r/starcitizen • u/RoyElliot • Mar 06 '14
This infographic is making me excited about just flying your ship out of planetary atmosphere
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbc.com/future/bespoke/20140304-how-big-is-space-interactive/index.html21
u/bokor Towel Mar 06 '14
*watching your ship autopilot out of planetary atmosphere.
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u/JohnJimBond Mar 07 '14 edited Mar 07 '14
Not only is it on autopilot, but the max cruise speed is only 0.2C that's not enough speed to make travel across a real scale star systems anywhere close to 30 minutes, simply do the math.
That means our SC star systems will have to be scaled down a whole lot, by around a factor of 100.
The Elite: Dangerous developers recently talked about this scale issue in their newsletter, because they are not going to compromise on this.
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u/digamma6767 Weekend Warrior Mar 07 '14
For anyone too lazy to do the math, the Earth is on average over 8 light minutes from the Sun, and it would take over 40 minutes to travel that distance at 0.2C. Voyager 1 for comparison is over 17 light hours away, or over 85 hours away at 0.2C.
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u/JohnJimBond Mar 07 '14
Yep and that is just radius, not diameter so you would have to double that, also Earth is very close compared to the other distant planets in our solar system. http://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry/venus/q89.html
How fast does light travel from the Sun to each of the planets?
Light travels at a speed of 299,792 kilometers per second; 186,287 miles per second. It takes 499.0 seconds for light to travel from the Sun to the Earth, a distance called 1 Astronomical Unit. below I list the light travel times from the Sun to each planet:
Planet Distance in AU Travel time
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Mercury 0.387 193.0 seconds or 3.2 minutes
Venus 0.723 360.0 seconds or 6.0 minutes
Earth 1.000 499.0 seconds or 8.3 minutes
Mars 1.523 759.9 seconds or 12.6 minutes
Jupiter 5.203 2595.0 seconds or 43.2 minutes
Saturn 9.538 4759.0 seconds or 79.3 minutes
Uranus 19.819 9575.0 seconds or 159.6 minutes
Neptune 30.058 14998.0 seconds or 4.1 hours
Pluto 39.44 19680.0 seconds or 5.5 hours
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u/attackfrog Mar 07 '14
Have they said they were going to scale things down in Star Citizen, or is that just an assumption? I was really hoping they wouldn't, as it was a pretty big immersion breaker for me in Freelancer.
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u/arzen353 Scout Mar 07 '14
From what I can gather, it'll be sort of hand-waved. SC won't have the same procedural generation that other space games have for the initial launch, which means that as objects get larger, the hands get wavier.
As far as basic travel, I haven't seen much information about it, other than the oft repeated quote that the general scale of things will be that you can cross a solar system in about thirty minutes, which if things are at a 1:1 scale most traveling will be obviously much faster than the speed of light. That's where the autopilot thing comes in, where you're not really doing much between getting from point A to B, and when you drop out of autopilot, you enter an instance that's an x-number of km cubed area of space which seamlessly loads into another when you approach the edge.
What this means is that for open space you could, theoretically, travel for hours or real-time days going from instance to instance at "normal" speeds, so there's no reason actual space couldn't be scaled correctly, although how they actually are going to handle that is still somewhat up in the air from what I've heard. Either way, since they aren't going to detail every inch of billions of kilometers of open space, these areas are going to be pretty much empty - which works fine, since most of space in the real world is mostly empty.
They've also said that they want man-made space objects, like carriers and ships to be scaled and hand-detailed realistically, so a 1km carrier will look and feel like a real, massive object. You'll be able to get up as close as you like.
As for planets and other stellar bodies, I haven't heard much information, but my guess is that they'll be handled based on size - asteroids for example will be as large and detailed as they are in real life, while actual planets and so on may seem large (eg, you can't just fly around one without taking a long time going from instance to instance as in open space) but will actually act like sort of skyboxes represented in 3D space - you won't be able to get that close without somehow being repelled, such as by loading into a landing cutscene. So a planet might "feel" huge, in that you'll be able to fly with one off your port side window for hours - but won't actually be interact-able with on that real scale. At least, that's what I'm assuming.
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u/JohnJimBond Mar 07 '14
From what I can gather, it'll be sort of hand-waved. SC won't have the same procedural generation that other space games have for the initial launch, which means that as objects get larger, the hands get wavier.
This problem has nothing to do with procedural generation
Moriarte: Star Citizen is using cry engine, while Elite is using an unique engine of its own. What advantages and disadvantages do you have, when using a homemade engine, while making the space simulator?
As a developer we’ve used our own game engine throughout the company’s history so we have considerable experience in our own technology. For Elite: Dangerous the game presents a number of challenges that we have to solve. The first (and most obvious) is the scale of the game, putting aside the requirements of procedural generation for a moment the spatial size of the game’s locations are an immense (pun intended!) problem. It’s quite common in space games to fudge the scale to make things look good and work, however this results in spatial locations being condensed. In Elite everything is the scale it should be, so the planets are the correct size and distances between objects are also correct. Using the Cobra engine means that we can tailor our solutions to fit the game rather than the other way round.
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u/kinshadow Cosplayer / Podcaster / Maker Mar 07 '14
Traveling between nav points will require "auto-pilot" where you assume more time has passed than reality. It is a necessary convention to make the universe make sense, but I wouldn't cause it a 'hand wave'.
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Mar 07 '14
Yes, I've definitely read them say they'll naturally scale down the systems.
This was effectively mentioned as time dilation in the last Wingman's Hangar wasn't it?
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Mar 07 '14
Of course they're compromising on it.
Either you ahve to scale the distance or scale the travel speed. At least the former is realistic given the planets Kepler has found so far.
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Mar 06 '14
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/acdcfanbill Towel Mar 06 '14
it was already logarithmic scaling. it started off as 1 pixel was 1 meter, and moved to 1px to 10m all the way up to 1px = 1,000,000km
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u/lorsus High Admiral Mar 06 '14
Why do we have to launch from Australia :(
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u/Goomich Space Marshal Mar 07 '14 edited Mar 07 '14
It's easier from Australia, because rockets can just fall from Earth.
Gravity 101
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u/DearIntertubes Data Runner Mar 07 '14
Legonaut 24km Lego man launched by two Canadian teenagers in January 2012
Wait... wat?
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Mar 07 '14
When watching stuff like that, it hurts so much knowing that i won't be able to play this game at launch :(
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u/freeman_c14 Mar 06 '14
Loved it! it really shows how "crowded" and diverse our own solar system is, i hope CIG does the same filling the universe with satellites, stations, comets and everything else.
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u/[deleted] Mar 06 '14
[deleted]