Pilot Archive
Thread: Unrealistic ship speed
What about a hypersphere? Right now, we're literally playing in a box, how difficult would it be to code the game so you could fly out of one end of the cube and up into it from the bottom?
I've seen an old arcade game called Space Lords from Atari pull this off rather well. The actual playable volume of space was limited, but you attained an effectively unlimited ability to fly in a straight line.
snltoonces wrote:I remember the Devs saying that they would rather design zones around the content, then make huge zones with nothing in them.
...
It's space, it's supposed to be empty!
... and I think you could do bigger space zones without too much extra server load if you got rid of those nebulas that shouldn't be there in the first place.
TomedNor wrote:
It's space, it's supposed to be empty!
I did a post on this ages ago. Why are you using imperial measurements when distance on JTLS is measured in metres? The true unit of speed used in game would be metres per second. And as a heads up an engine speed of 100 [or 1000 as it'd read on the HUD] would be 100 metres per second. The ships when using EO4 are actually comparible in speed to a WWII fighter plane if you can achieve a speed of around 1200+.
Plus it isn't slow when you get into some pvp situations and you're constantly turning. When turning, you are under constant acceleration [because of the constant direction change] therefore I think it is quite fast enough.
-Leaph
JanuHull wrote:
What about a hypersphere? Right now, we're literally playing in a box, how difficult would it be to code the game so you could fly out of one end of the cube and up into it from the bottom?
I've seen an old arcade game called Space Lords from Atari pull this off rather well. The actual playable volume of space was limited, but you attained an effectively unlimited ability to fly in a straight line.
Something like this would allow for long running pursuit battles without adding too much to the processing demands on the servers.
no not a hypersphere, just link the north-south and east-west edges and leave the top-bottom of the box as a hard ceiling and floor. This would be the closest approximation to an "orbital" sector, without having to convert all the gridding in space to a radial format (that it should have been in the first place) and have to deal with nasty trig functions 
i think, if there was a reason they didnt do this, its because they have trouble with server boundaries and probably ran into issues with fighting near or on the boundary, where ships were going back and forth rapidly across it; i could see where they might have issues with not being able to shoot a ship that was across a linked edge, etc.
So... no ludicrous speed?
droid327 wrote:
I'd think, if there was a reason they didnt do this, its because they have trouble with server boundaries and probably ran into issues with fighting near or on the boundary, where ships were going back and forth rapidly across it; i could see where they might have issues with not being able to shoot a ship that was across a linked edge, etc.
Thatguyfubu wrote:
Just the pure fact that you could actually fly around aplanet is awesome.
Actually this was one of my disappointments with the space zones too, I would rather have the planets look a lot smaller and be able to use them as static objects to hide behind, etc. Having planets and moons to zigzag around would be fun.
All in all though, this is *MUCH* better than Earth and Beyond. E&B had what seemed like bigger zones, but on a linear plane, the Z axis was almost nonexistant. I prefer this model much better.
Higginsis wrote:
FM_Warblood wrote:
Yea the zone size of space is tiny. They really need to enlarge them a good 20 fold.
The servers to make that possible would most likely put up the cost so much we'd have to pay $100 a month for them to cover costs.
Bigger zones would be great, but with the current techonology, this is the best we will have.
Not sure about that comment.
I played a game called Jumpgate, old space sim. The sectors of space had no end. There were two jumpgates around 30k from each other in a grid square and each sector was filled with astroids and enemy fighters, space stations, player owed bases.
What you could do was head for deap space and leave your pc running for an hour and you would still not hit the end.
Now this was an old game (but still running now) and I would take it still runs on the original servers.
also we are talking about a complex space sim, much more complex than jtl.