Yeah, Flight of Nova did it really well! It has an even more difficult problem to solve as well, because it covers a range of accelerations and speeds from takeoff all the way to orbital velocities. The way that the thrust scales up gradually in that game is both elegant and brilliant. - ThreadSky

why485.bsky.social • 9 days ago

Yeah, Flight of Nova did it really well! It has an even more difficult problem to solve as well, because it covers a range of accelerations and speeds from takeoff all the way to orbital velocities. The way that the thrust scales up gradually in that game is both elegant and brilliant.

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primalace.bsky.social•9 days ago

I always felt star wars stuff has to do that too else those fast cuts between taking off and then flying away from the planet into hyperspace must have covered a period of like 12 hours lol

why485.bsky.social•9 days ago

I've thought about this ever since I was a kid trying to figure out how to make a seamless game of that scale work, because like e.g. flying from Yavin's surface to the Death Star was completely in normal space despite the vast distance. I never really came up with any great answers!

primalace.bsky.social•9 days ago

You can compress time, compress space or compress speeds. On Elite we dynamically altered the acceleration and speeds based on how far away you were from stuff in space, with the effective outcome of making those vast realistic distances much more compressed in terms of time to cross.

why485.bsky.social•9 days ago

Aside from some very brief experiments, I've always wondered if you could get away with faking the distance through rendering/perspective tricks. I.e. make a Freelancer sized system, but then scaling celestial objects as you get nearer/further to make it look like you're traveling greater distances.

why485.bsky.social•9 days ago

To be honest though, I'm pretty sure this is one of those ideas that sounds cool on paper but wouldn't actually work. I still think about it though 😂

primalace.bsky.social•9 days ago

In the end though it doesn't matter unless you also fuss with the speeds and stuff at the same time otherwise its just a way to render something that's really big without using big numbers.

primalace.bsky.social•9 days ago

I've done that in unity before. It's how I prototyped the way supercruise in elite could work and sold it to the powers that be. I knew telling unity to render something 8au away wouldnt work so I rendered it 100m away and dynamically scaled and positioned it to look further.

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