Spacer: What if Freelancer had more realistic space?

[Backo]

NPC Traders
Traders now spawn from each station at random intervals to trade with any other station that is friendly to the origin station. They fly the same ships as you and mostly* follow the same simulation rules as you.
*Except they do not suffer from Main Character syndrome and as such can't control the time acceleration so sometimes their simulation gets simplified a lot when the time step is much higher than what they need for detailed simulation precision. They also cheat and quickdock, but who can blame them when powertrading like a real Discovery player?

Here you can see the renown John Trader having 1 more waypoint remaining and his cargo hold full of Food Rations is likely to fetch a good price (18 credits profit per unit). His Pelican is heavier and thus slower than my empty Rhino so his intercept burn takes longer, but his intercept waypoint is earlier than my waypoint so he quickly catches up and overtakes me. And just like my ship would, his turns around and deaccelerates at the last moment to match the speed and trajectory of the destination station.

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But what if John Trader was not alone? What if there were a couple of hundred more of him and we turned up the time scale to 11 somewhere between 100000 and 1000000? At such high time acceleration, reserved for when the player is approaching distant targets (after the initial burn and before the deacceleration), you don't really see the traders making those burns as each tick can be up to 4 hours. But you can still see them fly towards their target, forming neat lanes as they form a column due to the trip taking upwards to 50-70 days, but them spawning every 1-3 days or so. What I really like about this video is how as the stations and planet move, the NPC lanes change as the previous trajectories become less optimal or even impossible.

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It is still not perfect though and sometimes John Trader (and his brothers) stray from the correct path and end up dead drifting away into the cold dead void that is empty space, like that Pelican you see at the very start at the top left, near Pittsburgh (that orange-brown spinning disco ball) or that Rhino that fires like a bullet towards the bottom left corner of the screen. But hopefully just like with the player navigation system, I'll eventually iron these little mishaps out so that John Trader becomes competent enough for a flight license.

The player navigation system that works for intercepting stations, works also for NPCs. The only requirement for success is that you try to intercept a stable trajectory (them drifting on the approach to their target and not currently burning to change their trajectory). Here you can see me stop comically close to John Trader and giving him a taste of my engine exhaust. Luckily weapons and combat AI are still not a thing so he can not retaliate.

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Current plan is that once combat and more advanced NPCs are in, such an interception to the target (be it NPC or you)'s approach trajectory is going to be the start to police interdictions, piracy or any other reason for plain old violence and conflict. I'll probably make it so you can adjust the deacceleration burn to happen on engine thrust mode (much faster but more fuel expensive) so that the target has less time to react and to also add IFFs and scanner ranges so that you don't get map hack to see everything everywhere at all times. But that all planned for the future. Fingers crossed I don't burn out before we get there again.

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Republic of the Sword and Sun