

Does that make sense?
 
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