Have you ever...

fallen asleep while waiting to drop out of FTL travel?

I have.

Please make it shorter.

 

Remember it is tied to load times, so it depends on your systems specs, though they can maybe speed up planet loading some more.

 

It's a good suggestion. I have never fallen asleep maybe I wasn't playing the game half asleep. Still I understand it depends on the load time like link said.

 

I have fallen asleep doing things before, if i was tired and was running starbound slow enough i likely could drift off... need about 15 minutes though. It is odd waking up and realizing "oh i was doing something!"

 

Well... @linkthegamer believes:

But I am not sure if that's quite entirely true. I mean, you can initiate system warp then quit to the main menu. Then when you reload the save you are automatically at the planet you were warping to. And then there's this in the /interface/cockpit/cockpit.config file:

Code:

    "disembark" : [0, 85],
    "disembarkLoop" : [86, 90],
    "disembarkTime" : 6,
    "disembarkLoopTime" : 0.2,

    "speedUp" : [91, 125],
    "speedUpLoop" : [126, 130],
    "speedUpTime" : 2.5,
    "speedUpLoopTime" : 0.2,

    "jump" : [131, 140],
    "jumpLoop" : [141, 145],
    "jumpTime" : 0.5,
    "jumpLoopTime" : 0.2,

    "speedDown" : [146, 163],
    "speedDownLoop" : [164, 168],
    "speedDownTime" : 1.5,
    "speedDownLoopTime" : 0.2,

    "arrive" : [169, 198],
    "arriveLoop" : [199, 199],
    "arriveTime" : 2,
    "arriveLoopTime" : 0.5,

I have work soon so I don't have time to fiddle about with that section. But if someone does have the time or inclination I think that's the FTL warp animation related stuff. Also, it goes without saying but don't deliberately try skipping the FTL animation just yet. If I am wrong and @linkthegamer were to be right you risk data corruption.

edit: If there are no takers for some FTL animation experimentation then I will try tinkering after work, and I will report back with my findings.

edit 2: Actually, the above JSON may be just the interface animation. But like I said, no time to do any fiddling at the moment.

edit 3: There's also this in sky.config

Code:

  "speedupTimer" : 1.0,
  "flyingTimer" : 1.0,
  "slowdownTimer" : 1.0,
  "flashTimer" : 0.0,

 

You can travel gazillions of miles in a matter of seconds, and it's still too slow? Geez, kids these days with their entitlement...

It's about 30 seconds, right? I believe they said that the time was allotted to allow the largest planets to be fully created before you arrive as long as you meet the minimum system requirements. It probably isn't necessary for someone with a better PC to wait that long, which is why people quitting+loading can bypass it.

I would like it if they cut down the time spent myself, to be honest, though usually I find other things to do in the mean time.

 

I am just going by what developers have said. The FTL squeance is supposed to mask planet loading. Basically it is intended to be a playable "loading screen". If that has changed (it is possible) I would have missed the memo, I mean I did miss the one about changing the sectors of the universe after all.

I do wonder though, even if I am right, if you can shave a few seconds off by speeding up starting up and slowing down if infact the loading is only during the travel part of the animation. Hmm...

 

I was unaware that the time spent in FTL was related to planet loading. I guess that makes sense. I suppose then if you have multiple players traveling on the same ship it would finally stop when the last player finally loaded the destination.

And to the guy who called me an entitled child, f*** you. I have two kids, a wife and a full time job that all come before my rare opportunities to play video games (which may help explain why I might fall asleep if I sit idle for a while staring at stars whizzing by). My particular playstyle is to craft/sort/organize myself prior to choosing my new destination so I'm ready to go when I arrive.

Thanks everyone for the responses.

 

I didn't even think about multiplayer. Yeah, maybe in MP it is held up by the slowest player. It does seem to take longer when someone else is on the ship. Or maybe it's the server that has to do the loading?

Though I'm still fairly certain that there's a minimum amount of time you have to wait, at least in single player.

Only as a joke, dude, I promise (Sorry, guess I should've said that...)

I try not to do that seriously. Assumes way too much about the other person behind the keyboard.

 

use [joke][/joke] or [sarcasm][/sarcasm] tags, hard to tell someone joking from someone literally thinking the user is a child due to the lack of facial and vocal cues.

 

Thanks. I reacted a bit harshly but I didn't catch sarcasm in the tone of the post. It's hard to determine true intent of a statement when reading text alone.

 

It's obviously not directly tied to loading times, just a percentage of the total animation is, or you'd have very short FTL animations on fast computers, so they intentionally made it a fixed amount of time to make it more or less even for both faster and slower computers.

It can be shortened safely though I think, they made the duration a bit generous, and even if anything still has to be loaded/generated after the animation, it won't take so long anymore.

 

Didn't mean like a 1:1 loading bar style, I just remembered them mentioning it was to cover up planet generation so it you did not have to deal with watching a planet load. Hehe, be kinda halarious to see FTL travel on a fast computer, booting FTL ... powering down.

 

I can't say I've fallen asleep, but I can say it becomes a problem riding with people who have weak connections or slower computers. As linkthegamer said, this is tied to loading times. It doesn't help playing on a slow server either.

 

Oh! I did it!
So yeah, changing flyingTimer shortens the trip, I changed it to 1.0 instead of 30.0 and I arrived almost instantly.

Edit: Also, not sure about other people's computers, but even the rediculously short warp was long enough to load the planet.

Edit2: Setting it to 0.0 works as well.

 

What are your specs? Maybe we can do a test of this.

 

Oh also, a good way to test how long a planet takes to load on your computer is to move to a planet you haven't been to, exit the game and delete it's file in the universe folder, then start up the game again.
The planet shouldn't be there when you appear on your ship, and trying to teleport to it puts you in limbo. But, after awhile it will appear and you can teleport to it.

 

Cool. Thanks for trying it out @DoomFire

Some follow up experimentation would be required, though. Something that @Skarn said (and @Archer also alluded to) is the effect of the animation in multiplayer. Seeing that a lot of stuff in Starbound is client side, this will make for some interesting investigation. Is the animation length forced by the server (i.e. is it a strictly server-side parameter) or can players set different values?

... And if different players do have different animation values, what is the effect on gameplay?

edit: Yep. I tried the tweak too. It does indeed make the warp almost instant. At least on singleplayer

 

I think it will make the FTL speedy on multiplayer too (client setting), but the speed at which the world loads will purely depend on the server's capabilities, so you could arrive at a void that fills later on.

You should test this out : P

 

I probably will try it out some more when my week gets less hectic.

I have a feeling that the world doesn't even actually load during FTL. Well, not in the way you'd expect. I think (think being the operative word here) that only the type of world is loaded (and the correct graphics rendered).

In terms of terrain generation it seems to be something that's generated on the fly while actually on the planet. Evidence to support this can be found by manually cranking the zoom level down in starbound.config. Set it to something like 0.5 and you'll see chunks loading one at a time. You may argue "Well, it could be a rendering issue". Maybe. But it doesn't seem to take so long to build chunks if you beam up to the ship then return to the planet...
... So it could be that it builds chunks {x} many blocks away from player position. For most people this would happen off-screen (so is practically unless there's some random lag spike). Though I have to wonder if there's anyone with an insane resolution that experiences visible chunk loading. If anyone reading this knows of a person with high resolution it would be awesome if could you tag them in this thread.

@Sremaj it seems your topic is teaching people some interesting things about the game engine. Also, you should check out the first post made by @DoomFire