The only problem with a lack of precision is player to player interaction between ‘points of interest’. Without some sort of solution, there would be no rouge pirate station, remote fleet staging area, not to mention combat, etc etc, out in the middle of nowhere. Granted, the possibility of combat would be remote, as players are generally going to spend most of their time moving around planets, not waiting in the void for… some reason. Meeting another ship in the void by accident would be next to impossible. But I believe that the opportunity should not be simply abandoned.
Let me clarify: What I meant was actually very close to what you described, not that once you leave a system entirely that one would accelerate over a long time period. This strictly contrasted to another proposal to slow the warp speed down the farther away you are from a celestial body. Everything is tight around the planet.
As I:B is going to be a single system (unless as a stretch goal to add a star to test these very features (hint hint ) ), we are pretty much going to have to wait until the MMO to fully address this issue. Hopefully by then something would have been worked out.
I think you misunderstood where exactly the limitations are.
Inside a solar system every possible position is accurate enough to do any of the things you mentioned.
A Inovae “instance” is a cube around 1 Light year across.
What probably won’t happen is that you can “be” in the space between the stars. If you want to do a remote base just fly 10 hours at max warp from any star and build it there. That is “de-facto” in nowhere.
I just don’t see why you would wan’t to build inbetween stars. There’s more than enough void in a single solar system to fill with trillions of players that won’t ever see each other.
Sorry, I should have taken the time to explain that Jump drives don’t actually target by gravity, but by the negative mass neutrinos emitted by stellar fusion. Clearly this is the only way in which reasonably reliable faster than light travel could be possible.
Or reasons.
As far as it “always being generally assumed”… well, obviously not often enough to be included in my (admittedly vague) active recollection of the old forums, but yes now that you mention it I do think I read something about that… I just don’t think it’d necessarily be a good idea, due to gameplay reasons.
Would a planet the size of Earth with an average orbital distance of 10 AU (or 20, or 30) have been discovered if it existed in those systems? That is, how high is the sensitivity of finding planets by measuring the effect of their gravity on their parent star?
So we agree, then.
I agree with you. Making it so that meeting up with other players is possible literally anywhere in the universe is something I would absolutely spend the time to make happen if I was making a game like this myself.
This is why it would never, in a million years, be completed.
As far as Infinity goes I’d rather have a good game sometime before the end of the century than a truly perfect game several decades after we’re all dead.
Note: 1 Light year is approximately equal to 2^63 millimetres, so it is possible that this number started out as IA saying he would be using 64 bit coordinates with millimetre-precision and someone (possibly me) applying this information to a signed long integer (somehow ignoring the negative values).
The diameter of Neptune’s orbit (~60 AU) is approximately equal to 2^53 millimetres, which is the precision of a double-precision floating-point number (including negative values). By my (as previously mentioned rather vague) recollection, Neptune was mentioned by IA in the same post which involved millimetre precision and possibly 64 bit coordinates.
It is left as an exercise to the reader to draw their own conclusions.
You don’t necessarily have to have only one type of drive for each task, either. Maybe letting people choose what kind of drive they want would make the game more interesting. I certainly thing it would.
One kind of drive I’ve always liked is the system of Jump Drives from a book called Angel Station. Basically, every ship had a micro-black hole at the core that served as the power source; you released pure hydrogen towards it at precise vectors, and the gravity caused it to fuse and release a jet of energy in a specific direction, giving you thrust. That was your normal, everyday movement.
But then, if you wanted to get around QUICKLY, you would spin the black hole to extremely high speeds and basically pilot your ship through the hole in the center of itself. In the book, this had to be done manually, because it took place at speeds to fast that no computer could handle it; instead, they used psychics that could see a few milliseconds forwards in time to beat the odds. I mean, computers COULD do it, they just did it badly.
Anyway, the closer to dead-center you kept on the tunnel through space time, the further the tunnel went. And after an instant that seemed to last for hours, you popped out between 5 and 30 light years in the direction you wanted to go. That is, if you did it well. Do it badly and you could come out a dozen feet from where you started for a dozen light years in the wrong direction.
This also made interesting tactical choices necessary; as precise teleportation was nearly impossible, you had to choose between teleporting a fleet in en-masse and hoping the majority end up close enough to have a decent defence until you regrouped, or you would aim for the edge of the system and take a while to regroup, while giving the enemy a chance to prepare for your attack.
The problem with choosing between drives for the player is, the developers need to balance all those drives, which isn’t trivial, and it adds unnecessary complexity. So it would be better to have only one drive for each use (local, interplanetary, interstellar…)
A micro-black-hole may be, as far as we know today, the most efficient generator : it allows you to convert mass into Hawking radiation, the smaller the black hole, the more energy it releases (and the more matter you have to keep feeding it to maintain it at its current size). So basically, it’s a pretty good mass-energy converter (part of it is released into usless junk like neutrino, so it’s not 100% though).
So this could be used directly, by heating propellant hydrogen, like in a nuclear thermal rocket. Or it could be otherwise be used as an energy source for the engines.
Though as science marches on, we may find more efficient engines.
OTOH, I don’t see how that could work.
Anyway, I would suggest to keep the technobabble explanations as low as possible. Once a gameplay-smart system is chosen, having just enough rules to make it self-consistent and consistent with how the Universe works at large (to avoid fridge logic problems like “Hey, I should totally be able to travel through time with that!”), and then stop there. Too in-depth explanations will only create more problems than they will solve.
Well honestly, the mumbo-jumbo doesn’t matter all that much to the average player; they care about the gameplay mechanics of it, not the physics basis for it. Any comment on the actual transit idea? To sum up; a minigame involving sliding down a tunnel while avoiding the edges that accelerates exponentially. The further you make it, the further or more precise your jump can be. Then you are transported instantly from point to point. Faster than normal linear travel, but with the possibility of screwing up and going somewhere you didn’t intend to go at all.
As for the physics-y reasons for it working; black holes do funny things with infinities and the space-time continuum. However, they’re points, and so traveling through them requires your ship to become a two dimensional object, which is difficult to achieve.
However, if you spin it fast enough(possibly using FTL techniques to move the particles inside the black hole faster than light), you can turn that point of infinite compression into a disk, and use space magic technobabble FTL stuff to point the hole in a general direction. You then can pilot your ship through that disk, and pull the back hole through itself after you, and exit on the other side. It almost even makes sense.
A singularity-powered jump drive does sound perfectly sci-fi. I think the idea of storing a black hole inside my ship might make me a little nervous in real life, but it’s a game… who cares?!
Quite right. Admittedly, there are some people (like me) who like at least a bit of a hand-wave to science, but that can even be as little as a name. For example, you instinctively know that a “Black hole drive” will work differently to a “quantum drive”.
Which brings me on to my next idea. What if jump drive technology somehow harnessed the weirdness of subatomic particles to transport your ship by probability alone? (I’m not asking if that could actually be done ) So - you charge up your drive and have to scan yourself and your cargo. The longer you wait, the more accurate the scan will be. If you rush the jump, there could be errors which equate to damage. That would limit people attempting to jump away in combat.
The only problem with this is it completely goes against my liking for making interstellar travel interesting and could be seen as making the player wait for no reason. In that respect, I do quite like the warp tunnel idea, but my favourite suggestion so far is the accuracy of the jump being affected by proximity and mass of the target (as suggested way above). Player’s choice: jump more accurately but with more jumps, or longer jumps with the potential to get lost.
Yep, that was me, though it was more like 300 to 6000 minutes. After all, we were talking about a 1ly cube.
However, if systems are dramatically smaller (funny to say that when it would still be billions of km wide), there may be a simpler solution : simply prevent people to build things too far outside. If float imprecision tends to make things spontaneously blow up or otherwise not work, for example, then problem solved.
I still maintain that an increasing warp speed is a superior model, but without this particular issue, it becomes less of a problem.
Still, while Jupiter-Saturn is ten time more distant than Earth-Mars, it wouldn’t take the same time : first, because Jupiter and Saturn are more massive, so escaping from and entering their gravity wells would take more time. So atmosphere to atmosphere, it may well be longer, even with similar distances.
But if we replace Jupiter and Saturn by Earth- and Mars-sized worlds, then it still wouldn’t necessarily take the same time. It wouldn’t take 10 times more, but it may take 2, 5 or 8, depending on the formulas, positions and distances.
Here’s the thing : distances and scales are already blown out of the sky at the moment we can go from one planet to the other in one game session in real-time. So the main concern should be to make things interesting. If correctly tuned, such a system allows the pilot to always see something moving, be it an asteroid, a moon, a rocky world, a gas giant or a star.
If not, it’s precisely not different from a countdown to wait for arrival.
Note that I had always assumed that there would be no in-system jump. Again, this mitigates the question, though I still feel this would be the superior system - but it will probably be tested anyway.
This being said without questioning whether in-system jump should be possible.
The problem is, for a minigame to not become tiresome after a while, it would require to be treated as a game on its own right, which means lots of efforts dedicated to it…
So if done right, it could be interesting, but I fear it’s not worth the effort.
Well, we are not quite sure what happens inside a black hole. It seems that nature always has tricks to avoid physical singularities (for example, there would be a singularity at the centre of a whirpool in water, but there is no water there instead as it grows hollow), so black holes may very well be like that as well, and somehow have no actual singularity in their centre.
Note that the singularity is a point, though, not the black hole itself.
However, if they do, for what I’ve heard you could have a naked singularity by spinning them, which could make them torus-shaped, with the singularity in the middle, otuside of the event horizon. It’s possible that such construct, while allowed by our understanding of the Universe, may be impossible to create in practice (i.e. it can exist once it’s there, but maybe not appear)
What happens then, well, I bet on Yog-Sothoth opening a way to the King in Yellow with an explosion of marple syrup, but your guess is as good as mine.
I now want to know exactly how big of a system we can computationally have. I’ll do some calculations later on based on 64 Bit Float.
Anyway I’m with Cray here. I strogly opose any change in warp speed as soon as the planet is out of viewing range (depending how easy it will be to “hit” a planet), before that it should be scaled so warping trough a planet won’t happen.
Scale will be lost if the speed is changed. Real life tine is the only constant when traveling deep space. If the same warp drive changes its speed and only a number represents that speed it will be dificult to see the difference … no it won’t make a difference if you travel from venus to eart or mars to Jupiter. So why have a realistically scaled system in the first place?
If you set the lower limit for precision to be 1 millimetre, you would be able to address more than a googol times the diameter of the observable universe, though towards the edges the precision would be somewhat lacking.
Eh. That’s a good enough explanation for me. Just so long as the game isn’t using explanations that don’t make sense.
I still like the idea of allowing for interplanetary jumps, but disallowing them pretty much deals with the “one way trip” issue people had with building stations out by Pluto and using them as easy-launch raiding bases. It also builds a stronger case for elder game system infrastructure, such as warp lanes, so I’m happy.
Kepler, I’m pretty sure, could detect the signature of such a planet, but it hasn’t been, and it won’t be, operating long enough to actually confirm the sighting.
But that wasn’t really the argument I was making. My point was, is, and will continue to be that planets near to their star are common, especially around smaller stars (i.e. orange/red dwarfs), so having ships jump into a system at 2-5 AU, and limiting their top speed to ~3 AU/minute actually puts a huge number of planets (if not the majority of planets in the ggalaxy) within a convenient travel time of system entry.
The only reason to have warp speeds scaled to distance from the system’s star is because “I wan to see Neptune noooooowwwwwww!” I’m not, personally, sympathetic to that reason.
Why do sci-fi authors hate us physicists so? Always trying to induce aneurysms, they are!
Except for those of us who are physicists. Trust me, Big Fan of Game + Advanced Degree in Physics = Very Vocal Detractor of Game’s Bullshit. That’s not a guess, it’s a promise.
That may be true of our solar system, but we’re finding solar systems with Neptune and even Saturn-massed planets within 2 or 3 AU of their star. Imagine, then, a hot jovian at the orbit of Mercury, and a Saturn at the orbit of Mars, and then a Mars sized planet at the orbit of Jupiter, and an Earth sized planet at the orbit of Saturn.
Suddenly, you’re trudging through the inner solar system, and speeding through the outer solar system. I freely admit that, at the end of the day, this is a personal preference thing, but my personal preference is that this isn’t a thing that should be possible.
I talked about that literally the next paragraph, without even skipping a line, you know…
Though (assuming that the far base problem is moot) it is indeed a question of personal preference. From that point, there is probably little more we can do than wait for in-game tests.
Once upon a time people used to call me a good communicator of ideas. I think that time has past. Heh.
I know you dealt with replacing the giant planets with terrestrial sized worlds, but that’s only have of the step toward the absurdity. Jupiter massed, or even super-Jupiter massed planets in the inner solar system would be so large, under such a system, that you’d never get far enough away from the first for your warp drive to truly spin up before you started to enter the gravitational radius of the second.
You would travel much more slowly through the inner planets of such a system than you would through the inner planets of our own solar system.
Isn’t there a theory that our gas giant planets started off much closer to the Sun, then the gravitational combination started flinging them further out? I’m sure I heard that somewhere… I can see the issues this would cause with a warp drive of this kind.
Let me disagree with you : I’d rather have a 5 minutes task in the game instead of a 30 minutes if the only justification is “because physics”.
Remember the delivered software is NOT a simulator but a multiplayer game, therefore with some (if not much) fun intended.
Especially when dealing with PvP, or even PvE, I can guarantee you that the most vocal players will be the hardcore PvP.
I know this is a thread about science implementation in the game, but please keep in mind that even simple physics rules can grind a lot of CPU / GC performance. Gameplay must be preferred as often as possible… Except maybe in a simulator
He’s saying that if a developer is gonna handwave, fine, but he’s also gonna call bullshit when it’s blatantly, aneurysm-inducingly wrong. Very loudly.
What TA said. I have no problem with FUN > REALITY or the RULE OF COOL. I do have major problems when people come up with ridiculous bullshit explanations for game mechanics when there’s no need. “The jump drive works by pushing the big red button” is a far more suitable answer than “flying through micro-black holes that we carry along with us”.
I can guarantee you that you’re wrong. No one will be louder than me. That’s a promise. Unlike the PvP folk, my primary interest in this game is as creative inspiration; I will, quite frankly, simply spend more time on these fora than anyone interested in hardcore PvP.
Agreed then, I understood badly: if there can be a current physics law that explains partly or wholy a game mechanic, then let’s use it wisely and not throw conceptual words because they look cool … like “black hole”
However we’re mostly talking about future science and technology. So far all I’ve seen around here as propositions for “warp” explanations are based on theories at best, mostly on hypothesis though. If there has to be some small physics inconsentency for the sake of gameplay, so be it … and let’s not try to explain it
) ), we are pretty much going to have to wait until the MMO to fully address this issue. Hopefully by then something would have been worked out.
) So - you charge up your drive and have to scan yourself and your cargo. The longer you wait, the more accurate the scan will be. If you rush the jump, there could be errors which equate to damage. That would limit people attempting to jump away in combat.