advanced space travel

[codeyellow12]

The combat system in starmade has had loads of attention, so now i think the travel part of the game should get some upgrades and i just happen to have some ideas.

Firstly a hyperdrive.

The hyperdrive would be activated like the cloak/radar jammer and would allow the ship to enter hyperspace. Hyperspace would be a dimention where there are no blocks and for every 1 meter you travel there (useing regular thrusters) you travel 10 in normal space (maby higher level hyperdrives would increase that ratio?). The hyperdrives power consumption would be massive and if you lose power you would instantly drop out of hyperspace.

Something that will go hand in hand with the hyperdrive would be the navigation computer (maby called sally ai?) this would allow you to plot a course to any navagation marker in range, i would also allow you to set makers and see "bookmared" makers from a boosted distance. You would be able to select whether or not you use hyperspace and what to do if you are attacked or course.

And last of all i would like scema to fix the damed invisable salvage beam bug.

 

[Vyor]

And then you cry because your server is filled up from said hyperspace...

 

[codeyellow12]

I dont quite understand what your trying to say

 

[Vyor]

People would travel in hyperspace, right? There for it has to be stored somewhere, it wouldn\'t be much, but it could fill up pretty quikly...

 

[GROOV3ST3R]

I kind of agree with him. You proposed that we have 2 separate worlds in place, instead of one and that they have to be related together (so essentially a 10 times more compact copy of the original universe).

Don\'t know if an entire new universe with no blocks would or wouldn\'t kill memory, but it wouldn\'t help for people who wouldn\'t be using it actively.



I think the way it should work is it would simply stop loading chunks for you when you are warping. This would ensure you don\'t collide with anything and that you can freely warp between locations in the game (or rather fly 10-20 times the normal speed). It should also transform your ship into a beam of light/energy as the \'\'warp bubble\'\' is likely to be percieved by anyone looking at it from the outside. In th event the bubble collides with any player or object, it would simply warp through them as it would be too ridiculous to have collision mechanics in place for warping (just yet).



Technically, distances in StarMade are too small to actually require a jump drive or warp drive. We don\'t need it but it would be nice instead of having to sit through ridiculously long manual flights. The only disadvantage of this would be that now no place in the StarMade universe would be \'\'secure\'\' since people could jump in and out of your super secretbase at -100, 100, -100 and conduct flash attacks, destroying everything in 60 seconds and jumping out to the other end of the universe, safe from any counter attacks. At least that\'s the theory. It would need heavy balancing if it were to be implemented ^^

 

[Commodore]

I don\'t see why it would use up more memory, if anything, it would use less, and possibly allow for loading to be hidden slightly. If it is what I\'m thinking of, you would hit the jump button, and be teleported to an empty place, corresponding to your previous position. Empty space = no blocks to load. You would then fly along in hyperspace, using only enough memory to store your ship. When leaving hyperspace, there could be a jumping animation (minus gate) http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xnm14_babylon-5-jumpgate_tech giving the server and client time to begin loading the new sector.

 

[Heyguys]

With the Nether. You enter it through a gate. Inside of the nether, every step forward was the equivalent of 8 steps in the overworld. This applied to every form of travel. If you utilized Nether gates and minecarts, you could cut any travel time by 1/8, which was fantastic.



There are two primary issues however. One, you must decide if the \"hyperspace\" dimension is completely unoccupied, or to do it 40k style (and like the Minecraft Nether) where it\'s faster, but a dangerous place to go (unique, dangerous mobs). I would love to see 40k style warp, really would.



The second issue is loading time. It shouldn\'t strain memory, but if it took too long to load between the overworld and the warp dimension, that would nullify a lot of the purpose of using it instead of just trying to go really, really fast. If you could sucesfully make loading times extremely short, or in an even better world virtually seamless, it would be completely practical.

 

[GROOV3ST3R]

working mechanics are very different between the two - not least because you can actually move the blocks themselves and therefore move the reference point - and by extension, you have literally no reference point.



You may think: \'\'hold on, but when I\'m on a planet/station, it doesn\'t move. True. But the system in which that planet/station is, is constantly rotating around other systems. With all systems changing places relative to each other, you end up with such anomalies like apparently covering a distance between 2 points faster than it\'s supposed to be possible (such as taking less than 1 hour to fly 50km with a speed limit of 50km/h - which should be impossible because: a) you never reach 50kph b) you need to turn sacrificing speed c) because of turning, your flight path is not optimal).



Sure, you could do a crude system which would move you 10 meters forward for ever 1 meter of actual distance. But then if you actaully force your entire ship to teleport into another dimension to achieve this, the server has to first move the location of your ship, load it in the new area, load anything else in that area, keep the two copies of space synchronised (not to mention running 2 instances of the same space, with 2 different outcomes) and locations of anyone else within that space. Then when you teleport back (or drop out of warp), you end up having to load your ship again, update it\'s location relative to both universes and check whether everything is still in sync.

 

[NeonSturm]

Warp should not be a seperate world, but after each edit, each object could update some kind of preview (low resolution) of itself with simplified holes in it\'s shape.

While warping do others look (or you to others) a bit like a ghost.



What do you think about this?:

Increase your own gravitional-forces share to get more independent. Go away from planets to reduce dependence.

The speed is aproximately 1x near planets and without gravity, but everything

 

[Vyor]

not 14... older...

 

[BlisAx]

Instead of having complicated systems has anyone ever thought of using the closest thing we currently have to a hyperdrive? The \"change_sector\" command.

Implementation the user enters a destination sector, the game calculates the distance from the current sector to the destination (in a straight line). Then the game takes your thrust to mass ratio and calculates the time nessesary.

EG: 4000 thrust on a 2000 mass ship, would have a ratio of 2:1 or 2.0 using that and a constant time of lets say 2 seconds per sector. The game would divide the constant by the ratio so this ship would take 1 second to cross a sector.

After (or before) calculating the time nessesary the game unloads the users ship starts a timer for (timePerSector * NumOfSectors) when that timer is up the game simply invokes a \"change_sector\" command. While the user is waiting maybe display a nice animation of a light tunnel or something.

Power usage should be calculated by the dimentions of the ship (im not going to state any numbers for this) but should be fairly low. Reasons for this is in all the sci fi shows or movies i\'ve seen it shows that hyperspace travel can be indefinant. Although I do think there should be somesort of cooldown period to avoid players jumping in to a sector attacking and then jumping out. Just a thought but maybe because shields are not needed in hyperspace when you jump out shields have to regenerate from 0. Also helping with the jump attack and run possible problem as you could not jump directily into a battle safely.

Just a note on power, maybe a ship would need to have a certain amount of e/sec to even be able to jump to hyperspace. This would encourage the creating of carrier ships as simple fighters would not be hyperspace capable.

Instead of creating a new dimention or just traveling really fast, simply provide a way to use this command via a ship computer. I posted this because this is the newest thread i could find on the topic and did not want to make a new thread for such a overly used topic.

disclaimer: I have no idea of how the command interface is set up or if there is a way to currently invoke a command by a block. Also I have no knowledge of how the \"change_sector\" command is implemented or if it provides the nessesary checks to make sure you don\'t \"appear\" in the middle of a asteriod, planet or more interestingly another ship. Also I have purposly not included how a hyperdrive would be made in-game, just a rough idea of how it could be implemented on a code level.

 

[AtraUnam]

I like the idea of a star trek style FTL system. You stay in the same universe (collisions and all) but move at a far higher speed. This speed could be based on the number of \'WarpCore\' blocks on your ship (assuming you can power them) The consiquence of this is exagerated collision damage. At relavistic (near or above light) speeds your ship would have a far higher effective mass massively increasing collision damage for everyone involved. Commercially users could create and toll debris free routes for large ships to safely warp along.

The tactical possibilities that I can think of right now are:
-An invading force would have 3 choices:

1. Use an established safe route:
   Predictable angle of attack, possibly longer, Route owners may alert your target
2. Cut through debris filled space:
   Could result in damage to attacking ships due to greatly increased collision damage at warp
3. Cut through debris filled space but send a scout first:
   Scout may be detected allerting defenders, Scout would have to travel at normal speeds

-A defending force would also have new options available:

1. Focus defenses on area facing nearest safe route
2. Surround base in flak to discourage enemy ships from warping in to close
3. Sabotage safe routes by pushing asteroids into the lanes (Could also be an offensive tactic)

 

[NeonSturm]

But we need a simplified collision and object loading system, maybe a collision-avoidance system with heavily-filled sectors.

• (ask for sector data size on a sun-system hierachy level) - heavy sectors may act as warp suppressor/dampener in adjacent sectors.

Star-Trek also has deflectors which not push the particles in front of the ship but create an aerodynamic field.

• Borg-cubes have transwarp-pipe stations.
• In some voyager movie, you see also a species which used subspace roads.
• Sometimes the voyager used wormholes to beam a single person through, also seen in Deep-Space-Nine.

In Warhammer40k, \"The Warp\" is filled with Chaos. There is no need to store data - it is more or less randoom with two \'o\' . But ships can fly save for a very short time period.

A game does not need to be perfectly simulating the environment. It has to provide an environment where the user think it is perfectly simulated (for the rules the game defines).