The current game play in that time frame isn't any better but doesn't provide the benefits.
The witchspace tunnel could still be used. But now you can navigate through it yourself.
System to system travel using SC rather than Hyperspace = Hypercruise?
- Thread starter babelfisch
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Another benefit is that you could choose where you enter the system since you no longer necessarily arrive at the star.
Exactly my thought with the system exclusion zone. You could drop in closer to Proxima Centauri coming from the right direction. But you'd always have a longer supercruise to the star, so that's not always beneficial.
X rebirth already has you on this one:
[video=youtube;EyDnQ48fNzU]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyDnQ48fNzU[/video]
Give it it's dues, it has the kind of transport system you are after i.e. a seamless transition between systems and areas. I.m also sure you can fly to these area's outside the highways too, if you really wanted.
[video=youtube;EyDnQ48fNzU]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyDnQ48fNzU[/video]
Give it it's dues, it has the kind of transport system you are after i.e. a seamless transition between systems and areas. I.m also sure you can fly to these area's outside the highways too, if you really wanted.
Not really, you cant fly at high speed where you want (which is what OP is after), only the highways are available and apart from the minigame they changed later there is no 'hazard' or risk of any kind. Its more limiting than what OP seems to want, its basically a mini-game version of hyperspace jumps.
Tbh, I prefer even X:R version of what we currently have, but that is because I'd probably favor anything over what we have.
I've thought about this since all the way back to the alpha days pre 1.0. Basically you want Star Trek "warp" type of travel rather than the current Battlestar Galactica "jump" travel.
It certainly has it's merits from a gameplay point of view. It would be much more immersive and could actually make traveling though space very interactive and engaging, even fun too. Also the hypercruise method makes implementing a "fog of war" on the galaxy much nicer too. I understand why Frontier went with the jump design though: instancing. Elite's multiplayer design of peer to peer and instancing unfortunately makes the hypercruise idea almost impossible to implement.
Still, it's a wonderful concept to dream about, for sure.
If there is a transition from super-cruise to "hyper-cruise" it would be a "loading screen". If there is no transition between super-cruise and "hyper-cruise" it would take quite some time to accelerate and if the acceleration is very fast it becomes a transition and therefore a "loading screen".
No, it would be nothing like that. There would be gravity wells when passing stars and the fact that you compare it to Hutton Orbital shows that you still don't get the concept
Gravity wells could make the stars "bigger" and resulting in a bit of maneuvering required, but at the same time it would make accelerating to hyper-cruise in a system complicated - in system hyper-cruise would have to be slower compared to outside the gravity well. Making it slower than current jumps.
And it would be like a typical trip through a system in super-cruise. There are gravity wells that require a bit of maneuvering to keep the speed up, but more or less it's flying in a straight line.
I think I understand what you want, I just think it won't work the way you imaging it (unless a completely new game is created).
Elite already has dynamic instancing. You can enter and exit the "instance" of another player in both normal space and super cruise by proximity. There is nothing new/different/impossible required.
The thread isn't about technical limitations, but still:
Instancing is actually a non issue. The game already uses island based instancing. When you are travelling in SC there is a bubble around every player ship, if the game puts you in the same instance gets decided when these bubbles meet, not when you jump to a system or perform a transition. At least that's hoe I remember it from one of the Dev videos. Could be that I only dreamed it though.
The technical limitations for the idea are next to zero, assets already get streamed, instancing is already island based. But that's not the topic
No, to me it sounds like you don't understand it.
There is so much potential gameplay benefits in unlocking a new more interactive mode of interstellar travel that it would be a crying shame if it never gets implemented. What we have just now is effectively analoguous to star treks warp drive for moving around systems in supercruise and akin to star wars hyper jump for moving between systems, what the OP is proposing is something akin to andromeda's slipstream method of travel and IMHO that could knit nicely with the current game.
Gameplay wise, it would be more interactive having to spend 30 minutes of flying dodging rapidly approaching stars following an onscreen vector indication (like interdiction minigame), rather than: [jump via loading screen, stare at witchspace animation for thirty seconds, blue tunnel into system, supercruise around star, blue tunnel into witchspace, rinse and repeat 30 times]
Furthermore, there could be a tie in with the design decision forum concept of hyperjump beacons that cosmicspacehead refers to, where we could only "hypercruise" into systems with a nav beacon, but players could witchspace into the unexplored systems, scan the system, and deploy a nav beacon loaded with all its cartographic data enabling future visitors to hypercruise to it. I think this could be used to create a new wave of exploration of our galaxy and could be tied into the exploration buff coming in the q4 update.
Hypercruise cannot be all milk and honey though, so there'd need to be penalties, I'd suggest if we used somethign like the interdiction minigame screen to control the heading, and had star sytems hurling towards the player, "deviation from the vector" ie losing the hypercruise minigame would pick up ship heat, and would destabilise the "hypercruise conduit" as indicated by the right hand progress bar moving upwards; if the right hand bar tops out the player would do an emergency stop with lots of heat plus hull and module damage, in essence they fluffed their hypercruise into a misjump. But if they were good at it, and kept on the vector indicated their left hand progress bar would climb, and they would be making progress faster than repeated witchspace/supercruise movements. So starting off they would be travelling at the same sort of pace in hypercruise as via witchspace jumps, roughly one kylie an hour, as they kept their ship on vector and their left hand progress bar went up that speed would increase, say maxing out at for a hypothetical value 5 kylies an hour. However if they fluff it they would lose speed and when they end up with only the bottom notch on their progress bar they would be travelling slower than witchspacing at say 0.1 kylies per hour.
Using those values above it would bring hypercruise potential speeds and therefore hypercruise journey times roughly in line with neutron highwaying, thus colonia which has been done in a matter of hours but only if the pilot is good based on colonia at twenty two kylies and five kylies per hour top speed giving it four and a bit hours theoretical minimum journey time...
https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/5l16tt/whats_your_speed_record_from_the_bubble_to/
Lore wise, we could twist it into the game that we borrowed / acquired technologies that enabled us to go from witchspace hyper jumps to hyper cruising long distances from the guardians or thargoids during the future narrative unfolding regarding the other two civilisations we know of in the galaxy.
Gameplay wise, it would be more interactive having to spend 30 minutes of flying dodging rapidly approaching stars following an onscreen vector indication (like interdiction minigame), rather than: [jump via loading screen, stare at witchspace animation for thirty seconds, blue tunnel into system, supercruise around star, blue tunnel into witchspace, rinse and repeat 30 times]
Furthermore, there could be a tie in with the design decision forum concept of hyperjump beacons that cosmicspacehead refers to, where we could only "hypercruise" into systems with a nav beacon, but players could witchspace into the unexplored systems, scan the system, and deploy a nav beacon loaded with all its cartographic data enabling future visitors to hypercruise to it. I think this could be used to create a new wave of exploration of our galaxy and could be tied into the exploration buff coming in the q4 update.
Hypercruise cannot be all milk and honey though, so there'd need to be penalties, I'd suggest if we used somethign like the interdiction minigame screen to control the heading, and had star sytems hurling towards the player, "deviation from the vector" ie losing the hypercruise minigame would pick up ship heat, and would destabilise the "hypercruise conduit" as indicated by the right hand progress bar moving upwards; if the right hand bar tops out the player would do an emergency stop with lots of heat plus hull and module damage, in essence they fluffed their hypercruise into a misjump. But if they were good at it, and kept on the vector indicated their left hand progress bar would climb, and they would be making progress faster than repeated witchspace/supercruise movements. So starting off they would be travelling at the same sort of pace in hypercruise as via witchspace jumps, roughly one kylie an hour, as they kept their ship on vector and their left hand progress bar went up that speed would increase, say maxing out at for a hypothetical value 5 kylies an hour. However if they fluff it they would lose speed and when they end up with only the bottom notch on their progress bar they would be travelling slower than witchspacing at say 0.1 kylies per hour.
Using those values above it would bring hypercruise potential speeds and therefore hypercruise journey times roughly in line with neutron highwaying, thus colonia which has been done in a matter of hours but only if the pilot is good based on colonia at twenty two kylies and five kylies per hour top speed giving it four and a bit hours theoretical minimum journey time...
https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/5l16tt/whats_your_speed_record_from_the_bubble_to/
Lore wise, we could twist it into the game that we borrowed / acquired technologies that enabled us to go from witchspace hyper jumps to hyper cruising long distances from the guardians or thargoids during the future narrative unfolding regarding the other two civilisations we know of in the galaxy.
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That's, of course, an idea that sounds very cool, but try to think about what it would mean in practice. Specifically, think about the distances involved. The distances in interstellar space are by several orders of magnitude larger than ones in interplanetary space. And not just a few orders, but like 6 or 7 or something like that.
Not a lot of games do this. MS Space Simulator from the 90's had it, but it employed real physics. No FTL nonsense there. You actually had to "wait" (time accelerate) through hundreds of thousands of years to get anywhere.
One light year is 9.4607 × 10^12 km (a number with 12 digits in it)
That's a whole load of emptiness to travel through. Sure, you can accelerate supercruise speeds to the point where that becomes a relative breeze but even then you'd need to have a tedious acceleration and deceleration phase not unlike what you have with signal sources now, where you're just staring at a dot while waiting for a number to count down. And a dot it will be, because of the distances. There will be even less to actually see than in current supercruise. It will just be more trucking through blackness. You will not even notice a lot of parallax in the background stars, since a hop between a couple of adjacent stars is such a tiny distance compared to the galactic scale. Maybe if we were allowed to make jumps 1000's of light years long in a single go... Nah that's crazy talk. (Technically, that might be doable by just adding another "hypercruise" instance layer to the current system and using the visualisation from the galaxy map without gutting and rewriting the entire engine. But it won't be seamless the way you're probably imagining)
Something simple that might work better to add spice to hyperjumps would be a "glide" similar to what we have with planet surfaces, letting you somewhat control where in a star system you drop out when coming out of hyperspace. Might make those multiple chained jumps a bit less tedious, instead of dropping out next to a star and having to supercruise around it, you could just "glide" around it and immediately queue for the next jump. You could maybe do away with the SC cooldown as well, if other ships are allowed to interdict you whilst in glide. Or the cooldown period would already start during the glide and you could high wake directly from glide.
Not a lot of games do this. MS Space Simulator from the 90's had it, but it employed real physics. No FTL nonsense there. You actually had to "wait" (time accelerate) through hundreds of thousands of years to get anywhere.
One light year is 9.4607 × 10^12 km (a number with 12 digits in it)
That's a whole load of emptiness to travel through. Sure, you can accelerate supercruise speeds to the point where that becomes a relative breeze but even then you'd need to have a tedious acceleration and deceleration phase not unlike what you have with signal sources now, where you're just staring at a dot while waiting for a number to count down. And a dot it will be, because of the distances. There will be even less to actually see than in current supercruise. It will just be more trucking through blackness. You will not even notice a lot of parallax in the background stars, since a hop between a couple of adjacent stars is such a tiny distance compared to the galactic scale. Maybe if we were allowed to make jumps 1000's of light years long in a single go... Nah that's crazy talk. (Technically, that might be doable by just adding another "hypercruise" instance layer to the current system and using the visualisation from the galaxy map without gutting and rewriting the entire engine. But it won't be seamless the way you're probably imagining)
Something simple that might work better to add spice to hyperjumps would be a "glide" similar to what we have with planet surfaces, letting you somewhat control where in a star system you drop out when coming out of hyperspace. Might make those multiple chained jumps a bit less tedious, instead of dropping out next to a star and having to supercruise around it, you could just "glide" around it and immediately queue for the next jump. You could maybe do away with the SC cooldown as well, if other ships are allowed to interdict you whilst in glide. Or the cooldown period would already start during the glide and you could high wake directly from glide.
I think it's a fantastic idea/dream. Done right, it would really let you feel the scale of the galaxy much better.
Also, I like how it would make "long range" mean "large fuel reserves" or "high fuel effeciency" and not the semi-arbitrary jump ranges we have now.
It's also the best way of introducing non star-tied space phenomena - rogue comets or asteroids, long-lost generation ships, etc.
Also, I like how it would make "long range" mean "large fuel reserves" or "high fuel effeciency" and not the semi-arbitrary jump ranges we have now.
It's also the best way of introducing non star-tied space phenomena - rogue comets or asteroids, long-lost generation ships, etc.
To be perfectly honest.. this would be my preferred mode of transport. Especially if there was something to do on my ship during the travel.
Plus.. you know.. we could have cool effects, like this:
[video=youtube;ENngZlLXDZc]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENngZlLXDZc&t=3s[/video]
Then you just slow down, pick a star and drop into it.. :3
Not exactly. A system is one instance, the players simply enter and exit their local view "bubble" as they supercruise around. However, when both of them jump into said system they enter an instance of that system. We see this all the time on exploration expeditions, three dozen players can all jump into the same system yet only 30 can be in there together at one time, the other six will be in an entirely different instance of the same system and no amount of supercruising around will get them all together. The limitations can be circumvented by manipulating wings and forcing players into the same instance in excess of 30, but often it results in poor performance. Elite's instances aren't truly dynamic, player space view distance just makes it appear to be sometimes.
The game is broken up into "rooms" or instances everywhere. The outside system space is one instance, every signal source is it's own instance, planet surfaces are their own instances, starport areas are instances, etc, and every one of them has transition screens to cross between each other. This subdivision of "rooms" would be the largest technical hurdle to implementing what the OP wants, the game currently just isn't designed to handle it. How would the game handle players flying together in hypercruise out and around the galaxy outside of the systems? It just can't now due to instancing and peer to peer.
If the architecture was server based like WoW with a truly singular shared open galaxy then hypercruise becomes much more possible. In a peer to peer galaxy though it would be near impossible to implement effectively.
Isn't that what we already do?
When the ship locks onto a star and spools up the FSD, it's also plotting a route through darkspace that avoids colliding with the gravity mass of other stars, black holes, comets, ect.
As colliding with any of these would cause your ship to be dragged out of hyperspace prematurely and in the middle of say, a star or black hole.
That's what made exploration so dangerous. If you were documenting an unknown route between two systems, chances were high that anything could happen to you.
Right now the biggest danger we have is exiting right between two binary stars in close proximity to each other.
The other problem is that SC has a limitation. You can only get up to lightspeed on it (okay so you can exceed the speed of light but it's meant for intrasystem travel so it doesn't need to go fast enough to cover lightyears in seconds. Just cover lightseconds between planets). Hyperspace exceeds lightspeed which is why we arrive in systems lightyears apart in seconds rather then years.
Frankly the current system is more realistic. You have dozens of thousands of ships all charting and recharting the same routes making them much safer even as they shift and move around to avoid systems changing position. Safe, reliable travel. That is the most important thing to a space civilization. If systems ever get cut off well... just look at WH40K as an example.
Now if one was outside civilized space in the Deep Black where systems are not charted as frequently one might find more frequent hyperspace failures dropping you out early and into some amazing/terrifying phenomina....
I like the idea of some places being trickier to navigate than others, like the Unknown Regions in Star Wars. However I think personally the novelty would wear off because I'm lazy
Yeah, no. Dav once explained this with an animated graphic on a live stream, babelfisch didn't dream it up.
Your local instancing "bubble" is much larger than your local view "bubble". The fact that instances still have a soft cap is completely unrelated. You do not only enter and exit them via space transitions.
You can test this by observing network traffic with ctrl+B, making a Hutton trip with a large group or even observing for how far you can still get normal space target info from a wing member.
No, it would be nothing like that. There would be gravity wells when passing stars and the fact that you compare it to Hutton Orbital shows that you still don't get the concept
Then please explain it to me.
How would accelerating to hyper-cruise work and how would it look like? How would it be different from the jump-animation (without the tunnel) and how would that be different from the look and feel of a loading screen?
How would the gravity wells in hyper-cruise affect accelerating to hyper-cruise while in a gravity-well (being in-system). Considering that space is really big, how big do you think those "hyper-cruise gravity wells" would be?
If there isn't a big difference between flying form Sol to Earht and flying from Sol to Alpha Centauri, how would hyper-cruise make traveling more interesting?
I always had the impression that super-cruise isn't exactly the most beloved feature in the game.
It would be like super cruise, which has no loading screens. Yes, super cruise isn't the most beloved feature in the game. But that doesn't mean it isn't better than honk-jumping. Also the reason many people don't like super cruise is because it takes quite a long time to reach certain destinations. Nobody has a problem using SC to reach a station a few ls away from the main star and I guess the same would be true when cruising to the next system wouldn't take longer than jumping to it. I would go even further and remove all transitions from the game: Seamlessly leave a station, accelerate to ludicrous speed, navigate, decelerate, navigate some more and arrive at the next station in a different system. If you can't agree that this would be awesome I don't know what else I could say.
PS
It would also be more interesting than super cruise because of the gravity wells of other stars. You are right that space is big and stars are sparse, but with increasing speeds it gets more likely that you pass them closely, requiring you to navigate around them. Is that the holy grail of game play? Nope. Is it better than looking at a loading screen? Yes.
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I prefer supercruising to wearing out the jump key / button...