[soilder198]

When you go into a mission, you can fly in a map without boundaries. Or at least I think so. But can you really fly in any direction for as long as you want or would the game crash eventually?

[niffiwan]

The further you get from co-ords 0,0,0 the more floating point errors you'll get - I think this translates into collision issues and weird jerky movements of all objects.  I think there's probably a hard size limit in there somewhere as well, but I don't know if that's handled gracefully or not. 

There was a thread around somewhere that talked about all these issues, and a possible switch to integers instead of floating point numbers to represent all distances (note - this is not an easy task!)

[Rodo]

I remember a rather funny story-like narration from .. Hades I think? where he flew his fighter to the boundaries of FS universe, IIRC there's no limit but the game will eventually crash.
Yeah, weird things happen at the fringe of space.

[Klaustrophobia]

there's definitely a boundary in retail.  i found it when i tried to visit the third knossos in the SOC loop.  you just explode when you hit it.  no warnings, just death.  when i posted about this in the "funny ways to die" thread, someone said that the limit was moved WAAAAY further out in FSO, so far that the limit effectively doesn't exist IIRC.

[haloboy100]

No, there is a hard-set limit on the boundaries of FS2, since retail. If you fly far enough out there, command says something about you deserting the battle area - he'll repeat if a few times, then eventually your ship self-destructs.

Perhaps this isn't since retail, but It's happened to be more than once - but it takes about 20 minutes worth of flying to get there. i remember once doing it in the inferno mission with the giant Earth model; I set the time compression to x64 and flew straight towards it. I came back from a snack break 5 minutes later to find my fighter had mysteriously blowed up.

[z64555]

I haven't found the hard-coded limit just yet, but I heard somewhere that it's maybe 16 or 32Km from the center for multiplayer.

[Klaustrophobia]

i guess i never got any warnings because there was no contact with command in that mission.  took about 7 minutes (uncompressed) of max-engine flying punching afterburners non-stop.  skill level was either easy or very easy, so i was moving at a considerable rate of speed.  more boring than the run to catch up with the lucifer flying an ursa, but i really wanted to see those saths and the knossos up close.  i raged HARD when i just blew up a third of the way there.

[Nuke]

ive gone out about as far as 750km from the center while testing the feasibility of realism. get the fp jitters out there. ****ing krackens.

[karajorma]

There is a hard coded limit. In retail if you get 70km from the starting point, you start getting warning messages from command. You will get 3 of these followed by a final warning. 10 seconds after the final warning if you ever pass 75km from the origin, you'll instantly take 10 x your maximum hull points in damage.

Since those are builtin messages, missions like the loops which have command turned off won't send them. You just blow up 10 seconds after the game figures it would have sent the last one.


The SCP multiplied those distances by 10.

[Droid803]

You can get further by turning on invincibility, and then you get really weird things going on like HUD Migration, background distortion, etc

[esarai]

I think that was either Hades or me who flew to the edge of infinity and narrated it. 

I remember I made a fighter that flew at ~1 Mm/s, turned myself invulnerable and cranked the time compression up a few notches.  IIRC the normal battlespace bounds are at +/- 300 km along any axis, so getting invulnerable in this time (what having to press the A key while entering the codes) was one hell of a quicktime event. I dunno why but I never had 10 seconds.  I had like 2 seconds, best case scenario.  But yeah, eventually the game becomes so uncertain of where you are that you effectively exist in 15 different places at once, your hud morphs into oblivion, the nebulas redshift into the infrared spectrum and a giant spider-shaped tear in the fabric of reality appears behind you.

It's pretty funny to watch, actually.

EDIT: I derped the battlespace limits, lol.  I guess that's what happens when you start moving that fast.

[Nuke]

if you get the asmospheric flight script and load the tethys mission, you will be crammed between the moon and the edge of the mission with very little capacity for deviation.

[Mongoose]

This whole conversation is fairly reminiscent of Minecraft.  Far Lands or Bust!

[Scourge of Ages]

Ha! Found it! It was Shivan Hunter who did it, and it was awesome:
http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=71965.msg1422116#msg1422116

[z64555]

How big is the skybox, then?

[Swifty]

Skybox is always rendered at the same distance relative to the player viewpoint.

[z64555]

This would suggest otherwise... http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=71965.msg1426992#msg1426992

But then again, I'm not sure if he was facing away from center or toward it when he took those.

[General Battuta]

There aren't any skyboxes in those pics I don't think. Except maybe the starfield.

[esarai]

Oh yeah it was Shivan Hunter who started that whole thing.