Oh, and let's not forget that planet Pittsburgh and Manhattan should be about 100,000x farther apart from each other than they currently are. And the same goes for all the planets. Also, habital planets are about 10 MILLION times too close to their parent stars. Hey, if you're going to fix one thing...

and that suns are thousands the size of planets. and that red giants can be hundreds the size of normal stars. and that planets with cities should be billions of miles from suns.

lol this challenge is a bit too much for today's games. maybe you can bring this challenge up when computers are about 9^80 times better than today's.

i'm just foolin ya, i think it would be a great idea, but impossible for technology to pull off today. if someone can figure out how to do it, i'd own him a lifetime of awe. however, it would make the game so damn boring. flying around now is kinda dull anyway, but can you imagine sitting around for like a realtime week waiting to get to another planet?

Edited by - Siddious on 19-04-2003 01:44:35

Well, upping the cruise speed would solve that problem. And the engine speed, too. 80m/s? You have to be kidding me. That's only 290km/h.

Freelancer: NASCAR Without Boarders! (except those boarders we programmed into our boarderless game).

The second you enter orbit you're going thousands of kilometers per hour. 300 is childs play.

I admit that the poly count would be absolutely horrible to deal with, which is unfortunate. The real problem, however, would be actually making these systems. It would take forever. And that's ignoring the fact that the engine almost certainly cannot handle a system over several thousand km wide, if anywhere close to that. Someday, though.... Someday they will get it right. Maybe I'll put that astro degree I'm aiming for to good use, by selling out to the video game community > (Like THAT would ever happen).

You want realism?

go here

Well if we can find figure out the largest value for system size that FreeLancer can resonably handle and just reconfigure everything based on that, I think it would be worth it. Independence War 2 had pretty good system sizes and large amounts of planetary bodies all millions of miles away, but then I could be exaggerating. You can tell DB made FreeLancer specfically like this with numbers being small and velocities low, perhaps they did this en leu of Multiplayer. It can't be a hardware thing because I-War2 pulled it off so well, but then I-War2's MP sucked. Although now that I think of the basic difference between FreeLancer and I-War2's engines I can see how this all occurred:

In I-War2 the game engine keeps track of space born objects up to a certain distance and doesn't update the player's POV until they approach close enough. Infact if you disengage from a battle and escape and then immediately reverse course the ships won't be there when you return; this is completely different from FreeLancer where allot of entities are logged and their locations and patrol routes are kept track of in the WHOLE SYSTEM, heck I-War2 didnt have patrol routes the game just randomly created baddies to attack you.

So shoot just try to make the systems as large as possible and alter everything else accordingly, if you need a number cruncher or someone for the tedious task of altering all the values just tell me what to do and how to do it.

I can never understand the desire to have realistic distances in space games. Well I can, but I certainly don't agree with it. I tend to favor fun in the fun/realism scale. Especially in multiplayer, freelancer with ralistic distances would be boring. It just seems to me like playing Counterstrike on a a map the size of the real Manhattan.. Yes, speeds can be increased, but then try hitting anything heh

Now, since you are not forcing anyone to download your as yet nonexistant mod, I have nothing against it. And since so many people are always wanting realistic distances, you'll have a lot of people who will thank you for the mod, so go for it I just had to get that off my chest is all.