Rather than the massive, overbearing, complex, and insanely expensive contrivances that Egosoft calls "Highways" in XR, I would think that a much cheaper and more conservative system would fit the series a lot better. The "highways" could still be shoehorned into the lore as a later and more "advanced" development built up over a long period of time, not the quick and dirty makeshift system implemented immediately after the existing X3 timeframe.
Think along the lines of the Terran "accellerators", but on a smaller scale, and with several of them built in a line. They would boost your speed in the direction they point by something on the order of 1000-2000km/h, and that speed would begin to drop off pretty significantly after the first few km. By the time you reach the second booster in the line, 5-20km downrange, you'd be down to 500-1000km/h or so. That gives you SETA-like speeds or faster, without using SETA, and the ability to turn onto or out of the line at any point. High-speed routes would place the boosters closer, so you'd retain most of your speed before hitting the next booster; less important "roads" would have longer gaps between boosters, where you'd lose a lot of velocity before reaching the next one and only average 500-800km/h, rather than 800-1500.
The cost and time to construct the "highways" in XR would seem to dwarf all other investments in stations and ships by orders of magnitude, and just doesn't seem believable, no matter how much I try to hand-wave the impossibilities away. Building and placing a set of "boosters" would seem to be the first logical step, gradually being linked back-to-back and expanded into what would eventually become the XR highway network.
possible suggestion about highways?
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lyubarskiy
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I feel like end game for X should be building your own faction and dominating the universe.
Think of it as stellaris or any other 4X game but from first person.
From that thinking I think it would be great if you could build up you sectors to how you want them built. That includes highways. I feel like strength of X games was being able to build anything that an NPC can (build able in lore). Stations, ships, mines etc. Why not let us create our own empire the way that we want.
And even if you do end up with a grid over the whole universe. So what? that sounds like you played the game the way you wanted it. You built up the infrastructure through hard work and fun game play.
Heck, let the NPC factions build it, then play as pirate to destroy a section and kill the freighters. Similar to freelancer. Or stop supplies flow to an enemy faction.
I don't know, I see a lot of possibilities here.
Think of it as stellaris or any other 4X game but from first person.
From that thinking I think it would be great if you could build up you sectors to how you want them built. That includes highways. I feel like strength of X games was being able to build anything that an NPC can (build able in lore). Stations, ships, mines etc. Why not let us create our own empire the way that we want.
And even if you do end up with a grid over the whole universe. So what? that sounds like you played the game the way you wanted it. You built up the infrastructure through hard work and fun game play.
Heck, let the NPC factions build it, then play as pirate to destroy a section and kill the freighters. Similar to freelancer. Or stop supplies flow to an enemy faction.
I don't know, I see a lot of possibilities here.
My personal feelings about highways, are they are okay. But there are some things I would change personally.
* I would prefer it if they were more or less straight lines, the shortest distance between two points.
* I would prefer that there was less discrepancy between the speed of my ship and the ships travelling in the highway. This is to reduce or eliminate the bumper car minigame while travelling, I really hated that.
* I would prefer that any ships encountered in the highway were actually ships travelling to a destination, not simply spawned in the second you entered the highway in order to create the illusion of more traffic. I don't want more traffic when travelling at high speeds, I want less!
* Being able to build highways between two points would be pretty cool, it would have to take a bunch of time and money though. It would be even more cool if NPCs would dynamically construct highways as well, such as if a rich asteroid field is discovered, a station is set up next to it, so a new highway is created in order to better meet the needs of the station.
* I would prefer it if they were more or less straight lines, the shortest distance between two points.
* I would prefer that there was less discrepancy between the speed of my ship and the ships travelling in the highway. This is to reduce or eliminate the bumper car minigame while travelling, I really hated that.
* I would prefer that any ships encountered in the highway were actually ships travelling to a destination, not simply spawned in the second you entered the highway in order to create the illusion of more traffic. I don't want more traffic when travelling at high speeds, I want less!
* Being able to build highways between two points would be pretty cool, it would have to take a bunch of time and money though. It would be even more cool if NPCs would dynamically construct highways as well, such as if a rich asteroid field is discovered, a station is set up next to it, so a new highway is created in order to better meet the needs of the station.
My 2c: tl,dr - a lipstick on a pig.
I don't understand this dev's need to sustain this naive, childish idea of ... "some kind of tubes throughout the cosmos" for so long. Yeah, probably they've invested a lot of time and resources into this so it's hard to let it go, but it's essentially an equivalent of horse carts transportation put in the 21st century as a legit way to travel. And this attempt "let's try to fix the stupid concept by allowing the player to make more of it"... Ok, yeah, it's a game, I get it, but it's soo... not clever.
Highways are... "magic". Among all the bad things already mentioned while beating this dead horse, they're also breaking that famous "suspension of disbelief" to so many which was talked about a lot some time ago. And, who said "the only reason I'm buying XR is because of Highways" ever? They are adding nothing to the game. If you want some similar hocus-pocus, use those "slings" like in Mass Effect, or some contraption like that...
But, then again, yes, this is just a game, so why not, let's put wizards in also...
What?:)
I don't understand this dev's need to sustain this naive, childish idea of ... "some kind of tubes throughout the cosmos" for so long. Yeah, probably they've invested a lot of time and resources into this so it's hard to let it go, but it's essentially an equivalent of horse carts transportation put in the 21st century as a legit way to travel. And this attempt "let's try to fix the stupid concept by allowing the player to make more of it"... Ok, yeah, it's a game, I get it, but it's soo... not clever.
Highways are... "magic". Among all the bad things already mentioned while beating this dead horse, they're also breaking that famous "suspension of disbelief" to so many which was talked about a lot some time ago. And, who said "the only reason I'm buying XR is because of Highways" ever? They are adding nothing to the game. If you want some similar hocus-pocus, use those "slings" like in Mass Effect, or some contraption like that...
But, then again, yes, this is just a game, so why not, let's put wizards in also...
What?:)
So many developers refuse to let go of stuff they've added. no matter what.
I'm guilty of it myself.
Highways seemed liked a good way to solve a problem of pathfinding (*that I found wasn't that bad anyway, not in sectors that weren't stuffed full of asteroids) and speed without SETA. But as with all great ideas, they turned out to be less than optimal. And instead of just saying "oh well, we tried, didn't work out as well as we'd hoped this time", they instead try to keep fiddling with them until they are made to work.
The cost of putting them in means they have to spend more and more and more on them. The best solution here is to improve pathfinding, possibly pre-calc "invisible highways" in sectors for the AI to use and let the player do what he likes. (there are modern pathfinding algorithms that do this approach very well) and scrap highways as a thing. Then add a cruise drive to make ships go faster (or just make the top speed fast as you like, with reducing manoeuvrability the faster you go to prevent it being used in combat)
As for magic.. they are putting in teleportation to make up for the lack of jump drives so they know that JD is a good thing, they just can't bring themselves to realise all these problems could be solved easily, if they just let go of the new stuff that wasn't as good as hoped.
I'm guilty of it myself.
Highways seemed liked a good way to solve a problem of pathfinding (*that I found wasn't that bad anyway, not in sectors that weren't stuffed full of asteroids) and speed without SETA. But as with all great ideas, they turned out to be less than optimal. And instead of just saying "oh well, we tried, didn't work out as well as we'd hoped this time", they instead try to keep fiddling with them until they are made to work.
The cost of putting them in means they have to spend more and more and more on them. The best solution here is to improve pathfinding, possibly pre-calc "invisible highways" in sectors for the AI to use and let the player do what he likes. (there are modern pathfinding algorithms that do this approach very well) and scrap highways as a thing. Then add a cruise drive to make ships go faster (or just make the top speed fast as you like, with reducing manoeuvrability the faster you go to prevent it being used in combat)
As for magic.. they are putting in teleportation to make up for the lack of jump drives so they know that JD is a good thing, they just can't bring themselves to realise all these problems could be solved easily, if they just let go of the new stuff that wasn't as good as hoped.
Jump drives obviously create a game balance problem, where you can't really defend more than a single location, because a roughly equal enemy can just gather enough stuff into a single fleet to take it out. The only sensible counter is to gather everything of your own and jump in to oppose it, resulting in one cataclysmic battle which totally destroys one of those factions' ability to wage war in the first few hours of the game, and probably weakens the other faction to the point of being a pushover for a third race's fleet to jump in and finish the job. It's like the "Mutually Assured Destruction" policies in the 1960s and '70s.
By removing jump capability, it means that fleets have to travel sector by sector, and you have to spread your assets out to deal with local issues, because it may take days for help to arrive from the other end of the map.
Highways are NOT the solution, although I can see the need for some kind of boosters or accelerators to cut travel times across heavily travelled sectors. Packing them full of "traffic" which exists ONLY for the purpose of being a hassle to the player goes way out of bounds, and I seriously hope that the idea dies and is thoroughly shredded and burned to prevent it from ever rearing its ugly head again as a zombie idea. Rather than being an aide to the player, and an integral and believable part of the game universe, they become something to avoid if possible, and a depiction of mass insanity as hundreds of NPCs appear to willingly put themselves through that hell on a constant basis.
By removing jump capability, it means that fleets have to travel sector by sector, and you have to spread your assets out to deal with local issues, because it may take days for help to arrive from the other end of the map.
Highways are NOT the solution, although I can see the need for some kind of boosters or accelerators to cut travel times across heavily travelled sectors. Packing them full of "traffic" which exists ONLY for the purpose of being a hassle to the player goes way out of bounds, and I seriously hope that the idea dies and is thoroughly shredded and burned to prevent it from ever rearing its ugly head again as a zombie idea. Rather than being an aide to the player, and an integral and believable part of the game universe, they become something to avoid if possible, and a depiction of mass insanity as hundreds of NPCs appear to willingly put themselves through that hell on a constant basis.