09 Jul, 2009, Kayle wrote in the 1st comment:
Votes: 0
So. After a discussion with Banner over how to handle something, I reached the conclusion that the space system from SWR sucks ass (Sorry Banner, I think I dissed it again.). Now, In SWR, you have a star system. inside each star system are planets. And then ships, asteroids, and stuff like that. But what about all that empty space between systems. You know, where all good exploring takes place? Banner had the idea of allowing you to drop out of hyperspace early into this dead space. And then we ran into the issue of how to tell what was dead space, and what was a star systems space. Which lead to the realization that it's really a poor design to make star systems your biggest section. So let me pose a few questions to you guys.

Let's say you want to have your space measured at the galactic scale. With coordinate (0,0,0) being Galactic Center (hereon referred to as GC). Now radiating out from GC you have various star systems. Each of these are home to several planets, but do they have their own coordinate sets? Or do you just leave their coordinate sets as part of the galactic map? How do you handle something that could potentially be a very large map expanding quite possibly from -100,000 to 100,000 (or further) in all directions and still have it be an efficient beast.

Is this complexity why the makers of SWR avoided things on a galactic level, and just made dead space vanish? Is it worth it to have something like this?

Thoughts, ideas, suggestions always welcome. I hope to be able to look forward to KaVir's ever enlightening take on things.
09 Jul, 2009, Chris Bailey wrote in the 2nd comment:
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I think you could have a space of that size, or even larger. You just have to manage it properly, and only keep the parts that are in use around at any particular time. It seems to be that loading up a particular section of "dead space" when someone drops out of hyperspace would be pretty simple. You can't just pick up a tree and carry it away, but you can certainly cut it up and do whatever you want with the pieces =)
09 Jul, 2009, Igabod wrote in the 3rd comment:
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One specific use of this is so that a group of pirates can set up an interdiction field somewhere between GC and another planet and yank a ship or an entire fleet out of hyperspace far from any assistance and have their way with them.

As for ideas for this, you could set it up so that when there is a planet or star in your direct flight path you get yanked out of hyperspace within a set distance from the celestial body. Making it necessary to calculate around known gravitic fields. This makes for more realistic space travel, though it could be considered too complicated for the casual gamer.
09 Jul, 2009, Kayle wrote in the 4th comment:
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Igabod said:
As for ideas for this, you could set it up so that when there is a planet or star in your direct flight path you get yanked out of hyperspace within a set distance from the celestial body. Making it necessary to calculate around known gravitic fields. This makes for more realistic space travel, though it could be considered too complicated for the casual gamer.


Not those kinds of ideas. :P I meant implementation ideas. Whether to use a grid based system, how to set up said grid system.. Things like that. :P
09 Jul, 2009, Igabod wrote in the 5th comment:
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ah, then I'll be mostly useless on this discussion sorry. Though I do have to ask what other kind of system you would use if not a grid system.
09 Jul, 2009, Chris Bailey wrote in the 6th comment:
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I think a grid system is best but my concern is that using more than 2 dimensions can really complicate thing for your average space gamer. While it seems simple enough in theory, that extra axis of travel can really complicate movement and combat. Not to mention pathfinding, line of sight etc. Of course you lose that realism factor when you take it away.
09 Jul, 2009, Kayle wrote in the 7th comment:
Votes: 0
Igabod said:
ah, then I'll be mostly useless on this discussion sorry. Though I do have to ask what other kind of system you would use if not a grid system.


The cheesy SWR system that relies complete on random numbers and incorrect vector math? :P (Damn, another shot at the SWR space system, Sorry Banner. XD)

Chris Bailey said:
I think a grid system is best but my concern is that using more than 2 dimensions can really complicate thing for your average space gamer. While it seems simple enough in theory, that extra axis of travel can really complicate movement and combat. Not to mention pathfinding, line of sight etc. Of course you lose that realism factor when you take it away.


Well, it was never all that complicated for SWR, but they don't use a grid, they just have what amounts to random numbers. and the closer your numbers are to someone elses, determines if you can see them and shoot them. lol
09 Jul, 2009, Igabod wrote in the 8th comment:
Votes: 0
hmm well the original way of doing things was off the table in my mind since that was the whole reason for writing this new space system.

As for the grid system causing problems, I personally think it would fix a lot of the problems people had with space travel in swr rather than cause problems. Sure it makes it a complicated system to learn for those who are used to the old swr space system, but I think it allows for more freedom of choice.

It also allows for more exciting space combat. You have to keep your ship pointed the correct direction at all times and you have to figure out where your opponent is in relation to you. Also, you can set it up so that you can devote more power to your rear shields if your enemy is behind you or to your port shields if they are coming at you from the side.

All of these new possibilities negate any negative results from the switch to a grid system IMHO. So I vote heavily for the grid system.
09 Jul, 2009, Zenn wrote in the 9th comment:
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There currently is such a system that my game has as well as 1-2 other SWRs. Virtual space 'creates' a virtual system temporarily if a player's ship enters that system. It's set up on an x, y grid, and within it are standard systems with xyz coordinates.

It can also be coded in to spawn random pirate mobs in x number of systems randomly, mostly near planets so it's easy for players to get to them.


If a players' ship hits the invisible boundary between one system and the next (I.E. 50000 50000 50000) he automatically passes into the next system and hits -50000 -50000 -50000


An abandoned system is deleted after a certain period of time.
09 Jul, 2009, KaVir wrote in the 10th comment:
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I think I'd use a 2D map for the galaxy itself - galaxies tend to be fairly flat anyway, and it's much easier to display starcharts and plot courses in 2D. Each coordinate position in the galaxy map might contain empty space, a solar system, or some other point of interest.

Travel would consist of selecting a destination within range of your hyperdrive (much like Elite), with the option available to specify explicit coordinates rather than a known solar system, for those who fancy exploring.

Combat could only occur between ships at the same galaxy coordinates, and could be handled as either 2D or 3D (I think I'd personally favour 3D).


How much of the galaxy will be hand-built and how much generated? Will the hand-built parts be scattered across the galaxy, or confined to a small area? Will players be able to modify the galaxy (destroying worlds, etc)?

Will you always want just the one galaxy, or might you later add more? If so, will people be able to fly between galaxies, or will they need to use some sort of intergalactic drive to teleport between them?
09 Jul, 2009, Kayle wrote in the 11th comment:
Votes: 0
KaVir said:
I think I'd use a 2D map for the galaxy itself - galaxies tend to be fairly flat anyway, and it's much easier to display starcharts and plot courses in 2D. Each coordinate position in the galaxy map might contain empty space, a solar system, or some other point of interest.

So would you then have additional division within each of the squares of the galaxy grid for further refinement?


KaVir said:
Travel would consist of selecting a destination within range of your hyperdrive (much like Elite), with the option available to specify explicit coordinates rather than a known solar system, for those who fancy exploring.

Combat could only occur between ships at the same galaxy coordinates, and could be handled as either 2D or 3D (I think I'd personally favour 3D).


How would you swap between 2D and 3D though? If travel and the galaxy map are on a 2D plane, and then combat is handled with a 3D plane, how do you switch between them?


KaVir said:
How much of the galaxy will be hand-built and how much generated? Will the hand-built parts be scattered across the galaxy, or confined to a small area? Will players be able to modify the galaxy (destroying worlds, etc)?

Will you always want just the one galaxy, or might you later add more? If so, will people be able to fly between galaxies, or will they need to use some sort of intergalactic drive to teleport between them?

I hadn't thought about any of this.
09 Jul, 2009, Igabod wrote in the 12th comment:
Votes: 0
In the game banner is implementing this for it's not likely we'll be adding other galaxies at the moment.

As for your question about how much will be generated, do you mean the planets themselves? If so the answer is all of them will be hand-built area by area much the same way as swr does theirs.

As for how far apart they are, that's not decided yet cause we don't even know what all the races are or how many planets there will be. This is still in the development stages as far as the races and whatnot are concerned.

We want this to be as realistic as possible because the mud is based on what the galaxy (the milky way) will look like in 2000 years. Humans have discovered super-luminal travel (hyperspace) and are exploring the galaxy, discovering previously unknown races of beings.

I think that extra-galactic travel is still going to be quite impossible even at super-luminal speeds. (The distance between our galaxy and the nearest one is REALLY REALLY far.) Even in starwars nobody has been to any other galaxy. It took the Yuuzhan Vong several generations just to make the journey from their galaxy to the starwars galaxy.

[edit to add]
as for whether players will be able to destroy worlds… I hadn't thought about that. It might be worth looking into.
09 Jul, 2009, quixadhal wrote in the 13th comment:
Votes: 0
You might also consider using a system of vectors instead of a grid.

Instead of a cubic grid where the points are equal, regardless of content, you might simply denote the locations of things from the GC as two angles and a distance (3 dimensions). You could either make everything this way, or you could place grids that were centered on those locations to provide more traditional movement.

If everything is based on vectors, you don't need a volumetric space full of mostly empty coordinates. Distances can be relative (my ship is 34deg by -12deg by 1.7AU away from yours), or absolute (I'm 34deg by 127deg by 873ly from GC).

On the plus side, this would be very memory friendly since you only store positional data for things that exist in space. Travel by vectors is easy, and it should be fairly straightforward to re-calculate your absolute position once you move relative to where you are now.

It also matters how large you want things to be. Accurate galactic distances may require you to either use floating point (and the loss of precision that entails), or larger integers, or perhaps nested coordinates. That's kindof what I meant with the multiple grid idea. You could map each star as a vector but then drop a grid for more accurate positioning around it.
09 Jul, 2009, KaVir wrote in the 14th comment:
Votes: 0
Kayle said:
So would you then have additional division within each of the squares of the galaxy grid for further refinement?

I'd store the X/Y/Z position of each object within each galaxy position. If you end up with a lot of objects in the same galaxy position you may need to split them up into separate containers, but that's an optimisation issue and would be transparent to the players.

Kayle said:
How would you swap between 2D and 3D though? If travel and the galaxy map are on a 2D plane, and then combat is handled with a 3D plane, how do you switch between them?

To think of it in normal mud terms, imagine the galaxy is a grid of rooms, and typing 'north', 'south', 'east' or 'west' involves the use of your hyperdrive. Obviously you wouldn't actually use those command names - instead you might "plot 100 300" and then type "hyperjump". The ship could then be moved into its own 'hyperspace' virtual room where it would remain for the duration of the trip (as it shouldn't really interact with other ships while in hyperspace). You could then track their journey across the coordinates, so that if they drop out early you'd know which room to leave them in.

Within each room you've got a list of objects (ships, planets, suns, etc) each of which has its own X/Y/Z position relative to that room, and you fly towards them using commands such as 'target', 'accelerate', etc.


Igabod said:
As for your question about how much will be generated, do you mean the planets themselves? If so the answer is all of them will be hand-built area by area much the same way as swr does theirs.

I'm afraid I'm not familiar with SWR, but I meant in terms of everything - solar systems, astroid fields, strange wormholes, space stations, particle clouds, space debris, degenerate matter, alien artifacts (eg ringworlds, stargates, etc), and so on. Some of it you can create yourself, but as Douglas Adams once wrote, "Space is big". If you want people to randomly explore the galaxy, and have a reasonable chance of encountering interesting stuff, you're really going to need to generate content - even if it's just filler to pad out your hand-written stuff.

Igabod said:
I think that extra-galactic travel is still going to be quite impossible even at super-luminal speeds. (The distance between our galaxy and the nearest one is REALLY REALLY far.)

There are plenty of examples of intergalactic space travel in Science Fiction, and a wide variety of ways you could handle it. You can of course say that it's not possible, and that will make your task easier, but I really just meant it's best to decide now (rather than try to tack on extra galaxies at a later date).
09 Jul, 2009, Kayle wrote in the 15th comment:
Votes: 0
quixadhal said:
You might also consider using a system of vectors instead of a grid.

Instead of a cubic grid where the points are equal, regardless of content, you might simply denote the locations of things from the GC as two angles and a distance (3 dimensions). You could either make everything this way, or you could place grids that were centered on those locations to provide more traditional movement.

If everything is based on vectors, you don't need a volumetric space full of mostly empty coordinates. Distances can be relative (my ship is 34deg by -12deg by 1.7AU away from yours), or absolute (I'm 34deg by 127deg by 873ly from GC).

On the plus side, this would be very memory friendly since you only store positional data for things that exist in space. Travel by vectors is easy, and it should be fairly straightforward to re-calculate your absolute position once you move relative to where you are now.

It also matters how large you want things to be. Accurate galactic distances may require you to either use floating point (and the loss of precision that entails), or larger integers, or perhaps nested coordinates. That's kindof what I meant with the multiple grid idea. You could map each star as a vector but then drop a grid for more accurate positioning around it.


This vector idea intrigues me. And I think this is vaguely how SWR handles things. With the very big issue that their vector math is flawed, and outright wrong in places. Care to elaborate?

KaVir said:
To think of it in normal mud terms, imagine the galaxy is a grid of rooms, and typing 'north', 'south', 'east' or 'west' involves the use of your hyperdrive. Obviously you wouldn't actually use those command names - instead you might "plot 100 300" and then type "hyperjump". The ship could then be moved into its own 'hyperspace' virtual room where it would remain for the duration of the trip (as it shouldn't really interact with other ships while in hyperspace). You could then track their journey across the coordinates, so that if they drop out early you'd know which room to leave them in.

Within each room you've got a list of objects (ships, planets, suns, etc) each of which has its own X/Y/Z position relative to that room, and you fly towards them using commands such as 'target', 'accelerate', etc.

But that didn't answer my question as to how to swap between the 2D model for travel, and the 3D model for combat.
09 Jul, 2009, KaVir wrote in the 16th comment:
Votes: 0
Kayle said:
But that didn't answer my question as to how to swap between the 2D model for travel, and the 3D model for combat.

Erm, yes, it did. Intergalatic travel is like moving between rooms in a traditional mud. Once you arrive in a room, you can engage in combat with other people inside it. If you leave the room, combat ends.
09 Jul, 2009, Kayle wrote in the 17th comment:
Votes: 0
So each square on the grid is to be handled like a 3 dimensional plane, but travel between them is only handled via a 2D plane?
09 Jul, 2009, KaVir wrote in the 18th comment:
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Kayle said:
So each square on the grid is to be handled like a 3 dimensional plane, but travel between them is only handled via a 2D plane?

Yes. Some muds are room-based, but each room has internal coordinates for resolving distances during combat. This would work in much the same way.

This is based around the idea that normal ship drives would require decades or even centuries to travel between two solar systems, so you need some sort of hyperdrive. When you move to another room, you're effectively jumping through hyperspace.

You don't need to literally move the player one room at a time, though.
09 Jul, 2009, Igabod wrote in the 19th comment:
Votes: 0
KaVir said:
Igabod said:
As for your question about how much will be generated, do you mean the planets themselves? If so the answer is all of them will be hand-built area by area much the same way as swr does theirs.

I'm afraid I'm not familiar with SWR, but I meant in terms of everything - solar systems, astroid fields, strange wormholes, space stations, particle clouds, space debris, degenerate matter, alien artifacts (eg ringworlds, stargates, etc), and so on. Some of it you can create yourself, but as Douglas Adams once wrote, "Space is big". If you want people to randomly explore the galaxy, and have a reasonable chance of encountering interesting stuff, you're really going to need to generate content - even if it's just filler to pad out your hand-written stuff.

I think we're going to do all of that manually since it's not all that much work to just make a simple object in space. Though for a mob controlled ship we might go with generated mob ships, or we may have a set of pre-made mob ships that are randomly loaded around the galaxy. I haven't quite discussed this aspect with Banner very much so I'm a little fuzzy on the details here.
Kavir said:
Igabod said:
I think that extra-galactic travel is still going to be quite impossible even at super-luminal speeds. (The distance between our galaxy and the nearest one is REALLY REALLY far.)

There are plenty of examples of intergalactic space travel in Science Fiction, and a wide variety of ways you could handle it. You can of course say that it's not possible, and that will make your task easier, but I really just meant it's best to decide now (rather than try to tack on extra galaxies at a later date).


I'm pretty sure we're sticking with the one galaxy since that's going to be a hard enough job to populate as it is. Though you do bring up an interesting problem we might face later on once we get the storyline going and all that. What if we want to have a race from another galaxy (like the yuuzhan vong of starwars) come and attack our galaxy. We'd have problems adding in a new galaxy which the inhabitants of the Milky Way could counter-attack. This may or may not end up happening in the future, but it is worth thinking about just to be on the safe side.
09 Jul, 2009, Kayle wrote in the 20th comment:
Votes: 0
Igabod said:
I'm pretty sure we're sticking with the one galaxy since that's going to be a hard enough job to populate as it is. Though you do bring up an interesting problem we might face later on once we get the storyline going and all that. What if we want to have a race from another galaxy (like the yuuzhan vong of starwars) come and attack our galaxy. We'd have problems adding in a new galaxy which the inhabitants of the Milky Way could counter-attack. This may or may not end up happening in the future, but it is worth thinking about just to be on the safe side.

Or Uh. The Reapers of Mass Effect. And what about something outside the bounds of the Galaxy? Like the Ark in Halo 3?

KaVir said:
Kayle said:
So each square on the grid is to be handled like a 3 dimensional plane, but travel between them is only handled via a 2D plane?

Yes. Some muds are room-based, but each room has internal coordinates for resolving distances during combat. This would work in much the same way.

This is based around the idea that normal ship drives would require decades or even centuries to travel between two solar systems, so you need some sort of hyperdrive. When you move to another room, you're effectively jumping through hyperspace.

You don't need to literally move the player one room at a time, though.

Alright, that makes a little more sense now. I'm still intrigued by the idea of a vector-based implementation though.

(It should also be noted that I'm not designing any system like this currently, Banner's designing it, I just help him with minor things because he piqued my interest. Although, a spacefaring drop-in module for Elysium might not be such a bad idea..)
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