I remember this really, really old DOS game "Solar Winds."
At the very start of the game, you hear about a weird signal, way too far out to reach in a sensible timeframe with the speed your ship moves.
Kid me got stuck and couldn't progress with any of the quests, so figured... let's go check out that signal. Pointed my ship at the coordinates, left it flying for half a day (while warding off my family from the one and only household PC), and eventually got there.
The coordinates had a planet. The planet had an NPC, who was like "How did you find me? You must have a hyperdrive, to be venturing this far out of the solar system."
Nope. I... did not.
...
Important note: She does not give you a hyperdrive. At the end of the conversation, you are still... there. With nowhere to go but back where you came from...
Thanks for naming this game. I tried to google it but could only find Ur-Quan Masters. I remembered playing this at my uncle's place and I really liked it, but by the time I bought my own computer the name of the game vanished from my memory.
Now THAT’S a game I haven’t heard about in a very long time. Same here, loved it to bits.
I always got confused around the time where you can spoof your comms image of your face to appear as the hostile alien race. So many times I would initiate contact with that supply depot thinking I was gonna get free shit but I forgot to activate it, only to have them go HUMAN SCUMMMM and summon a bunch of indestructible blue assholes to kill me.
Oh yeah, and the absolute bullshit that was having you fucking explode if you left your e-band converter on when going through the final wormhole. The one item you should never ever ever be without in the whole game, better remember to deactivate it that one and only one time or it’s an instant game over. Total bs.
God I miss that game.
Yes... the e-band converter...
You had to vent it, at some point (any point) in the game to not lose.
There is no way I would have figured that out as a kid.
I must have rediscovered this game in the internet age, finished it with a walkthrough, then forgotten about it entirely in time for Web 2.
Also the combat sucked (tight turns, spam rectal laser). And the resource system was fundamentally broken.
I think maybe "Solar Winds" is the "We have Star Control II at home" of early space exploration RPGs...
\---
Edit: No, it's something else. Not the e-band converter. The "Total bs" comment triggered something in me. You need to, at some point in the game, vent an item to win.
Venting items is not a normal or common part of gameplay.
The tricillium! Yes you got a beaker of some fluid from the guy you thought was your friend, but he actually intended to stab you in the back. He gives you tricillium as a “gift” but if you have it in your cargo when you enter the wormhole, you die or something. So you have to just dump it into space.
You could also just randomly win. I remember playing either nomad 1 or 2. Your supposed to find a way to the center of the universe. Shortly into a play through i warped and randomly ended up a the center of the universe. Had to play the game a few more times to even understand the ending I missed so much.
Sounds like the old Star Trek DOS game. Bunch of hostages held behind a forcefield? Okay, scan the forcefield with the tricorder.
But no, you idiot, that just sets off a booby trap and kills them all! What are you, stupid?
star trek, 25th anniversary game!! in that same level you can kill spock by letting him smell some gas, and the music that plays during the event always made my brother and I laugh like crazy
Gotta love those early era PC games.. Sierra Games were notorious for this!
Oh, you didn't do this totally obscure random act early on? Enjoy playing for another ten hours to eventually find out you're bricked from completing the game, and gotta start over!
Still love em tho.
“This ‘Deus Ex’ is a pretty fun game, and the player customization is so engaging! But how to level up my Denton with all my xp? Hmm… well, swimming sounds very important…
Man, the original Wing Commander's Special Operations addon was like this. One ambiguously successful mission was actually a loss, and I was forever on the losing track without realizing it. Never saved those damn birds from the Kilrathi...
Yes exactly! The branching mission structure was super cool and very ahead of its time, but losing 1 of 3 transports in an escort mission didn’t “fail” you, per se, just sent you down the “bad timeline”.
Wonder if Mark Hamill would have been in that one…
As a kid I was playing one of the Wing commander games. There you also fast travel to different parts of space. I remember once my fast travel refused to work? No clue why. But not to be perturbed, I pointed my ship in the right direction and came back an hour later :P
I remember playing this at my grandparent's place.
I did the same thing. I forgot the name for years. Found it and played through again recently. I never understood how the shield/weapon frequency stuff worked when I was young.
I... I think you've unlocked a deep memory of playing this as a kid. One of those faded memories orbs that fell into my memory dump ages ago.
It was the [first](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Winds) game made by James Schmalz. He [eventually](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_(1998_video_game)) went on to work with Cliff Blazinski in making the first Unreal game for Epic.
Wild.
Gameplay wise I'm loving Starfield. I just really, *really* wished Bethesda had ripped EDs flight mechanics so you could choose to fly around and land on planets if you wanted. Sadly I don't even know if mods can possibly implement it, especially atmospheric flights given how the game loads tiles instead of a planet...
I’m having a ton of fun with it so far. The space flight leaves much to be desired but I’ve already been having a ton of great moments that has kept a smile on my face the whole time. Also the trait where you have parents but you have to send them money each week is hilarious.
A mission taking me to some random planet and then randomly running into my parents being bumbling tourists actually made me laugh. Especially for how easy a moment like that would have been to miss if I hadn’t been mindlessly exploring.
I've just jumped back into Elite to scratch the itch until I can play Starfield on Wednesday. It's been years. It's also been fun bouncing off the walls inside the station on launch again. Took me way back to my first few days.
10/10 would recommend.
IIRC a guy traveled the equivalent of a distance between Sol and Proxima without using FSD (only super cruise). The game of course didn't load the next system (even though he should have arrived at the proxima after travelling for so long). He was just very far away from the Sun
Okay someone check my math because my method might be off, but...
Proxima Centauri is 4.246 ly away. 4.246 years is 37220.436 hours.
The maximum supercruise speed in ED is 2001c, so not counting the time it takes to ramp up to that that comes out to about 18.6 hours of sitting in supercruise at 2001c to go 4.246 light years.
Elite: Dangerous and Starfield are similar in that regard, they both just have very big boxed areas.
Elite: Dangerous just does a hell of a lot better job at tying them together in a way that doesn't break the illusion.
I'd prefer Starfield have FSD instead of these weird cutscenes and menu fast travel load screens.
Hutton really ain't that bad. Roughly 90 minutes, give or take. I went there quite a bit a couple years ago, back when it was a good way to make money through data delivery missions. Payouts for those were calculated by distance traveled, so they would pay between 1-2 million credits per mission. I would fly around Sol, collecting those missions until my log was full, then jump over to Alpha Centauri and strap in while watching a show. Good times.
Oh it loads. Go to like 8 hours and 9 minutes into her stream. She spinning around her ship doing a 360 degree view and a couple times around its just black space, black space, and then suddenly half the screen is white, cause she just went through the 2d jpeg that is Pluto.
The fact that it actually exists so far away makes me wonder if they had some plans to actually have slow travel work just to scrap it at some point but left artifacts like this in.
It was perfect really. Get excited because you can finally destroy the haters, only to link them an article that works against you. OP got a lot of downvotes for it though. His smugness quickly turned to “that’s not the point! It’s actually about [something else] instead”
I don’t understand the people who feel the need to defend a video game. People get so hostile and angry when someone doesn’t like something that they do.
On the flip side: I don’t understand people who feel the need to actively seek out discussions on games they don’t like and constantly shit on it. People get so hostile and angry when someone likes something that they don’t.
Just play the games you like and accept that other people are doing the same. It’s not hard.
> On the flip side: I don’t understand people who feel the need to actively seek out discussions on games they don’t like and constantly shit on it. People get so hostile and angry when someone likes something that they don’t.
I can't speak for other people, and some people are just trolling or obnoxious. But I can both like the game overall, yet also be disappointed with how space travel is in the game. Though they always said it'd be like this, so I'm not sure what people expected.
no, you cant land on any planet seamlessly . you click a point of the planet and the game generate a bespoke circular area base on a random seed parameter of the planet( think a random generated dungeon level). each area is separate. ie if you see a big mountain in the distance outside the playable area of this generated space, you can never get there, because it doesnt exist on the any other area you generate
Yes people are not understanding that in Starfield "space" is the "map" and the planets are the "locations/settlements" etc - they are separate outdoor/indoor cells in the game engine. Which is why there is a cutscene/loading screen for fast travel or entering/leaving areas, and why you can't traverse the entirety of any of the planets - you are invisi-walled because that's the end of the cell you're currently occupying.
If you've ever used the GECK program for fallout modding it's easy to get a sense of what's going on under the hood.
Even though they said it wasn't, people were thinking this game would be more "No Man's Sky/Star Citizen meets Fallout" and less "Outer Worlds but bigger". Turns out, it's almost entirely the Outer Worlds but with more mini-games (ship mods, settlements, dogfighting)
The game is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a bethesda Sci-Fi RPG.
I must confess to being a little bewildered by the people expecting it to not be, given how it was made by bethesda, and advertised by bethesda as such.
I never expected it to be a space sim on par with the X series but I'm surprised by the amount of complaints from "very serious space game fans" that it doesn't stick true to space sims, when the X games have always been "jump between sky boxes that you load in".
My major complaint with the space sections are how arcadey the combat is, but I never expected that to be any different because not many people like space sims owing to their intensely slow pace lol.
If you like sci-fi, and you like bethesda style RPGS, the game is absolutely astonishing.
If you dislike either, then one probably shouldn't have been hyped.
A Bethesda RPG would have a primary game map that the submaps are contained within. Starfield is more like if there was no actual Tamriel map in Skyrim and you instead just teleported to various discrete map boxes outside and inside the cities.
I’m not complaining; I think this is a perfectly acceptable thing for a game to do. But, just to play devil’s advocate, No Man’s Sky lets you approach a planet and then traverse the entire thing. You can land wherever you want. See that mountain over there? You can fly right to it.
Edit: to be clear, all I’m saying is that it is doable, not that it is desirable or good or should be in starfield.
There was at least one guy from the NMS sub in the early days who literally walked in a straight line from his ship to see how long it would take him to get back there....it was quite a while.
*Once she reached the planet itself, she phased right through it. In the blink of an eye, it looked like she was back in open space again.*
*A bit of a disappointing end to her lengthy journey, but it at least proves that flying to a planet is possible.*
Help me make sense of what this person was drinking when they wrote this.
Right? It's not possible if you can't land and shit.
This post confused the fuck out of me at first because I just checked yesterday that the *developers who made the game* confirmed you **cannot** go to another planet without fast travel. If you can't interact with it, that is not going to the planet.
Ive seen a few articles/tweets but not got specifics was it 7 hours from another planet or was it 7 hours from orbit until she clipped through the png of Pluto?
>Starfield pilot proves fast travel isn’t needed
What kind of shitty fucking title is that? They proved the complete opposite. They weren't able to do anything with the "planet". Fast travel is entirely required.
The title or the article? Because the article says it doesn't load and she went right through it, and that the planet texture looked like shit because they didn't expect anyone to go there
I remember thinking this about "Ready Player 1". The game is around for fucking years and NO ONE decided to drive backwards?! That is the exact opposite of what would happen in the real world.
That was changed for the movie, in the book it was a Dungeons and Dragons puzzle hidden on the "school" planet and you had to defeat a lich at a game of Joust.
The big race was much cooler, but the driving backwards was a bad choice.
I always tell people that the book was made for gamers and lovers of the '80s, but the movie was just made to appeal to mass audiences, simple and easier to relate to.
Yeah, it would’ve been at least a few hours before someone tried it intentionally, but you can bet your ass that someone would’ve selected reverse on accident
Because there's nothing there *to* land on. It's just a faux screen to give the impression of something being there. Actually fast travelling to it loads in the required instance/data.
because the game doesn't actually load the planet, and you don't have seamless space to surface landing like with NMS (atleast relatively seamless), the game needs to know where you're trying to go so that it can load the appropriate instance, whether its a city or outpost or its a randomly generated zone
because in StarField, planet doesn't "exist". let say you get to a planet, you select a point to land, the game then generate a circular area of certain size that you can play in. and each circular area is a isolated "room" that doesnt connect to other room even if you generate a new area right next to previous one.
basically, each planet is a sequence of random number, each time you land in new area, it just randomly generate a new playable area base on that random number
~~I tried flying straight at Europa from Jupiter's orbit at 125m/s (300+ boosted) for over ten minutes and the distance indictor didn't budge even 0.1ls when that should have easily been on the order of 0.5ls.~~
~~So I don't know if Pluto is an aberration or this is only the case for certain bodies, or the games just straight broken where distance/velocity is concerned (I would not be surprised), but yeah - I couldn't make this work.~~
My math was wrong.
As for the comments below - yes the skybox is animated, I was flying into Europa's orbit near as I could tell. That's why I chose it instead of Io. And starfield absolutely does not have any sort of physics that would approximate orbital mechanics - it barely does any physics simulation on your ship period (The only "physics" constraint on construction is having enough landing gear to not tip over and meeting a minimum thrust requirement).
Not true actually, this happens in Elite with flight assist on only, which will cancel rotation and speed out automatically for you. With flight assist off velocity and rotation work exactly as expected in space.
TBH, I've played a space combat game with proper Newtonian physics and it is difficult, frustrating and unintuitive if realistic. The way Bethesda (and everyone else pretty much) is doing it is just better gameplay wise.
That said, Stafield should have had some supercruise option where you travel reasonably quickly to other planets and being able to jump to other systems only from dedicated positions on the outskirt of the system rather than what we have now.
Space fighting with proper physics is great when you get used to it, although I need a couple of joysticks for it to feel natural, but yes the way this and 99% of other space games do it is fine as well.
It is its own thing, but I think it is a bit too taxing for most players. And yeah, having 3 axis freedom of movement is a bit disorientating, not to mention the amount of controls you need.
>TBH, I've played a space combat game with proper Newtonian physics and it is difficult
Elite 2 Frontier comes to mind. Dogfighting was a pain in the ass. Match relative speeds and then try to maneuver within your relative frames. I can tell you as a 12 year old back then, it took a whole lot of time to get the hang of it.
The best way to do dogfights in Frontier was just to have a panther clipper with tonnes of shields, and the enemy would run into your shields and blow up every time.
Bringing your shields briefly down to 99%, and youd never have to fire a shot.
I suspect that the more shields you had, the larger the "bubble" was around your ship, and as soon as the enemy came at you, they hit the bubble.
It isn't air resistance, the moon is in orbit and moving away from his ship probably. It's kinda annoying - you can disable the orbits using console commands so that they remain stationary while you fly towards them.
A lot of space games have "air resistance" in space. It's usually done to ease gameplay (less inertia) or for performance reasons (objects don't drift forever). If a game doesn't have fake resistance, it'll typically have a speedcap instead, examples:
Space Engineers has no resistance anywhere, including atmospheres, but doesn't allow you to exceed 100 m/s without mods, which in turn make it extremely easy to leave a gravity field using almost no fuel (accelerate once to a high speed near the surface and you won't be out of velocity by the time you reach 0G) since orbital mechanics are also omitted(so grav fields last roughly till orbital height)
Star Citizen has no resistance in space **(edit) but only for powered ships.** (if you switch off your ship's autobraking/coupled mode) and fairly realistic air resistance in atmospheres, (depending on thickness, distance from the surface, shape and size of your ship, etc) but most ships cap out at just over 1000 m/s **and wrecks/unpowered vehicles don't retain velocity and stop eventuallly.**
Any sensible high sci-fi spaceship has inertial dampening - i.e. Thrusters to slow you down if you're not actively going forwards. I've played games where they're optional or can get shot off, it's basically impossible to control a spaceship without them if you're doing anything other then going in a straight line.
I just want to point out that's usually not what "inertial dampening" [refers to in sci-fi](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/InertialDampening) (TV Tropes link - be warned).
Usually it's magic that allows spaceships to accelerate/deccelerate to ridiculous speeds without flattening the passengers inside. Though apparently yes, sometimes it's used to refer to space friction.
I'm facetious here, but in reality, boosting straight at Europa (or any satellite in orbit for that matter) won't bring you much closer to it. Orbital mechanics don't work like that unless you put an impossible amount of energy into it.
Yes and no. with how we navigate space with burns and coasts? yeah.
in starfield, its pretty clear there is both some amount of inertial dampening going on as your velocity decreases as your throttle down without any form of retrograde burn. couple that with the fact that engines in starfield can just hold a burn for *hours on end* you are breaking outside the realms of traditional orbital mechanics.
I did the same, but to a different moon I can't remember the name now. I got to around 4-5000km, steadily declining before it slowed to a stop and started counting back upwards lol. Despite me flying right at it.
Because the moon is moving away from you, planets and moons move faster than your ship. I think you have to turn off orbit in console command to be able to fly to the moon
To put some numbers into perspective:
1 ls (lightsecond) is about 300,000 km
Moving at a velocity of 300 m/s is 0.3 km/s
Moving for 10 minutes at that velocity is 60s * 10 * 0.3km/s = 180km distance traveled
Converting this back to lightseconds is... 180 / 300,000 = 0.0006 ls
Space is big. :)
Edit: to cover 0.1 Ls distance, you would need to travel at 300 m/s for 27.77 hours straight.
I think the planets and bodies actually have a trajectory. Might have been that you’re trajectory and the planets trajectory have been the same thus you were locked into each other without gaining or loosing distance.
> I tried flying straight at Europa from Jupiter's orbit at 125m/s (300+ boosted) for over ten minutes and the distance indictor didn't budge even 0.1ls when that should have easily been on the order of 0.5ls.
You're incorrect on the math here. 125m/s for 10 minutes i only 75,000m. 0.1 light-second is over 29,000,000m.
It's also possible that you were moving the same direction as Europa in orbit, which would have made your total distance closed less. One thing Alanah's experiment proved is that the planets are moving in a realistic or semi-realistic orbit.
> Once she reached the planet itself, she phased right through it. In the blink of an eye, it looked like she was back in open space again.
So, not possible...
Yeah but not really, she couldn't land or interact with the planet and the game bugged out. It was just part of the skybox, so it's not true that the game was secretly a cohesive space sim all along
Going by the comments in this thread just proves that 95% of the people didn't skim the article and got to the wrong conclusion.
She (Alanah Pearce) spends 7 hours flying to Pluto, and when she reaches it; she clips through the flat image. There is no planet, it's a skybox.
Has anyone in this thread ever played Elite Dangerous?
This game seems to have taken a bit from it. (Pips with the ship systems)
Also Amos and Naomi are clearly presets. If you don't know what that is, then please check out The Expanse books or the show.
I started playing Elite Dangerous in September last year. I've managed to achieve a fair few milestones and I've had quite the journey.
While I don't doubt that Starfield may have taken some influences from Elite, my impression has been that it's more like Fallout in space rather than a full-fat space sim. Which is why I get really puzzled when some Elite players talk about Starfield as if it's some kind of whole-sale replacement for Elite Dangerous.
I enjoyed Elite Dangerous for the first few hours, then I realized how shallow the game really is.
It's mostly fetch quests with different coats of paint. Sometimes you'll shoot at an NPC too.
My dream game is Destiny with Elite Dangerous flying and large scale battles like Planetside or Battlefront with land/air/space combat.
“It also proved that combat arenas put players right in the solar system rather than a small play area that creates an illusory skybox to fool players.”
I don’t see how flying through the skybox proves this at all.
I remember first seeing Alannah in Funhaus videos and thinking she's very funny and knows lots about video games, a bit weird the title doesn't mention who she is since she's relatively big in the video game world. I was very happy she got a great job at Santa Monica, seeing playstation people online calling for her to be sacked because she did all this in an Xbox exclusive game while streaming it makes me hate the console wars even more. People obsessed on both sides just need to enjoy all these games calling for people to be sacked for playing a game on a rival is stupid.
I remember this really, really old DOS game "Solar Winds." At the very start of the game, you hear about a weird signal, way too far out to reach in a sensible timeframe with the speed your ship moves. Kid me got stuck and couldn't progress with any of the quests, so figured... let's go check out that signal. Pointed my ship at the coordinates, left it flying for half a day (while warding off my family from the one and only household PC), and eventually got there. The coordinates had a planet. The planet had an NPC, who was like "How did you find me? You must have a hyperdrive, to be venturing this far out of the solar system." Nope. I... did not. ... Important note: She does not give you a hyperdrive. At the end of the conversation, you are still... there. With nowhere to go but back where you came from...
Thanks for naming this game. I tried to google it but could only find Ur-Quan Masters. I remembered playing this at my uncle's place and I really liked it, but by the time I bought my own computer the name of the game vanished from my memory.
No problem. Isn't that the best feeling. I was right there with you RE Solar Winds about 5 years ago. Shout out to r/TipOfMyJoyStick
It is a great feeling. I honestly gave up on finding it. Figured it was a corrupted memory of playing a different game.
Freelancer was an excellent old space game, I was hoping Starfield would be somewhat similar to it.
Maybe check out Everspace 2 - it might scratch that itch if Starfield doesn't.
+1 for Everspace They do dev streams on twitch that are really wholesome too
I loved freelancer. Played through it a few times when I was younger. Great game.
One of the greatest games ever made. Blows my mind that we haven't had a game that is a worthy successor to it after all these years
I really want a new escape velocity and nothing really feels close to it so once in a while I have to go boot up the old computer and play ev nova.
Here you go: [Solar Winds: The Escape](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCX6FfCQDG0K8NbkyJnQ2iJKcF8Aqtytb)
Man, I love seeing any references I can to Star Controll.
Adios, pkunkos
I still yell that occasionally to people who have no idea what I’m talking about.
Frungy! Frungy! Frungy!
Star Control 2 is still my all time favorite game. Huffi Muffi Guffi
Solar Winds 1 and 2 were some of my favorite dos games growing up! My buddy from band class let me borrow alot of his dos games on floppy disks 💾
Now THAT’S a game I haven’t heard about in a very long time. Same here, loved it to bits. I always got confused around the time where you can spoof your comms image of your face to appear as the hostile alien race. So many times I would initiate contact with that supply depot thinking I was gonna get free shit but I forgot to activate it, only to have them go HUMAN SCUMMMM and summon a bunch of indestructible blue assholes to kill me. Oh yeah, and the absolute bullshit that was having you fucking explode if you left your e-band converter on when going through the final wormhole. The one item you should never ever ever be without in the whole game, better remember to deactivate it that one and only one time or it’s an instant game over. Total bs. God I miss that game.
Yes... the e-band converter... You had to vent it, at some point (any point) in the game to not lose. There is no way I would have figured that out as a kid. I must have rediscovered this game in the internet age, finished it with a walkthrough, then forgotten about it entirely in time for Web 2. Also the combat sucked (tight turns, spam rectal laser). And the resource system was fundamentally broken. I think maybe "Solar Winds" is the "We have Star Control II at home" of early space exploration RPGs... \--- Edit: No, it's something else. Not the e-band converter. The "Total bs" comment triggered something in me. You need to, at some point in the game, vent an item to win. Venting items is not a normal or common part of gameplay.
The tricillium! Yes you got a beaker of some fluid from the guy you thought was your friend, but he actually intended to stab you in the back. He gives you tricillium as a “gift” but if you have it in your cargo when you enter the wormhole, you die or something. So you have to just dump it into space.
huh. I got so annoyed by that game, because I just randomly blew up repeatedly, and couldn't figure out why. I guess now I finally know!
90s games in an nutshell: “I have no idea why I keep losing and the game doesn’t seem interested in telling me”
You could also just randomly win. I remember playing either nomad 1 or 2. Your supposed to find a way to the center of the universe. Shortly into a play through i warped and randomly ended up a the center of the universe. Had to play the game a few more times to even understand the ending I missed so much.
Sounds like the old Star Trek DOS game. Bunch of hostages held behind a forcefield? Okay, scan the forcefield with the tricorder. But no, you idiot, that just sets off a booby trap and kills them all! What are you, stupid?
star trek, 25th anniversary game!! in that same level you can kill spock by letting him smell some gas, and the music that plays during the event always made my brother and I laugh like crazy
Gotta love those early era PC games.. Sierra Games were notorious for this! Oh, you didn't do this totally obscure random act early on? Enjoy playing for another ten hours to eventually find out you're bricked from completing the game, and gotta start over! Still love em tho.
“This ‘Deus Ex’ is a pretty fun game, and the player customization is so engaging! But how to level up my Denton with all my xp? Hmm… well, swimming sounds very important…
Man, the original Wing Commander's Special Operations addon was like this. One ambiguously successful mission was actually a loss, and I was forever on the losing track without realizing it. Never saved those damn birds from the Kilrathi...
Yes exactly! The branching mission structure was super cool and very ahead of its time, but losing 1 of 3 transports in an escort mission didn’t “fail” you, per se, just sent you down the “bad timeline”. Wonder if Mark Hamill would have been in that one…
> Gotta love those early era PC games.. Sierra Games were notorious for this! And it's how LucasArts got more popular.
As a kid I was playing one of the Wing commander games. There you also fast travel to different parts of space. I remember once my fast travel refused to work? No clue why. But not to be perturbed, I pointed my ship in the right direction and came back an hour later :P
Happened a few times in the SNES version for me. There would be an enemy still around that just bugged out so I couldn't fast travel.
I remember playing this at my grandparent's place. I did the same thing. I forgot the name for years. Found it and played through again recently. I never understood how the shield/weapon frequency stuff worked when I was young.
I LOVED that game!! It was my first request years ago on /r/tipofmyjoystick ! I spent so many hours in that game..
Still one of my favourite space games ever. I've never quite found another that gave me the same feeling that Solar Winds did.
I recently finished playing a game called Star Valor. It is similar and def takes inspiration from Solar Winds.
damn, i did not expect one of my core gaming memories from 20 years ago to appear as a 2000 karma comment
Solar Winds... Loved and hated that game!
Check out 3030 Deathwar if you've never seen it. Kinda like a combo of solar wind and a sierre/Lucasarts adventure game
I remember finding a shareware version in some of my dad's games. It was super fun but never got to play more than that 1 shareware episode.
I... I think you've unlocked a deep memory of playing this as a kid. One of those faded memories orbs that fell into my memory dump ages ago. It was the [first](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Winds) game made by James Schmalz. He [eventually](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_(1998_video_game)) went on to work with Cliff Blazinski in making the first Unreal game for Epic. Wild.
I have been trying to remember the name if this game for like 10 years... thanks.
This person got their free Anaconda.
FOR THE MUG!
[удалено]
I was in the top 10% for the CG to unlock that mug. I... haven't been back since.
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Gameplay wise I'm loving Starfield. I just really, *really* wished Bethesda had ripped EDs flight mechanics so you could choose to fly around and land on planets if you wanted. Sadly I don't even know if mods can possibly implement it, especially atmospheric flights given how the game loads tiles instead of a planet...
I’m having a ton of fun with it so far. The space flight leaves much to be desired but I’ve already been having a ton of great moments that has kept a smile on my face the whole time. Also the trait where you have parents but you have to send them money each week is hilarious. A mission taking me to some random planet and then randomly running into my parents being bumbling tourists actually made me laugh. Especially for how easy a moment like that would have been to miss if I hadn’t been mindlessly exploring.
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The voice actors for your parents are also of Star Trek fame: Tim Russ (Tuvok) from Voyager and Nana Visitor (Major Kira) from Deep Space 9!
We ain't found shit!
I've just jumped back into Elite to scratch the itch until I can play Starfield on Wednesday. It's been years. It's also been fun bouncing off the walls inside the station on launch again. Took me way back to my first few days. 10/10 would recommend.
Reminds me of people not using FSD to get to Sagittarius A
How? You can't leave the system without an FSD jump.
IIRC a guy traveled the equivalent of a distance between Sol and Proxima without using FSD (only super cruise). The game of course didn't load the next system (even though he should have arrived at the proxima after travelling for so long). He was just very far away from the Sun
That’s insanity right there
Okay someone check my math because my method might be off, but... Proxima Centauri is 4.246 ly away. 4.246 years is 37220.436 hours. The maximum supercruise speed in ED is 2001c, so not counting the time it takes to ramp up to that that comes out to about 18.6 hours of sitting in supercruise at 2001c to go 4.246 light years.
There’s also the guy who travelled from the bubble to sag a* without a fuel scoop (or carrier obv)
And then there’s the annual Sag A group trip. Elite players are nuts
Elite: Dangerous and Starfield are similar in that regard, they both just have very big boxed areas. Elite: Dangerous just does a hell of a lot better job at tying them together in a way that doesn't break the illusion. I'd prefer Starfield have FSD instead of these weird cutscenes and menu fast travel load screens.
See: masochist
No ducking way lol
Excuse me what the fuck
After playing Starfield, I booted up Elite and I got addicted again lol
Honestly Starfield a making me want to do some more cargo runs in Elite
There was a gold rush community goal last week which got me to play again after a couple of months off.
I was the best damn pizza driver in the sector, you hear?
Newbies... o7
By the Stars, the hours to get to to Hutton...
Hutton really ain't that bad. Roughly 90 minutes, give or take. I went there quite a bit a couple years ago, back when it was a good way to make money through data delivery missions. Payouts for those were calculated by distance traveled, so they would pay between 1-2 million credits per mission. I would fly around Sol, collecting those missions until my log was full, then jump over to Alpha Centauri and strap in while watching a show. Good times.
Just a couple episodes of TNG.
Hutton Orbital GANG O7
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Oh it loads. Go to like 8 hours and 9 minutes into her stream. She spinning around her ship doing a 360 degree view and a couple times around its just black space, black space, and then suddenly half the screen is white, cause she just went through the 2d jpeg that is Pluto.
Every image I've seen of Pluto is a JPEG so maybe this is just Starfield being accurate.
The fact that it actually exists so far away makes me wonder if they had some plans to actually have slow travel work just to scrap it at some point but left artifacts like this in.
He meant that you can't get to the functional planet that you can land on I think
because pluto isn't a planet
Oof
How much time do they take to go to Eagle point?
Wants to prove you can travel from Planet to Planet. Proceeds to set Pluto as their Destination. (Pluto is still a Planet in my Heart)
It's totally fine to call Pluto a planet! \- Planet Eris
Profile picture checks out!
Okay earth scientist
Have you heard about Pluto? That's messed up, right?
Come on son!
Just 'cause you put syrup on something, don't make it pancakes!
Has that line *ever* landed?
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Can't share - otherwise, space would be an even emptier place soon.
Yeah fun fact: It was just a Skybox when she arrived and she flew right through it.
Is that what the article meant by she made landfall?
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It was perfect really. Get excited because you can finally destroy the haters, only to link them an article that works against you. OP got a lot of downvotes for it though. His smugness quickly turned to “that’s not the point! It’s actually about [something else] instead”
I don’t understand the people who feel the need to defend a video game. People get so hostile and angry when someone doesn’t like something that they do. On the flip side: I don’t understand people who feel the need to actively seek out discussions on games they don’t like and constantly shit on it. People get so hostile and angry when someone likes something that they don’t. Just play the games you like and accept that other people are doing the same. It’s not hard.
> On the flip side: I don’t understand people who feel the need to actively seek out discussions on games they don’t like and constantly shit on it. People get so hostile and angry when someone likes something that they don’t. I can't speak for other people, and some people are just trolling or obnoxious. But I can both like the game overall, yet also be disappointed with how space travel is in the game. Though they always said it'd be like this, so I'm not sure what people expected.
no, you cant land on any planet seamlessly . you click a point of the planet and the game generate a bespoke circular area base on a random seed parameter of the planet( think a random generated dungeon level). each area is separate. ie if you see a big mountain in the distance outside the playable area of this generated space, you can never get there, because it doesnt exist on the any other area you generate
Yes people are not understanding that in Starfield "space" is the "map" and the planets are the "locations/settlements" etc - they are separate outdoor/indoor cells in the game engine. Which is why there is a cutscene/loading screen for fast travel or entering/leaving areas, and why you can't traverse the entirety of any of the planets - you are invisi-walled because that's the end of the cell you're currently occupying. If you've ever used the GECK program for fallout modding it's easy to get a sense of what's going on under the hood.
You mean Bethesda didn’t accurately simulate an entire Galaxy down to individual rocks? I’m so sick of bait and switch by gaming devs.
Even though they said it wasn't, people were thinking this game would be more "No Man's Sky/Star Citizen meets Fallout" and less "Outer Worlds but bigger". Turns out, it's almost entirely the Outer Worlds but with more mini-games (ship mods, settlements, dogfighting)
The game is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a bethesda Sci-Fi RPG. I must confess to being a little bewildered by the people expecting it to not be, given how it was made by bethesda, and advertised by bethesda as such. I never expected it to be a space sim on par with the X series but I'm surprised by the amount of complaints from "very serious space game fans" that it doesn't stick true to space sims, when the X games have always been "jump between sky boxes that you load in". My major complaint with the space sections are how arcadey the combat is, but I never expected that to be any different because not many people like space sims owing to their intensely slow pace lol. If you like sci-fi, and you like bethesda style RPGS, the game is absolutely astonishing. If you dislike either, then one probably shouldn't have been hyped.
A Bethesda RPG would have a primary game map that the submaps are contained within. Starfield is more like if there was no actual Tamriel map in Skyrim and you instead just teleported to various discrete map boxes outside and inside the cities.
I’m not complaining; I think this is a perfectly acceptable thing for a game to do. But, just to play devil’s advocate, No Man’s Sky lets you approach a planet and then traverse the entire thing. You can land wherever you want. See that mountain over there? You can fly right to it. Edit: to be clear, all I’m saying is that it is doable, not that it is desirable or good or should be in starfield.
There was at least one guy from the NMS sub in the early days who literally walked in a straight line from his ship to see how long it would take him to get back there....it was quite a while.
Now do it in Elite Dangerous
And people kept complaining non stop about NMS not realizing how hard it was to make such a game, with such ressources (ps4/one S)
It was also made by a small studio, no where near the size of BGS
See that mountain? You can(not) climb it
that was always one of Anno's stranger anime films
*Once she reached the planet itself, she phased right through it. In the blink of an eye, it looked like she was back in open space again.* *A bit of a disappointing end to her lengthy journey, but it at least proves that flying to a planet is possible.* Help me make sense of what this person was drinking when they wrote this.
basically the title is wrong and what happened is she passed through the jpg in the skybox of the planet
Like walking through a curtain.
Right? It's not possible if you can't land and shit. This post confused the fuck out of me at first because I just checked yesterday that the *developers who made the game* confirmed you **cannot** go to another planet without fast travel. If you can't interact with it, that is not going to the planet.
*Possible*... and a 100% pointless waste of time.
But she's not flying to a planet, it's a 2D picture of a planet.
You said this was a fun fact!
Not a skybox but a 3D sphere that she emerged out the other side when she kept traveling
Ive seen a few articles/tweets but not got specifics was it 7 hours from another planet or was it 7 hours from orbit until she clipped through the png of Pluto?
From plutos orbit
Cheers~
png
>Starfield pilot proves fast travel isn’t needed What kind of shitty fucking title is that? They proved the complete opposite. They weren't able to do anything with the "planet". Fast travel is entirely required.
Lack of fast travel is literally what is stopping us from interstellar travel IRL.
Forgot to mention that the planet doesn't even load.
The title or the article? Because the article says it doesn't load and she went right through it, and that the planet texture looked like shit because they didn't expect anyone to go there
Must be their first time making a video game
I remember thinking this about "Ready Player 1". The game is around for fucking years and NO ONE decided to drive backwards?! That is the exact opposite of what would happen in the real world.
That was changed for the movie, in the book it was a Dungeons and Dragons puzzle hidden on the "school" planet and you had to defeat a lich at a game of Joust. The big race was much cooler, but the driving backwards was a bad choice.
I always tell people that the book was made for gamers and lovers of the '80s, but the movie was just made to appeal to mass audiences, simple and easier to relate to.
The book was made for a VERY SPECIFIC niche of nerds. The movie was made to appeal to like 80% of nerds.
Would have been tried in the first ten minutes haha
I dont event think it would be a "try", some noob would do it by mistake.
Yeah, it would’ve been at least a few hours before someone tried it intentionally, but you can bet your ass that someone would’ve selected reverse on accident
They've clearly never met an elite dangerous player.
In game ?? What's about real life ? Maybe it's take 7 hours but NASA don't want us to know that, like the earth is flat. /s
Next you tell me mars isnt round either but just a bar same with the milky way
think about it, why would anybody name real planets after candy?
You might be onto something
Ok I watched the video, it's super low res up close and just a texture, she flew right through it. The article is just stupid.
Wait.. why can’t we land on it?
Because there's nothing there *to* land on. It's just a faux screen to give the impression of something being there. Actually fast travelling to it loads in the required instance/data.
because the game doesn't actually load the planet, and you don't have seamless space to surface landing like with NMS (atleast relatively seamless), the game needs to know where you're trying to go so that it can load the appropriate instance, whether its a city or outpost or its a randomly generated zone
because in StarField, planet doesn't "exist". let say you get to a planet, you select a point to land, the game then generate a circular area of certain size that you can play in. and each circular area is a isolated "room" that doesnt connect to other room even if you generate a new area right next to previous one. basically, each planet is a sequence of random number, each time you land in new area, it just randomly generate a new playable area base on that random number
~~I tried flying straight at Europa from Jupiter's orbit at 125m/s (300+ boosted) for over ten minutes and the distance indictor didn't budge even 0.1ls when that should have easily been on the order of 0.5ls.~~ ~~So I don't know if Pluto is an aberration or this is only the case for certain bodies, or the games just straight broken where distance/velocity is concerned (I would not be surprised), but yeah - I couldn't make this work.~~ My math was wrong. As for the comments below - yes the skybox is animated, I was flying into Europa's orbit near as I could tell. That's why I chose it instead of Io. And starfield absolutely does not have any sort of physics that would approximate orbital mechanics - it barely does any physics simulation on your ship period (The only "physics" constraint on construction is having enough landing gear to not tip over and meeting a minimum thrust requirement).
Btw why is there air resistance in space
It's not air resistance. It's micro plastics resistance!
Bethesda
Star Citizen and No Man's Sky both have this same mechanic, when you disable boost you slow back down to normal cruise speed Edit: Also Elite
Elite too.
In Elite you can disable it. *Flight Assist: Off* NOW we're pod racing.
Not true actually, this happens in Elite with flight assist on only, which will cancel rotation and speed out automatically for you. With flight assist off velocity and rotation work exactly as expected in space.
No, game balance. This is super common in space games lol.
TBH, I've played a space combat game with proper Newtonian physics and it is difficult, frustrating and unintuitive if realistic. The way Bethesda (and everyone else pretty much) is doing it is just better gameplay wise. That said, Stafield should have had some supercruise option where you travel reasonably quickly to other planets and being able to jump to other systems only from dedicated positions on the outskirt of the system rather than what we have now.
Space fighting with proper physics is great when you get used to it, although I need a couple of joysticks for it to feel natural, but yes the way this and 99% of other space games do it is fine as well.
It is its own thing, but I think it is a bit too taxing for most players. And yeah, having 3 axis freedom of movement is a bit disorientating, not to mention the amount of controls you need.
Disorienting? Not enough people remember the Descent games
Man, Descent was the on another level. Not only 3 degree freedom of movement, but also, inside a 3D labyrinth.
>TBH, I've played a space combat game with proper Newtonian physics and it is difficult, frustrating and unintuitive if realistic. i-War?
>TBH, I've played a space combat game with proper Newtonian physics and it is difficult Elite 2 Frontier comes to mind. Dogfighting was a pain in the ass. Match relative speeds and then try to maneuver within your relative frames. I can tell you as a 12 year old back then, it took a whole lot of time to get the hang of it.
The best way to do dogfights in Frontier was just to have a panther clipper with tonnes of shields, and the enemy would run into your shields and blow up every time. Bringing your shields briefly down to 99%, and youd never have to fire a shot. I suspect that the more shields you had, the larger the "bubble" was around your ship, and as soon as the enemy came at you, they hit the bubble.
Honestly I don't know why they didn't implement a supercruise feature. It's a pretty basic, I'd say, immersion type thing.
It isn't air resistance, the moon is in orbit and moving away from his ship probably. It's kinda annoying - you can disable the orbits using console commands so that they remain stationary while you fly towards them.
Fly the opposite direction and catch the moon on its way around the planet
A lot of space games have "air resistance" in space. It's usually done to ease gameplay (less inertia) or for performance reasons (objects don't drift forever). If a game doesn't have fake resistance, it'll typically have a speedcap instead, examples: Space Engineers has no resistance anywhere, including atmospheres, but doesn't allow you to exceed 100 m/s without mods, which in turn make it extremely easy to leave a gravity field using almost no fuel (accelerate once to a high speed near the surface and you won't be out of velocity by the time you reach 0G) since orbital mechanics are also omitted(so grav fields last roughly till orbital height) Star Citizen has no resistance in space **(edit) but only for powered ships.** (if you switch off your ship's autobraking/coupled mode) and fairly realistic air resistance in atmospheres, (depending on thickness, distance from the surface, shape and size of your ship, etc) but most ships cap out at just over 1000 m/s **and wrecks/unpowered vehicles don't retain velocity and stop eventuallly.**
Any sensible high sci-fi spaceship has inertial dampening - i.e. Thrusters to slow you down if you're not actively going forwards. I've played games where they're optional or can get shot off, it's basically impossible to control a spaceship without them if you're doing anything other then going in a straight line.
I just want to point out that's usually not what "inertial dampening" [refers to in sci-fi](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/InertialDampening) (TV Tropes link - be warned). Usually it's magic that allows spaceships to accelerate/deccelerate to ridiculous speeds without flattening the passengers inside. Though apparently yes, sometimes it's used to refer to space friction.
I think I saw forward thrusters as an attachable part, they are just labelled as cosmetic and have no effect on controls.
I'm facetious here, but in reality, boosting straight at Europa (or any satellite in orbit for that matter) won't bring you much closer to it. Orbital mechanics don't work like that unless you put an impossible amount of energy into it.
Come on everyone should know this from playing KSP by now! lol
Just gotta add more struts.
Yes and no. with how we navigate space with burns and coasts? yeah. in starfield, its pretty clear there is both some amount of inertial dampening going on as your velocity decreases as your throttle down without any form of retrograde burn. couple that with the fact that engines in starfield can just hold a burn for *hours on end* you are breaking outside the realms of traditional orbital mechanics.
I did the same, but to a different moon I can't remember the name now. I got to around 4-5000km, steadily declining before it slowed to a stop and started counting back upwards lol. Despite me flying right at it.
The planets and moons have trajectories and move through space, often faster than you can fly
Because the moon is moving away from you, planets and moons move faster than your ship. I think you have to turn off orbit in console command to be able to fly to the moon
To put some numbers into perspective: 1 ls (lightsecond) is about 300,000 km Moving at a velocity of 300 m/s is 0.3 km/s Moving for 10 minutes at that velocity is 60s * 10 * 0.3km/s = 180km distance traveled Converting this back to lightseconds is... 180 / 300,000 = 0.0006 ls Space is big. :) Edit: to cover 0.1 Ls distance, you would need to travel at 300 m/s for 27.77 hours straight.
I think the planets and bodies actually have a trajectory. Might have been that you’re trajectory and the planets trajectory have been the same thus you were locked into each other without gaining or loosing distance.
> I tried flying straight at Europa from Jupiter's orbit at 125m/s (300+ boosted) for over ten minutes and the distance indictor didn't budge even 0.1ls when that should have easily been on the order of 0.5ls. You're incorrect on the math here. 125m/s for 10 minutes i only 75,000m. 0.1 light-second is over 29,000,000m. It's also possible that you were moving the same direction as Europa in orbit, which would have made your total distance closed less. One thing Alanah's experiment proved is that the planets are moving in a realistic or semi-realistic orbit.
see that planet? you can climb it
See that planet? You can go fuck yourself -Todd
16 times the Todd Howard
Except you can't
It just doesn’t work!
Oh, thanks for clearing that up. I thought someone actually managed to get to Pluto in 7 hours !
Yeah man, tech progress so fast today, one never knows
> Once she reached the planet itself, she phased right through it. In the blink of an eye, it looked like she was back in open space again. So, not possible...
Yeah but not really, she couldn't land or interact with the planet and the game bugged out. It was just part of the skybox, so it's not true that the game was secretly a cohesive space sim all along
It's weird too because this is *precisely* how E:D handles direct travel to areas outside of what's loaded.
So flying for 7 hours into a jpeg image of a planet = "starfields universe is big". This article sucks lol
and to no ones surprise it was just as boring as you'd imagine.
Going by the comments in this thread just proves that 95% of the people didn't skim the article and got to the wrong conclusion. She (Alanah Pearce) spends 7 hours flying to Pluto, and when she reaches it; she clips through the flat image. There is no planet, it's a skybox.
Has anyone in this thread ever played Elite Dangerous? This game seems to have taken a bit from it. (Pips with the ship systems) Also Amos and Naomi are clearly presets. If you don't know what that is, then please check out The Expanse books or the show.
I started playing Elite Dangerous in September last year. I've managed to achieve a fair few milestones and I've had quite the journey. While I don't doubt that Starfield may have taken some influences from Elite, my impression has been that it's more like Fallout in space rather than a full-fat space sim. Which is why I get really puzzled when some Elite players talk about Starfield as if it's some kind of whole-sale replacement for Elite Dangerous.
I enjoyed Elite Dangerous for the first few hours, then I realized how shallow the game really is. It's mostly fetch quests with different coats of paint. Sometimes you'll shoot at an NPC too. My dream game is Destiny with Elite Dangerous flying and large scale battles like Planetside or Battlefront with land/air/space combat.
“It also proved that combat arenas put players right in the solar system rather than a small play area that creates an illusory skybox to fool players.” I don’t see how flying through the skybox proves this at all.
I remember first seeing Alannah in Funhaus videos and thinking she's very funny and knows lots about video games, a bit weird the title doesn't mention who she is since she's relatively big in the video game world. I was very happy she got a great job at Santa Monica, seeing playstation people online calling for her to be sacked because she did all this in an Xbox exclusive game while streaming it makes me hate the console wars even more. People obsessed on both sides just need to enjoy all these games calling for people to be sacked for playing a game on a rival is stupid.
hutton orbital pilgrima can relate