P0-MS4: Part 242: Infinite Universe, FTL Travel

by PhoenixGames on Sep.17, 2017, under Astral Realms, P-0, Software and Games, Spiritus Astrum

The next step in the project is to add the FTL (Faster than Light) system. I need some way for players to be able to traverse large areas of space relatively quickly. I also need to be able to populate the regions that the player decides to explore dynamically.

I will probably use a grid-based system for this. The universe will be divided into zones, with each zone having a unique id. This unique zone id can be used to generate the entire zone using a pseudorandom number generator, so I don’t need to do any work on the server in terms of object creation, etc.

To travel at faster than light speeds to these zones, I can simply hide the scene, play a “warp” animation of some kind, and then update the players position on the server, then page or load in the objects from the zone that the player is travelling to.

The problem with this is that I want the zone transitions to be seamless. IE, it should be possible for the player to travel from one zone to another without using FTL, if they took the time to do this.

I need to run some tests first to make sure the player can actually move vast distances without issues. Once I have done this and it works correctly, I can then look into populating the zones that the player is travelling to.