Really can't we have the planets and LARGE objects like planets and moons to scale, then just shrink down asteroid fields to a size better for gameplay? And also, I would LOVE megastructures and/or asteroid fields that would take me hours and hours to fly across, things I could get lost in.

ThymineC wrote: No. I just don't imagine asteroid fields being all that big. Maybe a few hundred kilometers wide, so that it takes a few minutes to travel from one end to another.

That would make them awfully small compared to the size of the system. That way we'll get to Elite formula of empty space and busy key points. I like it a lot, but only with the right game mechanics (E:D proposed hyperspace within system). LT is clearly aiming to be Freelancer-like in that regard, and it's perfectly fine with me. Limit Theory is big enough in its scope to avoid adding some features. And after all, how many people do really understand what vastness of space means? We all know that it's substantially bigger than going to the local pharmacy, but very few of us have any idea at all. Most people are used to small or extremely small spaces; I guess making systems thrice the size of Freelancer systems would be enough for most people.

It's not really so much about increasing exploration opportunities - you're not really adding more content to the systems, since that will overly-dilute the actors within the system - so much as improving immersion. That being said, it would allow for more exploration opportunities for those that have beastlier computers and can mod the game to support it. With unrealistically-small systems, doing the same may make the system feel too cramped.

Freelancer didn't feel cramped, it felt...lively, in places, and almost empty in others. Again, my solution would have been 'bigger than in Freelancer, but still small enough to cross using cruise drive in a couple of hours'.

outlander4 wrote:

ThymineC wrote: No. I just don't imagine asteroid fields being all that big. Maybe a few hundred kilometers wide, so that it takes a few minutes to travel from one end to another.

That would make them awfully small compared to the size of the system. That way we'll get to Elite formula of empty space and busy key points. I like it a lot, but only with the right game mechanics (E:D proposed hyperspace within system).

Yes, that's what I'm aiming for - relatively compact points of interest separated by vast gulfs of empty space where all you'd see are Josh's beautifully rendered nebulae in the distance. You'd be able to travel between them relatively fast using the H-drive in cruise mode, HAVE lanes, and transfer lanes - on the order of minutes, perhaps. Personally, I wouldn't mind travel taking a little longer so long as we could make it interesting in some way.

Also, it's a small point but E:D uses the frame-shift drive to move quickly around the system; the hyperdrive is used for travelling between systems. I'd want the H-drive in cruise-mode to feel similar to the frame-shift drive.

outlander4 wrote:LT is clearly aiming to be Freelancer-like in that regard, and it's perfectly fine with me. Limit Theory is big enough in its scope to avoid adding some features. And after all, how many people do really understand what vastness of space means? We all know that it's substantially bigger than going to the local pharmacy, but very few of us have any idea at all. Most people are used to small or extremely small spaces; I guess making systems thrice the size of Freelancer systems would be enough for most people.

Maybe. Or maybe it will mean that the vastness of space in Limit Theory will blow these people minds. Or maybe not, I really don't know.

outlander4 wrote:

It's not really so much about increasing exploration opportunities - you're not really adding more content to the systems, since that will overly-dilute the actors within the system - so much as improving immersion. That being said, it would allow for more exploration opportunities for those that have beastlier computers and can mod the game to support it. With unrealistically-small systems, doing the same may make the system feel too cramped.

Freelancer didn't feel cramped, it felt...lively, in places, and almost empty in others. Again, my solution would have been 'bigger than in Freelancer, but still small enough to cross using cruise drive in a couple of hours'.

Well, my proposed implementation would be for much, much larger systems than I guess Freelancer had, but you'd cross them in minutes. There's two things you can vary independently of each other here: the size of systems, and the time it takes to cross them.

ThymineC wrote: No. I just don't imagine asteroid fields being all that big. Maybe a few hundred kilometers wide, so that it takes a few minutes to travel from one end to another.

Disagreed by an old word of josh "there will be solar system sized asteroid fields" (or so, something with the same meaning)

Think of protoplanetar disks in an intermediate stage of aggregation, not dust anymore but no planets either

Cornflakes_91 wrote:

ThymineC wrote: No. I just don't imagine asteroid fields being all that big. Maybe a few hundred kilometers wide, so that it takes a few minutes to travel from one end to another.

Disagreed by an old word of josh "there will be solar system sized asteroid fields" (or so, something with the same meaning)

Think of protoplanetar disks in an intermediate stage of aggregation, not dust anymore but no planets either

You sure? I thought Josh has said the opposite thing - making asteroid fields much smaller than they are now, so they're not filling the whole system.

ThymineC wrote: You sure? I thought Josh has said the opposite thing - making asteroid fields much smaller than they are now, so they're not filling the whole system.

Quite sure, but im basing on an old devlog video (8?9? A system with red dustclouds eas featured iirc) Could be that my information is not valid anymore

Cornflakes_91 wrote:

ThymineC wrote: You sure? I thought Josh has said the opposite thing - making asteroid fields much smaller than they are now, so they're not filling the whole system.

Quite sure, but im basing on an old devlog video (8?9? A system with red dustclouds eas featured iirc) Could be that my information is not valid anymore

Paging Mr. Parnell.

Of course - that's how it's done! The Elite: Dangerous guys are geniuses!

From the proposed mechanics of the frame-shift drive in this design document, while travelling at very high speeds through empty space: "It also alters the visuals from the cockpit significantly, for example other ships travelling at super-cruise are rendered as distorted flaring lights, visible way beyond normal visible range, and other astronomical effects, like magnetic fields become accentuated too, rendering them visible in many cases."

This is a great way to resolve one of the main limitations of realistically-sized systems, which is the fact that it makes random encounters between agents much more rare. But if you could see NPCs at much, much further distances if you're both travelling in cruise mode and you can reach NPCs in good time at the kind of velocities you're travelling at, it would be functionally equivalent to having smaller systems, shorter detection ranges and slower travel; you'd still get random encounters quite often this way.

For instance, if an NPC and I are travelling in cruise mode at, say, 1,000,000 km.s^-1 each, then if we make it so that we can detect other ships at 15,000,000 km ranges in this mode, all that needs to happen is for the NPC to come within 15,000,000 km of me or vice versa, and then it can detect me and, if it wants, start flying towards me and reach me in good time (perhaps a minute depending on the cosine similarity of our respective flight vectors?), and that would constitute a random encounter. 15,000,000 km might be too small given the scale involved, but in that case it could just be scaled up. It becomes a balancing issue.

Leaving the system size ideas entirely for a second, I can't state how keen I am on the HAVE lane/lay lines in space concept. It just seems so right on many levels, since it encourages exploration but also keeps things interesting in well developed systems by having fast-travel methods outside of anyone's control.

A few more thoughts:

• These things are a natural phenomemon, so to my mind that means there should be various ways in which they manifest themselves. As a first pass I would say:
  • Fixed - fixed lay lines are in one place, and never move. Basically a natural trade lane.
  • "Tidal" - these kinds of lay lines would shift in some sort of predictable way over a defined period. The potential for smuggling routes here is large.
  • Randomised - unpredictable lines that can shift at any time, disappear or branch - you name it.
• Information about the lay lines in a particular system should be buyable (or sellable!).
• Perhaps you can use Scanner 2.0 to find these things, or maybe you simply have to fly through one and observe some sort of visual distortion?
• When you're in them we could resurrect Scanner 1.0 and use it as a kind of "look ahead" that indicates which way you should fly to stay on the lay line. This would necessarily mean that using this mode of travel requires pilot input; but this also seems like a nice differentiator for the feature.

Factor in the "invariant" vs. sensitive zero-point energy extractors and you've got some really simple-but-deep gameplay.

mcsven wrote:A few more thoughts:

• These things are a natural phenomemon, so to my mind that means there should be various different ways in which they manifest themselves. As a first pass I would say:
  • Fixed - fixed lay lines are in one place, and never move. Basically a natural trade lane.
  • "Tidal" - these kinds of lay lines would shift in some sort of predictable way over a defined period. The potential for smuggling routes here is large.
  • Randomised - unpredictable lines that can shift at any time, disappear or branch - you name it.
• Information about the lay lines in a particular system should be buyable (or sellable!).
• Perhaps you can use Scanner 2.0 to find these things, or maybe you simply have to fly through one and observe some sort of visual distortion?
• When you're in them we could resurrect Scanner 1.0 and use it as a kind of "look ahead" that indicates which way you should fly to stay on the lay line. This would necessarily mean that using this mode of travel requires pilot input; but this also seems like a nice differentiator for the feature.

Factor in the "invariant" vs. sensitive zero-point energy extractors and you've got some really simple-but-deep gameplay.

I really like those ideas, definitely. The tidal/randomised HAVE lanes idea is great because it allows for the dynamically-shifting network that I wanted to get out of the transfer network but can't in LT1 due to static celestial bodies. The changing HAVE network can have subtle but very real effects on the economy of the system (maybe other things as well).

I don't think you'd be able to discover HAVE lanes just by accidentally flying into them - especially not with realistic system sizes if they're implemented, but even with small systems I don't see that happening. Instead, HAVE lanes are simply regions of ultra-high vacuum energy accessibility, so you'd be able to find them using whatever means is implemented to visualise vacuum accessibility normally. For instance, one way of visualising this would be to switch to a 3D grid-line representation of space, where the grid line density in a region of space correlates with the vacuum energy accessibility in it; if the grid lines are closer together, that means the vacuum energy is more highly accessible, and HAVE lanes would be represented by snaking bands of very dense grid lines. Perhaps like this but with far more subtle and less ugly grid lines:

Anyways, shouldn't it be easy to just change the values for system size in the data editor?

Yes, how to discover lay lines is an area ripe for interesting ideas. For instance, it could simply be another "workspace" view that replaces the visual spectrum with something that make the lay lines visible (almost like viewing the universe through a black light).

But I like the visible grid too, or maybe a 2D contour map?

Or perhaps there's a drone that maps them for you?

mcsven wrote:Yes, how to discover lay lines is an area ripe for interesting ideas. For instance, it could simply be another "workspace" view that replaces the visual spectrum with something that make the lay lines visible (almost like viewing the universe through a black light).

Well, it's really just a matter of switching view modes - though now that I think about it, it is a cool idea that each view mode is mapped to its own workspace, and that you switch view modes by shifting between different workspaces. If this works like in Ubuntu, where you actively see the workspace "slide" into the screen, it'd be like popping different kinds of lenses in front of a camera, which I think would be a really neat effect.

mscven wrote:But I like the visible grid too, or maybe a 2D contour map?

I considered this but a 2D contour map would be problematic, as you'd want to see how vacuum accessibility varies over 3-dimensional space.

mcsven wrote:Or perhaps there's a drone that maps them for you?

That's a possibility, yeah.

Draglide12 wrote:Anyways, shouldn't it be easy to just change the values for system size in the data editor?

It'd require a lot more than that to make sure the rest of the gameplay works well if you're switching to realistically sized systems. You'd have to design other mechanics around it.

Drone idea is good. Ships computer could overlay a track of their movements, pulses indicating the direction they go. Drones would automatically be attracted to the lines. This would give a sort of vector based graphic approach to line identification. I imagine visually the effect might be similar to warp drive activation in Star Trek.

ThymineC wrote: Yes, that's what I'm aiming for - relatively compact points of interest separated by vast gulfs of empty space [...]

Also, it's a small point but E:D uses the frame-shift drive to move quickly around the system; the hyperdrive is used for travelling between systems. I'd want the H-drive in cruise-mode to feel similar to the frame-shift drive.

[...]

Well, my proposed implementation would be for much, much larger systems than I guess Freelancer had, but you'd cross them in minutes. There's two things you can vary independently of each other here: the size of systems, and the time it takes to cross them.

Aye, I'm a bit behind on E:D terminology, but you got the idea.

I really suggest you having a look at Freelancer; your ideas are sometimes very good, sometimes very weird, and sometimes are plain brilliant; but they might not be fully compatible with the game Josh had in mind from the very beginning - that is, a Freelancer 2, better in every way but preserving the feeling of the original. That's what made me interested, because there haven't been a game like that since...well, since the original Freelancer.

For immense space and 'realism' I've backed E:D; for cheesier sci-fi with rubber forehead aliens and whatnot I've backed Star Citizen (might have been a mistake; I'm not all that excited now...); but for that magical Freelancer feeling there's no other choice but to buy LT.

And I'm sure that LT 2 will be different, and that's where your ideas might get more use. After all, if LT will be all it aspires to be, we won't need another Freelancer-inspired game for at least another decade