Make travel more interesting

Tomas9970 shared this feedback 25 days ago
Not Enough Votes

Hello. With some of the recent previews, we've seen a hint of fast-travel system between regions, which I think is not a good idea. Teleportation (including jump drives) makes game worlds feel really small and basically reduces them to a few desirable hot-spots with everything inbetween being almost meaningless after the first visit. Therefore I would like to push a better way.


Jump gates

Jump gates have also been hinted by Keen at the begining when the Almagest lore was first established alongside with the fact that jump drives should be a late-game technology. I think jump gates are a great way to travel between regions not only because they are interactive and in general more interesting than just pressing a button on your jump drive module, but also because we get to fly to, from and in between them. This time spent flying makes traveling between regions feel more meaningful and in turn gives a meaning to local things even if they aren't the best option in the game.


Obviously the gates should only have a single connection and if there are multiple ways out of a region, they should be spaced out so that you (for example) land at one gate, then fly to the next one and take it to the next region on your journey.


Another benefit is that the ships themselves don't need anything special to reasonably fly around if needed. Jump drives are no longer the key to mobility in the game.


Distinct regions

Now that there is a reason to fly around, it's time to decide how to make the environment intereting. I think the best way is by ensuring that each region has a distinct look to it even when traveling through it. This could be a planet, a distinct skybox or (for regions that don't have a planet) a landmark that's either visible from anywhere in the region or that is close to it's gates so that you meet it every time. The gates themselves could also vary between regions depending on the lore. There are just so many options for this part.


Only thing that I would keep consistent in this is gate sizes. I think all jump gates should be just as big so that you don't have to worry about not fitting through in the middle of a journey. Otherwise it's all open to being varied and interesting.


Jump drives

I know this whole point is about how to avoid having them but that doesn't mean they should be completely gone. Instead, they should be situational. You should use them when there is no other option. For example if the ship is too big to fit through gates or if you are for some reason trying to avoid them. This advantage should have a high cost with every jump and obviously require you to have the jump drive itself as a piece of end-game equipment.


Thanks for reading this and if you have any more ideas for meaningful (and not necessarily anoying) travel, feel free to expand on this.

Replies (3)

photo
3

Jumping through space should not be instantaneous, but should be a reduced percentage of normal travel time. During jump flight the vessel should be considered as being in a contained bubble of space. This will give the idea of distance being travelled, and give a little time for arrival preparation during jump flight.

photo
2

In other words, warp drive instead of jump drive? Yes! Like the FSD mod in SE1. I like this idea best by far personally, as I've always been a huge fan of Star Trek. A serious of instantaneous jumps is so much less fun than continuous high-speed travel. That being said... having both, and jump gates as well, with different benefits to each would be extremely interesting.

photo
photo
1

Jump gates

As we are in one system, I don't think jump gates makes a lot of sense. If we had the technology, constructing a jump gate between earth and mars for example would not make sense. If you can most likely use the same technology to create a jump drive in ships that are more efficient and less costly to make.

Also, if they add more systems so it does make sense, I hope they turn it into a block. So we need to build our own jump gates instead having items in the world that would be unobtainable. Creativity is key here.


I would also say that the Mass Effect mass relay would make more sense from a mechanics point of view. If we make a traditional jump gate, it's often a ring for the ship to fly through. So how big should the ring be? this would put a limit on how big we can build. How does the gate detect the different sizes of rings?


I think connecting to station that is aligned with another station, and making it shoot you forward like a railgun would be easier to design, program and model for the devs.


Also, jump gates would destroy the lore a bit. We are stranded in the Almagest system so if we would be able to construct a jump gate, why wouldn't we just go home again?


Distinct regions

Again, we play in a system not a galaxy. Like, our own solar system is relatively small with 9 planets orbiting a star. The Almagest system has 3 planets so way to small to have multiple and wildly different regions. Especially as space is kind of boring.


If we start to expand to different systems and they expand to a galaxy size, just like jump gates this would more sense.


Jump drives

For in-system traveling or going to other systems to construct a jump gate, this makes sense. As we had jump drives in SE1 there is no doubt we will get it in SE2. I hope however that it will just speed you up and not be instant plop into existence travel.


Recap

Good idea's, need some adjustments, most like to grand for the scale of the game but great idea's for expansions.

photo
1

I think that in SE2, we want to be in Almagest so no reason to go back home. Trying to make a connection is a different matter though but that might not be very easy to achieve for various reasons.


As for the gates themselves, you can stretch the definition of what they are quite a bit and still end up with the same or very similar functionality. Basically you end up with a set of fixed points where each of them allows you to quickly move to a single, distant location. It's not supposed to be the most convenient way to move around (because that would obviously be teleportation like in SE1) but I think that it's limitations are good for gameplay.


As far as I know, most jump gates in games are basically stabilized or completely artificial wormholes, which is a tricky and very expensive technology that isn't viable to be put into every ship (which is also why they are obsolete in very high-tech setting) so that's why it's built as a permanent installation. You could obviously say that about other jump-gate tech as well like the railgun considering the tech level that the game is going for. Not saying they shouldn't be buildable but it should be a real treat to get the construction right.


Also I'm not a big fan of having a mass-relay simply for the experience of flying through the gate in first-person. Just getting near something and getting launched doesn't cut it. You need to be able interact with it in a more physical way.


So yeah, it's up to discussion what the gate technology should look like but I think it should always have the same, fairly limited functionality because after all, it is a predecessor to readily available warp drive and jump drive tech.

photo
2

Given that the engineers didn't just FTL strait to Almagest and had to spend 10,000 years in cryo, it would be safe to assume that the system is well beyond the range of any FTL known to the exploring engineers, and even if fixed FTL-structures were the exception they may not have a way to communicate back and forth to safely setup such a travel-route.


Also having a much larger structure do FTL things in place of giving every ship FTL is very practical. The USA spends a huge amount of money paving and maintaining its roads, we could just make everyone that wants to travel buy/rent helicopters, but expensive roads paired with much cheaper cars is a bit more efficient in the grand scheme of things. Ships that need a gate/relay to go FTL and ships capable of independent FTL can easily coexist simply by virtue of resource efficiency.


As for mass-relays vs stargates... the mass-relays would probably be easier to use and code in to the game, but stargates would be so much cooler.

-Gates would of course have to probably be built to be the exact same opening-size on both ends to avoid issues with ships passing through only to collide with the exit.

-Gate sizing is a feature and not a problem. Someone expecting guests or needing to mobilize huge ships builds a huge gate to accommodate them, someone wanting to be sneaky and/or avoid being pursued through their gate-network builds tiny gates they only just fit through so that nothing bigger can follow.

-Gates would probably need to be some kind of directional to prevent the game from having to figure out what happens when a ship on one end intersects with a ship at the other end because neither could tell the other was trying to pass through.


-Mass relays don't care about size beyond what's needed to function, you could jump a from a huge one to a tiny one and back in a ship of any size without needing to match their sizes to anything more than their operational power-requirements.

-Mass relays could simply spit travelers in to the nearest unoccupied space around the target instead of having to worry about collisions happening at a specific point.

photo
1

We can fix the Gate size limitation quite easily with a little code magic/animation


say perhaps the gate works by the ship lining up with one of the entrances of the gate and then when it gets close to the gate (this being entirely dependent on both the ships and gates physical size (the bigger relative to the gate, the farther out it pulls you in)) is sucked into the gate while being compressed to a singular point. anything between the point at which the ship enters the gate and the event horizon of the gate is obliterated if in the way (no damage to the jumping ship as during that process its immediately unloaded and the vessels visual model is pulled in while being shrunk down to fit the gate event horizon.). Also to note, anything/anyone close enough to the vessel would probably also be pulled in with it.


of course, I do also like the idea of different sized gates. so, to play with that part too, I'd say that the power requirements of the gateway are directly proportional to the size of the ship relative to the gateway + the power requirements of opening the gateway with its destination (additional gateways along the travel path that are linked with the origin gateway can greatly reduce the travel costs). This means a tiny ship using a large gateway can use only a tiny fraction of the power a larger ship would, to travel. this means oversized gates can be useful for highly traveled routes, both because they can take much larger ships from point A to B but, also because they can transport the more typical sized ships at a much smaller cost (big=efficient).


I think to make things interesting i think "size" of target should be determined by the gate itself. the gate makes two pairs of cone casts along its two faces. One being the maximum size that fits, the other being slightly smaller then the max size cone and being the trigger for jumping. (the cones could be cylinders where one end is the same size as the gate and the other expands with distance). the ship is jumped when one of two conditions is met, either if exceeds the jump trigger cone while not exceeding the size of the max size cone or it gets close enough to the event horizon that the jump is forced as long as it fits.


this means ship orientation can affect both jump cost and how close you need to get before you can jump. which could bring some interesting gameplay and design considerations for the ship using the gate.


when it comes to the gate receiving the jumped ship. power costs should be a fraction of that used by the origin gate, and be calculated logarithmically rather then exponentially (though both sides should be able to reach massive distances before being too expensive) gates acting as relay stations between the origin and destination expend power amounts equal to a fraction of the average between the origin points power draw and destinations power draw for the full distance jump this sum is then dived between all the replay points equally (generally this is pretty cheap for each relay point, if a relaying gate can't afford the power costs, then 50% of the remainder is given to the origin gate and destination gate). when relaying gates are added to the mix the power cost for the origin/destination gate is calculated based on the distance between the start / each relay point / and destination. (note the discounted range cost due to the relay gates is used to calculate the power cost for the relay points)


for a 50,000km jump with 4 relay gates 10,000km away from the next gate, the cost of the jump would be essentially the cost of 5, 10,000km jumps instead of of the full cost 50,000km jump


This means even relay gates that have nowhere near enough power to jump a ship themselves can still save the origin/destination gates a large sum of power by dampening the exponential costs over distance. Additionally relay gate size is not a factor, meaning relay gates can easily be tiny lower power gates meant only to reduce jump costs of the main gates (while still being capable of potentially jumping very small vessels if they have stored enough power to do so.)


(i hope someone finds this novel of an idea both entertaining and useful)

photo
1

I said in the begining that I would like the prebuilt gates to all be the same size so that there are no issues with not being able to fit somewhere in the middle of a journey. Also the gates should be direct point-to-point connections only. No branching


As for what the gates should look like, assuming they will have a wormhole, I think there should be a separator in the middle of the gate that separates the entry and exit direction. The split should probably be vertical (entry at the top and exit at the bottom) due to horizontal ship designs being more popular than vertical designs but that's the general idea. Of course nothing is stopping a large, vertical ship from flying in sideways.


As for player-built gates, it's obvious to allow for varying sizes with various tradeoffs but again, point-to-point connections only. Unless you want to shut down the gate and re-connect it with another one that isn't already being used.

photo
photo
1

I’m pretty sure the way that it will work is like a current in the ocean that will allow you to travel faster. I’m pretty sure I seen a video of it, I can’t remember I watch too many videos!

Leave a Comment
 
Attach a file