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For all those experienced with the game: a question.
desperado568
Member Posts: 17
I honestly had no idea this game existed before I saw the frontpage love the site gave it, and I'm absolutely ecstatic that such a game exists.
But, I have one major question: I understand that it is more of a flight simulator and I like that; however, are the physics in the game based on "space" physics, i.e., you continue moving until you propel yourself in another direction, or does it work more like "earth" physics that treats your ship like its subject to drag and will eventually stop if you stop propelling yourself?
Maybe that was confusing, but if anyone can decipher what I asked and answer it I'd appreciate it.
Comments
I never played the original game but I found this description of the flight physics on their site:
Now remember: this is space, not a joyride on the Galacto-Bahn of Delphan IX. Out here, the physics are different. If you need to change direction, it is not a simple matter of pointing your ship's nose that way. That's because there is only minor gravitic drag (actually resistance) in space, and therefore your original momentum will decrease very slowly. Eventually your thrusters will align you with your target, but that can take a while. This depends largely on your speed at the time of the course correction. Your rate of turn directly correlates with your engine thrust; the more power you give your engines, the slower your spin will be.
The new game may adopt the current game's flight system exactly or with some modifications. Only the devs can say for sure.
The original games physics were a compromise between real-space spysics and playability. Obviously you should be able to accellerate to the speed of light if you left it going long enough, but that really isn't practical in a space game (As I understand it they did test an exact replication of real space physics when deveoping it).
Therefore there is a drag component which serves to limit your top speed and slow you down if you shut your engines off. However this drag isn't really all that high so if you're flying a heavily loaded cargo tow at top speed towards a rock, and turn 90 degrees you'll still be heading at that damned rock. (If you're lucky you'll just miss it).
That's an extreme case, if you're flying a more normal ship like a fighter then you can change direction much quicker, however it is still nothing like, for example, a normal flight sim. It's possible to 'circle' objects while keeping your guns on them which is effectively orbiting, something that is obviously not possible in atmospheric flight sim.
The other departure from space physics is in the rotation of your ship, which is fixed for a specific ship (although the speed of it may differ between the axes) whereas for real space flight you'd spin faster and faster.
Basically it is pretty much as close to real space flight as you can get while still being practical and fun, quite how this will change in the new version no one really knows. They want to make it more accesible but quite whether that extends beyond the interface and control system into the physics itself I don't think we know yet.
Thank you that actually answers my question quite well.
Oh and yes that was what I wanted to hear.
Thanks for your great explanation, Mithious. As it happens, we're currently testing two flight modes, one of which is identical to the JGC flight engine and one which is only mildly different.
The second flight mode was originally just a controls/UI adjustment, but it also involves an increased drag component (so, it touches physics and is a different "flight model"). This mode is intended to be easier for new players getting used to the game. Simply, the more drag you have, the more room you have for recovering from potential piloting mistakes. Also, more drag makes the engine a little bit more like atmospheric (or arcade) flight, which is more familiar to a lot of potential players.
So far, on the dev team, we have people using both flight modes, and since we added on-the-fly switching to try it out, some of us now use either mode depending on what we're doing: old mode for strafing a large target while flying past, as you'd see Starfuries do on Babylon 5, new mode for fighting AI ships in a dense asteroid cluster, where quicker changes of direction are more healthy. Keeping both modes will allow players to choose the one they prefer to use.
We aren't yet final on exactly how the new flight mode is going to perform, but this is what we're working with right now in pre-alpha.
That doesn't sound that bad an idea, I was thinking on how you could justify it in an RP sense as a "What physics do you want?" option is quite immersion breaking. I reakon you could get away labelling it as an option to turn on automated maneuvering thrusters that fight any momentum perpendicular to the direction you are pointing. This would effectively help change direction (so if you turn 90 degrees and fly sideways with them off you'd strafe, but with them on they would aid you by slowing down your sideways momentum).
You could also tie their effectiveness to the ship type and its total mass, giving you a good excuse to have them stop working effectively if you're flying a tow filled with 500 iridium since in this case being able to suddenly change direction is just rediculous and would massively disadvantage those that want a more realistic experience.
So now we can tweak each ship to have advantages and disadvantage so if we want to make a huge badass cargo hauler with massive speed but make it harder to control, we can do that. I'm a believer in tit-for-tat design so that nothing is "the best [blah] in the game."
In the end we'll see how people like the different modes and I'm sure we will tweak them a lot.
Hermann