Scene "realism" vs Optimized scene

Hello!

I am currently working in the main "ground" for my game, which consists in a 2D space survival game. The main places the player will be hanging around are, of course, solar systems. Having a lot of stuff in them, such as planets, stations, and other fun and dangerous things, I've come to a pause while considering something.​

Should I shrink the solar systems, in a way the player can reach all the celestials in a solar system within seconds, previously stating that the player is permanently within a sub-space bubble that allows him to move FTL, or make very large solar systems, which would make the player spend some minutes (may just 3, idk) to cross the entire system, and adding a "warp" option to celestials so the ship goes FTL on command, and subspace as the standard velocity?

Having the second option would add realism when in combat, because the difference between travel and standard modes would be clear, and helps the lore behing the tech we're using. The first option, however, would make everything easier to reach without need of extra commands, plus it helps me and the procedural system with our work, but having a fight on frigates that can cross the whole solar system within 30 seconds, being highly clear with the planets and sun in the background is probably going to look a bit weird and unrealistic, cutting the immersion.

What implications would come on this, regarding optimization (knowing we're working with sprites, and maybe sounds tied to celestials (different sound being close to an ice planet compared to the sun or a station), and overall user experience?
What system do you like the most, as developer and player?

 

From a completely non-technical standpoint, I think it comes down to how you want your game to feel, which is highly subjective. I think in any case you're throwing "realism" out the window. There is no known technology that would allow anyone to travel across a solar system in either minutes, or seconds. A decade is more realistic with known technologies. So in terms of realism, I don't think it matters.

If you make it take seconds, the game will feel arcadey and small. If you make it take minutes, it might feel more grandiose, or it might just feel clunky and boring. Is anything happening during those 3 minutes or are you just sitting there holding "w" and staring at the clock? I'm thinking back to my days playing Eve Online. A lot of times slowly travelling around was pretty boring, but occasionally the slowness actually increased the tension and excitement of the game because you could be in high risk areas where pirates could jump in at any moment.

What feel are you going for?

From a technical standpoint, you'll need to be aware of the limitations of Unity's 32-bit floating point representation of the world. I wrote a crappy article about it here: https://jschiff.com/Something-About-Floats/. The gist is that you should really keep everything in the world within the range of about -1000 to 1000 "unity units" for things to work well. Otherwise you risk starting to run into serious floating point precision problems. Unity's physics are also generally tuned around 1 Unity Unit = 1 real world meter. So you'll need to keep that in mind if you are using physics and you decide to treat Unity's unit as something larger or smaller than a meter. You may find that if you want to make a really big world you need to look into a concept called "floating origin", in which you recenter the origin of the world around the player to keep everything within that ~1000 unit range. Games like Kerbal Space Program do this.

 

Having spent some time with No Man's Sky, I can say I enjoy how the speed of movement scales relative to the distance you're traveling at a given time.. so for example when you're on a planet surface it's walking/running speed and that's perfect, but then in your space ship when close to the planet surface it feels as fast for that as it should, and when you're high in the atmosphere it's as fast as if you're comfortably orbiting the planet.. then like "warp" speed flying between planets, and I think what they've done well and what's important is that it never FEELS like it's taking forever to get anywhere. I think it's less about the scale and more about the experience of navigating. Also, some enjoyable transitions between areas could make it feel like you've traveled light years when in fact it's just another scene ..or having jumped a few hundred world space units

 

Thanks for your replies, guys!
I've decided to keep the system in a relatively big scene, from which you will effectively take 3 minutes if you manually travel through it, but you will have an option to warp to any celestial you want, making you move to it very quick. This will give the player the option to move manually and potentially find unwarpable locations, that you can only notice if you're at a certain distance, self-immersion, and combat, while using the warp to just get where he wants to be.

Since I think I will have to build my own procedural system, fixing a solar system wide size is the best option so the scripts don't break once they all start working together.

 

I forgot to add on the previous reply. This game is set 5,000 years in the future. We already met another civilization, we have FTL warp drives, and ships the size of a town. I'll take my time to explain how we got there on data logs and the like to be found across the galaxy.

I will take a look at your article, I've noticed that I accidentaly created a simple yet useful rotation system that may come great if I want to add orbits to planets and the like, so learning stuff may bring more interesting discoveries!
Ah, I'm also an EVE Online player.