You went too far. Just explore on the nav map you see when you bring it up. I have played the demo with the same save game for 19 hrs and I am still finding new stuff. I think some systems will be smaller and some bigger. But I have heard New York system is one of the bigger ones.

They all seem to be of similar size. There just happens to be a lot of stations and such to land on in New York Space. The other systems have quite a bit in them but a lot of it is off the beaten path. Exploration is such a huge part of the game.

I guess what I'm saying is more of a technical question regarding how the engine handles distances. I went that far to *test* how far I could go. Would I just bounce off the side of a wall? Would the game tell me to turn around? or will I keep going forever. Seems like the latter, I just keep going.

Yeah..it would just keep going and going and going.....in other words..a waste of vaulable time that can be applied to playing the game. Remember this...space is a very, very , very big place and without jump gates...travel time would be in eons. You would die of old age before you even got to another star in some cases! The closest Star system to ours ( Sol ) is 4 light years away. In other words it would take a ship 4 years to reach it traveling at the speed of light. Some stars in our galaxy are tens of thousands of light years away! A theory does exist that when a person reaches the speed of light..time for that person will stop. But ..I am chasing rabbits now.

Edited by - WhiteTiger on 04-03-2003 16:29:10

mmm,k

I don't want to knit-pick... but I'm gonna anyway... Sol is the other name for "The Sun", the nearest star to our system is Alpha Centauri/Proxima Centauri... just so ya know...

You are knitpicking. I meant our star is Sol. Thanks for making that clear tho freind. *grins.

Edited by - WhiteTiger on 04-03-2003 16:57:22

I beleive it is called nit picking.



-Stregone

And you misspleed belavse.

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Well, I just flew 800-K+ through liberty, way past the map boundries and there seems to be no end! How does it work?

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A more interesting test (which you can perform while you sleep) would be to go more than twice that far. The only reason it is interesting is that single precision floating point numbers (which are the kind of numbers that the Direct 3D graphics library uses) are only accurate to one part in a million.

If DA took the easy way out and used single floats directly, you could expect to see your ship start to distort at around that distance from the origin. It's kind of a strange effect - you might see the polygons start to come apart at the seams, and the overall shape of the ship become stretched and twitchy as it moves. There are simple techniques that prevent this sort of distortion (e.g. translation to a camera-relative coordinate system), but since they do eat up a few extra CPU cycles, and since you would never encounter this problem unless you were specifically looking for it, DA might not have bothered to implement a higher precision geometry engine.

On the other hand, if they did use a high precision geometry engine, you should not be able to fly to a system boundary in less than ten million years.

--milo
www.starshatter.com