This was already present in Frontier: Elite II released in 1993. You could travel at sub-light speeds as far as you wanted, visiting gas giants within the same star system and scooping fuel. But to get anywhere else, hyperspace was the only practical option.

The crazy part is that this 3D game was programmed in 68k assembly, ran smoothly on Amiga and Atari ST home computers, and fit on a single 1.44MB floppy. The massive universe with realistic solar systems was almost entirely procedural.

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mr_toad 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Jupiter is between 4 and 6 AU from Earth. So at the speed of light it would still take over half an hour to get there. It’d be a dull game flying anywhere at sub-light speeds.

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pavlov 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

It’s been over thirty years since I played Frontier, but I think you could accelerate the in-game time. So you didn’t have to sit still for hours to get to Jupiter. For your character, that time did pass.

	▲	davedx 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yup that’s how it worked - there were several time advance multiplier buttons. Anytime an enemy ship engaged you it forced you back to 1x time, annoyingly

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4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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