Post
Wed May 22, 2013 4:25 pm
#23
by FireryRage
So a few points on the discussion.
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TL;DR: Continuous is more realistically accurate, but the benefits of discontinuous likely outweigh those of continuous, when done right (and if so, the player may not even be able to tell). Nebulae have their points of contention depending on if they are actual 3D entities or 2D entities, 2D being useless if you want them to appear consistent.
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First between continuous vs discontinuous:
I realize Josh has opted for the "rooms" approach, and I have no real issue with that. Technically, each room doesn't need to have a practical "end" to it (1). The reality of space distances is that even if the game were true continuous, it would take forever to reach another system without the game having some form of warp engine/system/whatever.
Now, from that point, you could argue that you could have warp engines, and cut off warp in between two systems if you so wish, but really, to what effect? If you want some place out of the way, the rooms approach with ridiculously far away edges results in the same thing, effectively. If you're looking to travel with regular engines from one system to another... your descendants would still be flying and never reach it, so that's a moot point (2). Effectively, using a rooms approach will save you processing on simulating the universe, which means you can redirect that power to other things, and with a large enough room, the distinction wouldn't really matter much.
You can also look at the approach Infinity is taking, as far as jumping goes, where a player can jump to another system without necessarily requiring gates, by using the mass and distance of a system (3). This eschews the need of pre-existing jump gates as an explanation, and allows for easy setup for working with a "rooms" system. It also allows for hidden systems, as they are small and out of the way, and may not be reached from just any system, but may instead require a specific system to jump from which may be better located to reach it. It also naturally creates trade highways, since traders can make bigger jumps by using huge mass systems (likely giant stars) as anchor point. This also means more chance of interaction, since other ships will likely also be using those systems as easy anchors to travel to their desired destinations. I think it's a brilliant system that develops emergent behaviours that promote expected gameplay (4).
As for the nebulae, there is the question of whether the fractal Josh is generating are actual 3D entities, or merely 2D entities. If they're 3D, then it's an easy step to have the same nebula seen from various systems, as you just have to render them from the appropriate direction and bake them onto the skybox accordingly for each system that can perceive them. If it's a 2D entity, however, you're doing to have a bad time. It would be strange to see a nebula, travel to a system that is at a 90 (or 180) degree rotation around said nebula, and see either the exact same image of the nebula, or a completely different one that has no relation to it. Mind you, this might very well be a detail that most people won't catch either way unless they're gung-ho on correlating every single detail of the skybox, so you could reasonably get away with throwing a hack for 2D nebulae (which might also save you on the computation of generating the nebulae every time you change systems). I would assume most people would be too busy playing the game and interacting with other characters, or if looking at the sky, being more caught up in it being pretty to care to look for discrepancies (not to mention having randomly generated nebulae in each system means every jump would bring you to something completely different, and may just lead to excitement at the change of scenery, rather than: this next one will be mostly similar, with some changes here and there).
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1) The edge could be significantly far away that you could travel some distance from the center of a system and not reach it with regular engines in any effective time
2) Caveat: we know Josh isn't going true-scale systems, so technically, he could also distort inter-system distances for the sake of gameplay, to make it feasible to travel from one to the other with regular engines instead of warping, much like in WoW you can travel from Stormwind to Ironforge on foot, and it takes a while (yet still less than realistic distances would account for) but you can take a flight point to shorten it significantly.
3) Infinity uses proportions based on the mass and distance of a system to figure out the chance of jumping to said system, proportional to the mass, inversely proportional to the distance, with likely more effect based on the distance.
4) This also then makes piracy a more real threat, since pirate can waylay such routes as the odds of there being a ship when they show up in the system are way higher. Traders are able to avoid this risk by making more jumps through smaller systems, reducing the odds of there being pirates, but also increasing the fuel costs (assuming a static cost per jump). If you want to be a pirate, just do a run in the high traffic lanes, though you're more likely to run into trader guards/fed patrols, or roll the dice in smaller systems on the off chance a trader shows up there at the same time you do