It’s not like people are going to be travelling from planet to planet at sublight speeds in realtime.
No, but it doesn’t fake it either with jumps. If you wanted to, you could go a at sub-light speeds not just between planets but between solar systems.
OK. My point still stands. No one is actually going to do it, except as some kind of dumb stunt, and then we won’t know about it for decades.
I suppose it’s the same “feature” as having ~400 billion stars in the first place, to impress people with the scale and the “realism”. Never mind that from a gameplay point the game would be the same with just 1000.
KevinC
1764
What is your point, beyond it being a bullet point that doesn’t really engage your interest (I’m not asking this with a snarky tone)? There are 400 billion systems to discover. Yes, they’re procedural as opposed to hand-crafted and there’s going to be a lot of sameness between them, but the same thing holds true for the milky way. That being said, I’ve seen some crazy and cool screenshots from people who are out there charting the stars.
If you’re an explorer that happens to be an astronomy nerd, that’s kinda cool. And if you’re not (I’m not, at least not strongly) it’s nothing more than a bullet point on a feature list. Nothing more, nothing less.
My point is that “1:1” is meaningless. Distance doesn’t matter because the game gives you tools to circumvent distance and the gameplay is built around that. The actual cosmic bodies matching 1:1 isn’t true beyond a certain point because it’s all procedurally generated. So what does that leave as 1:1? I see it getting thrown around, but it’s just a marketing fluff phrase that I wish people would stop using as a positive point. It just irks me.
If you like the sense of scale in sublight, say that. If you like the fact that a bajillion points of interest are generated to explore, say that. The original Elite had 256 planets in 8 galaxies, but no one says that it was 1:1 scale.
I was nearly one of those guys that traveled all across Daggerfall in realtime (on horse that is). I got distracted though, but one guy did it on foot with a special wedge thing to keep his ‘W’ (move forward key) depressed so he could go do stuff/eat and not die in the attempt. He recorded the amount of steps it took (iirc) and overall it took him about a week (or was it two?) to cross the entire game map that way.
IF Elite Dangerous had proper Newtonian aspects to speed and flight (like in Frontier and FFE) i might try a bit of that kind of thing for the kicks, but with the artificial speed limit no-one is ever going to give it a go that is for sure.
@ Telefrog:
The Elite universe contains eight galaxies, each with 256 planets to explore.
so 2048 planets in total, so for sure not 1:1. They probably just should have paid the royalties for the marketing to say instead of 1:1,
Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space (in Elite Dangerous).
If you like the sense of scale in sublight, say that. If you like the fact that a bajillion points of interest are generated to explore, say that. The original Elite had 256 planets in 8 galaxies, but no one says that it was 1:1 scale.
That’s because it wasn’t. It cheated (in many ways, but especially because jumps were literal jumps, rather than very fast travel).The point being that when you travel between and within systems in Elite: Dangerous you are travelling through an actual (simulated, obvs) volume of space. You can be interdicted by other players travelling (or NPCs) in the same volume of space. If you wanted to, you could spend a thousand years crawling along at sub-light speeds and you’d eventually get there (or maybe run out of fuel, I’m not sure how fuel efficiency works in sub-light speed). Yes it’s a “marketing bullet point”, but there’s a very high degree of overlap between the audience for Elite and people who nerd out about this sort of thing. Plenty of people care about that bullet point (just like they do at the fact that the skybox is a real, location sensitive thing and not just a bitmap. That too is a “marketing bullet point”.
KevinC
1768
Just FYI, Ginger Yellow, you can’t actually travel from one star system to another via supercruise at the moment, just stellar bodies within the same system. I had a binary star where to get from one to the other took something like 20 minutes, though!
That being said, it’s something they said they’d like to enable at some point, even just for people wanting to be crazy and leave their ship at full throttle for weeks at a time.
Well, saying it’s a 1:1 scale galaxy has meaning to me. It’s shorthand for saying that stars are star-sized, planets are planet-sized and orbit the star at an appropriate distance. Binary and trinary systems also have realistic characteristics. Known stars are mapped in their known positions at known distances from each other. Other stars follow the known characteristics of our galaxy. If you’re an astronomy nerd, this is cool stuff.
It’s a huge difference from most space sims, which don’t even bother to represent a realistic star system. They just have a planet as a skybox and some colored nebula, and you ‘jump’ from one skybox to another. It is a meaningful feature for lots of folks, and describing it as a 1:1 scale galaxy to explore seems like an effective shorthand for this feature.
Andon
1770
But it’s far from true. You fly from one “game box” to another. You can’t really fly from planet to planet, star to planet. You “supercruise” and then when you are in the “area” of the planet you disable and the game loads the station zone for that area.
It’s all smoke and mirrors. When you jump into a new system, you can fly away from a star, but you can’t fly to a planet without supercruise. Not really. Because the “distance” is too great. Which is shorthand for, we need to load that zone up when you get there.
Not that I’m complaining, but I’m not fooled by the design. It’s not different than a jumpgate in the X-Series between sectors. Except I don’t have to supercruise for 20 minutes to get to my next docking station.
Imma just plug my ears against all you haters.
As an old-school Elite fan, ED brings nearly everything I want to the table – a ye-olde stripped-down space trader/fighter with beautiful presentation.
When you jump into a new system, you can fly away from a star, but you can’t fly to a planet without supercruise. Not really. Because the “distance” is too great. Which is shorthand for, we need to load that zone up when you get there.
So it’s not 1:1 because it is 1:1? You’d prefer it if the distances were shorter, so you could fly there for exactly the same amount of time at slower speeds?
Andon
1773
I can say the distance from me too the moon is 1:1 while I ride my bike there. It’s meaningless. It’s not meant to be done in the game setting. It’s marketing talk. The world in elite is the size of the area you can see at any given time and the jump points to land on a station. Everything else is dots on a map simulated for your imagination. I want a game. I don’t need to kibitz over the hype of a pointless design setting that’s there to stimulate your imagination of space.
It’s a great system, don’t get me wrong. But let’s call a spade a spade. Nothing here is more or less than what we’ve seen in several other space games.
X-3TC/Albion has a sector system. You jump from sector to sector and it loads. You “think” you are part of a large galaxy because you SEE the map. But the reality is one loaded sector of space at a time. This is not Minecraft where I can point to a mountain in the distance and say “I’m going to walk there and climb that.” Distance in space is TOO MUCH. I don’t need 1:1 space. Nor do I expect a company to try to convince me it an option.
What what what!? I put this down for two weeks to do stupid real life stuff. I didn’t want to get invested.
In Elite, a planetary body is an object depicted in 3d space. I can fly around it in supercruise. When I pop out of supercruise, I am seeing the position of the star, the planets, and even the distant stars as I would if I were actually viewing those objects from that position. This often leads to some really beautiful scenery as suns and planets and planetary rings line up in a certain way, which is specific to your location and the time (where those objects are at in their orbits).
In the X-games, it’s a pretty picture. A static backdrop. Same view every-time I go there.
Yeah, the loading system is smoke and mirrors, but the veracity behind the smoke and mirrors is a big deal to me. The fact that I can go explore a system and discover a beautiful vista, a sight specific to me at that place and that moment, is really cool.
If you don’t care, then I suppose that bullet point in their marketing isn’t a big deal for you. For other people, it is. Thus, it’s something they (deservedly) talk about.
Yeah, I LOVE the fact that as I approach a celestial body in SC, I see the HUD make concentric circles which radiate outward first, then just start seeing a little sphere take shape, which gets bigger and bigger as I approach it. I like that ED doesn’t insult our intelligence like Freelancer did with its planets at best hundreds of kilometers apart.
I can’t think of any game where you can view, say, the Big Dipper from Sol… and then watch the Dipper “change” as you jump from system to system away from Earth. It reminds me of the old Cosmos bit where Carl showed us what the Dipper and Orion would look like “from the side”.
Do I know that I’m jumping along a series of boxes in the game? Yes. Do I appreciate the verisimilitude used to mask this in ED? You bet.
There’s a beauty present in the ED’s space that I’ve not found in any other space sim, because it’s not just a box surrounded by a static, painted backdrop. Every star you see in the distance is a real object and you can get there (you may have to go through a load screen to get there, but you can still get there). You can see the clusters and nebulae and constellations and they change relative to your own position and movement - they have depth between them, it feels like a universe. Just load up the game and look out it into space at all the stars; it’s beautiful.
jpinard
1780
We now have 8 permanent members of the jpinard group. Friend me and look up jpinard to be added.
