2020-11-16 Steam Update, Primeval Nerf

[Rockinsince87]

Zephar Wrote:

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what about way to like in other strategy games. You could pause the game normal time and faster pace time when your trying skip waiting on something.

So that's a tough one. Most 4x strategy games use isomorphic view, and don't have any first person perspective. They can either be turn based or operate in real-time. That works for that style of game because they are preforming limited functions. They don't require much calculation precision in what they are doing.

Hazeron is both strategy game only in the sense that you should have a strategy to succeed. It's core is a first person space sandbox game. It's not a pure strategy game like: Civilization 1-X/space series, Aurora 4x, and so on. The elements are in Hazeron but each building is rendered and is still processing even when it's not rendered and that's fine for time compression, it's the rendered elements where complications come.

The rendered elements require precision in there calculations. If you've played Kerbal Space Program, you know how they prevent you from using time acceleration at certain altitudes or using high compression when you are lifting off, that's due to the precision loss that is associated with time compression. In order to make the game "go faster" you have to simplify the calculations by making them less precise otherwise your CPU/GPU would get saturated to the point where either the game crashes or it moves REALLY slow. Kerbal Space Program has a nice balance but still has issues with elements that require precision using time compression. The best example of this is the power systems and time compression. Higher time compression and your solar panels output is not calculated correctly or the sun exposure is simplified and thus not calculated correctly.

In short, time compression would require either a lack of precision to prevent massive lag/crashing or some form of "skip to destination" when traveling calculations can then be performed based on the ETA of your travel. The lack of precision most likely would back fire and your ship would dive into a sun the first chance it would get. Also, I don't like the "skip to destination" because traveling in Hazeron can be a lot of fun when you stop and take a look around constantly. 

Now what is possible....is that if your traveling. Your position, course, speed, destination, and eta could be tracked and stored. When you come back to the game, it could see when the last time you played and if it exceeded your ETA, you would find your ship already where it was heading. (This would simulate the persistent world similar to the MMO version to a degree) However any sensor data during your travel would not exist because you just "Jumped" sort to speak. It's similar to the previous paragraph where I pointed out that I don't like that  :) , however you could balance it by allowing that behavior happen only to systems you have explored before.