Supercruise - Why?

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Deleted member 94277

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First of all, I love this game. Seriously. I've played nothing but ED in the last few weeks and I cleared my save today just so I could enjoy the early game hours again. Of course I know many things can be improved and that eventually with more gameplay content being added this will be a great universe to get lost in. Even though it saddens me that those will probably come as paid expansions/DLC (and because this game is REALLY expensive here in Brazil) I understand that such are the times we live in and I'm kind of looking forward to it - I'll gladly pay for them. Also, despite a bunch of design choices I disagree with, I learned to enjoy even those, as they fit together nicely in ED's universe and setting.

Except for supercruise. I hate it. Hate, hate, hate it.

If one day I stop playing ED, is because of supercruise. As I bought the game after launch I didn't followed the developing process but I seriously cannot understand how supercruise ended as the mandatory way of travel in-system. At first I thought that there was some design reason behind it, I even found this little gem in older posts that gave me some hope, but after hours digging in the forum to try and understand why this atrocious thing was left in the game to no avail, I was baffled. Of course, I can understand some players liking it, hell, it even makes sense that explorers have to do it (even so the way that Supercruise is presented is ridiculous: you can't see things normaly travelling at the speed of light or above it, photons that hit your retina travel slower than you - but I digress) but I cannot believe I'm the only one who wish that it was possible to simply jump in Hyperdrive to discovered planets/stations. I get that some players like sightseeing; fine, then explorer ships could be lighter and faster, able to reach really high speeds that are not FTL, and they would sightsee the hell of the galaxy, leaving us, BH and traders to jump around. Hell, I don't know. Anything would be better than Supercruise - literally, even if SC was to be stay exactly as it is, with micro-jumps, it would be better. People always go on about how there's no perfect game and such, well, I feel that ED could be perfect when all promised content are added - and supercruise removed.

But I didn't created this thread just to rant. I honestly would like to ask the community why? What gives? Does the majority of players like Supercruising around? Was there, at some point during development, any questioning about it, like someone saying that it was boring, lacking realism or anything? I mean, it does break many of laws of physics. Is there any plans to add the possibility of micro-jumps or (what I feel would be better) free jumping between celestial bodies? Can I hope for one day being able to jump directly to a station in my jump range or should I just resignate myself to how things are now?

EDIT:
It's clear that most of the community actually claimed for supercruise and, therefore, I feel like I'm overruled and there's no sense in arguing for some change to it; chances are that's not going to happen. So, I better get used to it. But it seems that most people didn't understood my beef with supercruise, so I feel the need to clarify: I'm not against it because it's boring, I'm against it because the way it's presented is unrealistic. FTL travel is simply impossible unless using some method of hyperdrive or wormhole mechanic. Even if it was possible, you would be travelling faster than light, as in 'the very mechanism that allows us to see anything'. We'd be out running photons and as I said elsewhere, assuming that we're in some kind of 'bubble' when SC is on, we'd only be able to clearly see inside our ship or the immediate outside; everything else would be really distorted or not seen at all. This is not simply a personal thing: this is a fact.

Now, personally, I'd prefer a realistic game. Micro-jumps or POI hoping are both bad, both destroy freedom of travelling, but they are more realistic. The ideal, obviously, would be a kind of coordinate system of travelling, were you're actually in a place in space in any given time, travelling FTL in hyperdrive through space. FDev claimed that this would be hard to achieve from a technical perspective, but I think the real problem was the multiplayer component, since from a normal space frame of reverence, someone in hyperdrive would be nearly invisible - so, so long interdictions. So long protracted, close encounters, space combat. The only real combat would happen around planets and stations (I find that much more interesting, but that's me). People say it would kill exploration, I can't see how it could: instead of finding a celestial body and waiting a few minutes to reach it, you'd do it instantly. Same thing, only faster. How does this kill exploration? What in fact micro-jumps kill is sightseeing. Is this what you're saying, that sightseeing=exploration?

Anyway, I must point out that I know when I'm defeated and, to be honest, SC is here to stay. As I said, I must get used to it, or get out. If you feel this discussion - hating on SC - is pointless because of it, by all means, go to the next thread.
 
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I don't like super cruise but what other option is there. Micro jumping and hyperdrive just lets you insta teleport wherever you want. That means distances become blurred and its hard to tell how far your travelling + interdiction is impossible.
Super cruise has to stay in afraid, its like 80% of the game, you spend more time in super cruise than anywhere else, especially if your exploring.

I would prefer if they increased super cruise speeds so you didn't have to be in at as long, or add in galnet to ships or something so it's less boring.

But it cannot be scrapped, its a major portion of the game unfortunately.
 
I personally love SC - it's where the action is. Add to that the immersive qualities - the gradual change in the visual makes me feel like I'm truly flying from planet to planet, and not just going from room to room.

I do wish the flow from SC to normal space was more seemless, but I can accept that there's technical limitations behind it. If there is a solution, however, I trust FD will find it some day.

- - - Updated - - -

... or add in galnet to ships or something so it's less boring...

Granted, coming soon to a galaxy near you :)

Not that I know how I'll find the time to read it, though...
 

Deleted member 94277

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I don't like super cruise but what other option is there. Micro jumping and hyperdrive just lets you insta teleport wherever you want. That means distances become blurred and its hard to tell how far your travelling + interdiction is impossible.
Super cruise has to stay in afraid, its like 80% of the game, you spend more time in super cruise than anywhere else, especially if your exploring.
I would prefer if they increased super cruise speeds so you didn't have to be in at as long, or add in galnet to ships or something so it's less boring.
But it cannot be scrapped, its a major portion of the game unfortunately.

It doesn't have - actually it shouldn't have - to be instantaneous. Let's say something in the order of anything between 5 to 30 seconds per jump, depending on distance; maybe even more. And there could be still some kind of superspeed traveling that still has subluminar speed, like 2/3 of it. It's useless to travel between planets, but say that a station is the same distance from a planet that the moon is from the Earth - at 0.5 c it's just a three second ride. A station that is placed ten times farther still would be just 30 seconds in 0.5 c. Said subluminar supercruise could be much slower than light and still have some uses. I see no reason for interdiction to be left out, it could be used as it is now, just instead of removing people of a superluminal supercruise, it would remove them from a subluminal one. Same thing. More realism. Actually, this is my real problem with supercruise, it's too unrealistic.

I personally love SC - it's where the action is. Add to that the immersive qualities - the gradual change in the visual makes me feel like I'm truly flying from planet to planet, and not just going from room to room.
I do wish the flow from SC to normal space was more seemless, but I can accept that there's technical limitations behind it. If there is a solution, however, I trust FD will find it some day.

But would you object to a micro-jump mechanic? As in, leave SC the way it is, but add the ability to jump directly to a planet/moon/station (if it's already discovered, that is)?
 
I like it. What else would provide the depth of the galaxy? Simply jumping into places would ruin immersion. Have you not noticed how the galaxy background changes when you are moving around the galaxy? I find places to go by noticing a persistent object in supercruise - "oh what is that bright star", "what is that cloudy stuff", "check out that bright line of stars" - then you go look at the galaxy map and find that said object and head that way. Simply jumping about would ruin the depth. I wanted a hard-core simulation - not Wing Commander/X-wing
 
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I personally love SC - it's where the action is. Add to that the immersive qualities - the gradual change in the visual makes me feel like I'm truly flying from planet to planet, and not just going from room to room.

I do wish the flow from SC to normal space was more seemless, but I can accept that there's technical limitations behind it. If there is a solution, however, I trust FD will find it some day.

I agree, it truly helps to add scale to the system. If it was possible I'd love to see something a bit more like the jump effect from the Capital Ship video as the entry/exit for supercruise.
 
This is the 5.7 quadrillionth thread about this topic, going aaaalll the way back to the DDF before this was even a pile of code.

Microjumps were the original proposed travel method. Then many people rightly pointed out the total waste of time making the entire galaxy to scale if you never actually traveled through ANY of it ever.
 
I won't lie. I could do without the 17 minute 373,000LS journey across the same system just to go to another starport.
 
I love SC! It conveys the necessity of speed, distance, and time that is otherwise lacking in any other mode of instant teleport transport. It is a BRILLIANT way to help the player gauge the Vastness of Awesomeness of Space. Zooming in towards planets and mini systems is breathtaking with the awe inspiring dramatic music and sound effects that make you feel like you could loose control if you dare to blink. I find my heart starting to race when the SC engine sound effects change pitch to the point it almost feels like any second your brain might just explode. LOL.

I love it,and honestly, if it was removed I would never feel the same about ED ever again.
 
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I won't lie. I could do without the 17 minute 373,000LS journey across the same system just to go to another starport.

So - use another port closer? <- not trying to be an but I guess that is a question. You can purchase system information or 'honk' the system to know prior to committing. So you only have to travel if you haven't explored prior - which is avoidable if wanted.
 
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I quite agree with OP, supercruise is awful. Torus Jump drive from original elite was sooo much better. However, given the now real galaxy with realistic bodies and distance and the awful inevitability of multiplayer, Supercruise really is a very necessary evil unless you want to go full Newtonian and have everyone wazzing about at mental speeds in an uncontrolled fashion with crappy Frontier style gameplay. As much as I hate it, it really is the best compromise to glue together the gameplay facets.
 
I love supercruise and if was removed to be replaced by microjumps I would stop play ED.

I guess it's an option but I don't think it's reasonable to have to do that. The game should limit time wasters with no purpose such as that one. There's several ways to do so, I won't even choose a specific one.
 
I won't lie. I could do without the 17 minute 373,000LS journey across the same system just to go to another starport.

I usually mark stations like that in my logs as "Secondary Star" or "Huttonesque", so I don't accidentally them in my plans unless I REALLY need to get there.
 

Deleted member 94277

D
I imagined people love it, but you guys do realize that if we're travelling faster than light, we shouldn't be able to see anything, right? As I said, what we see are photons reaching nerves inside our eyeballs. Assuming our ship is in some kind of hyperdrive bubble, we should be able to see our ship and things inside it, but anything outside of it should appear severelly distorted, if at all. We're literally out racing what we see. This is why I hate it: it's unrealistic and not immersive, if you understand your physics. As I said, even tough it is boring, I wouldn't mind if it was well, even more boring but realistic, without the impossible visual representation of the universe outside.
 
Here is the very first official reference to what could be termed the birth of SuperCruise... a discussion item about "Point Of Interest" (POI) based game architecture... April 2013...


Quoting Mike Evans, Burning Question Answers Part 1

1. Is the POI-instance "teleport*" system set in stone? i.e. is this a design decision, or a technical limitation that forces the design.

All design decisions are inherently technically limited to some degree or another. The real issue here is the multiplayer aspect. That is the limitation being worked around more than anything. Also a POI based travel model is considerably easier to design and code then even the simplest and limited form of manual flight which is why we’re proposing such a system for the time being.

2. If the system will be in place as written, will the single player version also have that limitation, or will (can) it feature a more traditional Elite fast travel system where you do actually fly through the space between POIs and have encounters there?

Single player offline will work exactly the same way as multiplayer for obvious reasons. Yes it could be made different but what you’re basically asking for is for two different games to be designed and made at the same time which we’re not going to do. Single player offline is not the main focus of development. It’ll be just the same as whatever we come up with for online sans the galactic evolution and multiplayer aspects.

Can a player select a POI that is in fact empty space? For example they might want to fly out to some indeterminate part of the system if only to have a gander at that part of the system.

So this is an avenue to open up the current proposal to add more freedom to it. The difficulty here is coming up with a good way to actually select an arbitrary point in space to fly to in the first place! The secondary concern is that it’s all very well going to some point in space but given that there will most likely be nothing to do there other than admire the slightly different background do we want players to actually be able to meet up at these arbitrary places and how do we go about doing that? What are the ramifications for players able to meet up in the void or travel via random points? If npcs were to show up despite you picking a random point in space would that annoy you?

Seems a bit limiting to only allow players to fly to parts then know, otherwise how will they ever discover new things by accident?

Discovering new POI are based around explorer game play such as scanning and triangulating return signals to locate things and sending off probes etc. If you accidentally discover things then that kind of diminishes the value of being an explorer. Explorers discover things because they’re actively trying to and other players can benefit from these discoveries.

Within the current proposal, will the player be able to define ans save his/her own private POI's and then share these. Essentially saving and sharing grid coordinates within a system.

See the answer above. If this is something we want to pursue then I see no reason why we couldn’t store such POI targets.


more...

So some clarifications that may help you guys see why we proposed something so counter to what you guys want:

* Within a session we're dealing with a speed limit of around 500m/s relative to the reference frame. So at most you'll be able to fly at 1000m/s relative to another moving object if you're both going directly away from each other.

* With the above limitation you can certainly try to fly to the moon from low earth orbit but it'll take you hundreds of hours to do so! Imagine how long it would take to get to another planet. So although the engine can handle that no one in their right mind would try it.

* In our proposal and in any alternative when a player is travelling faster than the speed limit above we have to take them out of the reality of the game as it was in a session. They're out of session at this time and when they return to normal flight speed the server on our end needs to do the hand shaking and session matching it needs to do to get the player back into the games reality.

* Doing point to point helps the above in that all that handshaking can be done immediately and the player can be shown an appropriate visual effect which again can be pre-calculated immediately. Manually being able to alter the route means compromises will need to be made in the visual department and in the server handshaking which can only happen once the player has either chosen to stop or selected a poi somehow during the flight.

* A manual flight system is possible but its very hard to do both technically and designing all the systems to allow players to use such a system effectively as well. However even if we did such a model yet wanted to have some concept of an autopilot that could handle it for you (like in our proposal) it almost defeats the point in all the extra work because only a small portion of players will want to use it along with the fact that the autopilot does exactly the same thing only more efficiently. A manual travel model almost dictates that it should be the only way to fast travel between things in my opinion.

more...

Firstly Eve and Elite are completely different games even if the in system travel were exactly the same.

Secondly we're not designing this game to force players together at every opportunity to the detriment of any other mechanic. The thing is though if we didn't do anything to add choke points into the game players would never see anyone else ever except when leaving and entering a space station. Now this game is going to be multiplayer, it's what was promised and its what's going to happen. So if we don't have mechanisms in place to allow chance encountering it seems a big waste of time making this a multiplayer game in the first place.

So you'll have to deal with a little bottlenecking in places other than at stations because the alternative would result in an extremely lonely place in terms of human to human contact which would be incredibly odd compared to the fact that you'll be running into npc ships all the time as they can be created on the fly when they're needed.

Finally this is a proposal. There is nothing preventing us from changing the proposal. We're not locked into doing point to point but there is a very good reason we're proposing it. Doing anything else is considerably harder to do technically (both difficult to do and will take much longer to implement and test) for very little gain in terms of game play other than it feels nice to have control when going from a to b rather than not.

Any additional game play added to make it justifiable adds it's own complexity to the equation as the player doesn't actually exist in a session and we're actively trying to minimise the communication required between player and server to just the handshaking session management. So being able to discover things that exist in the universe that all players are in that could be found by proximity during manual flight involve some heavy bandwidth usage in terms of telling the server "I'm here now, is there anything interesting to discover" repeatedly as you fly about at silly high speeds. Now these could be instances created for the player only on their machine but then do we want other players to come see the discovery too? How do we explain why it's not known to other players? If we give the client too much control here we open up a variety of hacking exploits also.

People need to be aware that when we propose something like this it's not because we're being lazy or that we're trying to arbitrarily limit what the player can do or that we actually want to do the same thing as everyone else. There is a reason most space based games do the whole corridor and room thing because it's damn hard to do it any other way for very little to gain when the actual fun game play is had in the proverbial rooms. This is made even more difficult when we add in multiplayer to the mix.

We've had many long and hard discussions about having a manual fast travel option and we know how we'd like to do it (technical difficulties aside) it's just whether we can justify it for release (which is unlikely). If we decide we want to do this at a later date then it gets harder to justify because it needs to mesh well with the existing system (whatever that becomes).

Hope that helps justify things a bit.


There's a lot to be learned by jumping through the "Frontier icon" (top right) developer posts in that thread!
 
I won't lie. I could do without the 17 minute 373,000LS journey across the same system just to go to another starport.

I think this may have less to do with the SC mechanic and more with the proposal that hyper jumps be allowed to secondary, tertiary stars in a system. Intra-System Stars that are otherwise too far to make SC convenient. SC should still be used as the primary system (local) mode of transport IMO. I think most of these gigantic SC distances are when traveling from a nav point to planets, stations and locations that are part of a secondary, tertiary, etc star's area.

BTW, Hutton orbital in Alpha Centauri is .22 LY from the nav point and takes approx. 40 minutes in SC so I hear :eek:

It has been discussed in another thread I found that nav points are not jump markers (something I was not aware of), but are information beacons containing system station coordinates and IF that being the case, hyper jumping to systems non-primary stars was something that may be incorporated. I'm sure there are many more (other) threads on this topic.

Here is a thread that touched on this topic:


So... who laid all the .nav beacons?
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=149585
 
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It's not an arcade game. Supercruise is fine and much better than it was now that you can see the distance of a station from the entry star. You can choose whether you want to travel for several minutes to a far distant station or go elsewhere. It's rare that you have to spend more than 7 minutes in supercruise to get anywhere. And this game is more of a space sim.

Personally I don't have a problem with microjumps, but I think they should have a minimum range. As if a certain amount of energy needs to be spent to get the jump started which means that you can't jump less than 20ls, you have to supercruise those short distances.
 
Except for supercruise. I hate it. Hate, hate, hate it.

The alternative offered at the time:

- Open your map
- Hot spots appear on them
- Click to "jump" to it
- You fly around normal space only

Is that what you would have preferred ?

That was FD's original idea - hot spots which meant no "freedom" to roam - and the DDF at the time unanimously said no thanks so FD came back with Super Cruise.

You're welcome ;)
 
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But would you object to a micro-jump mechanic? As in, leave SC the way it is, but add the ability to jump directly to a planet/moon/station (if it's already discovered, that is)?

I'm afraid I would, for purely selfish reasons. The action I referred to kinda needs other people to be in SC to be any fun.

Besides, the whole game is unrealistic. If it was realistic, I'd be sitting in meetings and traffic jams all day.
 
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