I noticed that one of the things that alot of players want with there fast travel is hitting physical objects resulting in death.
The problem with this is that we do not want people going over the servers specified speed limit, and simulating all of those blocks for collision would require actually loading them. Basicly, many of the currently proposed ideas have alot of technical difficulties involved.
My Idea:
There is a sort of parallel game world called hyperspace that, similar to the nether in minecraft, causes your coordinates to be divided by X(normaly 8) when you enter it, and divided by X when you leave again. Effectively multiplying the distance you have traveled by X.
When you enter hyperspace you retain your current speed and heading while your controls become very unresponsive. Hyperspace does not cause your ship to slow down if you stop holding the forward key. You are still able to manuver a little, but on the average length trip you would be lucky to alter your trajectory by 20 degrees.
Hyperspace would either look like you would expect the inside of the sun to look, or it would look like some sort of neon blue swirly thing. At the relative positions of all objects in the main world there would be a shaddow billboard which is basicly a dark gradient scaled to the objects relative size. There are two types of these "shadows", the first is planets and the sun which kill you on contact and probably cause your ship to be converted to items which then explode into the neares empty space in realspace. The second type are ships,staitions,roids, and other stuff which do not hurt you to pass through, but which will cause the same type of explosion if you try to leave hyperspace while colliding with them.
Finally we have the blocks that are added with this feature, the "Hyper-Capacitor", and the "HyperCapController" There are several important aspects of this tech. first is that the amount of energy required to pull the ship into hyperspace scales with the dimensions of the ship. This energy is almost always significantly greater than the amount that even a ship which is 99% generators by weight could put out. As such each capacitor holds a large amount of energy that is refilled directly from your main power source. Additional caps over that required to enter hyperspace contribute to the time that you are able to stay in hyper space. There is a fixed cost per second of hyperspace travel which means that larger ships are better at long term hyper travel while small ships can do quick tactical hops if they specialize similar to cloaking.
Entering hyperspace would ofc be done similar to all other weapons with the control computer.
An important limitation of this system is that the hyperspace distance travled by your ship is almost entirely dependent upon the actual construction of your ship(you can speed/slow a little after entering hyperspace, but thats relatively small effect). Since docked ships are not counted as part of the dimensions of a ship, this system favors large carrier ships that run a dedicated route(you can make different capacitior subsystems for different jump distances). While also allowing small ships to make short tactical jumps.
Another consequense of the system is that in small ships the energy usage is largely dominated by the cost of traveling through hyperspace, while in large ships it is dominated by the cost of entering hyperspace.
Thats all I have on this for now, but later I may post my ideas for in game AI module improvements.
The problem with this is that we do not want people going over the servers specified speed limit, and simulating all of those blocks for collision would require actually loading them. Basicly, many of the currently proposed ideas have alot of technical difficulties involved.
My Idea:
There is a sort of parallel game world called hyperspace that, similar to the nether in minecraft, causes your coordinates to be divided by X(normaly 8) when you enter it, and divided by X when you leave again. Effectively multiplying the distance you have traveled by X.
When you enter hyperspace you retain your current speed and heading while your controls become very unresponsive. Hyperspace does not cause your ship to slow down if you stop holding the forward key. You are still able to manuver a little, but on the average length trip you would be lucky to alter your trajectory by 20 degrees.
Hyperspace would either look like you would expect the inside of the sun to look, or it would look like some sort of neon blue swirly thing. At the relative positions of all objects in the main world there would be a shaddow billboard which is basicly a dark gradient scaled to the objects relative size. There are two types of these "shadows", the first is planets and the sun which kill you on contact and probably cause your ship to be converted to items which then explode into the neares empty space in realspace. The second type are ships,staitions,roids, and other stuff which do not hurt you to pass through, but which will cause the same type of explosion if you try to leave hyperspace while colliding with them.
Finally we have the blocks that are added with this feature, the "Hyper-Capacitor", and the "HyperCapController" There are several important aspects of this tech. first is that the amount of energy required to pull the ship into hyperspace scales with the dimensions of the ship. This energy is almost always significantly greater than the amount that even a ship which is 99% generators by weight could put out. As such each capacitor holds a large amount of energy that is refilled directly from your main power source. Additional caps over that required to enter hyperspace contribute to the time that you are able to stay in hyper space. There is a fixed cost per second of hyperspace travel which means that larger ships are better at long term hyper travel while small ships can do quick tactical hops if they specialize similar to cloaking.
Entering hyperspace would ofc be done similar to all other weapons with the control computer.
An important limitation of this system is that the hyperspace distance travled by your ship is almost entirely dependent upon the actual construction of your ship(you can speed/slow a little after entering hyperspace, but thats relatively small effect). Since docked ships are not counted as part of the dimensions of a ship, this system favors large carrier ships that run a dedicated route(you can make different capacitior subsystems for different jump distances). While also allowing small ships to make short tactical jumps.
Another consequense of the system is that in small ships the energy usage is largely dominated by the cost of traveling through hyperspace, while in large ships it is dominated by the cost of entering hyperspace.
Thats all I have on this for now, but later I may post my ideas for in game AI module improvements.
