Travel time in I:B

Battlescape
41

yes I felt the same thing about thoughts around photons a few weeks ago and it really pushed me in some trouble for a few minutes :smile: 
 I was like : “in fact photons make 1 million years to reach the surface of the sun and 8 minutes to come to my eyes, or it make everything instantly ? It must be that, even at speed limit, time is not completely dilated, it always passes, even a little
 this speed limit for light and gravity has so much impact that it’s awesome”.

Think of all of this next time you look from stars, it’s just awesome to think that according to where you’re watching, you’re in fact watching a different space AND time (space-time so). Present is, for each point of view, at each time, something different, sum of different pasts, and maybe also future from some points of view


42

exactly, since we are not really experiencing space-time distortion but just simulating it inside a computer, it’s impossible to put this on practice inside a multiplayer game, until the day we can distort space-time on our chair so we really experience 1.6 seconds while the rest of the players on their non-relatively-distorted-space-time chairs experiences 8.5 minutes.

43

I really don’t see why it should’t be possible. After all we controll avatars in a simulation. We can simulate space-time distortion. We can create games. I don’t see any barrier there to mash those two together. You experience what your character expiriences.

I also don’t see a limitation when it comes to multiplayer games. Hell there have been multiplayer games that incorporated time travel.

1 Like
44

I thought the thread was about travel time, not time travel?

Anyway you can’t simulate time distortion in any way that would make sense to anyone, or be worth the effort, so lets forget it.

In a fully newtonian spaceship game in real scale, acceleration is king. The best idea people have had to ‘nerf’ acceleration is to link it to stealth, making faster acceleration much easier to detect from much further away. I like the idea of the current ‘warp’ in the prototype just affecting acceleration so you can use it as an initial boost and as space-breaks, while in between you can coast without being detectable. It allows for relatively fast journeys even while trying to be quite stealthy, while allowing for much faster travel if you don’t care about stealth.

I’m getting a sense of dĂ©jĂ  vu. I remember a very detailed conversation about this from years ago


Anyway, another way acceleration can be nerfed is fuel. To save fuel, coasting after a boost would seem like the sensible thing to do (this really depends on the cost of fuel). And/or you also have players escorting slow moving NPC supply ships between planets.

Basically, if you can make acceleration expensive in different ways, you open up an opportunity for people to intercept at high speed, because the guys you are trying to intercept wont be accelerating constantly. With smart enough players, some interesting tactics will come from this, particularly with different classes of ships and equipment on those ships affecting acceleration/stealth/fuel use.

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Really? The idea that it could take 2 seconds for Player A to move from Place 1 to Place 2 on Computer A, and 10 minutes as seen from Computer B doesn’t seem like a problem for multiplayer games? What is Player A doing on Computer A for the other 39 minutes and 50 seconds of real life player time?

2 Likes
46

Only way is instantanious jump, simulating your destination “where you should be” after X time.

No need for einstein stuff here, we cant even get pass thos simple fysics in game:

Distance = time x speed
100meters a second during 3 seconds = 300 meters

We CANNOT change time in MP game where we need everyting in sync.

So only options are:
*Wrap up distance by skipping actual space, or simply jumping

*Increase speed by ALOT, and at full sol system scale, that means, what? 100x FTL to reach outer planets?

*Or, decrease solar system size, get planets closer (like the prototype)
Anyone looking at real life jupiter naked eye. Will see that as a bright star. Not a fricking basketball floating in the air.

47

Those are moons. The distance scale there is reasonable for moons.

2 Likes
48

please stop saying CANNOT DISTORT TIME when in fact you just DON’T SEE HOW TO SIMULATE IT!! Let other people try to find how !! I heard that Newton hated people closing questions like that (or maybe it’s Edmond Halley). Like your character can take off a planet while you’re not moving from your chair, you can make that time (in game) pass differently from each point of view.

You say that in MP game we need everything in sync. It’s totally false. We WANT everything sync, because of the type of gameplay, in another genre, we could need that rendering of object positions being sync only when object are close or moving the same way. After a few hundred of thousands kilometers of speed for an object A, object B could have a different perception of it.

In term of programming, as I said, it includes a new notion in rendering (non pseudo-instantaneousness), it’s another way to calculate positions (only object with entity semantic could have position as data member, and even that not sure, 
 maybe no classic position (value semantic) as data member), and to concept objects (in term of OOP), but if we can simulate dilatation of space in game, without effectively distort space irl, why could not we be able to do it for time ? It’s just that classic gaming concepts think everything in terms of “absolute position”. Change that and you get your simulation of relativity

Edit : now I see a problem too :smile: but it is just I don’t know how to resolve it without cheating by compensating diferences of perception when object are getting closer. That is not saying it’s not possible :stuck_out_tongue:

49

In a single player game, you could increase the speed of the simulation so you can simulate 40 minutes of action for the NPCs while you experience only 3 seconds. But in a multiplayer game you’d need a magic crystal ball that could predict where the other players would be and what they would be doing in 40 minutes (if you think about it, it would be a great alternative to internet connections. :stuck_out_tongue: Like an internet connection so fast it can give you data from the future. Tachyon internet?). That, or you’d have one player experience forty minutes of travel while their avatar only experiences 3 seconds of travel (meaning it can only take 3 seconds’ worth of actions in those 40 minutes).

Otherwise, I fail to see how different experiences of time would work. If you think there’s another way to solve that problem, please describe to me what the two players would see while looking at their screens.

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It is not possible to have a multiplayer game where one person makes a jump in two seconds, and another person sees it as taking 10 minutes. There is a 9 minute 58 second difference in when the ship would finish the jump, and the only way to compensate for that would be to actually make the jumping player’s frame of reference shift time, which would require accelerating the actual player to the appropriate c.

There is no way to implement time differentials while stationary. You could have an in-game clock that shifts accordingly, but that seems stupid and useless because the jump is still going to take ten minutes.

51

you can if you buy my space-time distort chair! and it comes with a VR :smile:

Joke aside, about micro jumps, i think they can be actually just acceleration like warp, but with fancy FX and unrealistic speeds (which won’t matter because light particles are not simulated ingame so nothing wrong with this, poligons won’t turn into noodles and light won’t be left behind the ship).
Like, first the capital ship accelerates to max warp speed (.9999c?), when that speed has been reached, the jump drive system is used and you start the micro jump, after maybe 2-5 minutes you reach your destination, let’s say you are a carrier, so you get somewhere near a planet dominated by the enemy, but you are not that close to be detected yet (unless they send ships to scan, or we have a scan system or whatever). You wait for the other capital ships to arrive, warp as a float near the enemy, reach the enemy facilities, then carriers let the smaller ships go pew pew things and well, the fun begins.

To make those jumps balanced, you have to insert coords, with a margin of error depending on the speed (faster = bigger margin of error), so you set a max speed and the coords, other ships have to use different coords to avoid collisions (bigger margin of error = ships should spread more their coords), if done wrong, too fast and coords too close, you might crash against another capital ship, or too spread and too fast you might jump into enemy space (and be detected!) or you might jump too far away of your squad.

Also
Faster = easier to detect

We can also interrupt a jump, intercepting it with a capital ship using jump as well

Jumps should be easy to detect in the area where it started, not easily detected where it ends (unless they jump too close to the enemy)

We can even be able to jump almost instantly, but with the risk of our ships exploding-be disintegrated, and the margin of error going sky-high, pretty much a LAST RESORT.

To limit the use of jumps, 2 easy ways:
-Fuel
-Jump Drive overheats for a while after every use, so the system enters cooldown, you can still use it, but your ship might explode, so better let it cool down!

52

The only way I can think of to make it all ‘work’ is to leave players at rest and to distort the characters.

If my character is moving at 0.99c, then I see it moving around the ship at 15% normal speed, the ship is compressed in the direction of travel to 15% of its rest length, etc. I can still look at another character on a ship moving at 0.5c and see it moving around at 85% normal speed. On my ship, when I tell my character to fire photon torpedoes, it takes 7x longer for the action to happen than when at rest.

It’s not very interesting from a gameplay standpoint for a game like Infinity:Battlescape, but it’s possible.

Is there any particular reason that you want players to input jump coordinates?

How do I intercept a jumping ship if I also jump using coordinates?

53

because at those high speeds (even if a small relative difference is in account, since we are talking on c terms), collissions could be deadly, if the ship’s computer can handle that, i think it’s better, it’s also to give less control on a feature that is supossed to have a margin of error, or you may call it luck factor, but it’s not really gambling, not if you can control that margin of error, which you can under this logic.

Intercepting would just mean that you ship’s computer will manage the course to intercept the other ship, it will just follow the other ship’s route, if anything, you can add a margin of error so it won’t always be a success.

How would you intercept a ship? well, we are using sci-fi already so why not.
Ship A uses micro jump
Ship B detects that and follows ship A
Ship A cannot detect what’s behind so they won’t know if the other ship is getting close
Ship B can detect ship A and even read it’s vector, so they can follow the ship A and add a little more speed to reach ship A at a point.
Ship B gets close to ship A and breaks both ship’s inertia (i have to think about this, what can break both ships inertia? a kind of EMF bomb or something? hmm)
Ship B and Ship A fight, or whatever they chose to do.

In other words, jumps are a computer-controlled feature, doesn’t mean that coords are the only way to do a jump, but the easier way to do it, you can make the ship’s computer follow a jump vector, idk it’s just an idea :smile:

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just an idea of how to sci-fi this

55

That would certainly simulate the effects, but it would not simulate the dilation. I think we agree on all counts, though.

56

The only multiplayer game I know of with time travel mechanics was Achron. It worked fairly well as far as I know but I think it would be very difficult to implement those mechanics in a game like battlescape.

57

time instances on a space shooter i don’t think it would work unless we had an AI good enough to play just like the real player does, so we could have time instanced avatars
 too complex and sounds unplayable to me, besides we would end with as many instances as players on the server
ugh no ty

58

We should get back to discussing less extravagant stuff. I think the first relativistic multiplayer game (with more gameplay then collecting orbs) will be a groundbreaker in itself, I:B doesn’t need to be that game.

I just have the feeling that it should be possible, not a plan or concept. “no problem” was a little understatement, yes.

59

The kerbal space community has been busy on the same question for months or much longer.
Doubt the answer will pop up here any time soon.

A to B instant jump seems most plausible. Set xyz in jump computer and u just teleport.

Or sick speeds way beyond FTL thats second imo.
Dunno if the ship xan handle 10000g forces tho

60

you know we have been playing with unrealistic ships this whole time? :smile:
no ship would handle 50g or beyond but I:B goes way beyond that, i don’t think we have to worry about the ship endurance, you can always sci-fi that, since all of this is unrealistic atm.
Hence my sci-fi explanation of FTL travel (micro jumps, piercing space-time), you are making a hole in space-time, so you are not really experiencing that much acceleration.

Instant jumps should have risks or the feature will make the game prettty much a BF4 in space instead of a planetside2, it leaves not much room for strategies.