Time difference is something I had thought about for a while in an online multiplayer game. I came up with a solution for my game, but there are others.

Like mentioned before, players go about their business until there is a conflict. Movement is immediately slowed down (it is an action game) and anyone that can interact with the players are also slowed down. There is more to it, but the rest relies on individual characters.

For a frontier type game, I could only think of two solutions. One would be to have a "group advance" system that allows people to select a speed button and if everyone has it on, the speed is enhanced (not if someone is in battle)... that is not a realistic idea as people will be doing different things at different times. A more realistic option (for frontier) would to have the spaceships travel much faster. If it only took a minute to travel from the farthest point in the galaxy to the planet far away from them, I don''t think people would mind waiting IF other things took longer, such as trading.

For the bullet time issue, you could run it like this:
4 people are in a battle. Player 2 decides to use his bullet time. Anyone within a reasonable distance (or just everyone) slows down, but here is the catch. The player who is using his bullet time (others can use theirs if he initiated, maybe an auto-trigger would be nice) would be going at the correct speed, while anyone not using it would be slower.

Hehe, no matter how unfeasible, I''d love to play a Massively Multiplayer Frontier.

Let''s see... If I was designing a multiplayer variation of Frontier. I''d probably do the following: Give an option to ''group'' ships through the player comm interface so that the flight group can travel together, at the speed of the slowest of course. (Needs to improve the autopilot AI then)

For the time x1000 problem, I know that I -have- to follow these few simple rules:
-One player must not affect everyone with his time setting.
-His having advanced in time faster than others will break realism. He''s a week into the future now!
-It''s best to snap back to 1x time mode when non-grouped ships are nearby. Corollary: When a ''flight group'' is made, the slowest ship should best become flight leader, his direction and time compression affecting the whole flight group properly.

One solution I can think of:
-Make the inter-system jump instantaneous rather than one-week-long.
-Forget time compression. Let''s make this a ''sublight drive'' which creates a warp bubble enabling ships (in the flight group) to travel extra-fast, as long as there isn''t another warp bubble in the area. Which explains why ships snap back to 1x when non-grouped ships are near. Flight groups could of course ''share'' the slower ship''s warp bubble.

Hehe, just technobabble to explain the high speed of course. Different games will deal with this differently. As for FPSes, I rather like that last idea of the ''bullet-time user'' having slowed down everyone else instead. Real neat. ^^ Kinda like a ''slow enemies'' spell, rather.

''Just tossing ideas around'' Spacecat ^o.o^