Highways

Post by **Terre** » Fri, 30. Sep 11, 23:07

Will the player be able to commission JSDD to build a highway to an outlying factory or complex?

Naroku · Post by **Naroku** » Fri, 30. Sep 11, 23:11

Be cool if I could make o tech up to a "road" to my complex

Bobucles · Post by **Bobucles** » Fri, 30. Sep 11, 23:18

+1 to this.

Building your own highway networks would be amazing. Destroying highway networks even more so. These things literally change the shape of the universe!

I suspect Superhighways will connect completely different areas of the game world. Building or destroying these could be problematic. Disabling them, maybe. Controlling them, tempting. But they are such critical aspects of space commerce (and war) that they'd probably be as well guarded as the planets themselves!

Gazz · Post by **Gazz** » Fri, 30. Sep 11, 23:19

I would have to assume so because exploration would be rather useless if you couldn't do anything in the explored space.

Lets assume you find a nice spot (defined by whatever makes spots nice in Rebirth) and wanted to build a few stations there.
What good does it do you if your freighters take half a day each time just going from / to the factory to the nearest highway?

That would only turn sectors from small places around jumpgates (X3) into small places around highways (XRB).

Shimrod · Post by **Shimrod** » Fri, 30. Sep 11, 23:55

If distances become astronomical, I wonder if the game will still use arbitrary speed limits on ships, or switch to a model like Frontier of acceleration up until the halfway mark then decelerating until arrival.

Seems like the highways could fit either approach. Either boost accelaration or max speed.

Scoob · Post by **Scoob** » Sat, 1. Oct 11, 01:24

Hi,

I did actually propose in another thread that maybe the player could commission some contractors to extend an existing highway to terminate near a player-owned property.

As Gazz says it's rather pointless if your freighters take an age doing their trade runs because they need to travel for half a day just to get to the nearest highway...

I would hope that highways are an object in their own right and can dynamically be added to / altered throughout the course of the game.

Scoob.

awesley · Post by **awesley** » Sat, 1. Oct 11, 02:30

Ok, I've just read about the new highway system, as a long time player of the X series (maybe 15 years or so?) I had some thoughts about this to suggest... if the Egosoft devs are reading

As a thought experiment, you might consider the highways as analogue to the internet... ie:

- It is a connection graph or tree, where the largest (fastest) pipes connect between regions of high bandwidth and the connections get smaller (slower) as you reach out to the edge, with the size of each link set automatically according to how many destinations can be reached from each end.

ie the biggest (fastest/widest) connections are between galaxies, with many "sector" links coming off the end of that, going to different regions of a galaxy, and then from each of those are the smaller links reaching each individual star, and then off each of those are the smallest links that reach parts of each solar system.

When you enter one of the highways, you should be able to see and select your final destination (ie source routing) so you don't have to worry about the details unless you want to get off somewhere along the way...

- A player can add to the existing network by purchasing an endpoint and activating it at his/her desired location. It will automatically find and connect to the nearest highway endpoint and create a new (lowest speed) link. As long as their endpoint terminator is active then the link will stay up. If it's deactivated or destroyed then the link goes down.

If other players create new highways that link to this point then the size of the link increases (ie speed increases) automatically. So it's possible to create an entire new set of highways and roads to arbitrary locations, I'd guess that these might be analogous to the sort of "gold rush" mining booms that happen out here in the real world where something valuable is discovered out in the middle of nowhere...

Keeping links running must have some sort of "cost" so that unused/outdated links will slowly die away, maybe a small monetary cost or a requirement that they are used from time to time.

This is the nice kind of non-deterministic behaviour that leads to interesting gameplay.

Just my $0.02

cheers, Bird

Syock · Post by **Syock** » Sat, 1. Oct 11, 02:53

What is with Egosoft and their monopoly companies? JSDD must rule the galaxy by now with everyone needing their product that no one else can make.

Maybe they just want to rule the space game genre and it influences their story lines.

Being able to extend highways would seem like a must to me, although expensive. Maybe they are toll roads.

They didn't mention how they are connecting different solar systems to each other did they. The big highways were still all in system.

Bill67 · Post by **Bill67** » Sat, 1. Oct 11, 05:00

I have been reading sci fi since I was in my early teens (and that was tom swift, lol) and I have to say this is the first time I have seen a space setting set with 'highways'.

I wont say I am dissappointed til I play the game but the one thing that did get my attention was that they said that SETA/Hyperspace were hacks to travel but IMO I dont see how a highway isnt 1?

Yeah no one will want to wait 15-30 minutes to cross a solar system but to use a highway tube system to speed up travel seems strange to me.

Honestly I wonder if this isnt a crutch to keep the AI from crashing into things more than using other 'hacks'.

But since its going in I will try them and see what I think. Can I sit outside one of these highways and lob missles into them and see if I catch a ship?
Send some drones in and start a traffic jam?

Interesting idea of being able to construct 1 from one the above posters, as we can make our own stations can we make smaller ones to speed up our traders?

Syock · Post by **Syock** » Sat, 1. Oct 11, 05:06

Freelancer had highways. EVE Online kind of has makeshift highways by allowing high speed travel between known points. Earth and Beyond had nav points that acted as highways. Sins of a solar empire has highways too.

It is needed more for gameplay than it is for stories.

Galaxy613 · Post by **Galaxy613** » Sat, 1. Oct 11, 05:06

Bill67 wrote:I have been reading sci fi since I was in my early teens (and that was tom swift, lol) and I have to say this is the first time I have seen a space setting set with 'highways'.

Hrm, I guess you haven't been playing space games for that long though. Freelancer had the exact same local highways as Egosoft is proposing now. Not saying it's a bad idea, I really really like they are finally adding something like this.

In Freelancer it was a bunch of connecting accelerators which could be disabled and could leave freighters vulnable as they tried to get back onto the line... but if you accidently caught a military ship you'll be attacked on sight. You couldn't fight inside the highway though. But it did make interplantary travel much much faster.

Bill67 · Post by **Bill67** » Sat, 1. Oct 11, 05:19

Galaxy613 wrote:Hrm, I guess you haven't been playing space games for that long though. Freelancer had the exact same local highways as Egosoft is proposing now. Not saying it's a bad idea, I really really like they are finally adding something like this.

In Freelancer it was a bunch of connecting accelerators which could be disabled and could leave freighters vulnable as they tried to get back onto the line... but if you accidently caught a military ship you'll be attacked on sight. You couldn't fight inside the highway though. But it did make interplantary travel much much faster.

For some reason I never got into freelancer much. I dont know if was playing something else at the time or what, but have recently re-installed it but dont recall the highways. Will have to relook at it and see. I thought it was like indepence war 2 where you had the speed boost, but if anything that reminded me of seta than a highway. Same for E&B, I dont recall a fixed highway, you just choose to engage from whereever. Of course I have bad memory, but just not recalling ever playing where was a fixed tunnel/road/highway that I had to enter to use.

Bobucles · Post by **Bobucles** » Sat, 1. Oct 11, 05:34

How epic can a highway system be? Just go on a little stroll through two solar systems:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuY4szjjRSQ

The mod has its issues, of course. But I just love going back there once in a while.

pjknibbs · Post by **pjknibbs** » Sat, 1. Oct 11, 08:32

Bill67 wrote: I wont say I am dissappointed til I play the game but the one thing that did get my attention was that they said that SETA/Hyperspace were hacks to travel but IMO I dont see how a highway isnt 1?

Yeah no one will want to wait 15-30 minutes to cross a solar system but to use a highway tube system to speed up travel seems strange to me.

15-30 minutes? And the rest. It would take 5 hours of real time to travel from Earth to Pluto if (a) both planets were on the same side of the Sun--double the travel time if they're on opposite sides and (b) your ship was capable of travelling at lightspeed. Therefore there has to be SOME sort of method in the game of cutting these journey times to something reasonable!

SETA was always a bit of a hack because it requires the entire game universe to run at up to 10 times the normal speed. This puts a massive additional strain on the CPU which can result in all sorts of oddities--like capital ships in X3TC not firing their turrets if you're at full SETA because the scripts that control them don't have time to run, and the famous "auto-pillock" being unable to navigate properly at that speed. Far better, therefore, to include some artificial means of making the ships travel faster than to speed up the whole universe.

Now, I don't work for Egosoft and can't say what the design decision here was, but if *I* was thinking about this then I'd say to myself that allowing superspeed at any time in any direction is a recipe for disaster, particularly if all the autopilot controlled ships do it as well. Better to have all the ships travelling in the same path at the same speed, just like a real-life highway; far easier to avoid collisions and keep the autopilot working smoothly.

corhen · Post by **corhen** » Sat, 1. Oct 11, 09:57

5 hours!?!? dear sir, you seem to suggest the ships of the X universe could hit the speed of light!

Now, considering that the maximum speed of vanilla ship is around 1Km/s (the racers) lets see, the Perigee of Pluto to earth is roughly 4.3 billion kilometres, so, 4300000000Km/1Km/s/60S/m/60m/h/24Hr/year means you would have to travel.. in the smallest fastest ship in the X universe.. for a grand total of 136.4 YEARS!.. and that's when earth and Pluto are relitivly close

Master of the Blade · Post by **Master of the Blade** » Sat, 1. Oct 11, 11:56

Ummm, corhen?

pjknibbs wrote:Pluto if (a) both planets were on the same side of the Sun--double the travel time if they're on opposite sides and (b) your ship was capable of travelling at lightspeed.

Syock · Post by **Syock** » Sat, 1. Oct 11, 14:20

pjknibbs wrote:t would take 5 hours of real time to travel from Earth to Pluto if (a) both planets were on the same side of the Sun--double the travel time if they're on opposite sides and ...

Does this mean I could possibly be looking forward to planetary motion, rather than a static layout? http://forum.egosoft.com/images/smiles/icon_biggrin.gif

Post by **Terre** » Sat, 1. Oct 11, 16:15

I wonder if our super-fast highways will go to plaid.

Spaceballs - They've Gone To Plaid

DJ0JJ · Post by **DJ0JJ** » Sat, 1. Oct 11, 18:46

Lol people talking about going as fast as light and saying it will look like passing 5 hours... you forgeting TIME DILATION!

Gazz · Post by **Gazz** » Sat, 1. Oct 11, 18:58

That's only important when figuring out the wages of your crew when some of your ships are using highways at relativistic speeds and some are not.

Subjectively you are "on SETA" while on such a highway because the game around you must be operating at a higher time factor.

The only way around that would be wormhole travel or similiar types of instant travel magic.
You can't have your cake and eat it, too. =P