Big Big Systems
BY BOBBENS, ON NOVEMBER 10TH, 2010
So what happens when you take big systems and inject them with pure essence of big? You get Big Big Systems. How big are we talking? If an old system maybe had an effective radius of 3.75 kpx or so, now we have radius of 25 kpx. That’s a pretty big increase. How long does it take to fly across it? It’s likely faster than before thanks to dynamic time compression.
A brief overview of how this is handled; There are currently two ways to trigger dynamic time compression:
- Activate autonav
- Right click on the overlay map
What it does, essentially, is increase the time compression until your ship reaches an “effective” speed of 2500 m/s. That means all ships behave nearly identically, be it capital ship or light fighter. This means that capital ships are much more playable now.
Can’t leave you without a pretty screenshot, so this is what a big big system looks like. As you can see there’s a YOU and GOTO on the map and dynamic time compression is at 27.1x. My Empire Hawking is flying from YOU to the GOTO. On the map overlay you can also see friendlies flying nearby.
So what’s next? Balance. Balance? Balance! It’s going to still take a while, but it’ll be damn well worth it. For those following Git, big big systems are still in the balance branch and haven’t been merged into bigsys yet.
NOTE The screenshot has been lost to time :(