The Time Dialation Field

I've been pondering for a little while how to make the time dialation field such as seen in the Stargate SG1 Season 10 Episode 20.

It wuold need to be able to...

Either

- Freeze everyone else on screen and prevent jumps into the system allowing the player to move freely... (pretty difficult)

- Insanely increase the speed and turn rate and acceleration and shield recharge of the player for a limited period of time (maybe not too difficult)

or

-
some mixture of the two above, what does everyone think and what is possible.

You might be able to fake the latter by adding an outfit that has those abilities at the start of a mission, and then you lose the outfit at the end of the mission.

@mackilroy, on Dec 18 2007, 03:25 PM, said in How would you do this...:

You might be able to fake the latter by adding an outfit that has those abilities at the start of a mission, and then you lose the outfit at the end of the mission.

Either could be done.
Either do the outfit that grants benefits to the player, if the field is in one system for a certain amount of time then you could:
Lets say the field is in system X (could be done in more than one system the same way)
Make a new version of system X with a require visbit thats set whenever...
Have alternate versions of a handful of ships with a greatly reduced turn rate that are linked to Dude resources that could then be placed in the new system X.

The only problem is that if a pers happened to show up, they would be normal... of course that might be an ok effect, or you could just keep it from happening by giving system X a new government, and not giving any pers or flets the ability to appear in that system.

Did that make sense?

That way it might not be quite as noticable...

Or you could build in something about the x2 bug to increase game speed to 200%...

I'd use a high-range, invisible ionizing weapon. That would keep people from moving much. Have it repeat (via submunitioning) every few seconds to keep everything nice and still. Of course, you'd probably want to keep it from affecting you as well. Note that this could end up turning all of the ships the color of their designated 'ionized' color and they'd still have some movement, thought much retarded.

Werhner

@lostpinky, on Dec 18 2007, 09:19 PM, said in How would you do this...:

- Freeze everyone else on screen and prevent jumps into the system allowing the player to move freely... (pretty difficult)

- Insanely increase the speed and turn rate and acceleration and shield recharge of the player for a limited period of time (maybe not too difficult)

I'd agree with the above poster on the first one with a couple of changes. Just make it an unguided weapon with ridiculous ionization, count 1, speed 1, blast radius of whatever the upper limit is (probably in the 500-1000 range would be safe), and then check the "detonate at end of life" and "blast doesn't hurt player" fields. Also, the outfit could be made to have a secondary function of reinforcement inhibitor with a modval of -1 which would prevent all reinforcements from entering the system, but would not keep new ships out.

For the second idea, like you said, you can just give the outfit when a mission starts and take it away when it ends, but if you only wanted it to last for a set amount of time, here's another way you could go about it:

When the player gets the outfit, have it start a mission. This mission spawns an invisible ship that hypers in after a delay. The ship objective is "observe." When the ship objective is complete, it starts another, identical mission. This process takes around 5 seconds, and can be repeated as many times as you'd like, until you get to the last mission, which, on observing the ship (which means just being in the same system unless it's cloaked), removes the outfit. That way, you could have it last for any variable amount of time you want assuming you have the mission slots to dedicate to it.

This post has been edited by Archon : 18 December 2007 - 09:22 PM

I don't think anything that could be done in Nova would be consistent with the behavior of the Asgard TDF seen on the show.

The bubble, apparently, cannot move once it's created. So it would essentially just be like pressing the pause button.

There is no such thing as absolute immobility, of course. But motion relative to objects immediately outside the bubble appears to be impossible.

@lindley, on Dec 18 2007, 09:10 PM, said in How would you do this...:

I don't think anything that could be done in Nova would be consistent with the behavior of the Asgard TDF seen on the show.

The bubble, apparently, cannot move once it's created. So it would essentially just be like pressing the pause button.

There is no such thing as absolute immobility, of course. But motion relative to objects immediately outside the bubble appears to be impossible.

I still say my idea would work... just make sure the bubble activates when you land or before you jump in, then have modified ships that are immobile as the syst dudes.

I like the ionisation idea to slow everything else down, that would be sufficent for the purpose i'm thinking of and it could be used over and over, or set to drain power and cut off once the power is gone which is awesome. I'll play around with it a bit and see what i can come up with thanks guys.

It may not be exactly like the show but just becuase we saw one function on the show doesn't mean the TDF doesn't do more things... hell imagine they get back to Earth and activate the TDF for the enitre planet, in what seems like overnight we could jump 50 years ahead in technology... that would be awesome, and given the time to study the asgard stuff we could do it without the Ori interfering... (fades into the distance thinking of the possibilities, mission idea just comes to mind)

If you wanted, you could have it so the mission sends you to another system, which you have made identical to the previous one, except in this system, you make several random unlandable spobs and give them ship graphics. You still have the main planet that you make landable, then once they complete the mission, send them back to the normal system. Would that work for what you want to do?

@lostpinky, on Dec 19 2007, 09:43 PM, said in How would you do this...:

It may not be exactly like the show but just becuase we saw one function on the show doesn't mean the TDF doesn't do more things...

Maybe, but it seems like it would be easier to figure out how to move the bubble through space than to reverse time within it; if it were possible.

The notion of speeding up Earth alone is an interesting one, although that would require revealing things to the public. (The stars stopping in the sty would get noticed.)

Not to mention it would be really peculiar that all of a sudden the sun decided to shine on one particular part of earth for a good 50 years...

Good crops on the bright side of the planet though! Everybody on the dark side would be pretty depressed by the end though. I hope the SG universe has full-spectrum lightbulbs.