that would be consistent with relativity, so that a 5 minute 'jump' from one star to another advances (single player) game time 65 years, due to time distortion, and does not age the character, just the non-sync environment.

that would be consistent with relativity, so that a 5 minute 'jump' from one star to another advances (single player) game time 65 years, due to time distortion, and does not age the character, just the non-sync environment.

And? Sure, you could do it, and yeah, it's a cool idea as long as time is a significant element of the game, but to my mind it would be difficult for two main reasons:

1. Interstellar distances are massive, and even travelling at lightspeed (which you can't do), five minutes of traveller's time aren't going to get you from one point of interest to the next. If you want a "jump", as you mentioned, you're working with faster-than-light anyways, which relativity doesn't touch.

2. How would the universe age around the player? Any characters that the player interacts with are going to be dead after a jump or two, meaning that new characters would have to be generated for the player to interact with and surviving characters should age significantly. Cities and societies too change alot over a century or two. How would this be modelled?

Depending on the genre, these might be less of a problem. A 4X game could have a lot of mechanics revolving around the temporal difficulties of interstellar travel while avoiding the above issues. But an action game or RPG might quickly get out of hand. Games already play pretty fast and loose with time, so given the difficulties of implementing time dilation I think that the tradeoff for realism or gameplay might not be worth it.

Five minutes of travel at the speed of light wouldn't even get you from the sun to the earth. That takes 9.

Alpha Centauri, the nearest star to us, is 4.3 light years away. Also, you are WAY over-estimating the compression ratio. The highest cited compression ratio on this site (http://www.gravitywa..._Relativity.htm) is 22 times when traveling at .999C. Traveling to Alpha Centauri would still take months of subjective time.

The ratio you're talking about is 6,832,800 times.

1. Interstellar distances are massive, and even travelling at lightspeed (which you can't do), five minutes of traveller's time aren't going to get you from one point of interest to the next. If you want a "jump", as you mentioned, you're working with faster-than-light anyways, which relativity doesn't touch.

Much to the contrary: one of the key points of relativity is that time itself, is relative. As you approach the speed of light time travels faster for the parts of the universe that aren't traveling with you. At a high enough speed 5 minutes for you could be millennia for the rest of the universe. (Tau Zeo, a SF novel, plays with this concept, the characters spend 20 years of their lives outliving the rest of the universe because of their insane speed)

As for the modeling of the effect: wikipedia should get you started. Keep in mind that the speeds are going to have to be very high for any appreciable effect, on the order of .9999...c There is no realistic way to accelerate to those velocities in any time frame short of years.


Edit To Clarify:
If you're traveling at a high enough speed, during your trip an observer at Alpha Centauri sees you traveling at nearly light speed for four years to get to him. But according to your wrist watch you've only been waiting five minutes.

Did you even read that site I linked? The most that an accelerated frame of reference can do for time dilation is 22 times. Traveling for a day of real time will seem like a little more than an hour of subjective time. You cannot travel 4.3 lightyears and have it seem like five minutes.

Did you even read that site I linked?

Did you read it? The table was simply a list of sample figures: nowhere does it imply that the last entry represents the highest compression possible. In fact, further down it even states that at the speed of light, the time observed by the traveller would be zero.

[quote name='Khaiy' timestamp='1298657186' post='4779023']
1. Interstellar distances are massive, and even travelling at lightspeed (which you can't do), five minutes of traveller's time aren't going to get you from one point of interest to the next. If you want a "jump", as you mentioned, you're working with faster-than-light anyways, which relativity doesn't touch.

Much to the contrary: one of the key points of relativity is that time itself, is relative. As you approach the speed of light time travels faster for the parts of the universe that aren't traveling with you. At a high enough speed 5 minutes for you could be millennia for the rest of the universe. (Tau Zeo, a SF novel, plays with this concept, the characters spend 20 years of their lives outliving the rest of the universe because of their insane speed)
[/quote]

I could have been clearer. I didn't say that you couldn't blast yourself into the future. You can still do lots of interesting things with time dilation, but the rate of observers' time passage will be so massive that you're looking at the difficulties I posted above on a pretty large scale. Sure, you could move at x/c to the extent that you experience a 4 lightyear voyage in 5 minutes, but that isn't that much more realistic than a warp-drive. And even so, if you want voyaging through space to be a large part of your game, it's not going to take that many voyages to cause centuries to pass by relative to the traveler, even at near c time compression.

It's always hard when you want to model a realistic effect to determine how realistic you want to be. If it were me, I would simply prefer a lower x/c ratio for velocity or spacial warping to magicking away the increase in mass/energy required to move that mass as x/c inreases, just to hit an arbitrary time compression ratio (which would only become more difficult as the distance you want to travel increases). But that's just me, there's no reason that someone else's design would follow my own preferences, so I thank you for your correction.