Hello!

I know this would be hard to do, but I just want start a discussion about it and see what everyone thinks about it.
The game is quite big fun already and the universe too. But I feel a little strange about those seperated sectors, which look linked on the map but are worlds of their own.
So I thought about Frontier - Elite II, a game made by a genius (David Braben, ..). The whole game has about 800 kb in total, but has such a rich feature set and an incredible big and realisitic universe.
There are over 100.000.000 solar systems, and each of it is simulated correctly! So all planets are going around their suns in the correct time, they have the real masses and correct distance to the stars, etc.
You play in our real galaxy, the Milky way. It is only about 10 light years thick, but on the sides there are several hundrets. (don't know numbers now).
In Elite II you can set your self on the right place to watch a Sonnenfinsternis, also there are the moon cycles, etc. because just EVERYTHING is simulated realistically, even in far away solar systems.
On earth there are even several cities, where you can land at, etc. There is a moon colony, the mars is terraformed with some cities too, etc.
In the solar system map you can watch the planets in fast forward and look what constelation they will have in 300 years.
It is just AWESOME and I couldn't believe my eyes! The game is from 1992 or 93 and was released for Amiga and PC. It played fluent (and looked nice for that time) on my Amiga 1200 with Blizzard 68030 with 50 Mhz.
But Elite II travel system won't work for MMORPGs, because when you make a jump (to an other system) up to 2 weeks pass in just a moment.
When staying in the same system, you have a normal speed and to go such long distances you can fast forward up to 100 times faster then realtime (I think that it was)
But that's not a problem for using such a universe. For jumps you can make it, like it is, with jump gates leeding to other systems.
And for travels within a system there you should select a target and jump too, similar like it is now. But there also would be the possibility to fly directly to another station or planet (although it will take a long time). And day night cycles, projections and other interesting things will happen. The distance between 2 planets wouldn't be always the same, because they are moving, etc. It would open up many interesting aspects, but most important: it would feel much more realistic.
But then there are already real objects for planets so it would be strange to exclude them from beeing landed on. You could need an atmospheric shield for class M planets. Even the universe and it's habitants where well simulated in Elite II, there always had been news about politics, war, etc. and computer pilots lived a "normal" life.
So that's the first one.

Other interesting things that had been in Elite II, but not here:
•Mining drones, which you set out on asteroids and get back when they are fully loaded.
• Illegal items: So you where able to get a high profite from smuggling. On one world the item was legal, on the other it was illegal and could be sold for much more, but that was risky too. You could get caught by the police (mainly when docking)
• A Blackboard with things like missions and the news system from vendetta plus some more mixed up well. There players and NPCs could announce some things, write out requests for special items, offer something and so on.

I think that where the main things I miss here. Most important would be a real galaxy, but I know it would be much, much harder to realize, so I guess it's low priority.

Another thing, that annoys me well: There is nearly no need for money. Everything is much to cheap and you never have to less money or have to save for something.
Locking out new items and ships should be less license based and more money based, so smuggling, great traderoutes and all that stuff really make sense! Right now it's pretty useless to earn es much money, as possible.
I guess the only players who need that much money are they who play deathmatches all the time and buy the same ship at least 10 times a day. But I think that's not the plot of the game. ;-)
Maybe there should be anything else you loose, when you die, I don't know. Or people should just be more careful, when a Wraith costs 30.000c and so on.

Last but not least the already mentioned things: damageable and upgradeable stations, big capital ships who can store multiple small ships, ships who can/must be controlled by more than one person. Like one for steering, on for turrets, one for another torret and maybe just a passanger who plans in the background the next routes, etc. Also in-ship chat would be needed then ;-)

Greetings,
Stefan

PS: You from Guild Software are very, very great artists(!) and programmers! The game looks so STUNNING at really low hardware demand. Also the rest of the system is done extremely well! Carry on and I am excited about the future of Vendetta!

PPS: Sorry for bad English, I am from Austria. @ all: Best try Elite II for yourself. Get UAE - the Ultimate Amiga Emulator and get the game somewhere. ;-)

The developers of Vendetta have stated that they don't want to make Elite III, or Earth and Beyond II, or copycat any other game without good reason. Sure, those features are nice, but why should we have them here, other than a different game had those features?

One thing that definitely is NOT going to be implemented is the ability to travel from one sector to another by pointing in that direction and hitting boost. It's far too much for Guild's servers to handle.

The one thing I do agree with is the blackboard idea to make requests on. For instance, it would help a black market going:

"I will pay greatly for "insert weapon name here" if you bring it to me and sell it to me with out proper license"

or "Itani/Serco needs your help in CTC meet up at "name system here" right away!

Lots could be done.... Basically just an in game forum really... would that be necessary?

@ CrippledPidgeon

Making a realistically simulated galaxy has nothing to do with copying a game. It is more like copying our universe, which the developers of Elite II just did, back in 1993.

And about the other features: There is already a lot of features "copied" from Elite II, if you want to call it like that.

But everything said, I guess there won't be a realistically simulated universe in that game at anytime, right?

I should have said: why would those features be better than what we already have?

Sure, having a realistically simulated universe would be cool, but is there a reason why the developers want to do a complete overhaul on a system that already works instead of adding completely new features?

Personally I've never like the static look of the system maps. It would be much more fun to have to "plot" a course within a system, avoiding entering a gravity well of a planet or moon, running through the roids and getting hit by an ion storm. And if they were animated and in a rotation, then the systems would be slightly different each time you came to the system, giving the game a constantly changing enviorment. Right now everything is pretty stagnant/stale. Your right though, it probably does work great the way it is. I guess it boils down to what are the most important things about the game, what are people going to be doing and make those your primary features. I'm sure every person would design the game differently if given the opportunity. However, immitation is the biggest form of flattery, and taking a good idea from one game and implementing it in another is not wrong or bad, why re-invent the wheel. Good ideas are good ideas.

I would love to see an in-game messageboard system, I though that was what they were going to install when they put the trade route info in. Maybe as time goes on they can get around to that if it would work with the server.

realistic space flight would be nice. I understand that it would be an enormous amount if info to calculate if you had to keep track of everyone in a system zone in contrast to sectors. Also, being able to enter into orbit around a planet, even if you could not land or anything like that, would still be cool. Sticking them in the background is not fun.

Besides which, the problems involved in a massively multiplayer realistically rendered universe are enormous. Elite II works in large part because it is capable of playing with things that you can't play with in a multi-player universe.

1) You've already mentioned the fact that Elite does time dialation of up to 100 fold because realistic travel times would be tedious. It's worth repeating nonetheless. Without time dialation any sort of realistically sized universe is impossible to navigate. Unfortunately, you can't keep a multi-player universe in sync if every player is experiencing thier own time dialation.

2) Without time dialation in the other direction, realistic speeds are simply out of the question. Could you control a craft that was moving at 50,000 m/s relative to the frame? I couldn't. Consider that with a video card rendering space at 100 frames per second, each frame would be 500m from the last glimpse of the universe. Worse yet, human visual reflex is only about 20 frames per second, so between something being about 2500m away, and something being 0m away you wouldn't see anything. Think what asteroids would look like at that speed. Go out to 50,000m, turn around and look at a roid and think that you'd be impacting it 1s after seeing what you are seeing.

And yet all this great speed is nothing on stellar scales. At 50,000m/s it would take:

Only 13 minutes to orbit the Earth but...
2.1 hours to go from the Earth to the Moon
2.49 hours to orbit Jupiter
7.72 hours to orbit the Sun
10.45 hours to go from Jupiter to its Moon Callista
34 days to go from the Sun to the Earth
145 days to go from the Earth to Jupiter

And that's at speeds of more than 200 times what we have now! (What we have now is roughly the speed of commercial airliners or WWII fighter planes.)

3) A realistically designed universe is far far emptier than what we have now. Asteroids would be hours or days of travel apart. Only one sector in a million would contain anything to see at all. Elite hides this fact by having such primitive graphics that you don't expect to see anything.

4) Elite's planetary surfaces are simply spheres. This is unacceptable with modern graphics. However, the ammount of work required to produce realistic textures for planetary surfaces is prohibitive.

5) Probably the most prohibitive problem in a realistic multiplayer universe is the problem of numeric precision. In Elite, you are always at the center of the universe. Things which are distant from you do not have to be located with any degree of precision. If something is roughly 10000 km from you, the precision can be off by a kilometer or two and its not a problem. But in a multiplayer universe, no player is at the center of the universe. If you try to track everyone based on the same coordinate system, problems start arising when you get a few million meters away. It becomes increasingly difficult to figure out exactly how far things are apart. Imagine two fighters trying to duel when all the server knows about there position is accurate to within a kilometer or so. Talk about a miss being as good as a mile! Exactly how much percision do you need to map a whole solar system down to the meter? The devs are clever and could probably work something out, but could it be implemented given the current limitations of CPU's and bandwidth? And most importantly, given the problems with realism, why bother?

Having short distances between station and wormholes removes the necessaty of time dialation. You do not need to travel 145 days from Earth to Jupiter (of course if you want you can), you need to go from the station in Earth orbit to the Earth-Jupiter wormhole, and from another wormhole to Jupiter station.

Precision is also not a problem. You do not need to mesure relative position of objets that are xxxxxxx light years apart with 1 km presision. You need to measure presisely the location of small objects relative to the local coord. system (planet), and rough position of coord. systems (planets) relative to each other. Very similar to what happens in game now.

The reason for making "realistic" universe is that static universe is kind of boring. Just make a brownian motion for asteroids in sector, and it will make much more fun. Can you imagine the mission: "Asteroid is going to hit station x in 5 minutes. We pay 10000 credits to destroy it." ?

As a matter of fact, different kind of complexity of "realistic" models is possible. More complex models make more fun, but harder to implement. The static universe is the simpliest and the most boring. Anyway this is a system chosen by devs, and perhaps they had their own reasons for this, and nobody is going to push them hard to change their plans.

P.S. Elite II is a GREAT game. Hope somebody will make something like this with modern graphics and online play. And I do not care of copying things. If some game has cool features, just plagerise them and add more cool features :).

One reason that Vendetta is so compartmentalized is because it allows many users on without a global slowdown accross all sectors. Issues can be isolated.

zhuk: I appreciate you enthusiasm. Elite II is a great game. But I have the feeling that in your enthusiasm you aren't listening to anything I'm saying.

"Having short distances between station and wormholes removes the necessaty of time dialation. You do not need to travel 145 days from Earth to Jupiter (of course if you want you can), you need to go from the station in Earth orbit to the Earth-Jupiter wormhole, and from another wormhole to Jupiter station."

Isn't this basically what we have now. We have a 'Earth station' sector and a 'Jupiter Station' sector. You can jump between them.

Beyond that, you say that a person ought to be able to travel 145 days from Earth to Jupiter 'if they want'. Why? Why go to the extra trouble of making that possible? Worse yet, you are ignoring the fact that the numbers I gave were for speeds which are currently impossible. At current speeds, the travel time between Earth and Jupiter is more like 79 years. Why make that possible 'if they want'.

So, now imagine we've jumped into the 'Earth Station' sector which is centered on a moving point (you are in orbit) 2/3rds of the way between the Earth and the Moon. How would you know it was moving or not? The moon is always 'up', and the Earth is always 'down'. You and everyone else are moving, but moving only relative to objects which are years of travel time away _which we can effectively ignore_. Moreover, lets say you want to fly to the moon from the station and land there. Why, that's a journey of _only_ 14 days at current speeds! *rolls eyes* I think we can safely ignore that journey and just let you jump between 'Earth Station' sector and the 'Moon' orbit sector, don't you think?

"Precision is also not a problem. You do not need to mesure relative position of objets that are xxxxxxx light years apart with 1 km presision. You need to measure presisely the location of small objects relative to the local coord. system (planet), and rough position of coord. systems (planets) relative to each other. Very similar to what happens in game now."

No, its more or less identical to what we have now, only we don't have big things like a planet (2+ days to orbit at current speeds) so things are typically centered on a rock, a station, or some arbitrary point in space. What you are ignoring is that we don't need to calculate imprecise distances between any of our sectors because they are effectively so isolated as to be infinitely far apart anyway. Jumps are the only practical way between them.

Besides which, imagine how many local sectors you would need to map the solar system. Imagine each local sector is a ten million kilometer (that's 1x10^10 meters) cube. How many local sectors map a single solar system? The answer: 139,798,359. And that's if we mostly ignore things like the Kuiper Belt and the Oort cloud. Yet 99% of these ten million kilometer cubes would be completely empty of anything more than a few meters long. Our current radars would only see 1x10^-19% of each of these sectors.

Why bother?

"The reason for making "realistic" universe is that static universe is kind of boring."

Less boring than the above described realistic universe?

"Just make a brownian motion for asteroids in sector, and it will make much more fun."

Ok, even with are tiny 'unrealistic sectors', how far apart would each asteroid tend to be if we let them drift? There are only 250,000 asteroids all together. That's like 55 asteroids per sector. Most sectors are empty so lets say that sectors that do have asteroids have like 300. If are sectors are only 10,000km across (smaller than the planet earth), then the average asteroid would be like 140,000m from its neighbor.

"Can you imagine the mission: "Asteroid is going to hit station x in 5 minutes. We pay 10000 credits to destroy it.""

Yeah, I can imagine the mission. In a realistic universe it occurs ever 500 years or so. Far far better to do that sort of thing with a scripted event than waste CPU time on brownian motion.

"More complex models make more fun..."

Complex and real are two different things. Moreover, complex is not necessarily more fun than simple. What you really mean is well designed complexity.

I personally wouldnt mind a compromise of sorts.

I dont know if it would be possible, and it certaintly doesnt need to be done right now, but I wouldnt mind seeing a 'new' system map every month or so with the planets positions adjusted to show orbital movement. Nothing else would need to change, just move the whole sector to a new location within the system.

Obviously the more distant planets would only move ~1 sector a year, but it might be nice to see the innermost planets jumping a few sectors each month. The asteroid belts could be more or less left alone, tho some of the asteroid clusters might move as well.

I think that the game engine could be adjusted to adapt to the location of the planets (and as a result some of the stations) changing, It would add a sense of time passing to the game, and probably not be overly intensive in man hours. The game allready generates the skyboxes automatically I believe, so the positions of the suns relative to the station within sectors and such would update automatically. It might even be possible to write a subroutine to calculate the new system maps automatically so they dont have to be hand created.

Just a few thoughts.

I suppose. The sectors aren't very good scale models, and unless we want to put 2-3 thousand sectors per system, they won't be.

Anyway, the earth orbits once a year. The 'diameter' of the systems are like 15 sectors. (I forget exactly, but that's close enough for these rough calculations).

To scale, the Earth, Mars, Mercury, and Venus (and planets like them) are all orbiting in the 4 sectors nearest the middle of the map. The Earth orbits the Sun one time per year (duh!), so every 3 months it would shift over to a new sector. Venus would shift sectors about every 2 months, and mercury would shift sectors about every month. This would mean that all 4 planets would often occupy the same sector, which would look really wierd since in fact from each other they are actually only bright dots.

Bright dots are realistic, but unfortunately don't win you any accolades for good graphics.

Meanwhile, out in the outer solar system, Jupiter lies about 2 sectors from the middle of the map. Jupiter goes all the way around the Sun in about 11 years, so it changes sectors about once a year. A bit farther out, Saturn is 4 sectors from the middle of the map, and it changes sectors about once a year as well. Right on the edge of our map is Uranus, which changes its position about once every 2 years. Pluto and Neptune are about two whole system distances OFF the edge of our compressed map.

Celebrim, man, don't think I try to piss you off by arguing against you. I have read you posts, understand your points. Partially agree.

"Isn't this basically what we have now. We have a 'Earth station' sector and a 'Jupiter Station' sector. You can jump between them."

Yes, you got it right. That was exectly my point. It is possible to make a nice dynamic universe from static one that is currently present without too much changes. Time scale is not really a problem, since distances, speeds, radar ranges, object sizes, etc are all adjustable parameters. Right now they are adjusted to the present universe with box sectors and everything glued to the sky. Ofcourse in other model they would need to have other values.

"Why bother?"

Because that's fun. Don't beleive this? Try to play Elite II. (Oh, sorry for mentioning this game again.)

Do I ask to change thing right now? No. Devs have choses current system for a reason, right?

Will it be nice to have moving universe? YES. At least making asteroids in the sector moving, leaving everything the same way as it is would be fun.

"Ok, even with are tiny 'unrealistic sectors', how far apart would each asteroid tend to be if we let them drift?"

It depends on how far apart you will allow them to drift. Random motion does not mean uniform probability distribution of trajectories. They may have normal distribution with expectation sticked to some curve and dispersion depending on how far apart you will want them to be.

Spit a swarm of asteroinds in any sector at any time, just like ion storm, and let them move stochastically. If expectation of trajectories is a closed curve (like ellipsoid), they will stick in sector for a while. If it is not closed (spiral), they will drift away after one pass across the sector. Will any of them hit the station? That depends on Gods, sorry, Devs.

zhuk: I'm not pissed, just frustrated because I'm not eloquent enough to get my point across.

You said: "Because that's fun. Don't beleive this? Try to play Elite II."

I had thought that when I said:

"I appreciate you enthusiasm. Elite II is a great game. But I have the feeling that in your enthusiasm you aren't listening to anything I'm saying."

It was clear that I had played Elite/Elite II and was familiar with the game's wonderful features.

Anyway, telling me that Elite II was a great game doesn't explain why it was a great game. I'm trying to explain to you that some of those great features of Elite II just can't be willy nilly ported to a different game and magically another great game will appear.

To jump ahead abit, the reason that Elite II's 'living galaxy' is such a good thing is that its highly emmerisive. Elite II gives an illusion of realism and of really being there. What you are essentially complaining about is not Vendetta's lack of realism, but Vendetta's lack of emmersion. On that, I don't at all disagree with you. Vendetta is less emmerisive than Elite II despite Vendetta having much better graphics. In fact, Vendetta's graphics actually get in the way of emmersion to a certain extent because Elite's simply polygons force you to do a certain ammount of suspension of disbelief. Because Vendetta looks more real, you hold it to a higher standard.

"At least making asteroids in the sector moving...<snip a detailed mathimatical discussion>"

Scale considerations aside, there is another good reason to have as many things in the vendetta universe static as possible. Static things eat up less bandwidth. Things which have constant predictable motion don't have to have thier position and vectors updated on a regular basis. The server can just inform the client of the vector involved and thereafter the server and client will be in sinque regarding that object even if the sever never again updates the client. For this reason, complex motions around some sort of attractor just aren't practical with current technology. What's some poor joe with dialup going to do with the server wanting to update him with 300 new asteroid positions and vectors?

That leaves only about 4 practical possibilities.

Asteroids can be static. OK, that's easy and dull and we've got lots of that.

Asteroids can rotate about a point in thier boundaries. OK, that's easy and less dull, and we've got some of that. It might be worth asking the devs why more roids don't rotate, because well, it would make things look more dynamic and interesting. As it is, they seem to only have one or two rotaters per sector.

Asteroids can have a constant vector. Well, that's easy, but its also ultimately more dull than static because Asteroids eventually get scattered all over the place and become 'non-useful' (even if we do like 'Asteroids' and have stray asteroids 'wrap at the border).

The last possibility is a constant orbit. A long long time ago, I asked the devs whether or not they could have asteroids rotate around a point outside of thier bounding space. I never really got an answer. Assuming the could this would open up a few different types of local color. Obviously, it would look really wierd to have an asteroid obviously rotating around a point in empty space. It would break peoples common sense understanding of what sorts of motion are possible. But we could have a small asteroid (or even a flock of them) orbiting a larger asteroid, or two similar sized asteroids orbiting a point between them. We could also have an asteroid slowly orbiting a cluster of asteroids at a relatively large distance.

One problem that orbiting asteroids might have caused in the past is that they might have screwed up the bots path finding methods, but the current generation of bots is alot smarter and probably could deal somewhat with slowly moving rocks if they absolutely had to.

""Why bother?"
Because that's fun. Don't beleive this? Try to play Elite II. (Oh, sorry for mentioning this game again.)"

zhuk: i totally agree. while i heartily enjoy vendetta now, i certainly hope it will become more than just "good enough."

stuepfnick: gravity, planets, and the ability to land on them would be absolutely wonderful, some how or another. i guess it just boils down to more options. i for one would like to see an immersive, realistic as possible space rpg.

disregarding everything that celebrim has spewed, I think everyone has made good comments on additions that would be warmly welcomed. Where there is a will there is always a way. Sure some of these ideas would take time and debugging to get working correctly but I do believe that they would all add to the rpg/emersion/realism of the game. As it stands now, Vendetta is still a baby and still needs to do a lot of growing, hopefully some of these ideas will be implemented. =)

Celebrim, in a quick response to your comments regarding my post.

Obviously the scale of the systems is unrealistic, but doing a quick survey of the systems we do have, most of the planets are seperated enough that they would never be in the same sector as another planet. Some of the dual sun systems would be interesting tho, as the outer planets of one sun might just end up in the same sector as the other sun with the way they are laid out right now.

Anyway it doesen't have to be perfectly realistic, I'm more interested in the idea of a non-static universe to further the gameplay environment.

One thing that having the planets move WOULD do, It would make place names more important than thier sector locations.