I've made not know how many, maybe hundreds for my mod and yes, they were a true addition to enlarge the space. My XRSGE mod uses them to even connect two planets that are millions kms apart. They are immersive...but.......
THEY CREATE A LOT OF PROBLEMS:
1) Their placement has to be within certain ranges otherwise all sort of bugs happen. This limits how far away you can put them in a sector
2) They require having sector002 etc. so this creates smaller boxes that make no sense. In Rebirth the layout was nice, superhighway or not the sector was a single box
3) They are bugged even in vanilla
So I am having this strange idea...starting from XRSGE which already has each group of clusters assigned to a system and each having internal disposition of scenery (planets, etc) and resources (regions), so the template is there.
Also I did change all the meshes so now skyboxes are millions kms large, no visual issue.
The idea is removing even superhighways and of course all multi-sectors. Adding new coordinates to all zones that have to be moved inside one single sector 001 from their previous 002 and 003
This means adding the distance that was previous held by the whole sector002/003 to each zone. Lot of work but quite doable.
So, this would be the base, now what this means?
Example having a sector with a main planet and say 2 moons, in a radius of 500.000kms. These would be real 500.000kms for the engine to calculate.
As it is now, my mod already adds many gas giants that have real rings like in Saturn, so those regions are 200.000kms already. Also I added many scenery regions that cover whole cluster, so regions are not a issue.
But, can the engine keep coordinates of such large sectors?
Also, being the resources all relative to sector001, would this mean a huge save file? ...you know, +*00.000.000 is added to each coordinate
Another aspect is of course travelling through such distances. By modding the engine's travel mode we can have very high speeds. Not comparable to that of superhighways (that I reduced, still are much faster), but doable.
Then, how not to get lost in space? Yes I put planets/moons to point direction, but that is not enough. We'd need fixed navigational beacons and very large scanners.
How do you think this thing can be managed? E.g. a station in each zone's group (what was previously sector002/003 etc.) that is known to the player from start?
Of course catching a ship at very high speed is impossible but this is not different from catching a ship that is inside a superhighway, you can interact only when it is out in the sector. So you can interact when they have reached the group of zones. Travel mode should require a long cooldown and charge, to be used only in this true travel situation.
How would the engine manage ships traveling so fast all around?
Today I tried doing an unusual thing and it worked: I created a gate going from a sector to the SAME sector. It works! Both if it is sector*_001 to 002 and also 001 to 001. This means that one could have a very large sector that is internally connected by gates (accelerators). In theory, we could even have an entire solar system inside ONE sector...
Ok, these are my first doubts. Please add other possible limitations I did not think about.
At the moment I don't want to start another such big thing, still polishing the mod and don't want to jump again into the blue before having all the cards set
Thank you!
that was one of its big limitation, together with hardcoded physics model
