Comment by hparadiz
5 hours ago
They don't even do orbits of basic solar system objects. Lol.
Eve online has always just pretended to be a space sim.
5 hours ago
They don't even do orbits of basic solar system objects. Lol.
Eve online has always just pretended to be a space sim.
It helps me to just think of all these games as early 20th century naval warfare sims with a fantasy space theme. We like dreadnoughts and have a hard time with extraterrestrial physics.
Even more accurately, these generation of games are chat rooms with set dressing.
To me it seems like the engine (and the mechanics) are focused on being an MMO first and a "simulation" second. From their website "EVE Online is a community-driven spaceship MMORPG where players can play free, choosing their own path from countless options."
There are concepts in the game that would be unlikely in a simulation game but are common in MMO's. Think of fast travel, instance dungeons and more.
One of Eve Online's strengths is that it conforms gameplay to the MMO setting. That is one of the main driving factors in it's design and allows for example for Time dilation, huge battles and continuous universe and economy that it is famous for.
This is different from for example World of Warcraft, in my view that is a RPG first MMO second. That is one of the reasons it has sharding and smaller pvp battles.
Indeed, I would even say that EVE chose to be unsharded/monolithic first, and many of the key design choices flow from that, including the fantasy space setting itself.
The monolithic world needs to be big to spread everyone out. And it's easier to create ten thousand "systems" than it would be to create an immersive terrestrial world with a similar scale. Each EVE system is just a bunch of objects floating in a 3D space that you travel between.
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Well, even in Naval battles the environment is not this static - weather playing a major role in many naval campaigns, from hiding your ship in a rain squall to braving freezing waters during the polar night with the arctic convoys.
And of course tide played a major role, with the Germans during the Battle of Jutland racing to get past a sand bang to avoid being stuck at open sea & be mauled even more by the British.
games are about fun, if something only adds realism for no reason it's not good game design to add it
I still think it would be doable if done right. There are so many interesting elements of modern science and hard SF that could be included to introduce interesting game mechanics:
- adding various types of radiators (solid, droplet, etc.), gloving when weapons fire or engines activate, shooting them off prevents system from running
- planets on eccentric orbits with wildly varying surface conditions in mere days as the planet periodically get closer and farther to the star, from frozen solid to metals flowing like water days apart
- aerostat habitats in the atmosphere on gas giants or Venus like worlds, you could fly around but go to low (or get swept by a storm) and you might get crushed
- radiation belts, sun grazing comets or energy harvesting stations very close to a stellar body, can enter for a very limited time until even your shielded systems burn out - and good like with repair space walks!
- tidally locked bodies, where one side is always illuminated and the other one has an eternal night, with perhaps a thin habitable belt where conditions are just right for life, presenting interesting options for story telling and world building
Doing all of that math and tracking them is a huge order. Outer Wilds famously simulates an entire solar system using Unity and they had an issue early in development where bugs would occur more frequently as the player visited the edge of the solar system due to floating point math getting wonky in the engine and the solar system's Sun being 0,0,0 coordinates. Their solution? Make the player coordinate 0,0,0 and everything else moves _around_ the player. That's right, in Outer Wilds, when you jump, the planet you're on is actually moving away from you. But they managed to use this method to simulate newtonian physics pretty well.
And even that solution is only temporary. Its possible to watch the simulation go on so long that planets begin to de-orbit the sun as the math simulation breaks down. For spoiler reasons players don't run into this issue, but it exists.
PS: If you haven't played Outer Wilds and you enjoy exploration/puzzle games go play it. Avoid spoilers if possible.
Fun is of course subjective. Some of us care about realism more than others.
I think we're all aware of that. The post you're responding to essentially made the same point you did, but to someone who thought it appropriate to express their love for realism in a much less mature way.
I bet some do, but not enough for anyone to ever make a commercial game that focuses on hyper-realistic, multiplayer space travel.
It's going to be such a fun game flying 1000 lightyears at a couple hundred meters per second.
How fast can you speed run KSP RP/RO?
That's inaccurate, orbital periods are a thing at least for moons. It's one of those things you'd have to spend a year or two piloting an Orca to notice though.
Are stations and jump gates still fixed in place?
Yes and almost no one cares.
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how would it impact the fun of the game if they weren't?
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> pretended to be a space sim.
When has it ever done that.
Keep in mind, I played like starting year 3