Most amazing thing, maybe ever

I would have thought so indeed … but it is still quite amazing even if it’s only 7 years old ! :slight_smile:

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A while back, the Traveller was being pestered by messages that claimed to come from the future. Someone (probably Telamon, but it wasn’t clear) said this must be untrue, as time travel is impossible.

Then again, someone is lying to the traveller. The dead travellers and the abandoned building texts say so.

In a universe that lies to you about time travel, why would you be surprised at a game that was in use three years before it was launched?

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The thing with black hole diving in this case is that there is no indication how close the ultimate target is. What I needed to do, I think, was dive black holes and make five jump runs at the target to establish a vector. I sort of did that without the five jump runs using two systems I already had in my station jump list, but without the jumps my vectors were wildly vague and mostly just good for “okay that quadrant of the galaxy probably” level locating. If I had used black holes leading into that quadrant, say four or five of them, and established at least somewhat more refined vectors to triangulate I could have gotten a lot smaller target area and then just dove until I hit close to that.

Really, the way I was using the anomaly to get around would have worked just as well as the black holes. It was the establishing more precise vectors that would have made the difference. Should have thought a little more before I just started jumping, but I really thought I had to be within a couple hundred thousand light years and I could just brute force it from there. Now, since I am about three hundred thousand light years closer to it than I was I am pretty well committed to just jumping on. If I spent a day on vector analysis and it pointed to a system that is like five jumps further down my current path it would just be too infuriating to deal with.

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Okay.

So, there is no actual indication that I have ever been here. When I jumped in I was informed that it was discovered two years ago by someone else. Anticlimactic, to say the least.

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“Its not the destination, it’s the journey.”

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“Journey” does not really do that justice. Odyssey…maybe pilgrimage…

I definitely lost count, but it was in the neighborhood of 400 jumps.

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Well, you may have discovered it then it was written over by another player going there. I have had that happen to me many times. Maybe has to do with discovery services being down. I have spent weeks on a planet only to come back a month later and find its discovery attributed to someone else. :face_with_raised_eyebrow: I pack up and leave.

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As I understand it, when you are the first player to discover a system, that system is attributed to you - but only in your own, local, database. The discovery is also dated.

The discovery and ownership will not, however, be visible to other players, until you claim the discovery - this updates the remote server, and makes the information available to all players.

Imagine that in January, I discover a new system. Let’s call it Ploot. I explore Ploot, but I do not claim the discovery. On my computer, I will be recorded as the discoverer of Ploot, but to everyone else it will be undiscovered.

In March, player X finds Ploot. Because I haven’t claimed my discovery, player X will see Ploot as undiscovered. The system will allow Player X to claim Ploot, and name it. Player X then goes about building bases and otherwise developing a system which they believe they own.

In May I upload my collected discoveries, including Ploot, to the server. Because my discovery of Ploot pre-dates that of player X, their discovery gets overwritten. The system they thought they owned now belongs to someone else.

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This is why I always upload findings as I go.

This ten year bugged system is still a complete mystery though.

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One possible explanation to the value showing 10 years would be a rounding artifact. Of course this is just a idea but it is based on code I’ve written a few times before. When humanizing a duration we start with showing ‘Just now’ for a few seconds, rounding to minutes somewhere between 30 and 45 seconds, rounding to hours after some number of minutes, then days, weeks, months, years, etc. Their ‘etc’ could have included decades and the cut over time could be 6-7 years. I’ve done this both with a table approach and by calculating a logarithm (based on a 1990 idea by Paul Heckbert). Either could trivially include rounding for decades, centuries and even millennia.

Another possibility is data loss in the server. The timestamp could have gotten lost/corrupted and be holding a default value, often zero, which represents some epoch. Common epochs that I have encountered are 1970 , 1900 and 1601. In this case they could cap the duration to 10 years assuming that they thought that the game wouldn’t need anything more that that–I’m rooting for 10 years and more :slight_smile:

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I did consider rounding; pretty much first thought. Then I discarded it because of some numerical considerations that I now think were nowhere near as obvious as I thought. Because we are not really talking about ‘rounding’ in the typical decimal system sense, we would be talking about bit rounding in presumably a base some power of two register that would artifact into decimal in ways that would not be obvious.

On the other hand, data loss would be supported by me getting there and finding that it had been ‘rediscovered.’ I dunno. Pretty mysterious. Fits in well with the inscrutable and mostly all powerful Atlas.

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