Agree. I've mentioned to a few friends how that feeling of emptiness and scale is quite awe inspiring and was a first for me. Theory can't replicate how small and isolated you physically feel when you are between systems. At least not for me.

I suppose they can’t simulate time dilation, which does make it possible to visit other galaxies without FTL.

You certainly could simulate time dilation, I'd be surprised if that isn't already an element of some game out there.

If you go close enough to the speed of light, what you actually see is that space appears to shrink (in the direction of travel) and the trip seems to take less time than light would, because you've apparently covered less distance. Of course what those on the planets would see is that time has been moving oh so slowly on your otherwise speedy ship. There are equations you incorporate into a simulation that would account for this. If the game mechanics were such that you could could see what day/month/year it is in local time, vs your ships time, it would quickly become apparent that bashing through the void is no way to get anywhere.

You couldn’t simulate time dilation in a multi player game, at least not in any way that didn’t involve some players waiting for others.

Sure you could. Each local area (such as a planet) is a single timezone, and everyone there experiences time at the same rate. Someone leaving that timezone would experience time dilation... But in game it would just appear as a communications lag, just as it is for people on different planets. Then, once you've arrived at your destination, there's no longer any lag with your new timezone, and your lag with the original time zone is now fully synched with everyone else on your new planet.

Player A remains on planet A. Player B remains on planet B. Player C commutes between planets A and B, accelerating hard enough for measurable time dilation.

Yeah but by the time player C reaches the other player A thousands of real years have to pass so neither player A or player B can meaningfully interact with player C or each other .

Time dilation is just shortcut to say you are no longer sharing the same frame of reference. If everyone has their own frame of reference there is no difference between single player game and multi player one

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.

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.

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.

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