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Star Wars Galaxies Takes Jump To Lightspeed
Thanks to 1UP for its article discussing the recent announcement of Star Wars Galaxies' space combat expansion, Jump To Lightspeed, which takes the PC MMO into the heavens, and "focuses primarily on [space-based] vehicles for both combat and transportation, promising at least 15 new modes of travel." There are screenshots and an official FAQ over at the Star Wars Galaxies site, explaining "you can expect to pilot X-wings, Y-wings, TIE fighters, TIE interceptors, and many other recognizable starfighters", and, dodging some sarcastic online reaction, an interview with producer Haden Blackman over at IGN PC argues: "In many ways, we're looking at Jump to Lightspeed as 'X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter' online - much of our focus is on that dogfighting experience."
Maybe I'm just an old fart and correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the Star Wars faster-than-light travel called Hyperspace? Where'd this light speed shit come from?
How we know is more important than what we know.
I really, really dislike having to pay 30-50 per add on on top of the monthly fees. Why can't more games do what Lineage II is doing? All expansions will be at no extra charge.
I can't speak for you, but X-wing/TIE Fighter/Alliance were some of the best PC games I've ever played, instead of crappy RTSes and stuff, I'd much rather see additions to that series of games. LucasArts has pretty much crapped up any game with the Star Wars licence since Alliance came out several years ago. I'd much rather see those resources poured into a great flight sim like X-Wing again.
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
Han solo was the first to mention it:
"She'll make point-five past lightspeed."
What this has to do with Hyperspace however is completely subjective, because just about all the physics of the Star Wars universe is about as cohesive as the continuity in Star Trek.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
It's been literally years since Lucasarts did a space combat sim. The last one they made was X-Wing:Alliance or something, which was a story based game running a really recent rev. of the X-Wing engine. Unfortunately the game doesn't run under Windows XP with an nVidia graphics adapter, and LucasArts haven't bothered maintaining it after all these years. Can't blame them, though.
Star Wars: Rebellion was a MOO style game that was completely underrated, it looks like there are no plans to release an updated game (possibly because of the tepid reception from the new and horribly aborted Master of Orion 3?)
Of course, now there's a new X-Wing style game, and you have to buy Galaxies and pay a monthly subscription fee just to play it. Typical.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
Word has it, by the time the expansion gets released, there will be THREE WHOLE JEDI!
//lame
This is exactly the kind of stuff I was expecting to see in the game when I originally bought it. After playing for a while I decided to cancel my subscription because it wasn't what I was really looking for. But I want to renew my subscription after seeing this. Too bad I've already been sucked into Lineage2.
There is still a community around Rebellion (Supremacy in the EU), check the out at http://www.swrebellion.com
09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0
Huh. XWA runs just fine for me under Windows XP with a low-end GeForce FX.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
The line "She'll make point five past lightspeed" always got me. I assume it means that the ship can travel at 1.5 times the speed of light in a vaccum, but in the movies trips between star systems appear to take only a few hours, maybe a day or two at the most. Assuming that the Star Wars galaxy is similar to our own, it would take light years to travel between stars, and at 1.5 times the speed of light the trip would still take years.
That's a pretty fine nit to pick considering that "Star Wars" was released without any kind of flight at all.
Worst.. title.. ever.
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ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
This is where a MMO game could really benefit from a BitTorrent style system for distributing large updates. Just write a similar engine into the game's software. Have anyone who is playing automatically help share the file, and make the transfer engine only use spare bandwidth, or turn off if the computer is on a low bandwidth connection.
If it's well done, the strain on the download servers could be nearly negligible after some seed time to get the first few copies of the update out the door.
Chiss Clawcraft
According to relativity, how long it would take depends on who is doing the measuring.
For someone travelling close to light speed, the subjective time from their point of view to cross the galaxy could be very small (and approaches zero as their speed approaches light speed).
From the point of view of an observer stationary relative to the galaxy, the fast moving traveller would take thousands of years to cross the galaxy, even at the speed of light.
Of course, differences in perceived time intervals, and hence radically different aging of characters when accelerated to large relative velocities, tends to screw up (soft) sci-fi plots, and so it just gets ignored for the sake of a comprehensible plotline. (Although there are some good 'hard' sci-fi novels in which this is a key plot device.)
As for what the perception of time would be like for something travelling at 1.5 times the speed of light, my relativity is a little rusty, but IIRC time would appear to run backwards for such a traveller, and someone observing such a traveller would observe them arrive at their destination before they left their point of origin. There are obviously big problems for causality in such a scenario, which is why relativity is usually interpreted as prohibiting things travelling faster than light.
Actually ships "flew" from the surface of a planet, achieved escape velocity (presumably), and left the atmosphere.
And those little speeders flew around all over the place and tied up the AT-AT's (once they were adapted for the cold).
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
Check out Guild Wars. their proposed system has you downloading content as needed in the backgound while you play. Should be transparent. Dunno how well it'll work in practice, but it's a good idea at least.
Oh, and NO monthly fees will be nice too.
I get this godawful graphics corruption when in the cockpit. Having said that I've shifted to an Athlon64 now with a shiny new mainboard and all the other accoutrements (same video card though). I should give it another shot.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
I enjoyed X-Wings, TIE Fighters, X-Wing Alliance, and all the addons. I would love to see another game based on this. This MMO game addon isn't for me since I am not into monthly subscription game since I don't play often per week and I am cheap. :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I'd like to see a modernized version of Rebellion and a new X-Wing game set during the Clone Wars. Make 'em fully modern graphically and apply another few years worth of advancement into the single-player game. Maybe add a dynamic campaign. I've played some pickup missions in flight sims using a dynamic multiplayer campaign - that would rock. But I'm dreaming.
I have this sneaking suspicion the the MMORPG space combat isn't built on X-Wing v Tie Fighter or anything like a space combat sim.
And all that MOO3 proved was that games that aren't fun don't sell very well. Word of mouth on this title is just a notch or two below Daikatana levels. Maybe it should be OINK3, I dunno. Maybe for $5... yes, I'll admit to bagging a game that I haven't played - I had to, it was a good line.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
Actually, no, it makes no sense at all. Lower numbers hyperdrive ratings are actually faster. Basically all of them are rated 3 or lower. 3's are crappy civillian ships, mostly, and 1's are top-grade military ships.
Star Wars doesn't even pretend to make sense.
Um...I don't know this. Really...uh...I just made it up.
That's expanded universe stuff there, which is written in whole or part by people in furry wolf costumes in basements (when they're not in the queue for Episode III or at a furry party).
So I'd take that with a grain of salt.
for the whole thing to be reworked and everyones vechicle data reset.
Its works fine on my XP and GeForce4 440 MX. No patches or anything.
I played MOO3. God what a tedious game. It was incredibly complex. The menus were very deeply nested. Micromanagement was theoretically possible, but incredibly impracticle if you want to make it to the next game turn.
Furthermore, of course, with games like MOO, careful micromanagement is decisive in winning the game on any serious difficulty level.
Fleet management was also impractical to micromanage. Too much effort went into complicating things that were previously straightforward.
Want to build a big ship and go attack the enemy?
No, you can't.
First you need to go design a ship (or pick one that the AI has designed badly for you). That used to be simple in MOO, now it's complicated doing that as well. Then you need to build it.
Great, you've got a huge new warship. Where is it? It's hiding in some inactive group thingy that you have to click everywhere to try and find. Found it? Want to attack now? Too bad. Now you have to build a "fleet". That's right, a fleet isn't just a bunch of ships anymore! It's even more complicated than designing a single ship! But you only have one ship, and that's not a fleet? Sorry kids. This is MOO3, and a single ship isn't anything until it's in a fleet.
So you build a fleet. You need to decide how big the fleet is, what it's purpose is, what ships are in the fleet, and where the ships are supposed to position themselves when they're in the fleet. Then you can try and add your ship into the fleet! Hooray! But you can't do that until you've made sure that your fleet is completely full, if it's not, you can't do anything with it yet.
Then you get to attack.
In MOO, you had to select the ship and then right click the planet you wanted it to go to. If there was another ship there from the enemy, they'd fight. Just as a comparison.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
So I guess Wizards of the coast are now furries? I remember reading about this stuff in Shipbuilding guides for the recent Star Wars D20 games. I havent played in over a year, but, I may be wrong.
New space sims are very unlikely for one simple reason... they more or less require a (good) joystick and most computers aren't equipped with joysticks. And why should people buy one now, many games don't even support joysticks properly. Consoles (and price) spurred the movement to replace joysticks with gamepads.
That said some arcade style space-shooters are fun and work with a mouse... but you lose a lot of the control (for example freelancer had no rotation in the roll axis).
This is the same thing that destroyed mech games.
You shouldn't admit to that kind of thing.
For great justice.
Here's what I find the most funny. When Han is talking about the Millenium Falcon he says "This ship did the Kestle Run (or whatever it is called) in 12 Parsecs. Well, a Parsec is an astronomical until of length, so that is ridiculous, that would be like saying..."Whoa, that guy is so fast, he ran a Marathon in 4 miles."
What do you think most of the writers for WoTC do anyway? They live in their basements wearing furry costumes and get married to standup cutouts of Deanna Troi.
By the time it's released, there will probably be three Jedi for every ship!
This new expansion is going to drive economic inflation to new heights, as the people with several hundred million will pay it for a starship or components and the crafters know this. Therefore, said crafters won't be selling to the people who haven't bought money or been in the game since Beta and have an established income. I think the space expansion will lead to more people entering the game, but less people actually sticking with it. This rule will generally apply untill there are enough starship products and services in the market to force the prices down to more human levels.
For those of you that are not in the game but are considering it, your average mission payout for a solo mission is about 1200 or so credits. If a starship costs you half a million, it's going to take a LOT of mission running to get there, either that or grouping on the "adventure planets". The payouts are better with missions on these planets, but unless your Guild/Player Association is out there with you, you'll likely have a group of complete fools that will get you killed more often then they will make you money.
On and upward note, Sony has removed the necessity for having a membership to read the SWG forums. If you're interested in getting in and not burning-out before you get your X-wing, I'd be patient and poke around over here [until things settle to a dull roar following release.
Given Sony's history of buggy releases and expansions, being patient but informed may prove to be a much more agreeable path.
I think the made-up-after-the-fact idea is that the Kessel Run requires a complicated dangerous flight path, but which can be reduced in length with a fast ship (and skillful piloting?).
l /? id=eu
http://www.starwars.com/databank/location/kesse
"...another approach was just a pure contest of raw speed that skirted dangerously close to the black holes of the Maw Cluster. A smuggler that managed to shave off a sizable portion of the 18-parsec Kessel Run had bragging rights indeed."
actually this would make sense if the engine is warping space aroudn it.
so say the kestle run is 300 parsecs long in normal space, his engine might jsut be strong enough to shrink that space to just 12 parsecs,
all the ships would go at the speed of light it is the power of the warping factor of the engine that would then make the real difference.
The line "She'll make point five past lightspeed" always got me. I assume it means that the ship can travel at 1.5 times the speed of light
.5) is a fast ass ship. Take the time to travel from A to B and multiply it by the hyperdrive modifier. In this case, the halving the travel time.
I dunno how it works in the books and what not, but I remember it being explained in both the XvT series and that awful strategy game (that I can't remember the name of) as a modifier of travel time.
So, the Falcon (which can make
The ratings on the bigger ships tended to be 1 and up, and the Death Star's was like 4 or 5... meaning it took a long time to get anywhere.
Actually if you read some of the books, the Kessel run is the path out of Kessel past a large number of black holes. Han was bragging about how short of a run he made. Kind of off road experience in space. The books say that the path Han took was plotted as unsafe by the computers, and the slower ships that were following him were sucked in by the black holes.
Warning, cape does not enable user to fly
I've heard this explanation as well but it sounds like a total coverup for what was an obvious mistake. It's like saying, I drove from Chicago to New York in only 500 miles! And without the back story you provide, a viewer watching Star Wars would think it nonsensical. The parsec reference was obviously thrown in because it was found in the research and sounded 'spacey.' Lucas can't and won't admit he made a mistake so instead he comes up with a few details that seem to explain what he really meant.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
Han solo was the first to mention it:
Greedo mentioned it first.
Actually, it's not that far off. "Light-year" is a unit of space-time, and so is "light-parsec." So you can use it to measure length against a set unit of time, or time against a set unit of length.
But yeah, Lucas probably just stumbled onto that one by accident.
from parallactic arcsecond A parsec (abbreviated pc) is the distance at which a star or other object shows a parallax of one arcsecond due to the motion of the Earth around the Sun. One parsec is exactly equal to 648000/pi AU, and approximately equal to 206265 AU, 3.086e16 m, 1.917e13 mi, and 3.2616 lightyears. A kiloparsec (abbreviated kpc) is 1000 pc (or about 3262 lightyears), a megaparsec (abbreviated Mpc) is 1,000,000 pc (or about 3 million lightyears), and a gigaparsec (abbreviated Gpc) is 1,000,000,000 pc.
define: Parsec
Here's the handwaving from the SW RPG, in a nutshell. The Kessel run is through very dangerous space, with lots of gravity wells and the like that make hyperspace travel very tricky. Most pilots have to plot a course way around the nastiest parts or risk tearing their ship apart on a black hole or whatnot. Han Solo bragging about only 12 parsecs means that he plotted a course right through some of the worst regions, shaving a respectable distance off the trip.
:)
Or you can just assume that Lucas didn't know squat about astronomy, which is where I stand.
Actually those who have no Idea what a Parsec is, would still be pretty engrossed.
Thats like 99% of the people who watched star wars, just in case you forgot.
This *might* make me re-up my subscription.
The key here is that they're going to have to use the grace period allowed by the influx of dogfighters at the end of the year to fix the game before anyone notices that everything not space related is kinda boring.
I definately have to give them credit, they've done a really good job of turning a barren wasteland of content into a barren wasteland of content with a few dungeons. They're moving in the right direction. The Jedi Revamp, Corellian Corvette, and Droid Publish are all big improvements to the game.
In some ways, the failures of SWG are interesting to watch as a non-player because you can sit and watch SOE's development process in rapid-fire action. Good luck to them, I say.
So they release an expansion and CHARGE 20 - 30 dollars for it?
Um, isn't this what the monthly fee is suppose to be for? You buy the game and pay the fee. Shouldn't it be up to sony to continue to inovate and add enhancements *at no additional charge*?
After all, you're already paying for it.
-Mark
Dovie'andi se tovya sagain.
good show
Attention deficit disorder is a complicated issue, spanning several major... HEY LET'S GO RIDE BIKES!
I am going to assume it was a mistake, based soley on Jar Jar Binks.Had Jar Jar not been in the prequels, I would have given Lucas the benefit of the doubt. But thanks for all of the useful info. I am a Star Wars Fan to the core, but I have not read the books, just seen the movies a few hundred times. It is nice to know I can always count on fellow Slashdoters to fill in the gaps for me!
The Kessel Run has been the topic of much speculation given Solo's confusing boast of completing the Kessel Run in "less than 12 parsecs." Given that a parsec is a unit of measurement and not of time, it hardly seemed like a speed record.
The Star Wars Technical Journal came up with a workable explanation that saw a Kessel Runner have to deposit smuggled spice shipments in between freighters traveling at a fixed speed, so that the shorter distance covered by said freighters during a Run was worth bragging about. Another version of the Kessel Run, spun out of the Jedi Academy Trilogy, required a smuggling ship to skirt close to the black holes of the Maw Cluster, shortening the distance only through skillful piloting and powerful engines.
Of course, the simplest solution is the one favored by George Lucas, and the one that appeared in the screenplay for A New Hope. Han's boast was nothing more than a lie, meant to hoodwink provincial customers. Obi-Wan's knowing glance suggests he saw right through Solo's meaningless bragging.
This is from the official Databank
Wow, you sure seem to know a lot about it.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
No, that's a Rogue Squadron game. I mean the flight-sim-in-space games: X-Wing, Tie Fighter, etc.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
Korean type games like Lineage, Ragnarok and Priston tales are extremely limited bash-em-ups. Rigid class structure, limited weapons, limited moves. Lineage 2 even stand aparts from the other 2 for allowing, shock and horror, you to CHOOSE your sex, rather then have a sex forced on you based on your class.
Of course Koreans play the games in a totally different way. When you play any game in a real group at a physical location like a cyber cafe a lot of the fun comes not just from the game but from playing against friends you can talk to. It then actually helps if the game ain't to complex or deep as you can chat while your character just bashes away.
Personally I have had absolute blasts at cybercafes playing worms and other ancient titles when I had long since ditched those games when playing at home.
I am not saying I agree totally with the selling of addons when I also have to pay per month but it is not like Star Wars Galaxies is raking in the dough while spending nothing. Any mmorpg of its class costs a hell of a lot to maintain and they got the added burden of the licensing costs. Personally I have a greater problem with me having to pay the same subscription when I play once per week as someone who is logged in 12/7.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Hyperspace travel is a case of pointing in the right direction and hitting your engine. You will then leave this universe and enter hyperspace where time and distance are different but gravity is not. The trick is therefore to make sure there is nothing in your way. Hitting a gravity well while in hyperspace is rumored not to be a good thing.
Why yes I am single. How did you guess?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Then Han shot him with his walkie-talkie...