time travel hyperdrive

[cheapbooks]

- it would be interesting to have a time travel device. when you engage the drive, you can travel through time, which might only be for a short time, maybe 1 hour to the future or 1 hour to the past, but it would allow you to correct mistakes you made.

- so when you buy the drive, you have a record of everything you do and everywhere you go, perhaps going back for the last hour. then you can engage the drive, aim it into the sun or wherever, and then you can return to a point where you were in the past.

- perhaps it can restore lost credits, restore lost cargo, restore your ship to a pre-existing condition, allow you to get out of a losing battle, or restart a battle.

- from the point of view of other players, you just suddenly disappear, leaving a time travel signature. they do not travel through time, only you do.

- you can travel into the future. to your locked destination for example, or if you have waypoints, to any of the future waypoints.

- there is a chance your cargo will become irradiated and therefor worthless.

- maybe you can only do 1 time warp before you have to refuel, and you can only stock 1 fuel rod. so you have to return to the station to get another fuel rod.

- here is a scenario. you get intradicted. it sets a marker for the place and time. a pirate starts shooting at you. you are down to 10% hull and about to die. you engage the time warp drive, and it brings you back to the location you were at when you were intradicted, at 100% health, so the battle is still raging, but now you are 100% health.

- you are being chased. you engage the drive, and it can only got a short distance in the future, but far enough that you are distant from those who are chasing you. you advance to where you would have been 30 seconds later, if you were going the same speed.

 

[Seboss]

100 000 players each using time travel devices simultaneously sure is going to cause interesting programming problems

 

[carlisle]

How on Earth does one travel one hour into the future in a real-time game? You'd have to actually time-travel to do that.

And what if you're happily flying across the galaxy in your souped up Anaconda when without warning a pirate goes back in time to when you had a Sidewinder and shoots you down; you're none the wiser until paff, Anaconda gone.

Although looking at the OP's previous posts, I'm pretty sure they are a troll. Each suggestion more ridiculous than the last. This is the person who argued that Elite Dangerous has too much storyline, and who didn't want FD wasting their time on the EVA expansion

 

[DannyLeigh]

How on Earth does one travel one hour into the future in a real-time game? You'd have to actually time-travel to do that.

And what if you're happily flying across the galaxy in your souped up Anaconda when without warning a pirate goes back in time to when you had a Sidewinder and shoots you down; you're none the wiser until paff, Anaconda gone.

^^^ This

 

[Enride]

- it would be interesting to have a time travel device. when you engage the drive, you can travel through time, which might only be for a short time, maybe 1 hour to the future or 1 hour to the past, but it would allow you to correct mistakes you made.

- so when you buy the drive, you have a record of everything you do and everywhere you go, perhaps going back for the last hour. then you can engage the drive, aim it into the sun or wherever, and then you can return to a point where you were in the past.

- perhaps it can restore lost credits, restore lost cargo, restore your ship to a pre-existing condition, allow you to get out of a losing battle, or restart a battle.

- from the point of view of other players, you just suddenly disappear, leaving a time travel signature. they do not travel through time, only you do.

- you can travel into the future. to your locked destination for example, or if you have waypoints, to any of the future waypoints.

- there is a chance your cargo will become irradiated and therefor worthless.

- maybe you can only do 1 time warp before you have to refuel, and you can only stock 1 fuel rod. so you have to return to the station to get another fuel rod.

- here is a scenario. you get intradicted. it sets a marker for the place and time. a pirate starts shooting at you. you are down to 10% hull and about to die. you engage the time warp drive, and it brings you back to the location you were at when you were intradicted, at 100% health, so the battle is still raging, but now you are 100% health.

- you are being chased. you engage the drive, and it can only got a short distance in the future, but far enough that you are distant from those who are chasing you. you advance to where you would have been 30 seconds later, if you were going the same speed.

I guess your joking but if your not then sorry if i insulted you but this suggestion is not very thought through.
Making this work ( in any decent way) in a multiplayer enviroment is simply impossible.

And as a note, if your ship both travels through time, why would it regain health? I will just appear in another time inthe same shape it was as the time it left.

 

[MrVibrating]

Making this work ( in any decent way) in a multiplayer enviroment is simply impossible.

Obviously, to observe full player-avatar continuity would be impossible. However there's workarounds, at least in theory:

- some kind of highly-efficient logging system would be required

- AI would have to play the roles of real players whose past or future avatars were interacting with real players, while the real-time player avatar was elsewhere/elsewhen

- the game would thus need to support diverging timelines, to some extent

On the plus side, while retro-causal effects wouldn't be possible, Butterfly Effect & Back to the Future-type dynamics would make for interesting gaming opportunities.

For instance, my player avatar goes back to your past and kills the AI playing the role of your former avatar:

- maybe this suddenly kills you outright. Perhaps a little message pops up explaining why.. "sorry bud but bad news from two years ago"

- maybe you start to fade out slowly, BTTF-style, but with some waning influence remaining. Perhaps you're still in with a chance of returning to the scene of the crime and saving your younger self, or pre-emptively assasinating your assasin's AI-controlled avatar before he even got the idea of killing you (basically turning the tables on him)

- perhaps you can respawn in a user-selectable timezone - perhaps co-opting an NPC avatar; Quantum Leap style

Etc. etc. Potentially convoluted and imperfect, yes.. but to dismiss some things as "impossible" is but a challenge and an opportunity, if not a red rag to a bull...

 

[GerminVermin]

Supercruise is already time travel into the future. It's Fast Forward.

The suggestion in this thread is absolutely ridiculous.

 

[MrVibrating]

You can already travel in time in this game. Granted, is is only in one direction, and you travel about 1 sec per second.

Yeah no you're right, and it's really seamlessly well-integrated, to be fair... top marks to the devs there.

Supercruise is already time travel into the future. It's Fast Forward.

The suggestion in this thread is absolutely ridiculous.

Are you playing a different game? Because when i last checked, all clocks in ED are perfectly synched at all times, regardless of acceleration deltas / g-field densities.. it's actually a major bugbear for me..

 

[GerminVermin]

Are you playing a different game? Because when i last checked, all clocks in ED are perfectly synched at all times, regardless of acceleration deltas / g-field densities.. it's actually a major bugbear for me..

You can hear it right from Braben's mouth in the Dev Diary series on Youtube. SuperCruise is time dialation.

 

[MrVibrating]

But that stands at complete odds with the clocks remaining synchronised! If you undergo dilation on a round journey, upon return your clock has, by definition, advanced relative to mine in the non-inertial frame.

Have you any explanation besides "David says so", or perhaps a link to his statement? Maybe he explains the discrepancy, somehow?

SC should be subject to time dilation, i believe. The enforcement of universal time however makes any such claims entirely moot - there's no evidence of advanced aging to the ships as far as i've noticed, nor acceleration of mission timers, much less clock drift etc. etc.

And anyway, what have you got against time travel themes? It's a cornerstone staple of the sci fi genre. Yeah there's always paradoxes, it's how they're dealt with or brushed under the rug that makes a good story though. Seen Primer? Just the right balance of complexity and simplicity, still not 100% on the plot line but it doesn't matter; time travel makes for compelling storytelling. It could be brilliant if done well in a game like Elite..

 

[cheapbooks]

obviously it is just a game, it is not real time travel.

obviously from a programming perspective you can add this feature. I specified how. time travel returns you to a location, or state. it does NOT return everyone else to the state they were in or the location they were in, as I said.

the hyperdrive allows people to advance and my suggest adds the feature of regression.

hyperdrive isn't possible either, and space travel isn't possible, and it is just a game and it is a good idea for how to add something new to the gameplay.

it is easy to integrate as I said. you just need a logging feature, and future waypoints. and then you can jump into the past location or future.

imagine a quest where you have to defeat a skilled opponent, and you keep losing until you learn that you can use time travel to go back to the start of the battle and repeat the process until you win.

 

[Askarr]

I actually fully expected to see blue & red shift when in fractions of C, and was disappointed when I didn't. That said, implementing the true relativistic effects to match in a multiplayer shared universe would be.... tedious.

What you're actually asking for are multiple save points. Might as well put it in those terms.

 

[GerminVermin]

obviously from a programming perspective you can add this feature. I specified how. time travel returns you to a location, or state. it does NOT return everyone else to the state they were in or the location they were in, as I said.

If it's so easy, why don't you write the code, then? Seriously, this whole "from a programming perspective..." argument I see so often is such a joke. You have no idea how difficult it is in that how it breaks other mechanisms or how to fit it into the function of other players or how to influence other players.

If your "time travel" only affects you and no one else, that's called teleportation. That's not time travel.

 

[nexxo]

obviously from a programming perspective you can add this feature. I specified how. time travel returns you to a location, or state. it does NOT return everyone else to the state they were in or the location they were in, as I said.

Unfortunately in a MMO your state is inextricably linked to everybody else's state. Say you travel back in time to redo a cargo run differently, or redo a battle. Unfortunately your cargo run has already affected the market that determines prices for other players and thus their trading decisions and profits, and the course of faction events. They cannot be reset because you decided to go back and do something else. And that player who handed you your ass in that last fight? You can't go back and force him to redo the battle (and no, you cannot replay a recording of that battle, because as soon as you do something different, he would have to respond differently and there is no recording of what he might have done in that scenario. Every action of yours is like a pebble thrown in a vast, dark pond, its waves rippling out amongst all the other players and markets which all respond by making waves in turn.
.
The whole thing is simply impossible to realise. It also goes against the philosophy of this type of game, where the idea is that everything you do has consequences that affect your future and the universe; where you have to live and learn from your mistakes.

 

[nexxo]

But that stands at complete odds with the clocks remaining synchronised! If you undergo dilation on a round journey, upon return your clock has, by definition, advanced relative to mine in the non-inertial frame.

This is a known problem commander, explored first in the Star Trek Universe. Basically warp drive escapes time distortion effects because the ship does not actually move faster than light. It is the space bubble around it that expands and contracts --but crucially, does not move relative to the surrounding universe (there is no spoon; it is the mind that bends, kinda). As such time on the ship continues to pass at the same speed as time in the surrounding universe.
.
Impulse drive of course is subject to subtle time dilation effects, but ship clocks constantly synchronise with the standard time signal of nav beacons and stations throughout populated space.
.
Primer is a great story about time travel, but its effects would make for an utter mess. Which was kind of the point of the story.

 

[Marco 68]

The suggestion in this thread is absolutely ridiculous.

I get the same feeling, performing a time travel jump makes no sense in a single persistent world. Working it into a way of rolling back losses or jumping over dangers sounds more like a win button, forgive the expression.

 

[Fieldsweeper]

This has got to be the absolute dumbest idea on here.

so dumb i know it wont be added, and i am not bothering to type the obv reasons this couldn't, wouldn't and wont work.

 

[Figurative]

This thread needs to locked/removed before the trolling begins.

Sorry dude, but this idea is horrible. Why? Well...

- It doesn't really add anything new to the game, other than you saying "correcting your own mistakes".
- HOWEVER, correcting your own mistakes contradicts the theme of the game. This is the harsh environment of space. You will make mistakes. You will die. This is the nature of the game and what gives it its appeal.
- Time traveling would be a "OP" or "broken" concept in regards to PvP. I'm not going to start where the complexity of this application begins and ends in that regard...

 

[milkyway_dingo]

Aside from the practical impossibilities in a game like this with the community using 'time' travel, it would be interesting to be able to see the changes in star systems over time.

My understand is that every Starsystem in Elite Dangerous has evolved 'over time', to the point of where we see things today.

Might it then be possible to be able to 'rewind' that process back (or even fast forward?) to an earlier point in a systems evolution?

It would be interesting to know if it actually would be possible or not; Is there apart of the generating seed which indicates time period? Can that variable be changed so that we might be able to view a system much earlier, or much later in its evolution?

 

[schuesseled]

How on Earth does one travel one hour into the future in a real-time game? You'd have to actually time-travel to do that.

https://www.google.co.uk/?gws_rd=ssl#safe=off&q=tasks+that+take+an+hour

Do one of these, boom you are in the future.