[Grey Wolf]

The one that makes you self-destruct if you leave it?

[IceFire]

You fly that fast?

[vadar_1]

id like to see it removed... allow pherhaps near-lightspeed burners or pherhaps.... more realistic speeds be allowed.

[Nico]

Originally posted by vadar_1
id like to see it removed... allow pherhaps near-lightspeed burners or pherhaps.... more realistic speeds be allowed.

mmh? even with a very fast ship, it will take some serious time to reach that limit...

[DTP]

just removed it, the limit, set distance between player and point 0 or starting location in single to be "always Zero" .

[Darkage]

Why remove it, as Venom said it takes a long time before you go self destruct and i never had probs whit that most of the time you use a max of 10km of the box to create a mission in. so i don't see any good reason to remove it. besides i aht flying 5 km to a target let alone 120 when the box is modified.

[Stunaep]

Originally posted by darkage
Why remove it,  

Because we can!

[Mysterial]

No, you really can't. You can make it extremely large, but if you try to remove it completely I guarantee you will get crashes eventually, as arrays go out of range and such.

[YodaSean]

Its not necessary to remove it completely then.  A couple million kilometers should be enough  :-)

[TurboNed]

Originally posted by YodaSean
Its not necessary to remove it completely then.  A couple million kilometers should be enough  :-)

It would be cool if this game were still playable on systems with less than a gig of RAM, though.  I can't imagine a mission using more than 10 kilometers of space - 60 is PLENTY.  Come back to this thread when you don't have a boring mission that involves more than flying across the universe on subspace drives, but still requires more space than you have.

  --TurboNed

[YodaSean]

It was supposed to be a joke

[DTP]

ahmm RAM and posistions

Extreme posistions dont require more RAM.  MORE ships with more posistions require more RAM; but not much &  Memory is allocated anyway.

In multiplayer dogfight`s however, this would be a pain. "run away" players. But i have never seen anybody run away.

[an0n]

It would be good to have it at like 200km so you could have escort missions for ships with damaged subspace drives, or BOE missions where you could go between the forward command post and the front lines.

[delta_7890]

I-War is set across an incredibly vast area of space, why can't FS do the same?

[phreak]

IW2 only tracks ships within 400km of the player.

[mikhael]

Originally posted by delta_7890
I-War is set across an incredibly vast area of space, why can't FS do the same?

FS and Iwar2 work on two entirely different principles. You can't really do Iwar in the Freespace engine or vice versa without lots of changes to the underlying assumptions of the engines.

Freespace is mission based. Everthing in a mission exists all the time in that mission in some manner. Alpha1 is not the center of the universe.  He can move freely anywhere within his 60km box.

Iwar2 is player based. Cal is the center of a 400km universe. Anything outside of that 400km radius does not exist. When Cal's universe manages to reach a place that has some event/place/ships, the system spawns them. When he leaves, they disappear. Further, Cal's space is partitioned. To move from partition to partition, you have to capsule jump (a nifty way to cover the system load time).

[an0n]

Tachyon tried to merge the two and it sucked (the merging part, no the whole game).

[Stryke 9]

Mik: You sure? I'm fairly sure I got partway to another system on my LDS once, just by hitting it and leaving for an hour.

And it wouldn't have any issues with RAM. First of all, FreeSpace was originally built to work with a lot less RAM than most computers now have, and thus any additions would be like increases in the poly limit- partial upgrades. Second, they're right, FS doesn't use RAM for just the box.

[mikhael]

Originally posted by Stryke 9
Mik: You sure? I'm fairly sure I got partway to another system on my LDS once, just by hitting it and leaving for an hour.

Oh yeah. Late in the game you get a positively SICK LDS drive. It took me probably 20 minutes to fly from Santa Romero to where the Effrit was supposed to be. I pulled up my starmap, drilled down, found the Effrit and selected that as my destination. Then, instead of engaging autopilot, I turned my ship on the heading and jammed my LDS to max. It doesn't take very long to get there at all. There was nothing there at all. There was the star entity, but not system of any sort. Any destination your HUD shows as 'OUTSYS' has to be loaded.

Another way to test is to play about with the sensor settings. No matter what you do, you cannot get a larger range out of your sensors than the local universe. Even if your sensors have a range of a thousand klicks, you won't see traffic beyond your local space. As you move, things will spawn just inside the horizon, even though your sensors can technically see beyond it.

Besides the empirical testing, Stephen Robertson of PS confirmed that indeed, this is the way IWar2 handles space. Upon entering a system, the game runs a serious of scripts that start tracking major entities in the system (the system and traffic scripts) and another set of scripts that start creating and managing entities in your local 400km universe.

Certain things are tracked staticly when they are outside of your universe, but only if they are marked 'critical'. Mission items are marked critical and are therefor not recycled. Scripts would break horribly if they were.

[delta_7890]

Here's an idea!  Why not set it up like XWA does things?  Multiple areas that are linked together through nav buoys (in our case, Nodes).  That would work, wouldn't it?