Around the Verse - Building Solar Systems & Nox Preview - Star Citizen Videos - MMORPG.com

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Around the Verse - Building Solar Systems & Nox Preview - Star Citizen Videos - MMORPG.com

The latest edition of the Star Citizen: Around the Verse dev vlog is out and about. This week, Chris robers and Eric Kieron Davis discuss building solar systems and much more. They also check in on the Frankfurt studio as well.

Read the full story here

Tiller

Why does that Cherie Heiberg look drunk? xD

Kidding some cool stuff, still waiting to see if it all comes together as an actual full game before I put any $$ down on this.

MaxBacon

For those who want to check just the shown footage edit:


The text TL;DR can be found here.

A lot of discussions went by with the examples given about the speed and travel times, SC is not scaling at 1/1 so you're most of the time traveling to reach places due the enormous scale, with the game at 1/10 it seems an "edge to edge" of a solar system is said to be 20-40 minutes traveling at the max Quantum Travel Jump speed.

The dev prob misspoke when he said 800,000,000km across after scaled down by 90%, otherwise, 20 minutes would turn in 4hours, what goes against the example the writers did give... Follow ED when it comes to travel times would be quite the overkill.

rpmcmurphy

Apparently Stanton is 800 million kilometres, looking at Stanton in the star map and using it's outermost planet (Microtech) as a refernce gives a diameter of 5.8 AU or 868M km.

Travelling at 0.2c means 24 minutes at 1:10th scale. It would still take 37-46 minutes to travel across Stanton between the Terra and Magnus jump points. But something to bear in mind is that many many ships will not be traveling at 0.2c, some of the larger ones might only be doing a bit over 0.1c in which case we're now up to 1-1 1/2 hours between those points.

Even at 37-46 minutes thats considerably longer than travelling around in Elite, if it's taking 15 minutes or more to get to a station in Elite then you've picked a bad destination. If people find 15 minutes of A-B boring how are they going to find 3-6 times that?

Another thing I saw was that QD is straight line only, point to point. In Elite you can control your ship while doing 200c, you can go around planets etc (which is not to imply that Elite does it better) I'm just concerned that straight line gameplay is going to feel very limiting.

Xarko

Star Wars speeder bikes, neat

Voidfarer

rpmcmurphy said:

Apparently Stanton is 800 million kilometres, looking at Stanton in the star map and using it's outermost planet (Microtech) as a refernce gives a diameter of 5.8 AU or 868M km.



Travelling at 0.2c means 24 minutes at 1:10th scale. It would still take 37-46 minutes to travel across Stanton between the Terra and Magnus jump points. But something to bear in mind is that many many ships will not be traveling at 0.2c, some of the larger ones might only be doing a bit over 0.1c in which case we're now up to 1-1 1/2 hours between those points.



Even at 37-46 minutes thats considerably longer than travelling around in Elite, if it's taking 15 minutes or more to get to a station in Elite then you've picked a bad destination. If people find 15 minutes of A-B boring how are they going to find 3-6 times that?



Another thing I saw was that QD is straight line only, point to point. In Elite you can control your ship while doing 200c, you can go around planets etc (which is not to imply that Elite does it better) I'm just concerned that straight line gameplay is going to feel very limiting.

Some good points, i agree

MaxBacon

rpmcmurphy said:
Even at 37-46 minutes thats considerably longer than travelling around in Elite, if it's taking 15 minutes or more to get to a station in Elite then you've picked a bad destination. If people find 15 minutes of A-B boring how are they going to find 3-6 times that?

Another thing I saw was that QD is straight line only, point to point. In Elite you can control your ship while doing 200c, you can go around planets etc (which is not to imply that Elite does it better) I'm just concerned that straight line gameplay is going to feel very limiting.

It's hard to compare to ED because of how space is laid out, SC obviously has more points and stuff into one system (considering how much is put in Crusader alone and the future landing zones) ED is more about doing stuff on one system and move on to another one.

As for the QD in a straight line, it was mentioned small adjustments to a QD travel are possible, over that, in ofc Ships with Interiors we're not locked in one cockpit and there would be stuff to do within travels, either that is maintenance and so forth...

Quantum Drive Upgrades may be a factor here, if so then this is just BDO as you get higher tier horses that significantly reduce travel times.

I'd say simply if they are making systems with enough points and content spread through it, then it makes sense they wouldn't want players to be able to quickly move between far away points in a system.

I think they want you to travel progressively between points as you play the game and not jump directly to far away places at the start, if they roll in QD upgrades then it gets a logical progression to it.

rpmcmurphy

MaxBacon said:

rpmcmurphy said:
Even at 37-46 minutes thats considerably longer than travelling around in Elite, if it's taking 15 minutes or more to get to a station in Elite then you've picked a bad destination. If people find 15 minutes of A-B boring how are they going to find 3-6 times that?

Another thing I saw was that QD is straight line only, point to point. In Elite you can control your ship while doing 200c, you can go around planets etc (which is not to imply that Elite does it better) I'm just concerned that straight line gameplay is going to feel very limiting.

It's hard to compare to ED because of how space is laid out, SC obviously has more points and stuff into one system (considering how much is put in Crusader alone and the future landing zones) ED is more about doing stuff on one system and move on to another one.

As for the QD in a straight line, it was mentioned small adjustments to a QD travel are possible, over that, in ofc Ships with Interiors we're not locked in one cockpit and there would be stuff to do within travels, either that is maintenance and so forth...

Quantum Drive Upgrades may be a factor here, if so then this is just BDO as you get higher tier horses that significantly reduce travel times.

I'd say simply if they are making systems with enough points and content spread through it, then it makes sense they wouldn't want players to be able to quickly move between far away points in a system.

I think they want you to travel progressively between points as you play the game and not jump directly to far away places at the start, if they roll in QD upgrades then it gets a logical progression to it.

The thing about QD was from the latest ATV, it's covered in the relay link as well, the guy who said it states "Quantum travel is always in a straight line as an antigrav bubble protects the players, but turning would negate this, and so is not possible." I guess to get around this you would have to drop out of QD, orientate your ship and then re-engage but that sounds like it could be a right faff.

Regarding QD speed (taken from the ATV thread on the subreddit)
Quantum travel will vary from 0.05c to .2c, very few ships will hit the full 0.2c, empty ships like the Freelancer and Constellations will get up around 0.17c with possible increases due to tuning and equipment. Larger ships will be more in the 0.12-0.14c range. The 0.2c is a technological limit in lore for the fastest that the current drive technologies can reach - which means that its highly unlikely you'd be able to "tune" a drive above the system's ability to keep the field together. Heavily loaded Hulls D and E are unlikely to break 0.7c and there MAY be maximum overloading weight limits which exceeding will make it impossible to actually achieve quantum drive.

Remember that we're in Alpha and the 0.2c we've been moving at is a placeholder for quantum travel for game stability and predictability on the servers.

MaxBacon

rpmcmurphy said:

Remember that we're in Alpha and the 0.2c we've been moving at is a placeholder for quantum travel for game stability and predictability on the servers.

I remember mentioned small route changes like you couldn't go around a planet ofc, if that's out of consideration then it might be to ease implementation with QD interception and path viability due how ships are physically moving while in quantum jump.

But end of the day these are balance numbers, on one side as the solar system guy mentions it's easily possible to scale one system to what they want, as easy to change the QD speeds, many times it has been talked about travel times and their narrative was always against long and boring travel times vs gameplay; they will likely try out something and then the feedback should influence the approach taken.

Another thing is that in the solar system tool shown Stanton appears with a diameter of ~86.8 Million km, what is literally off by a factor of 10 from the number Eric gave if he misspoke after with before: 

Grendizer73

By the time this game is released we are going to use those vehicles for real...