Rodina: A Free-Roam Space Exploration Title With Promise

I downloaded the demo for Rodina, a game in development by Elliptic Games, and was quite pleasantly surprised. Now, for starters, this game isn't made to rival Skyrim in terms of graphics and environmental design. It is still in development, so better visuals may be on the horizon, but that's not really the point. The point is that Rodina actually delivers a fun, basic experience.

When you start the game, you find yourself on the surface of some asteroid. A small green circle hovers in your view, indicating the location of your ship. Using normal WASD controls and the spacebar to jump, you can navigate to your ship and approach the airlock.

Passing through the airlock leads you into the interior of the vessel, where you can wander through the halls and rooms until you find your way to the cockpit and pilot controls. 

Once you sit down at the pilot controls, the game switches the view to 3rd person and you can control the ship. There are currently 2 speed settings: one for combat and landing, and another for travel between celestial bodies.

Flight between celestial bodies is pretty fun. I only ever saw asteroid-sized planetoids, but that's ok. As far as I can tell, the majority of the planetoids have a pile of random crates and barrels and some sort of electronic storage devices that either give you random snippets of logs from other pilots or upgrades to your ship's decryption protocols. Landing is a little tough right now, since there's a bit of Newtonian-style inertia and sometimes your ship bounces across the surface for a bit before coming to a rest. Once you land you can leave the pilot's seat, walk back through the ship to the airlock, and leave to explore the surface. The planetoids are procedurally-generated with fractal landscapes, and, as you can see in the picture above, they look pretty cool. As far as I can tell, different planetoids have different amounts of gravitational force, because it seems like you can jump higher on some planetoids than others.

There is combat and your ship has 2 weapons: some sort of projectile and a missile weapon. Every once in a while you'll find an enemy ship flying around one of the planetoids. The game has options on combat difficulty that I haven't yet played with, but I imagine it could change the amount of damage the enemy ship can give and take or something of that nature.

Now, everything is pretty simplistic, to be sure. The ship has rudimentary roll, pitch, and yaw controls as well as linear thrusters in 5 directions (no way to go down). The HUD doesn't have much information at all and there isn't any autopilot or anyway to map out a course. Exploration, for me, at least, consisted of pointing my ship at one of the objects that seemed to be the closest and switching to the faster speed. Often I would overshoot the object, since there was no distance indicator or heading. The difference between the combat and cruise speeds is enormous, so I often needed to get as close as I could to a planetoid, slow to combat speed to reorient myself, switch quickly to cruise speed and then back and forth between the two speeds in short bursts to cover the remaining distance. Combat is also a little simple. You have to switch between the two weapons instead of being able to fire primary and secondary at the same time. The missiles automatically track the nearest enemy, which is fine, since as far as I experienced, you only ever find one enemy at a time, but still a bit annoying. Additionally, the lack of first-person view for flying the ship annoys me.

After that list, however, there is something I need to mention:

There

Are

NO

Loading Screens.

Anywhere. Once you are in the game, you're in the game the whole time. The longest process you'll encounter is moving between the inner and outer airlocks, and even that is a much quicker process than real airlocks.

So that entire experience, from starting on the surface of some asteroid, finding your ship, climbing in, finding the cockpit, climbing into the pilot's controls, launching from the surface and flying to another asteroid, landing on that asteroid, climbing out of the pilot's controls, walking to the airlock, leaving the ship and finding random stuff on the surface is all one continuous action. There are no loading screens, no pauses, no breaks. The only shift in perspective comes in the pilot's seat, and it happens in an instant. 

This leads to a phenomenally immersive experience, even though the graphics and gameplay themselves need polish. The fact that I can move my character up into the ship, take a wrong turn and wind up in a bathroom, backtrack and finally make my way to the cockpit, then fly from one asteroid to another, finding missiles and upgrades and people trying to kill me, all that is just incredible to me. That's exactly what I want in a game. There aren't any loading screens in real life, after all. I don't know how the developers accomplished what they did, but I am really excited to see what they do with this game.

On procedurally-generated universes

A few days ago I talked about Etherea1, the plug-in engine for Unity 3D that allows you to create planet-sized planets in a universe-sized universe. Today I found out that there are actually several other companies working on the same thing, and, let me tell you, that makes me pretty freakin happy.

The first thing I found out about today is a game called No Man's Sky. I'll admit, their website doesn't show a whole lot, but they demonstrated their game engine at VGX earlier this month. The premise of the game is exploring a universe. Fairly simple start, but the thing about it is that the entire universe is procedurally-generated, supposedly from the atom all the way up to galaxies. The following video gives a glimpse of the power of this engine and an idea of the gameplay.

And how awesome does that look? Oceans, creatures, plants, terrain, space, everything procedurally generated and waiting to be explored. The creators claim that every star that you see is a real object, complete with the possibility of having planets, moons, and things to discover. Most space games use a skybox (a cube of images) set at a sort of maximum distance from the camera to give the illusion of infinite space. This game actually seems to be able to make the illusion real.

How about that scene near the end where he blasts a hole in that asteroid and flies through? In reference to my post from a few days ago, that is definitely one of the things I would like to be able to do when I play a video game of that particular genre.

The second thing I found from a comment that someone left about No Man's Sky is a tech company called I-Novae, who claim, rather boldly, that "The only boundary is your imagination". Apparently they've been around for a few years developing a game engine to, once again, procedurally generate enormous game environments. Take a gander:

This is their most recent post, but I-Novae has quite a few more videos on their Youtube page. They've been working on this engine for a long time, and they're getting ready to launch a Kickstarter campaign to get funding for their game Infinity: Battlescape. Their goal is to build a persistent universe online, and the game will bring players into this universe. This means that everyone that plays the game will be in the same universe.

I've been looking for something like this for quite some time. One of the things that bothers me about most MMORPGs like World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings Online is that, especially at the early stages, the game feels like a single-player game. You follow a storyline that contains elements that should be unique, yet every other player is going through the same story. For example, I've played MMOs where you have to go collect the plants to create the medicine for some sick important person. As soon as you do that, he gets better, gives you cool stuff, and you go on your way. If you happen to look back, you'll see another dozen players collecting the same plants for the same sick person and receiving the same thanks and reward. With normal single-player games you know every other player is going through the same story, but at least there's a bit of pretense to try and make you feel like you're the only one. MMOs bother me because, by and large, they haven't been able to let go of the trappings of single-player-ness to fully embrace the possibilities of the medium.

Now, with games like No Man's Sky and Infinity: Battlescape, there will finally be a feeling of truly entering a realistic world where your actions have a unique effect. The ability to explore, find new things, new areas, new regions of space? So cool.

I leave you with some screenshots from I-Novae's game engine. Keep in mind that these images are completely computer-generated from an algorithm, not from a model that someone made manually.

Enjoy!

On META's AR headset

Several days ago I posted about AR, specifically the gamut of new companies entering the head-mounted AR display market. META was one of those companies I mentioned, and they started with a pretty cool idea with some serious limitations. Their META.01 version is just a display and has some limited distance sensing and display capability. The other day, META announced a new version of their headset, called the META Pro.

Highway to the AR zone

As you can see in the image, this new design actually looks fairly cool, if you're into aviators. I hope they come up with some new frame designs for the rest of us that look much less like hotshot pilots and more like backwater law enforcement when we sport these kinds of eyewear.

New aesthetics aside, the Pro version boast some pretty impressive stats. Twin 1280x720 pixel displays with a binocular 40° field of view give you 15x the screen real estate that Google's Project Glass offers. The sensor suite includes a 9-degrees of freedom with an accelerometer, a magnetometer, and a gyroscope, allowing the glasses to know exactly where they're facing. Twin color cameras and 2 distance sensors allow the glasses to recognize your hands and your surroundings and gives you the ability to use gestures as an input device. The whole thing is powered by a smartphone-sized pocket computer sporting a quadcore intel processor, 4 GB of RAM and a 32Whr battery, enough to handle some pretty sizeable computing.

Take a look at the video, which was shot through the glasses themselves.

One of the things that becomes immediately apparent is that the gesture recognition has improved a ton since the original developer edition video. They keep making the reference to the Iron Man movies where Tony Stark has a holographic interface and I think the comparison is warranted. Yeah, it requires that you wear their glasses, but it's still fairly incredible. The ability to interact with your phone and laptop in a completely holographic environment is neat, but, as I mentioned in my previous AR post, this tech will let us do things in a completely new way. Why do we need the visual outline of a laptop or an iPhone when you could just have icons floating around the periphery of your display? Move your hand over to one side to tap a menu button that opens a list of available apps. You don't need a holographic computer, just have the info on a floating window. I suppose some people will prefer less change, but I'm all for exploring how much we can make this tech change our world.

The META software is designed to be used with Unity 3D, which, as I've mentioned before, is basically a video game creation program. I've played around with Unity quite a bit and I really like the interface. You basically can create 3D worlds without ever writing a line of code, though if you want stuff to move around and interact, you'll need to be a proficient programmer. But this means that it's not terribly difficult to start making applications for META, and there are so many possibilities. The video depicted the user shaping the cone of a rocket engine and adding it to an assembly. Already on the website there are hundreds of app ideas, and since META has decided to allow 3rd party companies to develop software for their device, we can expect 100s more as time goes on. Some of the ideas are pretty cool. I've always loved the concept of using AR for LARPing so you can have computer-controlled enemies, give the mages some actual magic, even produce a scene that can't be easily created IRL.

One of the ideas I had (and posted on the website) was to incorporate the glasses with a flight simulator. Many people build their own simulator cockpits with varying degrees of complexity, which is pretty neat, but there are still only two options, each with limitations.

First, you use monitors in place of windscreens. This allows you to see the interior of your cockpit, use cool digital indicators and the like, but the problem is that the image won't be 3D and even with decent head tracking, it won't mimic the feel of actually being in an airplane since looking around won't provide the same changing direction of view.

Second, you can use a VR headset like the Oculus Rift. This gives you a 3D image with good head tracking, but since you can't see anything besides what's on the screen, why even bother building a sim cockpit except to have the feel and the location of the controls? Plus you can't see your hands unless you wear motion tracking gloves and have the program show you an approximation, so you'll spend time fumbling for switches.

My concept allowed you to build a fairly simple sim cockpit with just the controls and the actual interior, but with a reference pattern printed on any surface designed to be a window or windscreen. Then the AR glasses display the rendered game image anywhere they see that reference pattern. That way you can still see your hands and the interior of your cockpit, even your instruments, but you also get a 3D view with proper head tracking. The software could render the exterior view in a sphere around the player location so you'd be able to look all around, even stretch or lean to the sides and see just like if you were in a real vehicle.

Obviously the list of possibilities is pretty long. This kind of tech opens up many new doors, even doors we didn't know existed, and that's absolutely fantastic.

In which I discuss FTL

I think by now it's sort of redundant to mention how much I love space exploration, video games, and space exploration video games, so I'll probably eventually stop mentioning it.

Lately I've been playing several sessions of the game FTL. If you haven't heard of it, FTL is a roguelike spaceship management simulator game. Kind of a mouthful, but the long and short of it is that FTL gives you the experience of being a starship captain in a procedurally-generated universe, tasked with the mission of carrying important information to your superiors, 8 sectors away from your starting point. The roguelike nature of the game means that if your ship explodes, that's it. You have to start over from the beginning. There are no checkpoints, no way to save the game in case you make the wrong decision and want to go back.

The game is actually fairly simple, on the surface. The interface is a top-down view of your ship, which is divided into different rooms and systems. You have a number of crew members that you can control, ordering them to man different systems, make repairs, or repel boarders. Each sector is divided into procedurally-generated systems of planets. You jump from system to system and at each system have a random encounter. Sometimes you run into pirates, sometimes you find people in distress, sometimes there's a sun or an asteroid field or a store. Combat consists of aiming and firing weapons, using different drones, or even teleporting to the enemy ship to fight it out face to face. As you go, you acquire material to make upgrades to your systems or purchase new equipment.

There's something extremely satisfying about ordering your crewman to man their stations while launching missiles and lasers at an enemy ship. I've also experienced a visceral pain as I've watched a particularly good ship and crew break apart under the onslaught of an enemy ship. Like I said, immersive. Even though the interface and graphics are simplistic, the gameplay, story, and random nature of the game makes it feel quite real.

One thing I don't recommend for gamers that tend to get very immersed in games is naming your crewmen after people you know, unless you want those people to die horribly. Crewmembers can and will die in fires, from boarders, by suffocation, from space diseases, and just from a straight-up direct hit from a missile to the room they're currently inhabiting.

I think the takeaway from this is that it doesn't require the latest and greatest graphics technology or a 3D virtual reality headset and tactile interface to make a game immersive. I've felt more immersed in a book or a well-made movie than I ever have in Skyrim or similar current-gen games. The real immersion comes from creating a believable universe, an experience that is plausible enough in and of itself  that you don't doubt it while you play. FTL manages this, and while I'd love to have a similar experience with a more complex game, but until I find that more complex game, FTL serves to temporarily scratch that itch.

On Procedurally-Generated Space Systems

Most of the people that know me know that I love space and space exploration. Most of the people who have read a few of my other posts will have been able to gather that same information.You may also be aware that, since I can't actually go out and explore space personally, I tend to enjoy video games that allow me to do that sort of thing.

What might surprise you to know is that I actually don't play that many space exploration games. I own and have played quite a few, including Battlecruiser Millenium Gold, Artemis SSBS, Freelancer, Galaxy on Fire 2 (for the PC, of course), and X3: Terran Conflict. All of them had their good and bad, and some of them I enjoyed much more than others. But the thing that they all lacked in common was the actual feeling of exploring space. Some of them had really large and really open worlds. Some of them were good at handling free-roam elements while still providing a story. But the reason that I don't play these games regularly, (and didn't even finish several of them) is because I didn't get that feeling that I was looking for, the feeling of adventure and exploration, the feeling of finding something new that had never been seen before, and that has prevented me from dedicating much time to the genre, outside of looking for a new game that might slake my thirst.

One of the major issues with space games actually comes from the limits of computer precision. I know that sounds ludicrous, since consumer computers these days are incredibly powerful, but it's true. To put it simply, the variables that are used to hold location data can only hold the kind of precision that games need out to a certain number of digits. The end result is that most game engines can't handle distances larger than 100 km or so before the accuracy makes the game unplayable. 100 km sounds like a lot, and for games like Halo and Half-Life, 100 km is more than sufficient. However, for most space-type games, 100 km is practically nothing. 100 km is the distance from the surface of the earth to what is considered the lowest border of "space." However, the International Space Station orbits the earth at almost 4 times that distance, and the moon orbits the earth almost 1000 times further. 

Now, some games get around this limitation by moving the origin of the measurement system periodically. Some games handle this with load screens between areas. Other games manage to dynamically move the origin without a load screen, depending on the system speed. However, these games are still generally kept in smaller regions, planet-bound or similar. Additionally, the need for art assets for large game areas makes the memory requirements substantial.

Except when it doesn't. As I was searching for a way to overcome floating-point precision errors for my own projects, I stumbled across the work of a programmer named Imerso. His program is an amazing space exploration engine with some incredible features. On the surface it seems simple. The player controls a simple-looking spaceship while flying around a solar system, but a deeper look reveals some ground-breaking concepts. First of all, his program uses an algorithm for procedurally generating entire planets, complete with fractal-based surface topography. (By the way, follow that link. Fractally-generated landscapes are incredible.) The amazing thing about this program is that it generates planets that are actually planet-sized, meaning larger than 100km in diameter. The second awesome thing the program does is it incorporates an algorithm for seamlessly moving the origin of the game as your player ship moves through the system. Because of this and a good control over the level of detail, you can fly your ship between planets and all the way down to the surface and back again without ever seeing a loading screen. Now, if this doesn't sound amazing or remarkable in any way, you probably haven't played many video games. 

Let me be clear.

THIS

IS

INCREDIBLE

And it gets more incredible-er

The C++ demonstration version of the whole program, including all art assets, is only 88 kilobytes.

I'll repeat

Eighty-eight kilobytes. Not Gigabytes, not Megabytes. Kilobytes. As in, you could fit the entire program 16 times on an old 3.5" High-Density floppy disk and still have enough room left over for a 10-page Word document.

If you don't believe me, check out the following videos:

This first one is basically what the 88 kilobyte tech demo (for free download on that page) looks and feels like, except there's a little 3rd-person spaceship in the middle of the screen and a sort of HUD to display info like speed, distance to next, etc. As you can see, there are no gaps as the camera flies from deep space down to the surface of the planet and back again.

This second one is exactly what the tech demo is like, except for the music. That you have to provide yourself.

Now, the game engine itself has been developed for use with Unity 3D, which is a game development platform. The engine is available for sale and purchasing it give you the ability to incorporate it into any sort of game you want. This means you can add gigabytes and gigabytes of high-def art assets and complex gameplay and everything 

This last video demonstrates the kind of scale he can achieve with the engine:

Now, the one thing a lot of you may have been noticing if you're clever, is that the actual scale between celestial objects isn't quite right. And if you didn't notice that, take a minute to think. When you look up at the sky, how big do other planets look to you? Quarter-sized? Nickel-sized? Even dime-sized? If you know what you're looking for, the planets look like brighter-than-normal stars. That's the one thing that bothers me about this engine, and it's not even a problem with the engine, but rather with the tech demo. That last video shows the ability the engine has to separate objects by realistic distances, so really it's more of a question of the user doing the right thing with it. 

Imagine what could be done with this sort of thing. Imagine a game where you can fly your ship to a new planet, travel down to the surface and find an interesting place to land. Then you get out of the ship and explore the area, maybe even building a base of operations in a secluded area. Then you can fly right back out to space and find new regions, new planets and moons. The engine could generate a near-infinite universe of unique planets, moons, and solar systems. 

Even if the engine were used for a single planet, that could be a huge step for gaming. Planets could be randomly generated, complete with cities and environment locations. This could be the base for a strategy game, an adventure game, or even a first-person shooter MMO.

Basically, this sort of engine could be used to create the kind of space exploration game that I could really sink my teeth into (and by teeth, I mean time).

on the concept of self-driving cars

I think one of the things that bugs me the most in my life is the amount of time it takes to get anywhere. Even just my regular commute to school and work seems to take too long sometimes, and then when we start talking about going to my in-laws or my extended family or anywhere fun, we're talking about 8+ hours of driving. If I'm actually driving, I generally find myself struggling to remain awake and sane, and generally coming dangerously close to failure. And especially when I'm driving, I can't do anything else. I can't watch movies, play videogames, or even work on homework or my ever-expanding list of projects. I can listen to music or audiobooks, but that feels so much less productive than I could be if I wasn't at the wheel.

So, you can probably imagine my excitement about the idea of self-driving cars. A car that you don't have to drive, because it can handle the entire trip by itself. You just get in, type in your destination and push go. Then you can do whatever you want while the car gets you where you're going. Such a cool idea.

Right now the biggest contender in that particular market is Google. 10 years ago, that would have been surprising, because Google was just the search engine, but they've been expanding their empire, and I, for one, welcome our new Google overlords. I jest in calling them overlords, but I'm actually all for Google expanding their market into tech, because frankly I think they do business the right way.

The Google driverless car, called Google Chauffer, is demonstrated in the video below. It is well worth a watch. 

Currently the law requires that there be a licensed driver in the driver's seat of the car, just in case, and the controls respond to user input similarly to current cruise control technology, where moving the steering wheel or touching the gas or brake pedals will cancel the computer control. But, as shown, there isn't a lot of need for human input. Using a suite of sensors that maps the area around the car, and combined with maps and GPS and other motion sensors, the car can get itself around just fine.

So, this is super neat and all, but why is it important? More than just offering the user the ability to kick back and do something else while the car drives to the destination, self-driving cars will have a major impact on our society.

One of the things that these sort of vehicles can do is coordinate with each other. I'm sure almost everyone has pulled up to a 4-way stop before and had the fun waving conversation with another driver or 3. Without a working knowledge of semaphore signalling, you're reduced to trying to figure out if the other guy's wave means "go ahead" or "stay there cause I'm going". And that's a relatively simple situation compared to merging or changing lanes on a freeway. Not only can self-driving cars react MUCH quicker than a human driver and have a MUCH better sense of its surroundings, but multiple self-driving cars could have the capacity to communicate one with another, sharing intended paths and actions and increasing the cooperation on the road. Fleets of self-driving cars could band together on the freeway to create convoys, similar to the flying V of migratory geese, or drafting techniques used by bicyclists to reduce air resistance and increase efficiency.

Self-driving cars will decrease the accident rate and increase the survivability of the accidents that do happen. They don't have blind spots, they don't get distracted, and they don't sneeze/blink/reach down to change the radio station, etc. 

Rush hour traffic isn't caused by having large numbers of drivers on the road at the same time, but by the inability for those drivers to coordinate their actions. How many times have you been stuck on an on-ramp because the person in front of you is waiting for a mile of clear road to merge? Self-driving cars can merge in a space only a few inches larger than the car itself, and do so at freeway speeds. They don't cut people off, they don't brake suddenly because they didn't notice traffic slowing in front of them, and they don't almost miss their exit.

Granted, not everyone is going to have a self-driving car as soon as they come on the market. Even though they're aiming to have self-driving models only cost a few grand more than their manual counterparts, that seems an unlikely goal until the product is sufficiently proven. The traffic problems and fatality rates aren't going to drop until self-driving cars constitute a majority of drivers.

However, at the rate technology is progressing, I don't think it'll be TOO long until we see affordable self-driving cars on the market, and I don't think it can come too soon. 

I'm looking forward to being less angry because of all the idiots on the road.

In which I discuss the value of space exploration

Most people would naturally agree that space (outer space, the black, the void between worlds, whatever you call it) is pretty dang cool. (Physics pun, of course, since the "emptiness" of space is pretty much as "cool" as it gets)

But seriously, there is some neat stuff out there beyond our atmosphere. There are earth-like planets to be explored, (and I highly recommend checking out that wikipedia link), nebulae and supernovae and new stars and the frickin hexagon on Saturn, planets and planetoids in our own solar system, etc etc.

So
Much
Cool
Stuff.

I actually just watched The Europa Report yesterday, and while it wasn't exactly the sci-fi romp I was hoping for, it was actually really good. Basically a team is sent to Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter, and the most likely candidate in the solar system (except for Earth, of course) to have evidence of extraterrestrial life. Europa is covered in ice and possibly liquid water, which makes it really interesting. I'm not going to go into details of the film, of course, but it was a fun look at what an expedition to Europa might be like, using more or less current technology.

And that brings me to my point: current technology. Humanity has done some pretty impressive things, of course. We sent men to the moon using less computing power than most teenagers carry around in their pockets. Obviously most teenagers wouldn't know how to even start using their smartphones to control an Apollo rocket, but that's besides the point. We've sent a probe out beyond what is generally accepted to be the border between our solar system and interstellar space. Took us 35 years to get there, but we made some stops on the way, ok? We also have astronauts living in a space station 230 miles above the surface of the earth, and a fleet of satellites surrounding our little planet that do everything from give us internet to tell us where we are. We live in a really cool age. We can do some REALLY cool things.

But the problem is Space. We're hesitant about sending people to Mars, much less Europa, and much MUCH less Tau Ceti E, and with good reason. To quote the good doctor "Space is disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence." Outside of the protective region afforded to us by our home planet, space is a dangerous and lonely place. Similar to the explorers of old, setting off into space means abandoning all thought of help or rescue from home. However, to make it more difficult, space explorers can't catch space fish for food, or evaporate sea water for drinking water, or even find a convenient island to restock the supplies. The vehicles we make that seem so mighty, so powerful, here on earth, are egg-like in their fragility in space. One little speck of space dust, the size of a grain of sand, can punch through the hull of a spacecraft like a needle through a bubble, with similar results. A solar flare kicks up and shoots high-energy particles through the radiation shielding, cooking the crew. Even mechanical failures that would be minor in an Earth-going vessel can prove catastrophic in the vastness of space.

Additionally, ships in space can't rely on natural forces like wind and tide for propulsion. Yes, we are working on things like solar sails to harness thrust from photons from the sun or laser arrays on earth, but those things will barely provide enough thrust for tiny sensor packages. We're not anywhere close to seeing solar sails being implemented on a manned vessel. This means that, with current technology, we're limited to vehicles that can carry their own fuel with them. For rocket-type vehicles, this generally means doing one large burn to get going and another to slow down once the destination is reached. With some new types of thruster technology, such as ion thrusters, the force per unit of fuel is much higher, and the engine can be run for longer, achieving much higher speeds, though at very low acceleration. Now, when I say higher speeds, I mean compared to chemical rockets. According to NASA, chemical rockets can achieve speeds of around 8.05 km/s, where the ion-powered rockets could get up to 90 km/s, or over 10 times faster. This sounds pretty fantastic, until you actually get a sense of scale. The distance from the Earth to the Sun, known as an Astronomical Unit, or AU, is approximately 150,000,000 km. This means that our ion rocket would take 20 days to travel 1 AU, and that's if it's at top speed the entire time. In reality, the amount of time it takes to speed up and slow down an ion-powered rocket would make that trip on the order of months.

There are more esoteric concepts being explored, such as nuclear pulse propulsion, which, in a nutshell, involves detonating smallish nuclear devices behind the ship and using a shielded plate to catch the shockwave and ride it off towards the stars, or matter-antimatter reactions, which is limited by the difficulty of generating antimatter. These methods could produce conservatively estimated speeds of up to 50,000 km/s, or nearly 1/4 the speed of light. Compared to the 90 km/s from an ion engine or the 8 km/s of a chemical rocket, that's a pretty big increase.

But it's not enough.

To get a bit more perspective, the solar system is around 40 AU in diameter, if we assume that the outermost orbit of Uranus is the end of the solar system. If we go to the edge of the heliosphere, which is the more commonly accepted definition of "edge of the solar system", we're talking about 180 AU, or, if you're too lazy to do the math, about 89 AU from earth to the edge of the solar system. The problem is that getting to the edge of the solar system isn't really our goal. Let's say we wanted to go to the nearest possibly inhabitable planet, Tau Ceti E. Tau Ceti E is almost 12 LIGHT YEARS from Earth, or almost 760,000 AU. Assuming that our little ion rocket is going its absolute fastest, it'll still take around 400 CENTURIES to travel that distance. Yes, that's right. 40,000 years, or 1000 times longer than Moses and the Israelites wandered the desert. A nuclear pulse ship would take about 180 years to make the trip, and an antimatter rocket ship would still need around 50 years, and that's not including the time it'll take to speed up and slow down.

 IF, and that's a big if, we could outfit a ship with a crew that could actually survive a journey of 40,000 years or 180, or even 50 years, it's extremely probable that before the mission reached the half-way point we'd have new technology that would allow us to go pick them up and take them the rest of the way in much less time. This principle is featured in the wait calculation, which basically states that there is a threshold for sending manned missions to interstellar targets based on the idea that people who leave later would have the technology to get there sooner.

So what do we do? Even at speeds approaching 1/4 to 1/2 the speed of light, we're looking at really long times to get anywhere interesting. We've proved time and again that there is the big cosmic speed limit, just like Einstein said. If we could get a ship up to around 99% of the speed of light the crew wouldn't experience a very long trip, due to time dilation effects, but getting up to that sort of velocity is incredibly difficult. As the velocity of a vehicle increases, so does its mass, meaning that it takes more and more force to achieve higher and higher speeds. More force=more fuel=more mass, generally, so that's kind of a circular problem.

But what if we could get around that speed limit? What if there was a way for us to travel faster than the speed of light without breaking the laws of the universe? Faster-than-light common trope of science fiction, mostly because no one wants to watch a show where it takes 50 years to get anywhere and by the time they do the characters you care about are old or dead, but what if it were possible?

Enter Miguel Alcubierre, a theoretical physicist who came up with what's now known as the Alcubierre Drive. The Alcubierre drive is a method of stretching and squeezing space-time to move an object. We already know that space-time is expanding, and in some places that expansion is happening faster than the speed of light. Alcubierre postulated that by expanding and contracting space-time in a region localized around a ship, the ship could be moved at speeds faster than light without violating any laws of physics.
Basically the ship would be enclosed in a bubble of space-time and the bubble would move faster than we can achieve with current technology. 

Of course, there are a series of catches. First and foremost, the math requires the existence of matter with negative density, normally called exotic matter, which is something that is postulated in several separate theories, but hasn't been confirmed to exist. 

Second, there's the actual amount of exotic matter required. In some calculations it was shown that in order to move a ship across the galaxy you would need around 10^64 kg of exotic matter, which is several orders of magnitude greater than the estimated mass of the entire universe. Not exactly practical. However, several scientists have reworked the calculations by considering a thinner bubble shell and a different shape. Notably among these scientists is Harold White, a NASA scientist who is actively working on the warp drive problem. His calculations showed that an average-sized spaceship would only require around 700 kg of exotic matter for the Alcubierre Drive to function. That's obviously a significant difference, which brings us from the realm of "neat but impossible" to "this might actually work."

Harold White is important because, as mentioned, he's actually working on this idea. His department at NASA has an experiment they're performing to test whether or not space can actually be warped as postulated. It's been shown that gravity bends beams of light, but whether or not space itself can be warped by man-generated effects is still unproven. The initial results of the experiment were inconclusive, but the scale on which the experiment is being run is so small that vibrations from the Earth and the surrounding environment can affect the results.

Regardless, the fact that we even think that something like a Star Trek Warp Drive is possible and that there are people out there actively working towards making this sort of thing a reality is incredible. 

And this brings me to the "why is this important" part of the post. I'm not going to spout nonsense about overpopulation and us needing to find a new home or building colonies or anything. I'm all for expanding humanity to other planets. I think that's an awesome idea. But I can't sell overpopulation and dwindling resources as a reason why we HAVE to do it. I think we all know that if we managed our resources (including space on earth) a little better, we'd be just fine. 
No, I believe that space exploration is important because, deep down, the vast majority of humanity has a curiosity that needs to be sated. We need to know what's out there. We need to find new things, see new sights, experience new places. Obviously any individual person can spend their whole life on earth and never run out of new things to see or do, but humanity as a whole has nearly exhausted all the "new" our little planet has to offer. There's an entire universe out there, and I'd like to see it.