Suggestion summary: Allow warp from system to Sun Sector, remove all but Sun Bottom Reasoning: - The ability to warp your mothership to a sun sector, undock and explore it in an SV, then warp back to the sun sector would a very nice QoL improvement - The fact that when you warp to another star and back, htat you can end up in an entirely different sun sector is a massive annoyance, which massively outweighs the slight added realism involved in having separate sun sectors where the star, moon, and planet positions change proportionally to which sector you are in - Names like North, South, East, West, Top, Bottom don't really make sense anyway as there is no "up" in space - Eliminating all sun sectors except Sun Bottom would be optimal as you can see most/all features in the local star system, the light comes down from above which makes for better visibility and screenshots, and GREATLY cuts down on the total number of unused playfields which must be present anyway on every MP server Thank you for your consideration
This would mean that every time you warp into a new system, the sun would always be directly overhead. It would actually make it much harder to take cool screenshots then and anyone building within the sun sectors would be required to build with solar panels facing upwards instead of outwards, and wouldn't be able to enjoy the nice view of the sun since it would be directly overhead. You can already warp back to your mothership by using the registry to place a bookmark on your ship and/or placing a bookmark in the sector before you leave. Directions would still be used for navigation. For example the galaxy would have a north, south, east, west, top, and bottom as the galactic powers would agree on a common set of guidelines for navigation, same as it works on Earth. Not to mention that the game itself obviously has a coordinate system and one of those is "up". The game has an absolute up/down, and every space station must be placed while level with the playfield plane otherwise you run into issues with, for example, NPCs, accidentally building your ship or station backwards, docking, etc. The only reason not to orient your space station to the plane of the playfield would be if you're building in one of the few sectors that isn't level with the plane of the star system you're in, or for appearances. But not being level just makes it so much more annoying to use your space station.
I understand that the game defines an "up", etc, and I understand that some people want to be able to see the sun out the window, but the real problem is that every single star system in the game has 6 sun sectors, and getting back to a specific one is a pain. This is a pretty lousy solution tbh. Especially given how annoying it can be to clear one specific HUD marker once you've left the sector it was set in, and especially if you are doing a ton of exploration and want to be able to leave your mothership in a sun sector and return to it every time you enter a new system. Removing 5 out of the 6 sun sectors would for example remove 140,000 - 150,000 redundant playfields from your RE/PE scenarios, saving TONS of MP database bloat, and greatly reduce the odds of triggering the failed warp bug (which is virtually guaranteed unless your server only has 1-2 players and has less than 32GB RAM dedicated to it). Heck, even if they reduced it to two, say Sun East and Sun West, it would go a long way, but so long as you can't warp directly to them from inside the same system, it's still going to be very annoying and immersion-breaking. If 5 out of the 6 were removed and no one were told, would more than 5% of players actually notice anything other than a faster game with fewer warp bugs?
I don't think removing a few empty playfields will have any performance impact. I reduced the overall size of the Galaxy by about 40% and that made no difference.
The vanilla game doesn't really have the warp bug whereas RE seems to, so it must make a difference at some point. But even if not, it still reduces database size, helps with the fact that you currently may have to warp out to different stars and back and still end up in the wrong sun sector, and it also would help a bit with the fact that there are so many playfields (even in the vanilla game) that you basically never run into another player other than in the starter systems unless you play with a tiny galaxy or tell people where to meet you.
I've played on large and small servers odd varying scenarios. Never had the warp bug as you describe it. (Simply a failed warp) The one exception being a few play fields with bad configs on official servers. (Was quickly fixed) Oddball glitches like that seem more tied to server population size than galaxy size. Also, your argument that it'll increase chances to meet other players is pointless. Removing even half the play fields won't see players bumping into each other. Official EU and NA only run about 100 random systems, and you almost never meet players outside of the starter systems, PvP, and like two hotspots (Polaris home system). It's like getting two lottery tickets; sure, your chances are doubled, but it's still so low that it doesn't matter. Ravien's points are correct too, and I agree.
I've had it on brand new RE servers before, I've even had it on my own before. I reduced it by bumping up the spare playfields amount, but if someone is hopping across the galaxy as fast as they can, they're going to run into it eventually. I do think certain versions of the base game were more likely to result in failed warps than others though, and ever since they added that long unavoidable delay between warps, that seems to have reduced it a bit. Sure, it's a numbers game, but an argument to not reduce redundant playfields might as well be an argument to introduce more of them, and I don't see anyone asking for a galaxy with 100 million stars "for realism" and 12 sun sectors per star or something. Players are WAY more likely to set up shop in some systems rather than others, so it's actually not hard to track down players' bases on a 100-star server if you know what players like to have in the same system as their base, and that tends to include peaceful sectors very close to a bright star, systems with several valuable/rare asteroids, or with many moons so profitable trading routes are easier to find. The lower the percent of playfields are sun sectors, the more percent of the playfields are going to be ones that get used or have players or their bases in them. I don't see why someone wouldn't want to aggressively eliminate things that add nothing to the gameplay, other than to waste people's time and storage space on the server (which multiplies quickly when several backups are being taken and kept).
