Could I travel between systems without jumping?

[LouieH]

If I really wanted to could I find two close systems and travel in supercruse from one to the other,

[Dolphin Bottlenose]

It has been attempted before - you will reach that system, but the will be an empty space - no stars or stations.

Doing a jump to another star system loads that new star system. It's basically a glorious loading screen. Without loading the new system you can't have that system.

[Wylie28]

No hyperspace entry is the only thing that triggers system level generation. You can however manually fly to all the planets in the same system. But not stations as supercruise dropping triggers thier instantiation as well.

[LouieH]

Originally posted by Dolphin Bottlenose:

It has been attempted before - you will reach that system, but the will be an empty space - no stars or stations.

Doing a jump to another star system loads that new star system. It's basically a glorious loading screen. Without loading the new system you can't have that system.

There goes my plans for a road trip, shame.

[ReeNoiP]

Well if you like flying in supercruise you can always visit Hutton Orbital and get some mugs and a free Anaconda.

[ZombieHunter]

The FSD screen is basically an elevator in other games. It is a loading area.

There is a good computer sciencey reason it was done this way and it has to do with the min and max values of values. Of course one could use 'sectors' and each local coordinate was relative to the sector you were in. So one sector could have min,min,min - max,max,max values and you could have a collection of 0 to max sectors. Then if that isn't enough you could use a 3d array of sectors that were each min,min,min - max,max,max large and the 3d array could be 0,0,0 to max,max,max large and then each 'whatever you want to call the area' would be 0 to max.

Anything is possible with abstractions but load screens is the way FD chose to handle it and it is the simplest easiest to develop approach. So each little system on your galaxy map is a 'level' that is loaded and what determines if you can get there is the 'cost' between your system and that system. Then the game says 'load up system X' and it does this in the background while you watch the fancy FSD witch space display.