New speeder piloting - 500% with gearshift

[Lirtoo]

Very often I see missions where we have to go from top of the map to talk to a guy at the bottom, then travel all the way back to the top. Back and forth, back and forth -- mission after mission. I'm sure this is BW's game design to extend the time of the missions and keep you online longer for population. However, the speeder use part of the mission is painfully boring. So I would not mind if they made the speeders 500% faster with "fall damage" if you crash, and also make us be able to control the speed with a "gearshift" like 100% > 200% > 300% > 400% > 500% etc. (Like KOTOR's pod racers) If you crash in top speed, you die, as in spawn in a place away from your destination. You might spend longer time to get to your destination, but at least you will have fun on your way. Do jumps on stuff etc.

[Mewmaker]

Oh, god no. Just skip the speeder rides like they do on makeb.

[Lirtoo]

I don't mean those speeders, but the speeder piloting on mounts. Those you use instead of walking.

[JattaGin]

I get where you're coming from and I'm sure many agree.

 

The problem is that the game's engine cannot handle faster speeds. The devs have officially stated that long ago. They tweaked the system to give us those small extra boosts last year (or was it in 2016?), but I'm fairly sure this is the best we can get.

 

Do you know the special speeder mission in the Ziost daily area? That's faster and you can see what happens. The rendering stops every now and then, because the game needs a pause to calculate the new environment. 500% would never work. I would really like it though.

[SteveTheCynic]

Also 500% with crash-on-die would be the source of a *lot* of complaints about people dying because they crashed into a pixel. (Oh, and how exactly do you make it respawn the player away from his destination? How does the game *know* the player's destination? And if "destination" means "current mission objective", what if I have five missions open on the current planet?)

[Lirtoo]

Also 500% with crash-on-die would be the source of a *lot* of complaints about people dying because they crashed into a pixel. (Oh, and how exactly do you make it respawn the player away from his destination? How does the game *know* the player's destination? And if "destination" means "current mission objective", what if I have five missions open on the current planet?)

 

Destination ans re-spawn place are two separate things. Lets forget about destination and pretend you are killed by a mob while you farm mats. You can choose to spawn in the place you died or go to the nearest post where a med droid is. So if you're killed on your speeder, the same re-spawn system applies.

[Lirtoo]

I get where you're coming from and I'm sure many agree.

 

The problem is that the game's engine cannot handle faster speeds. The devs have officially stated that long ago. They tweaked the system to give us those small extra boosts last year (or was it in 2016?), but I'm fairly sure this is the best we can get.

 

Do you know the special speeder mission in the Ziost daily area? That's faster and you can see what happens. The rendering stops every now and then, because the game needs a pause to calculate the new environment. 500% would never work. I would really like it though.

 

There are taxi speeders that goes really fast through complex landscape mesh on certain planets and it renders fine at my end. Thus I was thinking if that's possible, then it should be possible to go allot faster with our speeders too.

[SteveTheCynic]

There are taxi speeders that goes really fast through complex landscape mesh on certain planets and it renders fine at my end. Thus I was thinking if that's possible, then it should be possible to go allot faster with our speeders too.

Taxis are, in a sense, disconnected from the world. Nothing knows you are there, nothing shoots at you, tries to infect you, nothing. A player on a speeder is NOT disconnected from the world, and can trigger a wide variety of things. Well, used to be able to trigger a wide variety of things. Less so now, since [AREA] missions are now given by recon droids instead of merely passing through the area.

 

That's the usual player-sourced reasoning. Reality? Who knows?

[MikeCobalt]

I *Thought I remembered the *Expected Speeds to be the #1 reason stated the "Swoop Races" mini game was not possible. They had tried and the lag / game engine issues simply couldn't be fixed / improved to "Rezz" the world fast enough. I believe that was an Instanced environment also (apart from most ingame sequences). Edited April 25, 2018 by MikeCobalt

[Lirtoo]

Taxis are, in a sense, disconnected from the world. Nothing knows you are there, nothing shoots at you, tries to infect you, nothing. A player on a speeder is NOT disconnected from the world, and can trigger a wide variety of things. Well, used to be able to trigger a wide variety of things. Less so now, since [AREA] missions are now given by recon droids instead of merely passing through the area.

 

Not sure if you understand what I am saying. The issue people are assuming is graphics and lag. What I am puzzled about is if that is the case, then why can my cpu/gpu handle a taxi running through e.g Yavin 4 with lots of mesh? It would seem logic to me that my mount could do the same, regardless of pulling adds or not.

[SteveTheCynic]

Not sure if you understand what I am saying. The issue people are assuming is graphics and lag. What I am puzzled about is if that is the case, then why can my cpu/gpu handle a taxi running through e.g Yavin 4 with lots of mesh? It would seem logic to me that my mount could do the same, regardless of pulling adds or not.

Because when you are on a taxi, there's a pile of processing that *isn't* happening, and when you are on a speeder, that processing *is* happening. Can that mob see you? Well, when your character is on a taxi, it isn't even looking for you, so it doesn't matter if you are there for long enough for it to see or not. When you are on a speeder, and the mob *is* looking, it very much matters.

 

So that addresses lag-like stuff when you are on a superfast non-taxi (i.e. a souped-up mount). When you are on the hot-rod speeder in front of the People's Tower on Ziost, well, you're in a small zone, and the mobs tend not to see you as you blast past in the "turbo" segments. The "small zone" part is important - to correctly process what's coming up, the game has to have that territory "active" in memory, and if speeders can go faster, then it needs to keep more in memory to be able to keep up. I don't mean that it has to load stuff from disk all the time, not really, just that it will have a sort of "radius" in which it concentrates its attention, and the faster the mount goes, the larger that radius has to be so that you can't glitch out of the radius and become effectively invisible.

 

There's another consideration. Running with Sprint turned off is "normal" speed. Sprint is +35% and corresponds to about 10 metres per second, so "normal speed" is about 3/4 of that, 7.5 m/s. A +100% mount speed is around 15 m/s, and a +500% mount would be three times that, 45 m/s. That means that it goes from out-of-range in front (30 metres) to out-of-range behind in less than 1.5 seconds versus about four seconds on that +100% mount. The faster that mounts go, the higher the chance that the game will miss you being "seen" by mobs, and the easier it will be to just ride through them without ever having to worry about being attacked.

 

Well, except that you'll crash into a pixel you didn't notice until it was too late, and you'll die.

[Lirtoo]

Can that mob see you? Well, when your character is on a taxi, it isn't even looking for you, so it doesn't matter if you are there for long enough for it to see or not.

 

How do you know this? Have you seen the code for this? If the mobs are programmed to attack your character in first place, you need a code that will tell them not to do so when you fly a taxi, which will require as much processing. There are planets where you fly really close to mobs on a taxi.