Ship engine behavior

[CutterJohn1]

Maybe some ppl is not remembering the details... Do you remember what happened on IW2 when a flight formation was broken when trying to engage the player? Did you actually paid attention to what those ships were doing with the "reallistic model"? They were bumping each other most of the time... Did you pay attention to your "turret fighters" and how the Devs "solved" this issues when the player ship was the one potentially affected by this?

This are the kind of things that kill any sense of "realism", at least for me. And this are the kind of issues that become exponentially harder to fix the complexer your flight model becomes.

Sure they bumped into each other occasionally. 'Most of the time' is hyperbole. I admit to never actually using the turret fighters due to them rather sucking, so I'm not aware of any issues associated with them.

X1/2/3 pathfinding was not perfect either. No games will be.

[ragamer]

'Most of the time' is hyperbole

On a formation?... Was a guarantized collision when they broke. In fact, just in the beggining, when you are a kid and you fly your command section around... There is somekind of fight going on around, if you ignore the 1st steps of the tutorial and explore the freighters that are engaged by the "bad guys" you see they are systematically bumping each other... All around the sector.

[Ryuujin]

Actually I retract my statement. I had a little think about the recent X-games and why this never much bothered me; and I realise now it's because the functionality is already there.

In Freelancer I'm not sure strafing was possible; if it was it wasn't particularly significant, so the inertial turret mode was important to dogfighting in the hardest scenarios.

Now, why did I find X3 combat to be acceptable? - I realise now it's because X3 craft had pretty powerful strafing thrusters; while the ship obeyed inertial damping the basic functionality I was getting from Freelancer (flying in one direction but firing in another), was being compensated for by my ability to strafe; kind've like in a shooter when you "look" left or right by compensating for the change of direction by strafing the direction you were originally heading.

With that in mind; while enabling inertia based flight would be authentic and natural, as long as the Pride can strafe (And judging by those big coaxial mounted thrusters and gunship style turret, I suspect we can), there would be no real gain in functionality by adding such a feature. You'd have two features that provide the same functionality (the ability to fly in a different direction to that the ship's main guns are trained).

Obviously changing the flight model wholesale over to inertia-based WOULD add a lot of features, that's a whole different can of worms... a nice can of worms but extends beyond what I was suggesting ;p

[amtie]

Strafe isn't really as good, because strafe thrusters are a lot weaker. Also, they only work at 90 degree angles to your ship's nose (up, down, left, right).

[ragamer]

Strafe isn't really as good

Well... Some capitals on past X's moved as fast strafing than using their main engine .

[Alan Phipps]

X3 strafe uses fixed acceleration and top speed for all ships and takes little account of relative ship 'mass' or forward max speed. Hence the vanilla X3TC Aran with 12m/s top speed forward can go 132 m/s diagonally sideways with max forward + 2 adjacent strafe. Still, only the Player can use it (and probably just as well - imagine dodging high-speed side-crabbing capitals all the time.) I'm sure XR will do it differently!

[A5PECT]

Strafe isn't really as good

Well... Some capitals on past X's moved as fast strafing than using their main engine .

I think the idea of scaling strafe drive speeds to ship size (instead of the constant value used in previous games) would go a long way in making the game feel a little bit more realistic.

Of course, I think an equally important improvement would be getting the AI to use the damn thing.

[frymaster]

I think the idea of scaling strafe drive speeds to ship size (instead of the constant value used in previous games)

in the aforementioned previous X games, the drive had the exact same speed as your forward speed. This meant that the fastest way to go from, say, the W gate in a sector to the N gate was to point directly east and strafe left - basically, your heading was always 45 degrees to the course you wanted to fly

Now, it's a constant speed, which means it's no longer insane for capships, but means it's faster to go sideways in a spacesuit than straight ahead...

[amtie]

It's not really hard to make the strafe drive strength a small proportion of the main engine strength.

[ragamer]

Linking strafe capabilities to main engine is not a good idea... Because it takes away options.

In a reallistic spaceship "strafe" just means that your craft is able to apply acceleration in different relative vectors (looked from the craft reference system).

Engineering-wise, when your ship will be spending a lot of time travelling to a distant point, makes far more sense to "overload" a given vector (aka "Main Engine") and dedicate a much smaller fraction of your mass to "rotate" that vector (aka "lateral thrusters" or "vectorial engines"). That's why it's intuitive to think on "strafing" or "rotation" as much slower movements than travelling ahead... Because it's a common design decission on how to split the mass used for propulsion solutions.

The act of strafe would be to use your lateral thrusters to trigger displacement instead of rotation...

...If you take into account the above way to think... Your winner magnitude on past X's would be to base "strafe speed" on the angular rotation speed, which was an independent characteristic of the ships. Just by "accident" (or common perception) the variation of this rotation speed over the size of the different ships on previous X's games was much higher than the variation of cruise speeds.

Looking at XRB would rock to allow players to sacrifice surface elements of their ships to provide bonuses to the Main Engine OR the Lateral Thrusters... But not both at the same time, thus giving tactical options.

So far most of the examples we have read about surface options are on the weaponry and defense department but on this video Bernd makes a brief comment about Jumpdrives on Cap ships as a surface element... So there is room for "non direct combat" elements, I think.

[A5PECT]

Engineering-wise, when your ship will be spending a lot of time travelling to a distant point, makes far more sense to "overload" a given vector (aka "Main Engine") and dedicate a much smaller fraction of your mass to "rotate" that vector (aka "lateral thrusters" or "vectorial engines").

Actually, this would depend on the purpose of the craft. That design makes perfect sense for large, long-range vessels like freighters. But a small, short-range combat ship would find prominent lateral thrusters much more useful for performing very quick, dramatic changes in vector (aka evasive maneuvers).

I'm not saying that the lateral thrusters should be directly linked to the main thrusters. A ship's purpose would dictate the lateral/main thrust power ratio.

[Mordobb]

Making long things short.

unlimited acceleration is utopy but wouldn t be a problem if general flight compensation system is surpassed. Changing vector would make you tumble madly in space...good luck not ending like a pancake unless you hit a "Ho sh!t" button that could take a random time to stabilize, slow speed and the pursuers shooting you.

How to attain more than safe speed ? Old sacrifice you shield, weapon energy and stepmother to the gods. It works, its effective and its fun.
On gthe other hand, sacrifice speed and weapon to gain shield recharge or boost, and same for weapon to complete the triangle.

So we end up in a earthling fighting scenario without lift and gravity until you enter some celestial body gravity field.

So what is fun for small ships:
Possibility to upgrade ship, possibility to go beyond safety speed parameters, and beyond strafing, possibility to turn upon your axes maintaining initial vector, and try to change this at any time.
and a combination of all this

In resume we want enhanced dighfighting for small ship and i see no problem with that.

But this bring some problem for AI the must be looking into so capital ships dont get over vulnerable and AI offer a challenge that is balanced so we wouldn t resist a 10 VS 1 but wouldn t necessarily fall on a 2 vs one.
I think this is feasable with various degree of AI.

[Ishanda]

It's just my opinion, but many may also share it along with me, but Independence War II Edge Of Chaos was awesome

I will second that. I will never forget the moment you first get to the Badlands...the music (the Act 2 Theme I think), the mood....[sigh]. Anyway, I totally appreciated the way the flight model worked and was integrated with the LDS drive, which imo was a masterstroke. Sure, it had quirks but it was (for me at least) fun whilst still being challenging. If the AI is the problem preventing a newtonian flight model from working like it should then I vote for fixing the AI, but then again, I am hardcore like that. I would much rather fly in a 'realistic' Me-109 when playing a WW2 simulator. So, why would I want it any other way in a space sim? This is exactly where space sims have more freedom to strike a balance and this is where I think the IWAR system succeeded best.

Maybe this is the price we pay for a game like X-R (or previous incarnations). I mean, the X series isn't just a space flight-sim right? Neither is it just a building game or a trading game or a story driven game. Can we expect X-R to be absolutely fantastic as standalone sections or just more than the sum of its parts (pretty much a rhetorical question)? I do not recall a single game ever that tried to be lots of things that managed to do all of them 'landmark'-like.

On a side note, where IW2 went backwards compared to IW1 was in that the initial idea with IW1 was to have the player flying a single ship that had several 'sections' and this idea was dropped for IW2. Granted, at the time technology probably did not exist to bring this idea to true justice. I did however feel brief glipses (with IW1) of being part of a greater ship as opposed to feeling 'I am the ship', which is how I have felt with any and all other space sims. Hopefully the 'rooms' feature of X-R will take me back...er...now that I think about it, I reckon if you could get the SSV Normandy 'roominess' coupled with a pilotable ship that would be just about right.

[Sorry for rambling a bit]

[Flaming Blastclaw]

A single solar system with planets, powerful AI, newtonian physics and convincing sci-fi beats a X-universe of 100 tiny sectors with thousands of ships all staying below a speed limit being driven by an AI pilot dumber than a rock.