Chasing ships to 65000m+ is silly. At some point, there should be an auto jump or shift to next sector... or you start heading back to the center again. All these infinite sectors get frustrating to hunt This could make space smaller too, since some don't like my AWAC suggestion that would increase player interaction and retention for no stated reason.

edited to add... if you view the sectors as a sphere, it makes sense.

-1 While I agree chasing ships to 65km is silly, the infinite sectors are part of the charm of VO.

I wonder if Greenwall worries about his dent

btw, the distance should be smaller in the inner sectors and larger at the outer sectors to represent the sphere

Let's not let dent owners -1 all the good ideas like sphere shaped systems and awac addons

I like this idea, but 8km is too short.

ARF, if the system is a sphere, mabye the outer sectors are larger than the inner sectors and 8000 could be the midpoint or an early point and the outer sectors would be 15,000 or so

First of all, the distance from the Earth to the Sun is 1 AU (astronomical unit) or 150,000,000 km. With the current sector sizes being roughly a sphere of radius 1.5Mkm (before you hit the dead zone), each system is roughly 0.3... AU (3M*16)

Ignoring the fact that reworking the backend and protocols to support this type of sector transitioning is likely a big task at this stage, some sectors have strings of asteroids running for over 65km.

Even taking into consideration that the speed of travel here is quite a bit slower than you'd likely encounter in reality, 8km before a sector change is really far too short.

If a 3rd speed level (impluse, turbo, <3rd speed level>) were to be added, it would make far more sense to just maintain the current sector sizes and just switch sectors when you reach the dead zone. Though this would put us face first into other issues.

Ultimately, while I support the concept, I think the project is far too big at this point in time.

-1

We definitely need more reasons to bring people together, but this is not the way to go about it.

I've written elsewhere about our adding intra-sector navigation, to allow faster travel within sectors, and we'll probably still do something along those lines.

Implementation:
1. Place flashing beacon-thingies around the sector within an X perimeter from center.
2. Beacon-thingies dispel corrosive space dust/gas. We'll call it dustgas.
3. As you move away from the beacon-thingies out into the fringes of a sector, slow damage over time effect is applied.

Benefits:
1. People cannot sit out in the fringes indefinitely. People can no longer just turbo out to deep space when they run at 5%.
2. Beacon-thingies can become a craftable thing to aid in deep-space mining.
3. Until beacon-thingies are craftable, a team of players can explore the fringes and repair each other to offset the corrosive dustgas.

So, if I go make a sandwich and grab a beer while on turbo I could die magically? Fuck that.

It's like making a sandwich while riding a horse in the old west. Dustgas will get into your intake and cause damage which will cause damage-over-time and eventually you'll fall off your horse.

I have dustgas filters. :P

That is not an approved use of your horse.

I'm sorry Sir, but it seems that dustgas has clogged the intakes of your horse, causing you to fall off your steed. If you would have had insurance this surely wouldn't have happened!

Sometimes the horse itself is faulty...

necrobump for that vaping horse and the idea

Too bad it seems like the capship lobby is still going strong

I just burned a massive amount of development time on sector code optimization (and a new rendering engine), so I can make more extensive use of sectors, make them far larger and contain a lot more visible "stuff". I have been planning this for over a decade.

After all that, I am not going to suddenly make sectors much smaller, simply because people don't like "runners" or something. I'm honestly not sure why that would even be an improvement to the "running" situation, because client-side sector load times then become a race based on the 1) bandwidth of the individual user and 2) filesystem I/O of the individual user (assuming the "next" sector has something in it). Neither of which is a game-tweakable parameter.

If there's a perceived problem with "runners", then solve it some other way. Like, I dunno, a long-range unguided rocket with a large-ish area effect and trigger, that causes some sort of mild PCB affect? Or, maybe a PCB-based railgun? Or, maybe the efficiency of power cells is inherently impacted by health levels dropping under X percentage? Or, a weapon whose area-effect detonation causes turbo to temporarily go offline for a brief period of time? Or.. whatever?

I'm not personally advocating for any of these above solutions, or claiming they're ideal or balanced, but I am saying that looking for gameplay solutions to gameplay problems is far better than shrinking the total amount of usable space in the game universe.

It was not a good solution in 2015, and it isn't a good solution now. I have considered it, many times (going back to the beginning), but I don't think the negatives outweigh the positives.. and regardless, it is not a good "balancing option" to tactical combat issues. If we do make "sector boundaries" and edge-to-edge sector transitions, it will probably be for other reasons and not be tactical considerations.

Also, the proper way to raise an old topic like this, that's many years old, is to create a new discussion thread and link to the old one. That way there's some clear delineation in time, and discussion of changes in context.

I think the biggest issue with runners is that some ships have infinite turbo. Usually you pretty much can't die, you can turbo forever and deepspace Unrats or easily escape pirates because most ships don't have infinite turbo and you also need to shoot your weapons which costs energy as well. I don't think removing infinite turbo is a good idea though, instead I would like to bring up the idea of a better damage model again. For example when someone is turboing in a Hog Mk2 and I get a hit on his engine from behind it should disable turbo for a few seconds.

Or perhaps make PCBs better, I never see them getting used. Only NPCs use them or a player gets them out of a station where they collect dust just to be used a single time against a capship. I'm not sure if I have ever seen a player using PCBs to catch another fighter besides myself and my experience with them isn't good either. Buffing the drain might make them too strong against capships but sometimes like having an extra effect against small ships or increasing the velocity a lot might make them more interesting. Maybe just give it the ability to deactivate turbo in addition to the drain but only against small class ships.