Is That a Sparse Matrix? Extraordinary!

OMG this game is so cool ... I'm fairly sure the "sandbox" you fly around in is what Mathematica calls a "sparse matrix".

Check this out: billions of square (or possibly even cubic) kilometers of empty space, and you can fly into any point in that space you wish!

Of course the LaGrange points allow some "chunking" of that massive vector space, but the space you get to seamlessly fly around in is still huge.

How did the designers do it? How can they let you fly through a mind-bogglingly huge sparse matrix at millions of km/s?

This is the FIRST and ONLY game that really gives me a feeling of "the vastness of space". You can cut the LDS drive a "mere" 10,000 klicks away from a target ... then realize that your thrusters are going to take weeks to get you the rest of the way. The unmanagability of manual LDS because of the number of orders of magnitude crammed onto the throttle's input domain took my breath away. I was awed by the immensity of it all, and humbled enough to let the computer handle the LDS.

How did they do it? How did the designers make that enormous vector space and make the player's ship fly through it at such speeds with such apparent ease? I'm ... blown away.

Hah, now that I've played it some more I'm finding a few "tricks" I-War 2 uses to chunk that seemingly huge universe into little pieces.

I'm thinking there are "scripts" that run wherever something is happening where the player isn't, and that objects aren't rigorously tracked until the player is within 200 km of them.

"Local events" like "Jafs picks up tagged cargo" or "Jefferson Clay resets minefield" happen instantaneously if you're not there, while "travel events" are calculated according to some approximation of the game's rules regarding LDS drive speeds.

"Combat events" I'm not so sure about, and the "distress signal" encounters are almost surely faked: what are the odds that, within a persistant universe where all ships come from the shipyard, one will receive distress signals within 300,000 km of one's own position, wherever one might choose to roam?

But then there's that Maas freighter I followed from a jump point to the junkyard (ran out of LDSi missiles) ... for a non-persistant object it certainly knew exactly what it was and where it was going ...

I-War 2 seems to have used a lot of the dynamic object creation tricks that Privateer did, but has sprinkled in just enough persistance to make the game feel much more "real". I'm still not sure how they made such a vast space for the player to fly around in.

really is a great game, isn't it? scripts have a lot to do with how the game sets up missions and the like, calling jafs runs a script and all that, but i really dont know C++ let alone POG so alot of that stuff is lost on me.... one thing that lets such a huge atmosphere of play possibility exist, is the fact that past a certain distance from the player, nothing exists besides stations and a few other things like L-points, all other traffic is culled at either 1000km or 400km (not too sure, talk to Gtrout or shane, they could tell you). distress sigs are scripts, and only occur near the player position. and yeah you can pick a ship just out there flying around and follow it as long as you want, as long as you, the player, are near it it will neatly stay in existence, but once out of the "box" of space that surronds a player, it is sacrificed to the all-mighty need for more FPS. but all in all PS did a great job of tricking the player into thinking they are in a huge environment when really not much happens without you there

"Faith lies in the ways of sin"

1000km or 400km

400 km is the official distance. I have never actually tested this number, so we'll just have to trust what Stephen Robertson listed in the pog sdk. The only thing that exists outside this is stations, bodies (planets, moons, etc), lpoints, and objects that have been specifically set to not cull (generally only done with stuff critical to missions).

I agree that the tricks used to create the illusion of vastness of space yet a living civilization scattered about within it are incredibly well done. I also found it very compelling. There are a few things one can do to 'break' the illusion and expose the tricks, but why would anyone want to do that? Yes, scripts define the traffic, object locations and distress signals, but if you pick a random vector and hit max LDS for a few hours, you'll find that each system is a neatly confined and limited 'bubble' beyond which there is no 'interstellar space'. You also can't create a nice cache of cargo pods and memorize their location...they won't be there if you leave for awhile then come back for them.

The Great and Ominous Wizard is just an illusion created by some people behind a curtain pulling rods and levers. My hat is off to that team of people. They are the true wizards, and in this case they are the PS folks, now with Argonaut-Sheffield.

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Hot4Darmat

I wouldn't expect interstellar space to be modelled, since even with LDS Upgrade 3 it would still take decades to make the trip ...

The fact that a whole solar system resides within such easy reach of my computer's CPU that I can fly through it at near light-speed and drift the joystick around at random just blows my mind. I can fly from planet to planet and any point in between, without the computer visibly loading "zones" or anything of the sort.

If I hang out on the fringe of an L-point, like 200 klicks or so, there's TRAFFIC zooming by ... there are actually ships flying around on the fringes, staging or headed to or from the L-point. The zones are so alive I'm just blown away by it.

Exactly how big IS the sandbox? How high is it? (If you point your ship 90 degrees from the ecliptic and punch the LDS, how far can you go before you run out of space?)

That you can just "fly around" at will at near lightspeed in a space so huge makes me gasp in astonishment:

*gasp*