Slightly More Realism

[JelloTickles]

It's a bit not really anything to be fixed right away but it's kind of stupid how fast you travel in this game and how far apart the planets are. First of all, planet's shouldn't be like 10 Km away, that's just stupid. Secondly, 50 km/h would take about 3 days to get from New York to Florida, nevertheless travelling from a planet to planet? It would be awesome if they were made even 10 million km's away, and the speed instead of 50 km should be made 50 km/second.

 

[JanitorialMilk]

50 km/s is much more realistic than 50 km/h. 50 km/s is still REALLY slow when you are talking about space. The speed should be displayed at like 200 km/s. That would be a much much more reasonable speed to travel at, unless you were trying to get to a planet.

 

[Fiestaguy]

You can already configure the max speed on a server. also this is a different universe than the one we\'re living in in real life. Maybe in that universe its normal that planets only have 10KM distance from each other. and Gameplay>realism. i just wanna be able to hop from planret to planet easily.

 

[JanitorialMilk]

I think setting it to 180000 km/h would break the server though. It would need to actually be coded into the game.

 

[ALPHAshadowfox]

Why not just change the display so it\'s 5000km/s? that\'s all that needs changing.. it\'s not going to change the speed or anything.. just so it looks more realistic.. and maybe they can develop a function where you can set the minimum and maximum distance between planets when you generate a universe.. this allows there to be gameplay like it currently is.. or realistic play where the planets are about 4 minutes apart.. or a minefield of planets..

 

[JanitorialMilk]

That\'s what I would want. Don\'t change speed, just change the speed displayed. Sorry if that was vague in my last post.

 

[Morrigi]

Then you\'d just run into a different spatial scaling problem. Going 50km/s past a 100m long ship is still gonna look like going past that 100m ship at 50km/h. It really isn\'t that simple.

 

[JanitorialMilk]

True, but he can change how the view of the world looks. He still doesn\'t need to change the speed, unless you\'re only going 50,000 blocks per hour, which would be the conversion for speed into blocks/meters. That seems way too slow for a space game. You should be going like 50,0000 blocks per second at the SLOWEST. Even the Voyager spacecraft is moving faster than we are in the game, and the game takes place in the future.

 

[JelloTickles]

That\'s exactly what I meant, we could believe that each block ship is bigger, and the displays would change too.

 

[D-Car]

Alright, you mass of derps ... there are a couple reasons most space games don\'t operate on \"real world\" scale. First, tellng the server to let us move at 10,000km/s would effectively render us all blind unless we come to a full stop due to, quite literally, the speed at which servers can load the amount of voxels required to keep a smooth field of view at that speed. Second, we can\'t keep the same absolute speed of movement and just change the label for how fast we\'re moving because ejecting from the ship core and seeing a character standing as tall as two \"1km^3\" blocks is just silly.

Warp/Jump drives aside, you\'re just going to have to accept that the speed limits are the way they are because the game cannot handle moving at the speeds a lot of people want to see ... barring some kind of miracle code optimization that makes everything load 100x faster.

 

[JanitorialMilk]

You don\'t tell the server you move at 10,000km/s. That would be crazy and would immediatly break the server. You change the number displayed for speed. I don\'t mind speed limits, they just shouldn\'t be in km/h. In space, km/h is NEVER used because of how fast things need to move to get anywhere in space.

 

[D-Car]

What\'s wrong with km/h? It\'s the same thing whether you say m/s or inches/year.

 

[JanitorialMilk]

Think about how big space is. If you want to get from earth to another planet, say mars, you\'ll need to go much faster than 50km/h if you want to get there within a reasonable amount of time. This game lets you move from planet to planet in 15 minutes going 50km/h! That means the planets are like 12.5 km away from each other. If they were that close to each other, they\'d collide and destroy each other.

 

[D-Car]

Right, but that brings me back to the scale of a game world where if we list the existing space at a different numeric scale ... then the player would be measured at hundreds of meters tall or something. That wouldn\'t make sense either.

 

[JanitorialMilk]

Why would the player be hundereds of meters tall? We are only changing the distance between planets and the displayed speed at which your craft supposedly moves at.

 

[D-Car]

Okay, a practical example: You get into a ship of some kind and tap the thrusters for a moment before stopping. The ship says you\'re moving at one mile per second and you\'ve moved a few blocks. Therefore, a few blocks of distance would equal one mile. The character is about two blocks tall, so that\'d mean he\'s 2/3 of a mile tall in this example. Alternatively, making everything remain at the same scale but spreading it apart would be counter-productive in game terms since it\'d literally take days to travel between objects, even at light speed. The only way to travel would be with a jump drive that doesn\'t exist, so you might as well have been asking to rewrite the arrangement of the universe and to also rewrite travel mechanics so we have a sub-light speed of 50km/s while also having an FTL/Jump drive that operates on coordinates or something.

 

[JanitorialMilk]

You\'d have to accelerate to the speed of 50km/s, which would take a bit of time because you\'re starting at 0km/infinite_amount_of_time, unless you want to calculate in the speed at which the solar system/planet/galaxy is moving around its center point. That being said, you wouldn\'t be moving a few blocks a second, but 50,000 blocks/meters a second. The scale of everything other than the distance between planets could remain the same. The rendering issue could be fixed by rendering all objects as fixed points in space and not rendering any objects you can\'t see. It wouldn\'t take days to travel to things because he can still scale the universe down a bit, but he needs to scale it up a bit because 50km/h is too slow to move to another planet in one person\'s lifetime, unless the planets were 12.5km away from each other.

 

[D-Car]

The rendering issue could be fixed by rendering all objects as fixed points in space and not rendering any objects you can\'t see.


This doesn\'t actually fix anything. The server will still need to load things at 50,000/50 times as fast as normal when a player is moving through space. Loading a single planet (on a local server) would need to be instantaneous, and it\'s simply not that fast. You can watch the chunks get loaded as you approach with a pithy 50m/s speed limit. How in the world is the programming going to support moving 1,000x the speed? I\'m derping around on a server where they set the speed limit to 250m/s and the game absolutely cannot keep up with loading things when I\'m at that speed and there\'s nobody else on the server.

 

[JanitorialMilk]

Actually it does fix some things. You only render the image until you are slow enought to actually see it clearly. Rendering an image at a fixed point in space is easier than rendering the actual planet, thus it takes much less time and allows for faster speeds. If he moved the planets apart, you wouldn\'t need to render that much anyways. You\'d see one planet and a bunch of stars/small planets that look like stars.

 

[D-Car]

So, you\'re suggesting he make space itself really really super empty and just spread everything apart while also increasing the render depth ... for the sake of increasing travel times ... because you think the current system isn\'t realistic?