Increase speed limit

domingo ●

While I would really like that too, I think it is unfeasible to increase max speed in magnitudes higher.

Having higher speed => more chances for two simulated objects to not hit collision window.

So imagine your Inter Galactic Cruise Missile you fired from your asteroid base to the enemy player's base on the planet 1000km away, it gains tremendous speed 120km/s due to your Gravity Accelerator and overpowered thrusters and then ... one moment your missile is just above the enemy base ready to strike but another moment it appears on the other side of the planet with missile and base untouched ...

Although I can think of some algorithm improvement: to use dividing intervals in case of doubt whether two object intersected between previous and current frame, this will lead to increased need for computation power. And the game is currently already taxing on CPU.

And understand that higher max speed means much powerful kinetic weapons :-)

And by the way - in reality in space we ALWAYS speak about relative speed ... that 8km/s is relative to observer on Earth surface.

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Gwindalmir ●

I was going to comment about relative speeds too. :-D

To the OP:

Realistically in this game, the max you could probably do without too much issue is 200 m/s, but then you'll still have problems with small grids (there already are at 100).

For example, build a wall of small grid half blocks, even at 200 m/s, you have a high likelihood of phasing through another small object (like another wall of half-blocks). The slower the sim speed, the more likely that will happen.

100 is simply the highest they can have with the least amount of problems for the majority of players.

Personally, I play with a speed mod of 200-250, but I understand the details of this problem.

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Paul ●

I think that now where they have an experimental mode, you should be able to decide how fast the max speed is in the world options.

This way you can decide if the speed is worth the problems as with all other features in this mode

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pakislav ●

Say you run the game at 120 frames per second. At speed of 120m/s your ship travels at 1m per frame.

Now increase that speed to 1200m/s. Now your ships travels 10m per frame. This means that it basically teleports 10m in space each frame so you would end-up not colliding with objects or teleporting inside objects.

That could be avoided with a prediction raycast but that would be taxing on the system and could produce weird and disastrous behavior.

On top of that come game balance considerations. If a ship can travel at 1200m/s then the turrets have to have much greater range, which tasks the system further. Also the world needs to be bigger. The view-distance needs to be bigger to avoid people ramming into asteroids and objects they never even saw, which tasks the system further.

It's an annoying and disappointing limitation, but a very practical and physically obligatory one. You could always make a mod that just adds a '0' to all *displayed* speeds and distances... for immersion purposes? Then the asteroids would be "200km" away and you'd be going "1000m/s" while everything would work the same.

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Andrey Kleshchev ●

>Now increase that speed to 1200m/s. Now your ships travels 10m per frame. This means that it basically teleports 10m in space each frame so you would end-up not colliding with objects or teleporting inside objects.

Strongly depends onto mechanics in question. But even with per-frame physics update it is possible to implement.

It is not a question of perfomance, but a question how to implement it in perfomance friendly way without 'teleporting'. There are ways to do it...

Example: Lets say we have a small (1-2.5km) playfield/bubble of objects that moves at 4km/s, but objects inside move at much smaller relative velocities. If high speed bubbles on similar course will collide, they will merge, if bubbles on opposites courses collide (which exceptionally hard to manage without proper tools) then there will be time for ray-casting at small scale and performance hit, but for a short time (either until they pass each other or until total mutual annihilation which will take less then a second in both cases).

Such scheme has a bonus - most ships will become independent bubbles very fast since they will be far from each other and it will make game very easy to thread. Static objects (without acceleration) will be simpler to manage.

>It's an annoying and disappointing limitation, but a very practical and physically obligatory one.

I have no idea how kerbal or some other games do it, but in kerbal most performance issues seems to be from inter-ship physics, collisions are obviously taxing, but there are no issues with detecting collisions (8km/s relative speed). But their unique coordinate system and orbits might be the ones to blame. But collisions there happen only under direct control, otherwise physics will be off (not that it stopped anyone from multiplayer or even combat in kerbal).

Hellion also dials with huge speeds, but haven't tried collisions there...

>On top of that come game balance considerations. If a ship can travel at 1200m/s then the turrets have to have much greater range, which tasks the system further. Also the world needs to be bigger.

But that's one of the reasons why players want it) Also turrets need serious rehaul.