Have there been any discussions about delays in radio comms, voice-over-IP, over great distances?
TL;DRReal delays in long-distance comms are possible in theory but would be frustrating, so they're unsure; they could add static and dropouts with distance, and gameplay decisions aren't theirs to make.
So is the question, if I send a message now or I try to open a channel, at the point I'm talking, no one will intercept it until a delayed period of time based on distance?
Imagine once the Stanton system's complete, and you're at one farthest end of Stanton and the person that you're trying to contact is at the other farthest end. Would it still be a one-to-one, I talk, they hear, or are we discussing some kind of delay occurring? I was just watching an episode of The Expanse the other night where they were communicating back from Earth and the Moon and they were trying to have a conversation. They were stepping all over each other, that kind of thing.
Well, in theory, that is definitely possible. But would we want to have that experience in the game? Because that'd be very frustrating, right? If you're trying to have real-time conversations, everyone would just jump on a third party to be able to communicate. But the idea of being able to leave a message for someone to find, that would be wicked. So you can record a message and put it on, say, a probe or something, and then go, there you go, and someone can come across this recording. That'd be cool. Message in a bottle. I don't know if that as a feature is going to come online in regards to distance affecting comms. But what we could do is attenuate the signal based on distance. So introduce more static and more dropouts if you're far away, or based on what quality of equipment you're operating with. So there's loads of stuff we can do aesthetically, but with regards to the gameplay side, do we need direct communication? Yes or no, that's not for us to decide, unfortunately.