with better network performance of today compared to 6 years ago...
- Thread starter kiario
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Robert Maynard
Volunteer Moderator
Even if it was possible, would it be considered to be an improvement?
yup, always had issues with the speed wall. 500 m/s is snail speed in space and surfing planets
just imagine continued acceleration
They could combine it with a seamless transition to SC speed
And regarding dogfights, it would just mean a new way of doing it. The speed is not directly relevant in dogfights anyway
just imagine continued acceleration
They could combine it with a seamless transition to SC speed
And regarding dogfights, it would just mean a new way of doing it. The speed is not directly relevant in dogfights anyway
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Robert Maynard
Volunteer Moderator
An improvement for some, maybe - certainly not all.
.... and some ships can achieve considerably faster speeds than 500 m/s.
Here's one of Mike Evans previous responses to the topic:
forums.frontier.co.uk
.... and some ships can achieve considerably faster speeds than 500 m/s.
Here's one of Mike Evans previous responses to the topic:
ED sub-light speed physics are super-unrealistic
I think when someone says "the flight model made for a horrible experience in Frontier", they're just remembering their experience in the first part of Isinona's video where he specifically entitled it "What not to do" - you basically were flying Newtonian all wrong! :) I didn't even mention...
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The maximum boost speed [1] has about doubled from 1.0 - it was below 500m/s then, and you can get about 920m/s with an optimised Viper III or similar now.
The problem is that network performance improvements over the last five years have mainly been in bandwidth, rather than transmission speed, and transmission speed is already pretty close to the speed-of-light limits.
If you're playing in an instance with people in both US and Europe, the distance between the two players is about 7000km (depending on exactly which bits of the continents). The speed of light means you can't get information between them in under 23 milliseconds even if you run a fibre-optic cable directly between their two houses - in practice, the need to have regional and local hubs, and less than speed-of-light network infrastructure means you're going to be a fair bit slower than that. So there-and-back latencies below 100 milliseconds are unlikely to be achievable regardless of advances in network technology.
In 100 milliseconds at 920m/s the Viper III will have travelled 92m. That's a larger distance than its size. Even at more conventional combat speeds of ~550m/s the disagreements between game clients about exactly where the ships are this millisecond can give pretty big issues such as a player dodging a ram on their screen, but getting hit by it anyway because the other player hadn't got the update of their dodge yet, so their client's predicted path was an intersection. (Shadow rams)
The game clients do a pretty good job of smoothing all this out to prevent visible rubber-banding in normal play, but once people are fighting in combat and deliberately being unpredictable in their movements, even the current speeds are probably a little bit too fast for it - and since it's the speed of light that's the real limitation, better networks won't help much.
[1] The SRV does not have a capped speed and people have got those into stable gravitational (i.e. full newtonian) orbits around small moons at about 2500m/s. With a larger body and a higher escape velocity, faster orbits would theoretically be possible.
There's also a trick to accelerate ships to arbitrary speeds when in a gravity well. So the engine doesn't have a problem with ships going that fast as such - but the networking definitely does.
Robert Maynard
Volunteer Moderator
Understood, however Mike seemed to be very clear that the speed limitation was a design decision:
From that it does not seem as if significantly greater speeds in normal flight will be seen in this game.
This topic again? I don't long back to the days of Elite 2: Frontier, in which certain NPCs would accelerate towards you and conduct combat at a significant fraction of lightspeed, meaning you were in weapons range for maybe 0.03 seconds. After that, you had to maneuver for perhaps minutes before you had the possibility of another shot.
Thanks, but no thanks. I've been there and it's not going to do Elite: Dangerous one bit of good at all.
Thanks, but no thanks. I've been there and it's not going to do Elite: Dangerous one bit of good at all.
Robert Maynard
Volunteer Moderator
Doubly so given that the sequels, with the Newtonian flight model, had to allow time compression (otherwise just getting to the next system would take a very, very, very long time) - something that would not be compatible with a multi-player game.
Move closer to the servers is probably the best option, IMO
Players complain about the slip on large vessels now, imagine how bad said complaints would be if every ship took 30 mins to change direction because they were going so fast...
Frontier combat done correctly:
(I wish I’d seen this back then)
As for Elite Dangerous, I’d certainly like FAOff boost speed to stay and not artificially degrade down to normal max speed.
Sure, but when a NPC accelerates towards you from the other side of the solar system, you have very little control over their speed, to say the least, and the NPC may well approach you at a speed of thousands of kilometers per second.
How would the interdiction work in a newtonian flight model?
On the occasions this happens, StarDreamer time acceleration is your friend
It’s also a very good reason why uncapped speeds wouldn’t be much good for Elite Dangerous.
The reason I backed this game way back when, was because it didn't have the flight model of F:E2 and FFE. If they went with the full Newtonian flight model those games used, I would have skipped it and totally forget it even existed!
Title of the thread is both a loaded statement and a fallacy. There haven't been much of any relevant network performance improvements since the game started.
The problem is latency and without a radical change in underlying network infrastructure (which Frontier has essentially no control over) and the game's networking model (which Frontier is not likely to change), latency is not going to significantly improve.
The game has to work with round trip latencies in excess of 500ms, esle huge swaths of the playerbase not be able to connect with eachother. Despite all sorts of issues with latency that we have now with the relative velocities that are achievable, it's amazing the game works as well as it does with as broad as disparate a collection of connections and geographical locations between players that we have.
I am 110% certain that were near zero latency possible, that a fully Newtonian normal space flight model, where acceleration rates, rather than velocity, were the limiting factor, would be both better for gameplay and offer a far more 'cinematic' experience than the current flight model. Most of the time, actual relative velocities would also be lower, especially if acceleration was limited to reasonable levels (Say ~2g for the largest ships with the best thrusters and maybe 8-10g for the absolute highest performance small ships) and fuel was something that mattered.
Same way it does now. SC (and FTL in general) is inherently non-Newtonian. Even with Newtonian acceleration in normal space, bypassing SC would not be easy. With any sane acceleration, it would still be far too slow for interplanetary, let alone interstellar, travel for most gameplay...especially since none of our ships can carry more than several days burn worth of fuel anyway.
I would vastly have prefered a tweaked version of those flight models.
The problem is latency and without a radical change in underlying network infrastructure (which Frontier has essentially no control over) and the game's networking model (which Frontier is not likely to change), latency is not going to significantly improve.
The game has to work with round trip latencies in excess of 500ms, esle huge swaths of the playerbase not be able to connect with eachother. Despite all sorts of issues with latency that we have now with the relative velocities that are achievable, it's amazing the game works as well as it does with as broad as disparate a collection of connections and geographical locations between players that we have.
I am 110% certain that were near zero latency possible, that a fully Newtonian normal space flight model, where acceleration rates, rather than velocity, were the limiting factor, would be both better for gameplay and offer a far more 'cinematic' experience than the current flight model. Most of the time, actual relative velocities would also be lower, especially if acceleration was limited to reasonable levels (Say ~2g for the largest ships with the best thrusters and maybe 8-10g for the absolute highest performance small ships) and fuel was something that mattered.
Same way it does now. SC (and FTL in general) is inherently non-Newtonian. Even with Newtonian acceleration in normal space, bypassing SC would not be easy. With any sane acceleration, it would still be far too slow for interplanetary, let alone interstellar, travel for most gameplay...especially since none of our ships can carry more than several days burn worth of fuel anyway.
I would vastly have prefered a tweaked version of those flight models.
Robert Maynard
Volunteer Moderator
For some, maybe - however planetary landings would be fundamentally altered - in a way that I would not consider to represent an improvement. A ~2g limit on large ships would stop them landing on a significant number of bodies that they can currently land on.