Why is anyone surprised by this? I mean you're going through a loading screen every time you enter and exit super cruise anyway... should be used to Elite's instanced nature by now, but as it seems it is a by-product of multiplayer OR is a by-product of technology itself, No other game does what elite does and if there is one (independence war 2 I am looking at you) it is only seamless because of some smart technical things the dev did. Why FDEV didn't do what Sony online entertainment did with planetside 2 is beyond me, but this is the unfortunate technical aspect of elite.
Supercruising to another star system reveals design flaws
- Thread starter Vatox
- Start date
Well, I'm not sure having 400 billion stars to scale with all their planetary bodies and all of the other stuff that makes up our galaxy loaded up constantly, even with a draw distance feature, would even be possible without some next level super computer.
I mean, it takes hours, days, months and even years to travel interstellar distances even at speeds 1000 times that of light. And space is big, real big. Even galaxies that are multiple times the size of ours are just a dot among the vast abyss that is our universe.
That might explain it perhaps ahah.
I mean, it takes hours, days, months and even years to travel interstellar distances even at speeds 1000 times that of light. And space is big, real big. Even galaxies that are multiple times the size of ours are just a dot among the vast abyss that is our universe.
That might explain it perhaps ahah.
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This isn't due to multiplayer nor is it technically impossible to make it "seamless" if they wanted to. It has to do with how loading is currently handled. Loading in a system in smaller steps with a more complex LOD system in place would make it seamless, but that would still take up some dev time to implement. Dev time that at this point is better used on other things since this functionallity would add very little to the gameplay at this point in time. What people perceive as "seamless" is never truly seamless. It's all just clever tricks with LOD systems and assets being streamed in in realtime.
All this is is people creating "problems" where no problems exist. The hyper jump from one star to another is the loading screen for that system. If you don't load it you can't get to it. It's like in any other game where you use noclip mode to run through a door to the next level without clearing the level before it first. All you'll see is greyness or blackness.
So what's the problem? Are you saying you want to travel 9 hours from one system to another and for everything to be loaded and in tact as if you had just hyperspaced there? If so, why? Why would you feel underwhelmed?
So what's the problem? Are you saying you want to travel 9 hours from one system to another and for everything to be loaded and in tact as if you had just hyperspaced there? If so, why? Why would you feel underwhelmed?
Or they could have, you know, used it for... oh, I dunno, actual exploration?
Exploring what exactly?
Even if they put thing like rogue planets in the game, there is about a 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 chance, and that's probably being fair, that you'd bump into one.
Space is big. It's hardly a terrible decision to limit resource usage for gameplay reasons, in order to cut out 9 hours of nothing.
Ok then, what would be better? You have to consider the scale of space.
How else are you going to travel between planets?
Stellar objects aren't instanced, neither are stations-- because if you fall out of SC early and the station is still a long way out-- you can travel to it in normal space.
It's also the case that you can selectively fall out of SC at the edge of a ring system.
Don't agree with the premise of the OP that the way systems are instanced, with hyperspace (loading) screen, constitutes a design flaw. I don't agree either though with other posts, that interstellar supercruising should be ignored as a pointless exercise. Near galaxy centre, or in clusters, it isn't a 9 hour flight, and can easily be less than 0.5ly system to system.
For want of a better expression it is galaxy-breaking, not to be able to cover a journey in SC that you can achieve in Hyperspace. HS is much quicker, but you are still traveling across real space. If you can get there on a fuel tank, then there MUST be a star system there when you arrive in supercruise IMO.
This feature has been requested before and is slated by developers as desirable, if lower down the development priority list. I'm looking forward to it being added, so the OP gets my +1.
For want of a better expression it is galaxy-breaking, not to be able to cover a journey in SC that you can achieve in Hyperspace. HS is much quicker, but you are still traveling across real space. If you can get there on a fuel tank, then there MUST be a star system there when you arrive in supercruise IMO.
This feature has been requested before and is slated by developers as desirable, if lower down the development priority list. I'm looking forward to it being added, so the OP gets my +1.
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Another old original player dumbfounded by the design. Yes it is dumbfounding, and breaks any aspect of this version equaling the immersion and scale of the original done on a much older PC. But that's what FD has given us. Like someone else said, just ignore the man behind the curtain. That immersion is there, but harder to find.
You have to use your imagination.
Interesting. In the past I've more or less dismissed this as an irrelevance, but now that you've pointed out the system density in the core I can understand what an issue it might be. I was certainly wrong to dismiss it.
I posited in another thread a while back that it might be possible to fake interstellar supercruise by loading assets one-by-one from the system towards which the player is flying, and tweaking the skybox to account for parallax movement of other nearby stars. But I was thinking in terms of a handful of systems 5 or more light years apart, not thousands of them all on top of each other.
Definitely not an easy fix.
I don't know, my ONLY problem with Supercruise is that it is Frame shifting on a smaller scale but wouldn't work (from what I am understanding frame shifting to be) like they have it implemented. Personally I think they could have easily fixed it by removing canopies from the ships and instead having your view be a projected view based on internal sensor data, and it would make more sense. Let me explain.
From my understanding Frame Shifting is essentially using Einstein's Theory of Relativity that the result of an action taken is dependent on your frame of reference. So that if you drop a ball out of the window of say a moving car, to you, the dropper, it appears to fall straight down, while to someone observing from outside the vehicle it moves downward in an arc. Thus Frame Shifting is such that the frame of reference of the actual distance between two points (let us say your location and a Nav Beacon in another system) is (the O's being systems or points):
O............................................O
And then the frame of refernce is shifted so that it becomes:
OO
Thus you move from point A to Point B and then shift the frame of reference for travel back down to normal space. Kind of like the further you zoom a map out by the shorter the distances appear to become, of course again this is just me making it up by using the logic of the name and what it appears to do. The problem arises in that in system frame shifting would essentially be the same thing except simply not zooming out so far so it is more controllable and only in the "relativly" local area. The problem is you would not be seeing things outside the canopy as you do, it would appear more similar to a jump space as again you are changing the points of reference to a higher "plane" if you will.
Thus why I think it would have been better if the canopies on the outside of the ship were non-existant and your piloting canopy view on the inside were instead said to be real time rendered views generated from gathered sensor data, thus allowing the computer of the ship to "fake" the faster than light speed (which in my mind isn't actually occuring as that would then open up that by the time you jumped 50 light years only a few moments would have passed for you while much longer may have passed for everyone else, a shift of reference makes more sense). Course with an interior computer canopy/view rendering it gives the awesome chance to get your view knocked out in combat and having to fly by instruments alone which I think would be awesome. Course it is also more realistic that they would bury the ship's cockpit in the center of the ships mass rather than the edge and use rendering based on sensor data to improve the preservation of the crew's life.
Course again this is just my 2 cents and it is a little late to change it.
From my understanding Frame Shifting is essentially using Einstein's Theory of Relativity that the result of an action taken is dependent on your frame of reference. So that if you drop a ball out of the window of say a moving car, to you, the dropper, it appears to fall straight down, while to someone observing from outside the vehicle it moves downward in an arc. Thus Frame Shifting is such that the frame of reference of the actual distance between two points (let us say your location and a Nav Beacon in another system) is (the O's being systems or points):
O............................................O
And then the frame of refernce is shifted so that it becomes:
OO
Thus you move from point A to Point B and then shift the frame of reference for travel back down to normal space. Kind of like the further you zoom a map out by the shorter the distances appear to become, of course again this is just me making it up by using the logic of the name and what it appears to do. The problem arises in that in system frame shifting would essentially be the same thing except simply not zooming out so far so it is more controllable and only in the "relativly" local area. The problem is you would not be seeing things outside the canopy as you do, it would appear more similar to a jump space as again you are changing the points of reference to a higher "plane" if you will.
Thus why I think it would have been better if the canopies on the outside of the ship were non-existant and your piloting canopy view on the inside were instead said to be real time rendered views generated from gathered sensor data, thus allowing the computer of the ship to "fake" the faster than light speed (which in my mind isn't actually occuring as that would then open up that by the time you jumped 50 light years only a few moments would have passed for you while much longer may have passed for everyone else, a shift of reference makes more sense). Course with an interior computer canopy/view rendering it gives the awesome chance to get your view knocked out in combat and having to fly by instruments alone which I think would be awesome. Course it is also more realistic that they would bury the ship's cockpit in the center of the ships mass rather than the edge and use rendering based on sensor data to improve the preservation of the crew's life.
Course again this is just my 2 cents and it is a little late to change it.
Definitely not an easy fix.
Don't be too downhearted Cmdr
.. for example, I don't think it would be too bad from a gameplay point of view if you were asked to target the system you wanted to supercruise to in the Galaxy map. Not only would you get a beacon to aim for, the game would have a way of knowing that approaching half distance between the system it knows your in, and your destination. It can then switch instance with some background loading, while you're miles from either place and don't really have a point of reference. As for paralax in skybox, on a galactic scale, with the exception of these two local stars (see next), paralax ought to be more or less negligible? "Free roaming" (without targeting, and with the game picking automatically that you're in the influence of a new star system) is a bit more challenging from an instance switching point of view but I think it's still possible. From what I've seen (although not 100% certain) I think the skybox is generated from the galaxy map (or vice versa) and that they are linked enough to inform the game of your galactic coordinate between stars, from your stellar coordinate, and from that star system's known position/ origin. As you depart/ arrive at a system, galactic coordinate only needs a resolution that's "close enough," to feed you into the new system, with background loading, more or less in the right place.
I think that's right, but it's still basically impossible to travel faster than light without some pretty exotic Physics. For the purpose of ED, frame-shift is a bit of madeup-ness that allows us to travel the HUGE distances without "speeding up time" (which other Elite games did) instead by going faster than light. In FE2 the "star dreamer" doubled, multiplied by four, x8 , x16 "time" (so the journey days (subluminal) passed more quickly. That couldn't be for ED because of multiplayer .. it would look I was typing REALLY quickly!
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Elite Dangerous already has seamless travel WITH multiplayer instancing. The very fact that people are travelling to these distance stars prooves it works. The only drawback (currently) is the skybox doesn't get re-rendered and any local assets do not get loaded. The journey itself still worked and the engine coped.
So anyone saying its an engine limitation or a multiplayer limitation are just wrong. Frontier did this just because they need a loading screen for the skybox and asset loading. This gives me hope that a solution going forward could be possible.
Computers don't need to load everything to have an infinite seamless space. Look at Minecraft for a very basic understanding of that concept.
So anyone saying its an engine limitation or a multiplayer limitation are just wrong. Frontier did this just because they need a loading screen for the skybox and asset loading. This gives me hope that a solution going forward could be possible.
Computers don't need to load everything to have an infinite seamless space. Look at Minecraft for a very basic understanding of that concept.
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so many times talked through...
I can't imagine that rendering the view of the galaxy from your position within that galaxy - the skybox - can exactly be computationally cheap.
It would be interesting to know just how much of the hyperspace time is actually taken with that render though, not that I expect it to ever be released (not do I expect it to be released).
It would be interesting to know just how much of the hyperspace time is actually taken with that render though, not that I expect it to ever be released (not do I expect it to be released).
the galaxy map is a good indicator.
Look at how much it is actually processing, when you zoom in and out you see dense squares and clear borders.
Now recognize the lag and also that "only" stars and nebulas are being shown....you get the idea.