Is That a Sparse Matrix? Extraordinary!

Originally posted by Shane

Unlike I-War, Edge of Chaos does not utilize time compression. PS was going to use time compression, but dropped it at some later stage in development. So whatever your travel time... that's the actual time the trip takes.

You cannot really travel (via LDS drive) between systems (i.e., like LDSing from Hoffer's Wake to Coyote). That's just something everyone has to test when playing the game the first time.

Oh man, i really know i cannot travel throught systems with LDS drive, that was just a "traslation mistake" from mine. Sorry .

So EoC does not use time compression. Haha, i see some kind of "bordering physics" tricks to make the game work. I just can't imagine if that things would be possible someday in the real world. I'd liked old Elite Frontier time compression mode, you spent weeks traveling between PLANETS of the same system.

Edge Of Chaos rookie
I-War veteran

Too late for a registry edit, I've already reinstalled from scratch and reinstalled the patch.

It's working now.

I have been thinking about how the illusion of space is achieved in I-war. The first clue is the way interact with massive objects visible for billions of Kms ie stars and planets. There is only one... you crash, before you hit the surface. (maybe the atmosphere?)

So my thought was that these massive objects do not occupy the same coordinate space that small objects, ships, stations, pods, etc do.

The trick comes with the way they are rendered... always behind the small objects. It works like a cinematic effect, that a small model can be made to look huge if it is filmed close up and then composited behind something we know the size of.

This way nothing you can see is ever really a great distance away, except maybe the light sources which illuminate both coordinate spaces.

This does not take away the magic of the game, it does feel like space, I-war has spoiled me. I played X2 yesterday, that game feels like playing in very big boxes no sense of space at all and that kills it for me. I know X2 has features we wanted for I-war (that may come with Epic) but I just cant get into it.

Jumbo


<font color=gold>[wide beam,Marain clear.tra. @4.28.891.7393+]</font id=gold>
xGCU Grey Area
oGSV Sleeper Service
It's all right. Goodbye and farewell.

It would be possible to calculate what a distant object "should look like" within a given zone then build the zone to look like that. The problem is that I-War isn't divided into "zones" -- it clips unimportant objects at ~400 klicks, but it doesn't have "zones" in the sense Privateer did.

The zone-rendered "what it would look like from here" image would not work as soon as "here" started moving around. The "autopilot" in Privateer eliminated the problem, so they could paint stars and even planets onto the background to their heart's content, and of course Freelancer was hit by the shrinking ray, but in I-War you have a real-time, pilots-eye-view FTL drive that can zing you from one side of a full-sized solar system to another in a couple of minutes -- and there's no "zoning" along the way. (Traffic scripts notwithstanding.)

Then there's parallax: if you fly toward a point collinear with and extended from a sun and planet, the planet will appear to move more quickly than the sun. Try it with The Effrit for a really visible example.

I don't think the large space objects are "backdrops" -- I think they're the real deal. If they were backdrops or "CG camera tricks" how could they have parallax?

("Backdrop" objects should exhibit the parallax of objects of infinite or extremely long distance, such as stars in other solar systems.)

i have set my max thruster speeds to an insane level before, like 5000000000000, and then gave my ship like 1000000 hit points just to see if i could crash into a planet, when you get close you start taking heat damg. from atmosphere, but just when i thought i would crash into it, i flew right through it, turned around and there it was right behind me

"Dust to dust we're wired into sadness"

I didn't mean that the stars and planets are rendered onto a background picture, but I do think that they are rendered seperately.

Imagine you could create a star system model in you large room and that you could fly around it quite slowly as an infinitesimal object. Without any reference for size but the vastly scaled units you are told you would believe those objects were very large and the spaces betwwen them immense. Every object in this room can be seen at all times if it is big enough and bright enough.

Now imagine another room that contains objects that are similar in size to you, this room is odd in that you are always at the center of it so that when you "move" objects appear at one wall in front of you, move across the room towards you, and then disappear through the back wall. It is possible to "move" very fast in this room. [ Is the room moving! ]

If you could see these two rooms at the same time but always see the small objects in front of the large objects, and although your displayed speed in each is the same your actual speed is vastly different. It will appear that you are moving through a massive star system in 3D space because from your point of you you are. The clever part is the you can also interact with the small objects at the same time, but not the same "space".

I hope its clearer this time.

It makes we Wonder at how David Braben did it with Frontier 10 years ago on an Amiga. Do planets move in their orbits in I-war as they do in Frontier?

Jumbo

<font color=gold>[wide beam,Marain clear.tra. @4.28.891.7393+]</font id=gold>
xGCU Grey Area
oGSV Sleeper Service
It's all right. Goodbye and farewell.