Hey all, Trying to understand something. When I teleport a long distance, say to the other side of the planet or another playfield entirely, of course there's a loading screen as the Playfield is loaded. This is fine of course. However, I still get a Playfield reload occurring - at least, I assume that's what happening - when I just do a short-range Teleport. I like having Teleporters in my Bases and CV's - even the smaller utility ones. This makes life much easier as I just teleport directly to the base I've just landed on, rather than walking that distance. However, when I do this, despite only travelling a short distance, it still triggers the loading screen yet everything it could possibly be loading is already loaded. While the utility of short-range teleporting is still worth it, it is irksome that the game triggers a "changing playfield" type loading screen when I'm right there already. Picture this scenario. I have my large main base with three CV's docked. One is my main "Mobile Base" CV, another is a local-only "Freighter" CV for looting and collecting stuff, a third is a "POI Killer" CV I'm tinkering with, it was a wreck I found in space, so I decided to restore it. Teleporting between these - all within 100 metres of each other - triggers a loading screen of a compatible length to those when I teleport to another planet. This isn't a bug or anything, it'd just be nice if it were able to be streamlined a bit for pure QoL purposes. What do people think? Does this irk you too or do you not use teleporters? I didn't for ages but as I'm relatively material-rich, I've started installing them on everything. I even went back to my original base on Pandora (very peaceful) to add one so I can take a break once in a while lol.
Agreed, but I'm not sure the game keeps in memory all objects in the visible range, even those that are not visible. Also there can be environmental effects in the spawn zone that are not active (loaded) when the player activates the teleport (ex. temperature, radiation). Servers do a good job at teleporting the player at short distances without any load screen hahahaha... What I find way more annoying is the long warp animation showing thousands of star streaks around us when simply warping to a planet inside the same solar system...
I doubt this would be any priority for Eleon to look at, more streamlining this would be a nice QoL change. I don't know if many people make regular use of Teleporters as I do - as mentioned, I never used to - but not having that loading screen when there's technically nothing to load would be good. Thankfully, for me at least, my PC loads stuff pretty quickly (M.2's RAID 0) and has ample RAM (32GB) so loading is quick. Even with the "ok, I'll load the same stuff again cos reasons" delay, it's still quicker than sprinting between the Base and CV. Regarding intra-system warps, my hope is that this will evolve into literally moving the player to the new location at speed, with all the system's other bodies in physically correct positions. So, the planet we're flying to would simply grow in size with everything else relative to that. I wonder if systems will ever gain orbital mechanics...?
Many old games had instant teleport inside the same level, which of course could include a zone isolated from the rest of the "main" level. It could be a mirror-like plane that the player simply walked through and the player got out of the corresponding endpoint instantaneously. If teleporters could work that way in Empyrion then we could use them for traps/ special events in scenarios. I suspect that the reason everything is loaded/ unloaded is just because teleporters can connect 2 entirely different (but adjacent) playfields and that making a series of conditional checks to decide which version of the teleport feature is appropriate in any situation would only make things longer in all cases. It could also be that there's an auto-save triggered when using a teleporter, and that's another small delay to "hide" with a load screen... The reason I include the "warp" thing here is because it is just another version of the "teleporter" mechanic, with a forced animation that lasts too long for the stuff it really has to load. At some point I'm wondering if the animation itself is not also forcing a longer delay because of how it was implemented.
Same issue when you die and select a spawn location that is nearby. You still get a loading screen for no reason.
I think you're right re: the reasoning @Kassonnade, the teleport destination could be in another playfield. However, the game surely can tell whether it is or not without defaulting to "let's (re)load the playfield just in case" it does currently. @ravien_ff - very good point. I was thinking the exact same thing too. Of course, the delay is minimal now - well, my PC is quite fast - but there is still a delay before you get back into the action that's not really needed - assuming you choose to return to where you died of course. Again, I'm aware this is a minor thing, but I do believe it'd be nice QoL to have it work better and not unnecessarily reload a playfield. Thought: on a Multi-Player server with lots of players, I'd imagine it having to reload the Playfield every time someone dies / teleports places extra stress on it. This might lead to random stutters etc. (something fairly common in MP, from the videos I've seen) for other players.
Well even in the same playfield the game has to make changes to both the player file in the savegame and change coordinates/ inventory in the database, and the speed of the database access is not something that can be "foreseen" depending on what the player has been doing just prior to use the teleport. We all know how long it can take for the game to unload stuff (when it does) and how weird things happen when a player leaves an area : turrets not responding, constructors stop working, plants grow/ don't grow erratically, etc. Not saying an instant teleport is impossible, just saying that this game has many loose ends that may look innocuous but in reality are signs that the whole system is struggling to keep everything together without dropping some parts. Even with your top notch PC you seem to experience some of these weird issues, so I would be surprised if making anything "instantaneous" in this game is still possible without a few more optimisation cycles. It's also important to keep in mind that if a scenario is running, it relies on the API and this is a "listening" system, it does not tell the game what to do : it reacts to it, sends a request then waits to get the game's answer. In such cases, instant teleport could probably result in broken scenario chains/ timers/ messages display etc.
