I am curious as to why the constant flood of people trying to do real scale solar systems with procedural planets and transitions from space to planet without loading screens in an mmo. I understand the appeal as far as immersion is concerned but there is no real way around the massive lag of the velocities needed to make the transitions feasable in an mmo. As well, what would you do with 20K Km of planet? 100,000 people could be on that planet and never find each other. How do people expect to overcome this or are they just into trying because no has made one yet?

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Original post by david_watt78 I am curious as to why the constant flood of people trying to do real scale solar systems with procedural planets and transitions from space to planet without loading screens in an mmo.

I am not sure it really is a flood... Ysaneya certainly is headed in that direction, but I don't know of many others (mine planet simulator is intended to be single-player).

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I understand the appeal as far as immersion is concerned but there is no real way around the massive lag of the velocities needed to make the transitions feasable in an mmo.

There are all sorts of solutions (time-dilation/warp drive/jump gate/etc.) to the distance problem, and I don't see that 20 minutes spent flying to another planet is that much worse than spending the same amount of time galloping across Azeroth - at least as long as you give the player something to do.

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As well, what would you do with 20K Km of planet? 100,000 people could be on that planet and never find each other.

Pretty sure it is closer to 60 million square miles, and a few 100 million people [smile]

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How do people expect to overcome this

Careful control of civilization spread can help to keep distances down, and areas of interest can help players to encounter each other. And of course, some players just like to explore, and those we can cater to very well...

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or are they just into trying because no has made one yet?

Sure, part of the appeal is always to do something new. However, I don't think the barriers are insurmountable.

Here is the basic distance issue. While Jumping is feasable to some degree, the issue is with massive velocities creating massive jittering. For example if the user is traveling at 100,000 Km/sec with a lag of 100 mills then the margin for error is +-10,000 Km. There is no technique to hide that, my thought is that if you are using gates or jumps then there is no point to using the large scale either. Time dilation doesn't change the perception of speed. People will warp in and out massively unless trips are on autopilot and the itinerary given to all players who need to know about it.

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Original post by david_watt78 Here is the basic distance issue. While Jumping is feasable to some degree, the issue is with massive velocities creating massive jittering. For example if the user is traveling at 100,000 Km/sec with a lag of 100 mills then the margin for error is +-10,000 Km. There is no technique to hide that, my thought is that if you are using gates or jumps then there is no point to using the large scale either. Time dilation doesn't change the perception of speed. People will warp in and out massively unless trips are on autopilot and the itinerary given to all players who need to know about it.

As you have correctly suggested, space is big, and space travel happens at really, really high velocities.

From this is can be decided that the chances of two players rendezvousing unintentionally in the middle of space is just about nil, and we can adjust the mechanics (if we want) to make sure it is exactly nil. At that point, player interactions only occur in the (relatively) small zones surrounding planets and space stations.

Of course, the zone around a planet is still huge, so we have to deal with high velocities. However, you missed two things in your explanation...

The first thing is that we don't care about absolute velocity, instead we care about *relative* velocities. If player A is traveling at 100,000 km/h and player B is traveling at 5 km/h, then there can't be any meaningful interaction between them - player A is just a blur on player B's screen (if even visible), and vice versa.

The second thing is that jitter is not caused by speed, instead it is caused by changes in velocity. An object miving in a straight line at high-speeds is a trivial application of client-side prediction. A fast moving ship takes a *very* long time to make a meaningful change in velocity, and thus our prediction remains accurate for longer than it would for a slow-moving ship (with a much higher ability to change direction/speed).

well the thought is that automatic flight with points of interest is no different than dividing the world into zones and jumping between zones. The flight will simply be like a cinematic cut scene to some degree. If you allow manual flight at high velocities these problems exist since the user will change velocities and direction. Manual high velocity flight is also ripe for exploits such as dropping out of warp , launch torpedos at station, and warp back to cruiser to reload.

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Original post by david_watt78 well the thought is that automatic flight with points of interest is no different than dividing the world into zones and jumping between zones.

Note that the high-velocity partitioning was a separate concept to the changing velocities.

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If you allow manual flight at high velocities these problems exist since the user will change velocities and direction.

No, my point is that even with manual controls, the pilot can't greatly affect the velocity.

Consider once again identical ships A and B (having identical maximum thrust) - A is travelling at high velocity, B at low. If B thrusts at maximum, B is thrusting at a very large percentage of its own velocity, whereas A can only thrust at a fraction of its velocity. Thus B can very quickly change direction/speed, while A can only make gradual changes.

Science fiction themed games featuring procedural universes have some interesting gameplay problems, mainly in the area of filling up all that space with useful things to do. Games centered around just dogfighting and flying I think get by okay, because the environment is simply scenery. When you shift to something like a Mass Effect style RPG game, that much space may become a real problem.

I use the whole argument of realistic planets being pointless to help counter the dogmatic view that realism automatically equals good game design. If you can do things like build or explore in such a world I think there's a real danger in the sheer size of the play area dwarfing any impact the player can make. In an MMO this already seems to be a bad enough problem, I can imagine it being more so when the cosmos itself tells you that you're puny and insignificant-- and why would we want that in a game when the real cosmos does this to us already?

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Original post by swiftcoder I don't see that 20 minutes spent flying to another planet is that much worse than spending the same amount of time galloping across Azeroth - at least as long as you give the player something to do.

Haven't played WOW but I can't help wonder if this isn't exactly the same thing. Space is empty, so you're going to have some tension between fidelity and the need to have something to do. On the ground you have plants, caves, trees, animals, etc. But for an equivalent feel in space you'd have to fill it with junk, artifacts, derelicts and other corresponding debris. Aside from this being confusing (in 3D, anyway) it doesn't mesh with the correct "feel" of space.

Alternately you could go the Freespace route and constantly generate NPCs near the player, but again you run into the whole "space is supposed to be lonely" motif.

It's a hard problem to solve.