I really wish supercruise could take you between systems. It would be cool to say you snuck into a permit locked system by cruising there undetected instead of jumping in. I'd do it once just to say I did
It's part of the loading system unfortunately. Though i wish there was a "Pulse" jump system. So you can jump between stars in a multi-star system. Rather than spend 5hrs super cruising to a distant system
Great demonstration Astro! This explains why people who have been too low on fuel were unable to supercruise to a nearby system (and other oddities in the game). Thanks!
Down to Earth Astronomy- I actually had a similar experience in that I found out that the jump distance is that from star to star and not from your present location. Am exploring an area where stars are sparse and I sometimes need to synthesize fsd boost. Well, the closest star was just over my aspx boosted jump range, and I had to burn off fuel to lighten my ship enough to jump. Flew in a straight line for almost 5 hours, and when I could finally jump, I saw the same thing you did in this vid, that the jump distance was calculated from the star in the systems untangle you're still in.
@@Chrono_Mitsurugi Well fuel adds mass, the FSD has a limiter on fuel consumption, so burning off fuel does increase your jump range by lowering your mass. But out of context its funny as fuck.
The reason you could not move when you got to the other star is that your ships maximum velocity was less than the available precision of its floating point position (i.e. velocity it was less than 1 ULP in the position) due to the massive translation from the origin. Essentially the large exponent value in the position meant that the velocity was less than the smallest unit that the position could be moved by and so adding the velocity to the position resulted in the entire velocity being discarded as a rounding error. This is also why you did not end up with a division by zero causing a crash.
Just for readers: ULP in floating point means unit in last place or unit of least precision. As a programmer myself who has dealt with floating point issues / bugs, I can say it is a non-intuitively complex area of programming. I would like to know if ED uses floats or doubles (C++ types) for use in its modelling of spaces and game engine.
I'd expect that there is very limited or no use of doubles. On the GPU, limited support for doubles and the need for performance means that it will be a mixture of single and half-precision floats and integers. on the CPU side, we know from descriptions given by the team that much of the universe modelling is done using fixed point. In general games use single precision floats for performance reasons (smaller data, can be optimised into vector processors etc.) and I would expect that ED is no different. I would expect some segmentation of spaces with local origins and different exponents to allow for the fairly massive changes in scale. There is probably a local origin and offset for each instance space.
You are not inside or even close to the star. There is likely to be very little data about the star apart from its location loaded because we are actually still in the other system. You'll notice that no secondary effects of the star occur (no heating or fuel scooping or drops from hyper-space due to getting too close). The other artifacts with the position also point to there being a general problem with precision this far from the origin of the system that we are actually in and there is no indication that any assets from the system that astro has attempted to reach exist apart from the sun marker which is probably part of the original system assets.
6:01: shortest approach 32.8km. Hmmm... who wants to bet that is actually 32768 meters? 32768 being, of course, 2^15. So I think you're right that this is 1 ULP of something. Can't figure out what though - 0.41Ly is 3.8e15 meters, and the factor to 32768 meters is 1.18e11, which is about 2^37, which isn't really an "aha!" number...
This could be solved in game programming. For example, when you get to maximum super cruse speed, a strange almost witch space tunnel appears and that's when the new system loads.
so, witchspace jumping was discovered by making FSD go more than 2000 times the speed of light. then they learned to harness it and create a sort of mini wormhole directly into witchspace? Got it, thats my headcannon now. P.S. that would explain why your supercruise fluctuates between 2000 and 2001, the ship is breaking into witchspace!
You don't even need that, they could just unload the system you were in after you travel enough and load the closest. And it wouldn't be more performance heavy either because they would only need to load the star until you get close enough and by that time the previous system is long gone. It's probably like this because of multiplayer.
The bounty that you'd get by supercruising into a permit-locked system would be tremendous. It'd be kinda cool if your systems had to operate in anonymous mode to avoid being recognized as trespassing (and perhaps appear as an unidentified signal source) and if anyone or anything scanned you you'd get slapped with a massive bounty.
Eugene InLaw having whole galaxy in one instance no matter what or having each system be seperate instance hmmm... also Elite is using p2p networking so yea clearly no reason for it to be as it is right now.
Wanderer628 Technically it's possible, because everything is procedually generated and thus there is no actual need to load everything. SpaceEngine has managed to simulate the scale of the entire observable universe, and it was made by one person. I'm sure that there is a way to implement multiplayer and other game elements into it if enough effort was put in.
There's no need to load everything at the same time. A system could be loaded when you get close enough. At most you would need to have a couple of systems loaded at any time and you wouldn't need to render anything aside from the stars from more than one system at a time.
Its also interesting to note that you can fly between location in-system via sublight engines if you were inclined to do so, as in you can fly from a has rez site to a station without entering supercruise
I was thinking of using this method to get into permit locked systems... won't work. But I can't stop thinking if the programmers @ FDev saw this video, they must have gone: "Ho no!!! someone did that!!!! Guys: someone actually did that!!!!!!" ha ha ha. (And thanks for the super interesting content, as usual).
I found a jump in the lightseconds (some 0.009 light-years I think) and I supercruised it, then jumped 84 lightseconds. And it's in human space (found it on a rare goods tour). Zeta Doradi, I think it was. Zeta something, at least.
I think that, if you are half way towards another system, the said system should be loaded too and other one unloaded (or about this range) to make this possible.
I believe this would be such a rare thing (someone flying between systems) and add so little value to the game that it doesn't really justify the added code (and debugging)
I found two systems very very close to each other randomly while running missions for the Sirius corporation, remembered your video and confirmed that they indeed are the same one you showcased.
Well experimented. Those of us who travel to Hutton Orbital regularly know what it feels like to do long duration supercruise, but at least the orbital is there when you reach you destination :)
I had a feeling that the system wouldn't load, that each system is basically a separate "map", but I did not expect the game to break the way it did, that was amusing XD Thanks for doing this so I didnt have to waste about 2 hrs trying it myself :P
WOW! Talk about telepathy ON! I was fiddling with this idea yesterday and realized I hadn't the time, so please find me very grateful. Answered things I didn't even realize I was pondering, like top SC speed, 2Kc+1ish (I got to 1003c and had to quit). o7
To the people saying it is not possible to load everything and that's why you can't travel between star via supercruise: that's nonsense. You do not have to load everything, Nast do it ghe elder scrolls way and load the system when you are close enough and unload the other one..
I'm pretty sure they made it that way so you don't skip the fuel requirements, since you don't actually use fuel in supercruise and only when jumping. still funny how it bugged out on you for a second there :D
few... the first day i got the game i ran out of fuel and tried to fly to the next system but gave up. thanks to the fuel rats I was saved. good thing i dont have to check that anymore. great video! koodos for answering the question for a lot of people playing:) Keep up the great vids!! Triple thumbs up!!
What’s funny is they could’ve just done a transition where your sensors go blank after X amount of distance and your only frame of reference is the waypoint, then proceed to load the next star system as you pass through the interim loading area. But nah, 3 lines of code is HARD
Makes sense - doesn't narrow down the specifics of a few minor elements, but it seems like the reference map for the other stars is done using polar coordinates to establish their relative position, and while they didn't need to use actual distance in these calculations, they seem to have done this just... well, because it's probably cooler. This is why the accuracy of the point in space is low, because it's clipping the minimum arc accuracy. It'd be more innaccurate at larger distances. The one question I've had most interest in is how they are rendering the actual background, and if it supported parallax... because as I'm sure any of you who've been within 20kly of the core can attest, it sure seems like it sometimes... but based on this video it seems that this is not the case, and that the background is calculated using polar projection onto a skybox - which is what I would have expected for the location markers as well, had I not already known that people had tried to fly to other systems before =p So kind of sad that there's no parallax - maybe they simulate it using effects, which would be a pretty cost-effective way to do it? I'll have to pay more attention next time I'm out near the core - because it seems too neat to exclude... plus presumably they pre-render all of the skyboxes, so it's not as problematic as changing a client-based render... though who knows maybe they do use a client-based render for some reason.
i actually think they could make a really cool solution to that by making it so that the star system you locked on to starts loading in when you hit about half the distance between both of the stars and resetting your position relative to that star. my guess why the interface thingy was jumping around is because its just that far out from 0,0 and with numbers that big the computer rounds them and starts producing errors when trying to calculate its relative distance to you. not too long ago i was watching an interview with a developer of a different space game and they got around that problem by setting the players ship as the 0,0 coordinate and moving the universe in relation to that. that solution is not that feasible for elite, because you would basically need to rewrite the entire game, but i think if you were to load in the other system and teleport the player to the correct position relative to where they should be it would make for a relatively clean transition. now someone just needs to comeup with a way to transition between the skyboxes of the two systems so that it becomes barely noticable and we'd have a cool new feature. imagine if you then tried to fly into permit locked systems like some other commenters suggested and you would first get a message that you need a permit and if you dont provide that get somehow intercepted by a capital class ship or something and proceed to get absolutely bodied.
yeah I see a lot of comments saying it should be implemented. Honestly how often would such a feature be used ... appart from a "cool tech demo" of some sort it doesn't really serve any purpose !
i found a couple systems that were literally 300k Ls apart and did this, but that was waaaay back when "the Bubble" was actually a Bubble. i can't for the life of me find them again, or remember which ones they were.
this is a neat little experiment! I used to stuff like this as a kid with games on my playstation 1. who knew, i could make a successful youtube channel with that hobby lol
Thats actually not division by zero, it is because the coordinate system uses floating point numbers that get less accurate as they getbigger - so much so that you can't seem to get closer for a while when approaching because it always yields the same inaccurate number. (Floating point numbers consist of a number and a second number saying where the comma is. When the number gets really big the comma is far on the right -> less numbers after the comma) Great video, always wondered what would happen :)
I dont remember where i was, but i was on my way to polaris when i noticed a star system measured in light seconds, not years. Just about 2.3 million i think it was?
Game devs are like..... nah! don't be silly! no one's going to be crazy enough to super cruise all that distance just for a laugh! No need to do lots of extra programming and adjusting the game engine to make up for the background rendering inaccuracy when super cruising!
TL;DW Each star is a self-contained instance, so the only way to go from star to star is to jump through witch space because that’s the loading screen between stars.
I saw a hyperspace jump that was only a distance of 1.1 mil Lightseconds, or 0.04 Ly, I can’t remember the exact systems but I recall it being two systems quite close to cubeo (aisling duvals capital system)
Would have been interesting to hear Frontier's discussions when they designed this. I bet Braben would have wanted to solve it, but it's a very difficult programming problem. There's plenty of time to load the new system in the background, but how would you seamlessly re-render the starfield as you approached?
I thought it felt like you were basically stuck with your nose pressing against the Heliopause of the Star System, just before the bow shock and the interstellar wind but the distance kept counting down as if you were moving. I actually attempted this about a year/year a half ago. About 20 minutes in I started seriously worrying about my fuel and wondering if I was wasting my time (I didn't know about the fuel rats at the time and I was on XB1, I had only just gotten the game and decked out my very first Asp Explorer! Amazing times 💖🚀)...so I looked it up and found out frontier/someone on a forum (can't rember which) had already said it was a no go 😂 Oh well, it was a nice 35ish minutes of not being shot at as I had been attacked by pirates in the system I jumped into when I set out for the attempt! Shook them off but they followed me right through the system and were hanging around even after I'd sold most of my cargo to save fuel and re-fuelled. It was still a really exciting trip as I wasn't sure if I could make it back with fuel to spare and the pirates were still waiting for me when I got back to civilised space as I hadn't been able to sell what it was they wanted just barely made it into the station without losing my ship! I fell in love with the game that day, even those A.I bastards didn't manage to knock me out of supercruise, they were so intent on whatever it was I was carrying as they still hanging around the planet/station waiting to get me 40 minutes later!!! Super cool!
I would love it if Elite Dangerous utilized true space between systems. The only software that realistically does this is Space Engine, which would be perfect for many sci-fi scenarios.
Fuel consumption is changed. Almost ran out of gas so rerouted to nearest system, still could not jump, shut all systems and supercruised close enough to jump.
What would be a solution for this? Have the game load the nearest star system in and unload the one you were just in if you try to super cruise like this?
There should be a sphere, say 0.8ly in diameter where if you cross it, the system unloads and if you enter the sphere again, either from the system you come from or to a new one, it will be loaded in And the background, if they ever implement this, they will have to change it
I think I might have tried the same thing 35 years ago. Playing Elite on my Amstrad CPC 464. Just point my Cobra Mark III "out there" and let it fly. In short, nothing happened.
Since your maximum speed is determined by your distance from a stellar mass, how far were you when you reached 2001c? It would be cool if it just auto jumped to that distance in the target star when you overcome 2001c!!
I wish you could fly between close systems without jumping. Like if they’re within a certain lightyear limit, as you get within a small distance it loads them anyway. That way if you jumped into an unscoopable star system with not enough fuel to get to a scoopable one, you could just supercruise as far as possible and theoretically drift the rest of the way (which is also why I wish you could drift at speed, especially since you can go at least 2500m/s and maybe more outside of supercruise by utilizing gravity.
If the game actually worked like this there wouldnt be enough created storage capacity to even load the game on any current HD. The file of a 1:1 milky way and everything loaded at once would be unfathomable.
fully engineered and completly loaded out with extra fuel tanks with the ship that can fitt the most of them, how far can you get before you run out of fuel and how long will it take? this i am concidering to try out :)
I tried this a little while ago. Couldn't get the distance down to 0m, just a couple of hundred (IIRC). So jumping was not a problem. Didn't look back at the difference behind me, but I was kinda expecting that.
You could use this to glitch the game and make a record breaking jump of potentially thousands of light years. If you afk while flying away from a star for weeks on end and then jump to a star near where the game thinks you currently are. You'd effectively be jumping a huge distance while the game believes its only a few light years.
I’m a fuel rat and recently I had to fly to a client 0.95ly away from the parent star, it took 4 hours for me and my fellow rat to make it. Afterward our paint jobs looked terrible :p
my god this again in the same system! i mean i try that when in this region did seems the game was coded this way but try it anyway...goodbye my immersion that day lol...but well thanks nice catch
No. You'd still would be considered as being in Oryginal System XXXX LY away from its centre. Unfortunately you need to MAKE THE JUMP in order to load next system (This way FDevs made sure people cannot access Locked systems without permits). The only thing that He got wrong is fuel requirement which is actually calculated according to REAL Distance instead of "Star to Star" distance. This way you could actually jump to systems that are Too far for you FSD. Example. Your FSD can do 30LY jump. System you want is 50 LY away. Travel first 20LY in SC and than you'll be able to jump remaining 30LY with fuel cosumption equal to 30 LY (instead of 50 which would be Star to Star distance).
Carth bet don't you think the supercruise at several tons of fuel an hour will spoil that attempt? Otherwise agree with your analysis that logging doesn't help. I wonder if DTEA tried that at all.
It would because you end up NOT being able to access PERMIT LOCKED systems (Imagine yourself you spent last 3 days flying in supercruise and still not being able to get where you want to be). The only reason why I posted it was to amend mistake regarding fuel consumption during jump and the reason why some people might do it (Long range expedition for example where stars are way beyond jump capabilities of FSD). I'm not saying it is efficient way of making jumps just informing there are option.
Might have been interesting to see what happens if you logged out and back in while at the nonexistent star position. But not interesting enough for me to risk getting stuck :)
Follow-up question: If you disconnect and then reconnect to the game after manually flying to a neighbouring system, will it load the new system (because of your location) or load the old (because that's the current "system" it stored as you being in) ?
FDevs looking through the logs: "He did WHAT?!!?"
I really wish supercruise could take you between systems. It would be cool to say you snuck into a permit locked system by cruising there undetected instead of jumping in. I'd do it once just to say I did
+KepleroGT
but if they could do it, they would.
You could use the max speed to sneak into Sol in a little under 4 hours
@@user-zv8qg1co4z a little under 4 hours from Alpha Centauri
It's part of the loading system unfortunately.
Though i wish there was a "Pulse" jump system. So you can jump between stars in a multi-star system. Rather than spend 5hrs super cruising to a distant system
would make smuggling a whole new adventure
FD : Let's design the game a certain way so it works and doesn't break the game immersion too much. DTEA : Hold my beer
when you anger the gods so much they move an entire solar system just to piss you off
Great demonstration Astro! This explains why people who have been too low on fuel were unable to supercruise to a nearby system (and other oddities in the game). Thanks!
Down to Earth Astronomy- I actually had a similar experience in that I found out that the jump distance is that from star to star and not from your present location. Am exploring an area where stars are sparse and I sometimes need to synthesize fsd boost. Well, the closest star was just over my aspx boosted jump range, and I had to burn off fuel to lighten my ship enough to jump. Flew in a straight line for almost 5 hours, and when I could finally jump, I saw the same thing you did in this vid, that the jump distance was calculated from the star in the systems untangle you're still in.
i find it hilarious that you needed LESS fuel to make it to the next star. lol
@@Chrono_Mitsurugi Well fuel adds mass, the FSD has a limiter on fuel consumption, so burning off fuel does increase your jump range by lowering your mass.
But out of context its funny as fuck.
@@zachjollimore4339
got it in one CMDR o7
@@Chrono_Mitsurugi Fly safe Cmdr, and don't forget yer limpets
I’m impressed by how solid this game is. Great video and very interesting from for a programmer's point of view.
I'm pretty sure that Frontier stated, quite some time ago that this wouldn't be possible. Great video, as always. 👍
Yeah I remember hearing that in an ObsidianAnt video
I wanted to try this myself for a long time. Thanks for trying out, because I can save me the 2 hours flight.
The reason you could not move when you got to the other star is that your ships maximum velocity was less than the available precision of its floating point position (i.e. velocity it was less than 1 ULP in the position) due to the massive translation from the origin. Essentially the large exponent value in the position meant that the velocity was less than the smallest unit that the position could be moved by and so adding the velocity to the position resulted in the entire velocity being discarded as a rounding error. This is also why you did not end up with a division by zero causing a crash.
Just for readers: ULP in floating point means unit in last place or unit of least precision. As a programmer myself who has dealt with floating point issues / bugs, I can say it is a non-intuitively complex area of programming.
I would like to know if ED uses floats or doubles (C++ types) for use in its modelling of spaces and game engine.
I'd expect that there is very limited or no use of doubles. On the GPU, limited support for doubles and the need for performance means that it will be a mixture of single and half-precision floats and integers. on the CPU side, we know from descriptions given by the team that much of the universe modelling is done using fixed point. In general games use single precision floats for performance reasons (smaller data, can be optimised into vector processors etc.) and I would expect that ED is no different. I would expect some segmentation of spaces with local origins and different exponents to allow for the fairly massive changes in scale. There is probably a local origin and offset for each instance space.
You are not inside or even close to the star. There is likely to be very little data about the star apart from its location loaded because we are actually still in the other system. You'll notice that no secondary effects of the star occur (no heating or fuel scooping or drops from hyper-space due to getting too close). The other artifacts with the position also point to there being a general problem with precision this far from the origin of the system that we are actually in and there is no indication that any assets from the system that astro has attempted to reach exist apart from the sun marker which is probably part of the original system assets.
um whats that in english
6:01: shortest approach 32.8km. Hmmm... who wants to bet that is actually 32768 meters? 32768 being, of course, 2^15. So I think you're right that this is 1 ULP of something. Can't figure out what though - 0.41Ly is 3.8e15 meters, and the factor to 32768 meters is 1.18e11, which is about 2^37, which isn't really an "aha!" number...
This could be solved in game programming. For example, when you get to maximum super cruse speed, a strange almost witch space tunnel appears and that's when the new system loads.
so, witchspace jumping was discovered by making FSD go more than 2000 times the speed of light. then they learned to harness it and create a sort of mini wormhole directly into witchspace?
Got it, thats my headcannon now.
P.S. that would explain why your supercruise fluctuates between 2000 and 2001, the ship is breaking into witchspace!
You are not a programmer clearly as programmer would never bother with something that almost nobody would use (and for sure nobody would need).
You don't even need that, they could just unload the system you were in after you travel enough and load the closest. And it wouldn't be more performance heavy either because they would only need to load the star until you get close enough and by that time the previous system is long gone. It's probably like this because of multiplayer.
The bounty that you'd get by supercruising into a permit-locked system would be tremendous. It'd be kinda cool if your systems had to operate in anonymous mode to avoid being recognized as trespassing (and perhaps appear as an unidentified signal source) and if anyone or anything scanned you you'd get slapped with a massive bounty.
I think this is shorter than the Hutton Orbital run :D
Hutton is half this distance though.
But, you decelerate once you have reached the halfway point between the two stars. Here, he did not.
hutton orbital is worth it though, got my free anaconda there.
well you did used to get a free anaconda cos 1 round of passenger runs and boom 200 mill+
@@jdrmcm You monster. I love it.
Only just found this little gem. Great work. Thanks again for all your diligent investigations D2EA. O7
That was interesting. As expected, you can't travel between systems in supercruise. Jump between systems is your loading time.
Sickbrain which is just killing the immersion
There's literally no reason for this
Eugene InLaw having whole galaxy in one instance no matter what or having each system be seperate instance hmmm... also Elite is using p2p networking so yea clearly no reason for it to be as it is right now.
Eugene InLaw Are you simple? It's not technologically possible to load everything in one instance.
Wanderer628 Technically it's possible, because everything is procedually generated and thus there is no actual need to load everything. SpaceEngine has managed to simulate the scale of the entire observable universe, and it was made by one person. I'm sure that there is a way to implement multiplayer and other game elements into it if enough effort was put in.
There's no need to load everything at the same time. A system could be loaded when you get close enough. At most you would need to have a couple of systems loaded at any time and you wouldn't need to render anything aside from the stars from more than one system at a time.
Its also interesting to note that you can fly between location in-system via sublight engines if you were inclined to do so, as in you can fly from a has rez site to a station without entering supercruise
That a good idea
I was thinking of using this method to get into permit locked systems... won't work. But I can't stop thinking if the programmers @ FDev saw this video, they must have gone: "Ho no!!! someone did that!!!! Guys: someone actually did that!!!!!!" ha ha ha. (And thanks for the super interesting content, as usual).
I found a jump in the lightseconds (some 0.009 light-years I think) and I supercruised it, then jumped 84 lightseconds. And it's in human space (found it on a rare goods tour). Zeta Doradi, I think it was. Zeta something, at least.
I was wondering about this for a while now. Cool that someone tried it out for us to see. Very interesting :P
I tested this out about a week ago on ps4, wish I'd seen your video first and saved myself the time!
Thank you very much for that ... it was something i always wanted to do but never did in ED - nice work Commander, fly safe! :)
Haha, naughty naughty, toying with the programming .....Great fun and worth a watch.
There is one closer that is only 0.21 light years near barnards loop.
I think that, if you are half way towards another system, the said system should be loaded too and other one unloaded (or about this range) to make this possible.
I believe this would be such a rare thing (someone flying between systems) and add so little value to the game that it doesn't really justify the added code (and debugging)
I found two systems very very close to each other randomly while running missions for the Sirius corporation, remembered your video and confirmed that they indeed are the same one you showcased.
Well experimented. Those of us who travel to Hutton Orbital regularly know what it feels like to do long duration supercruise, but at least the orbital is there when you reach you destination :)
This was awesome. I love the mechanism being laid bare.
Very cool video! Sheds a lot of light on the inner workings of ED’s systems.
Nice Work, I always wanted to do something like this to see what would happen! Thanks for the vid, as always!
You almost make the server divide by zero
Thank you for trying this, I want always try it, but never found the time. Really great video.
I had a feeling that the system wouldn't load, that each system is basically a separate "map", but I did not expect the game to break the way it did, that was amusing XD
Thanks for doing this so I didnt have to waste about 2 hrs trying it myself :P
How expensive was the advanced repair? Or did the dock worker told you just go buy a new ship?
Henrik D. advanced repair is considerably cheaper than even 15 percent of the ship even at 100 percent. this comment is on very out dated issue lol
Peacefully Existence this "outdated" comment was never more than a joke pointing on the dumb repair system from Frontier
WOW! Talk about telepathy ON! I was fiddling with this idea yesterday and realized I hadn't the time, so please find me very grateful. Answered things I didn't even realize I was pondering, like top SC speed, 2Kc+1ish (I got to 1003c and had to quit). o7
To the people saying it is not possible to load everything and that's why you can't travel between star via supercruise: that's nonsense. You do not have to load everything, Nast do it ghe elder scrolls way and load the system when you are close enough and unload the other one..
Thank you!
I'm pretty sure they made it that way so you don't skip the fuel requirements, since you don't actually use fuel in supercruise and only when jumping.
still funny how it bugged out on you for a second there :D
You do use fule in supercruise
few... the first day i got the game i ran out of fuel and tried to fly to the next system but gave up. thanks to the fuel rats I was saved. good thing i dont have to check that anymore. great video! koodos for answering the question for a lot of people playing:) Keep up the great vids!! Triple thumbs up!!
Loved it. thanks for doing this.
A great experiment! Love your way of thinking and your commitment 😁
6.003 GM/s. I can't even imagine that velocity!
What’s funny is they could’ve just done a transition where your sensors go blank after X amount of distance and your only frame of reference is the waypoint, then proceed to load the next star system as you pass through the interim loading area. But nah, 3 lines of code is HARD
Makes sense - doesn't narrow down the specifics of a few minor elements, but it seems like the reference map for the other stars is done using polar coordinates to establish their relative position, and while they didn't need to use actual distance in these calculations, they seem to have done this just... well, because it's probably cooler. This is why the accuracy of the point in space is low, because it's clipping the minimum arc accuracy. It'd be more innaccurate at larger distances.
The one question I've had most interest in is how they are rendering the actual background, and if it supported parallax... because as I'm sure any of you who've been within 20kly of the core can attest, it sure seems like it sometimes... but based on this video it seems that this is not the case, and that the background is calculated using polar projection onto a skybox - which is what I would have expected for the location markers as well, had I not already known that people had tried to fly to other systems before =p
So kind of sad that there's no parallax - maybe they simulate it using effects, which would be a pretty cost-effective way to do it? I'll have to pay more attention next time I'm out near the core - because it seems too neat to exclude... plus presumably they pre-render all of the skyboxes, so it's not as problematic as changing a client-based render... though who knows maybe they do use a client-based render for some reason.
Big repair bill on that hull after flying so far in super-cruise? Now I feel like I've just discovered the Wizard of Oz hiding behind the curtain.
I already did that lol I flew for about 5 hours. 1.6 ly. It was interesting.
Well i did not expect this video to be this fascinating
Loved the "walking dead" paintjob at the end
i actually think they could make a really cool solution to that by making it so that the star system you locked on to starts loading in when you hit about half the distance between both of the stars and resetting your position relative to that star. my guess why the interface thingy was jumping around is because its just that far out from 0,0 and with numbers that big the computer rounds them and starts producing errors when trying to calculate its relative distance to you.
not too long ago i was watching an interview with a developer of a different space game and they got around that problem by setting the players ship as the 0,0 coordinate and moving the universe in relation to that. that solution is not that feasible for elite, because you would basically need to rewrite the entire game, but i think if you were to load in the other system and teleport the player to the correct position relative to where they should be it would make for a relatively clean transition. now someone just needs to comeup with a way to transition between the skyboxes of the two systems so that it becomes barely noticable and we'd have a cool new feature.
imagine if you then tried to fly into permit locked systems like some other commenters suggested and you would first get a message that you need a permit and if you dont provide that get somehow intercepted by a capital class ship or something and proceed to get absolutely bodied.
Technically it could be implemented. Though just count on fingers how many players choose to travel this way.
yeah I see a lot of comments saying it should be implemented. Honestly how often would such a feature be used ... appart from a "cool tech demo" of some sort it doesn't really serve any purpose !
Well I was hoping that maybe close systems are not working like this, but oh well :D Thanks for going through all this for the answer for us ^^
Awesome vid ..always wanted to know if you could fly between systems. Got my answer. Great work as always👍👍
interesting. I don't think FDev foresaw any of its ED players doing this kind of activity.
Then they REALLY don't know their playerbase!
Hmm, one person out of many many thousands after four years? Yeah, I think they have a fair idea lmao
Believe me, Astro is not the first to try this.
Excellent, I'll check out all the other experiments done with this too - cheers
they did. they even stated that travelling in normal speed between systems is not possible in a QA video. still pretty intresting to actually see it.
i found a couple systems that were literally 300k Ls apart and did this, but that was waaaay back when "the Bubble" was actually a Bubble. i can't for the life of me find them again, or remember which ones they were.
Makes sense. Loading everything and culling probably still would give worse performance than this.
this is a neat little experiment! I used to stuff like this as a kid with games on my playstation 1. who knew, i could make a successful youtube channel with that hobby lol
Hutton Orbital in Alpha Centauri is 0.22Ly away, which requires 1.5-2 hours to get there in supercruise.
Now what will happen if we fly from an orbital station to a surface station in normal flight mode instead of supercruise?
that worked about as well as expected. cool.
Thats actually not division by zero, it is because the coordinate system uses floating point numbers that get less accurate as they getbigger - so much so that you can't seem to get closer for a while when approaching because it always yields the same inaccurate number.
(Floating point numbers consist of a number and a second number saying where the comma is. When the number gets really big the comma is far on the right -> less numbers after the comma)
Great video, always wondered what would happen :)
Humans: *jump several light seconds between binary stars*
The Thargoids watching: "how did this species even get this far"
I dont remember where i was, but i was on my way to polaris when i noticed a star system measured in light seconds, not years. Just about 2.3 million i think it was?
Game devs are like..... nah! don't be silly! no one's going to be crazy enough to super cruise all that distance just for a laugh! No need to do lots of extra programming and adjusting the game engine to make up for the background rendering inaccuracy when super cruising!
TL;DW
Each star is a self-contained instance, so the only way to go from star to star is to jump through witch space because that’s the loading screen between stars.
I saw a hyperspace jump that was only a distance of 1.1 mil Lightseconds, or 0.04 Ly, I can’t remember the exact systems but I recall it being two systems quite close to cubeo (aisling duvals capital system)
Would have been interesting to hear Frontier's discussions when they designed this. I bet Braben would have wanted to solve it, but it's a very difficult programming problem. There's plenty of time to load the new system in the background, but how would you seamlessly re-render the starfield as you approached?
I thought it felt like you were basically stuck with your nose pressing against the Heliopause of the Star System, just before the bow shock and the interstellar wind but the distance kept counting down as if you were moving.
I actually attempted this about a year/year a half ago. About 20 minutes in I started seriously worrying about my fuel and wondering if I was wasting my time (I didn't know about the fuel rats at the time and I was on XB1, I had only just gotten the game and decked out my very first Asp Explorer! Amazing times 💖🚀)...so I looked it up and found out frontier/someone on a forum (can't rember which) had already said it was a no go 😂 Oh well, it was a nice 35ish minutes of not being shot at as I had been attacked by pirates in the system I jumped into when I set out for the attempt! Shook them off but they followed me right through the system and were hanging around even after I'd sold most of my cargo to save fuel and re-fuelled. It was still a really exciting trip as I wasn't sure if I could make it back with fuel to spare and the pirates were still waiting for me when I got back to civilised space as I hadn't been able to sell what it was they wanted just barely made it into the station without losing my ship!
I fell in love with the game that day, even those A.I bastards didn't manage to knock me out of supercruise, they were so intent on whatever it was I was carrying as they still hanging around the planet/station waiting to get me 40 minutes later!!!
Super cool!
I would love it if Elite Dangerous utilized true space between systems. The only software that realistically does this is Space Engine, which would be perfect for many sci-fi scenarios.
Fuel consumption is changed. Almost ran out of gas so rerouted to nearest system, still could not jump, shut all systems and supercruised close enough to jump.
What would be a solution for this? Have the game load the nearest star system in and unload the one you were just in if you try to super cruise like this?
Tokanova Chunk system would be a pretty nice idea
There should be a sphere, say 0.8ly in diameter where if you cross it, the system unloads and if you enter the sphere again, either from the system you come from or to a new one, it will be loaded in
And the background, if they ever implement this, they will have to change it
❤ thank you ❤
I think I might have tried the same thing 35 years ago. Playing Elite on my Amstrad CPC 464. Just point my Cobra Mark III "out there" and let it fly. In short, nothing happened.
Since your maximum speed is determined by your distance from a stellar mass, how far were you when you reached 2001c? It would be cool if it just auto jumped to that distance in the target star when you overcome 2001c!!
I wish you could fly between close systems without jumping. Like if they’re within a certain lightyear limit, as you get within a small distance it loads them anyway. That way if you jumped into an unscoopable star system with not enough fuel to get to a scoopable one, you could just supercruise as far as possible and theoretically drift the rest of the way (which is also why I wish you could drift at speed, especially since you can go at least 2500m/s and maybe more outside of supercruise by utilizing gravity.
If the game actually worked like this there wouldnt be enough created storage capacity to even load the game on any current HD. The file of a 1:1 milky way and everything loaded at once would be unfathomable.
fully engineered and completly loaded out with extra fuel tanks with the ship that can fitt the most of them, how far can you get before you run out of fuel and how long will it take? this i am concidering to try out :)
The cake is lie! We're all living in a MATIX CMDRS!!!!
I wounder if Cannon will keep the Gnosis after the carriers drop? And not deal with future hassel of asking permission from the devs to move it.
Thank you for wasting your time instead of me having to figure it out
I've come out of hyperjumped between two stars and survived, it's gets real hot real quick, so blow though quickly and or heat sink
I tried this a little while ago. Couldn't get the distance down to 0m, just a couple of hundred (IIRC). So jumping was not a problem. Didn't look back at the difference behind me, but I was kinda expecting that.
You could use this to glitch the game and make a record breaking jump of potentially thousands of light years. If you afk while flying away from a star for weeks on end and then jump to a star near where the game thinks you currently are. You'd effectively be jumping a huge distance while the game believes its only a few light years.
InvisFrames Welp , if you use a cutter with a shit-ton of fuel tanks maybe
I’m a fuel rat and recently I had to fly to a client 0.95ly away from the parent star, it took 4 hours for me and my fellow rat to make it. Afterward our paint jobs looked terrible :p
For IRL HOURS
I wounder what would happen if you logged out then back in.
That's what could be called "zero point hyperjump" lol
You could supercruise between star systems in the original elite game in the 80’s
my god this again in the same system! i mean i try that when in this region
did seems the game was coded this way but try it anyway...goodbye my immersion that day lol...but well thanks nice catch
there's also the systems cl pismis 13 and cl pismis 19, which are 53 ls apart. i want to go there and try this.
I wish that they would load in the closest system to you. Apart from permit locked ones
I tried this in Frontier 2. And what I can remember I arrived normally
i did it in eagle nebula where systems are 0,08LY away from each other
Hmm...If you were to log out and back in. Would you respawn inside the star?
No. You'd still would be considered as being in Oryginal System XXXX LY away from its centre. Unfortunately you need to MAKE THE JUMP in order to load next system (This way FDevs made sure people cannot access Locked systems without permits). The only thing that He got wrong is fuel requirement which is actually calculated according to REAL Distance instead of "Star to Star" distance. This way you could actually jump to systems that are Too far for you FSD. Example. Your FSD can do 30LY jump. System you want is 50 LY away. Travel first 20LY in SC and than you'll be able to jump remaining 30LY with fuel cosumption equal to 30 LY (instead of 50 which would be Star to Star distance).
Carth bet don't you think the supercruise at several tons of fuel an hour will spoil that attempt?
Otherwise agree with your analysis that logging doesn't help. I wonder if DTEA tried that at all.
It would because you end up NOT being able to access PERMIT LOCKED systems (Imagine yourself you spent last 3 days flying in supercruise and still not being able to get where you want to be). The only reason why I posted it was to amend mistake regarding fuel consumption during jump and the reason why some people might do it (Long range expedition for example where stars are way beyond jump capabilities of FSD). I'm not saying it is efficient way of making jumps just informing there are option.
So basically, you can't fly up to the star, but you can fly really far from your starting point.
I remember 2 systems being 0.13 light years from each other in the bubble, and no, im not talking about hutton orbital...
Might have been interesting to see what happens if you logged out and back in while at the nonexistent star position. But not interesting enough for me to risk getting stuck :)
What if you go past it, and jump to it? Would you have to turn back or forward or where it should be?
Follow-up question: If you disconnect and then reconnect to the game after manually flying to a neighbouring system, will it load the new system (because of your location) or load the old (because that's the current "system" it stored as you being in) ?
It will still load the old system
I think they should update this bug, games that use ladders as loading screens exist, I don't see why this would be difficult
In the 2 hours it took to get out there I don't see why they couldn't add a function for it to load at some point along the way..
Can you hypercruise back the the dual star system or does it consider you to still be in the same system?
you expect stars in ED would render in a galaxy with 400.000.000.000 of them?
Space bend Time yeah