Zones/Loading Screen Clarification...?

[Nosscar]

Wow, that sounds awesome and certainly clarifies the situation for me at least, and also explains a little of how multi-threads are gonna help this game.
thanks CBJ.

[hourheroyes]

Well that's exciting as heck. I think it's going to be really immersive to be able to hop in highways and never encounter a black "LOADING...." screen or a silly animation of our ship flying through a jumpgate.

One thing I am excited to see is the animation of going through jumpgates! I hope it's cool--one thing I have to say EVE did extremely well was the new animation when going through gates.

[Inverness]

Enough of the insults, please, whoever they are directed at.

OK, let me re-iterate and clarify once again. You can leave local highways but you cannot leave superhighways. The difference relates to the spaces that you are traveling between. As has been explained before, you can fly anywhere in the space between zones, but you cannot fly in the space between sectors, which is what the superhighways link together. To those insisting that the superhighway is a "loading screen" because you are locked into it, I can assure you that you are wrong. You still have control of your ship, and you can still see the universe zooming by outside. And yes, what you see is real, not a video.

Perhaps the confusion comes because of the way other games work. In X Rebirth there is no "loading" of different chunks of the game universe like there is in some games, because, as we always have done, we keep the whole universe running regardless of whether you are there or not. The sectors are there, the ships and stations are there, and we only get rid of data associated with little details that aren't needed if you can't see them, like animations.

The reason our older games had loading screens at gates was mainly because we had to load a lot of graphical assets in order to show the new sector you were entering, and that took time. With X Rebirth we have the wonderful thing called multi-threading, which means that we can load those assets in the background, mostly before they are even needed, and therefore we have no need for loading screens. And aside from restoring those little details I mentioned, which it can happily do without interrupting your flight, there is nothing else the game has to do at those times.

Edit: OK, unlocking this having removed the trading of insults. If there is any repetition of it then the this thread will be locked too.

Is the inability to fly in the space between sectors a gameplay limitation or an engine limitation? I can certainly understand blocking that area off since it would be totally empty, but could mods in the future allow people to travel in the space between sectors without a super highway?

[WhoCares01]

As I understand it, the main benefit of this is that you can do other things while you travel in the Superhighway.
Things like chatting with the crew, organizing your empire, ordering trades, .... - all the things that you couldn't do in a load screen as the universe temporarily freezed - as has been said, the loading is now done in the background with the whole universe still active, so you can interact with it...
You seem to be just limited in the possible flight maneuvers while in a Superhighway. For that they have the lane hopping and other flight maneuvers, which may just be there to keep those entertained that have nothing else to do.

[CBJ]

Is the inability to fly in the space between sectors a gameplay limitation or an engine limitation? I can certainly understand blocking that area off since it would be totally empty, but could mods in the future allow people to travel in the space between sectors without a super highway?

Neither, and both. The question is a bit of a red herring. There are game engine limitations that prevent you from jumping out of superhighways, but they were put there deliberately based on design decisions. The whole point of sectors and superhighways is to separate areas of space. If you want people playing your mod to be able to hop out of all your highways then just make them all local highways and don't use multiple sectors.

[Ericius11]

There's a really big implication to this... If every ship and station is still "there" and we just can't see it, does that mean there will be no equivalent to OOS combat? Are we saying that ship combat in a completely different zone/sector will have the same outcome as if if we had been there watching?

[Nanook]

Enough of the insults, please, whoever they are directed at.

OK, let me re-iterate and clarify once again. You can leave local highways but you cannot leave superhighways. The difference relates to the spaces that you are traveling between. As has been explained before, you can fly anywhere in the space between zones, but you cannot fly in the space between sectors, which is what the superhighways link together. To those insisting that the superhighway is a "loading screen" because you are locked into it, I can assure you that you are wrong. You still have control of your ship, and you can still see the universe zooming by outside. And yes, what you see is real, not a video.

Perhaps the confusion comes because of the way other games work. In X Rebirth there is no "loading" of different chunks of the game universe like there is in some games, because, as we always have done, we keep the whole universe running regardless of whether you are there or not. The sectors are there, the ships and stations are there, and we only get rid of data associated with little details that aren't needed if you can't see them, like animations.

The reason our older games had loading screens at gates was mainly because we had to load a lot of graphical assets in order to show the new sector you were entering, and that took time. With X Rebirth we have the wonderful thing called multi-threading, which means that we can load those assets in the background, mostly before they are even needed, and therefore we have no need for loading screens. And aside from restoring those little details I mentioned, which it can happily do without interrupting your flight, there is nothing else the game has to do at those times.

Edit: OK, unlocking this having removed the trading of insults. If there is any repetition of it then the this thread will be locked too.

Is the inability to fly in the space between sectors a gameplay limitation or an engine limitation? I can certainly understand blocking that area off since it would be totally empty, but could mods in the future allow people to travel in the space between sectors without a super highway?

That's a good question. I, too, would like to know if the empty space actually exists in the game such that a clever modder could give the player ship a super warp drive to travel between different systems/sectors, or is the empty space between such areas simply inaccessible. In other words, is the game world organized in a 'realistic' and consistent fashion outside of the normal playing areas?

[lember]

There's a really big implication to this... If every ship and station is still "there" and we just can't see it, does that mean there will be no equivalent to OOS combat? Are we saying that ship combat in a completely different zone/sector will have the same outcome as if if we had been there watching?

Well in all the xgames the entire universe ran on the background so that's not really new to xrebirth. what they'll probably do is treat everything outside a certain radius as oos. So you'll still have a lot of oos combat the question is how much has it improved.

[Argonaught.]

Enough of the insults, please, whoever they are directed at.

OK, let me re-iterate and clarify once again. You can leave local highways but you cannot leave superhighways. The difference relates to the spaces that you are traveling between. As has been explained before, you can fly anywhere in the space between zones, but you cannot fly in the space between sectors, which is what the superhighways link together. To those insisting that the superhighway is a "loading screen" because you are locked into it, I can assure you that you are wrong. You still have control of your ship, and you can still see the universe zooming by outside. And yes, what you see is real, not a video.

Perhaps the confusion comes because of the way other games work. In X Rebirth there is no "loading" of different chunks of the game universe like there is in some games, because, as we always have done, we keep the whole universe running regardless of whether you are there or not. The sectors are there, the ships and stations are there, and we only get rid of data associated with little details that aren't needed if you can't see them, like animations.

The reason our older games had loading screens at gates was mainly because we had to load a lot of graphical assets in order to show the new sector you were entering, and that took time. With X Rebirth we have the wonderful thing called multi-threading, which means that we can load those assets in the background, mostly before they are even needed, and therefore we have no need for loading screens. And aside from restoring those little details I mentioned, which it can happily do without interrupting your flight, there is nothing else the game has to do at those times.

Edit: OK, unlocking this having removed the trading of insults. If there is any repetition of it then the this thread will be locked too.

Is the inability to fly in the space between sectors a gameplay limitation or an engine limitation? I can certainly understand blocking that area off since it would be totally empty, but could mods in the future allow people to travel in the space between sectors without a super highway?

That's a good question. I, too, would like to know if the empty space actually exists in the game such that a clever modder could give the player ship a super warp drive to travel between different systems/sectors, or is the empty space between such areas simply inaccessible. In other words, is the game world organized in a 'realistic' and consistent fashion outside of the normal playing areas?

This is how I tried to ask about the superhighway but didn't have enough info to frame the question so.

[Inverness]

Neither, and both. The question is a bit of a red herring. There are game engine limitations that prevent you from jumping out of superhighways, but they were put there deliberately based on design decisions. The whole point of sectors and superhighways is to separate areas of space. If you want people playing your mod to be able to hop out of all your highways then just make them all local highways and don't use multiple sectors.

Ah, I'm sorry, it seems I wasn't clear.

When I say engine limitation I mean is there a limit to the size of sectors imposed by using double precision floating point numbers for coordinates? This is something that I would assume would force you to limit sector size in order to transition players between different coordinate systems through super highways.

Another way to phrase it would be: could the game engine handle a playable area the size of an entire system? Your answer implies that this would be possible, so thanks.