This may be too hard to implement, but I feel like it would make add a very nice "something" if the game never had to "load"

Each sector was only, just for this example, lets say 7.5 km², so that once you pass that boundary your just in the neighboring sector.... for example: if you fly 7.5 km "left" in B2 towards A2 you end up in the "right"-most area of A2.

If you were to continue to fly "left" and end up on the edge of A2, (the edge of that system) you just become lost in space, or sucked in a Wormhole or something creative and essentially you explode and wind back in your home station.

That would add a new dimension because you wouldn't always have to jump from sector to sector, only if you wanted to get their quicker or had a long distance.

Then when you did jump, you stayed in "cockpit view" (unless you hit F9) and it was basically like an ultimate turbo... you couldn't steer or shoot or anything and you just saw lines and dots whizzing by you, or maybe you were in a blue tunnel thing a-la-starwars.... and then would "slow down" somewhere in your destination sector.

Warps could be handled similarly. The only difference being that to travel from system to system you would have to warp, you couldn't fly through, be it the "edge of the system death trap thing"

This just seems like it would add greatly to the environment of the game.

Although for the amounts of players we have now, that might in inviting, but when they really start advertising, I think separate sectors would work for the better. Such an overhaul of the system would be too drastic anyway. I'd hate to see dial up try to load a system instead of a sector with hundreds of ships flying around instead of just the ones at the station you're sitting in.

I suggested this, and received some mixed feedback on it.
I prefer to think of the sectors as the 'populated areas' of each grid section, where everything in between is empty space (explaining the edges of sectors being empty)

The speed our ships operate at in normal space would never be able to traverse a solar system without jumping. It's an issue of scale, which in this game isn't as important as the gameplay, so realism is on the sidelines here.

I do like the idea of abolishing the loading screens and giving us something pretty to look at while we jump or warp. It'd add to the immersion of the game greatly. I suggested a low-detail version of the system you're in stay in memory and as you jump, you see this low-detail version (no players or bots or anything, just major asteroid fields/objects/planets/sun) whiz by while you load the sector. Think of some of the binary star systems, watching the suns go past. Fun stuff.

But the devs are busy working on actual gameplay, which is most important at the moment.

deal.

I was just reading about the MMO "Dark and Light" and the idea of a full map with no load times seemed very appealing.

the game would lag so bad and is space really that small?

""I do like the idea of abolishing the loading screens and giving us something pretty to look at while we jump or warp""

As soon as andy gets around to multi-threading the loading screen.

Right now its single threaded so it cant do 2 things at the same time. it can LOAD, or it can show pretty pictures, and then load.

For now i'd just like to see the loading screenshot change to maybe the system map of wherever you are headed. just a still navcomp image would work, doesn't even have to show the destination sector, tho that would be really cool. Right now i occasionally get distracted (thats what i get for reading while doing trade runs) and jump back through a WH i just came through.

if you can still chat while loading I don't see why they couldn't show a movie or some sort of animated sectors stuff like tkjode said.

The way it's working right now (as far as I can tell) is that the loading screen is a thread on it's own, dedicated to receiving the new sector info from the servers. The issue right now is that as the data is being loaded in the background, it's actually drawing these objects... you can't see it because of the loading screen, but if you alt-tab out at an opportune moment and alt-tab back in, sometimes you can see the roids and stations being drawn in as they're being loaded.

There's definately a few changes that would have to be done... namely a thread that would handle drawing the warp/jump stuff, the current loading process would be put into an asynchronous thread, which depending on system performance may have an effect on load times. Additionally, it would have to be changed to do all of the loading/texturing in framebuffer memory, then introduce it once it's fully loaded, and then the jump ends as the fully loaded sector zooms into field of view.

If you notice, none of the loading in the entire game happens while 3D graphics are on the screen... I'm thinking it's a game engine thing... possibly having to due with the hurdles of writing for DirectX and OpenGL and maintaining cross-platform stuffs. Implementing this might be an ever larger undertaking than previously thought.

[VPR] T.K.Jode

How about some random variation on camera position when we jump? Some new jump sequences would be REALLY refreshing. >.<

Or how about just having some different artwork, or even different screenshots from in game? One to go with each of the different tips that are displayed at the bottom of the screen when loading.

Different art work would be nice.
It feels like as a player base we're kinda gettin into a routine.
We need somethin new.
As long as its simple and (get ready for it) "Doesn't take away from content development"

/givemoney Devs 2c