6.0 Physics engine is garbage!

[adeine]

Anyone who plays the game for even a short time will immediately notice the issues with the Physics Engine.

What issues? I've had now several hours in 6.0 and I have not noticed anything extraordinary. Perhaps I've been flying wrong way in wrong place with wrong ship, but nevertheless the "anyone" is not completely true.


Devs do not have time to "play 10 to 20 minutes" and hope that whatever they do is the thing that reproduces whatever some player encounters. How many saves can you check in a day? What if none of them reveals any issues? Not that day.

Yes. Some issues are very hard to reproduce. The closer we can get to that and the more precise our description is, the better the chance that devs manage to deduce what might be the actual issue.

I guess you haven't noticed it yet because you don't have a lot of ships of your own. Once you do, you will definitely notice it especially if you fly around with your fleets a lot. Having ships in fleets and attacking other fleets will always lead to this. Of course, I also see this happening all the time with ships assigned to stations.

You don't need a lot of ships to run into the issues. Honestly just about any M/L ship you fly (especially the non-pointy nosed ones like transporters) you will struggle to have any collision that isn't broken as soon as you even gently touch another surface. Flying a ship and made the mistake of putting drones on it? You're pretty much guaranteed to get stuck on them if they launch while you're moving/turning.

I think the primary way to avoid running into any of the problems is if you're just playing from the map in another sector.

[xrogaan]

I wouldn't go as far as saying the physics engine is garbage, but there are definitively issues. When a S ship can embed itself into a L then prevent the bigger ship from maneuvering, it gets a little bit annoying. The lesson I've learned is to not be part of any fight which involve more than one L ship, as they will inevitably ram into each others and combine.

[BlackRain]

I wouldn't go as far as saying the physics engine is garbage, but there are definitively issues. When a S ship can embed itself into a L then prevent the bigger ship from maneuvering, it gets a little bit annoying. The lesson I've learned is to not be part of any fight which involve more than one L ship, as they will inevitably ram into each others and combine.

Right and I wouldn't say it is garbage either. I am certainly not agreeing with the OP's tone. Once they fix these issues I am sure it will be very cool

[Buzz2005]

there is those testing battle starts you can get with mods that probably devs use, out of 3 reloads the first had 2 destroyers getting all tangled up, it took them about 10 minutes to untangle

and yes i see it often too if you have a big fleet, like more then 5 Ls sooner or later they will get stuck, hope they are aware and looking for fixes

new engine is not garbage but needs tuning

[taztaz502]

Anyone who plays the game for even a short time will immediately notice the issues with the Physics Engine.

What issues? I've had now several hours in 6.0 and I have not noticed anything extraordinary. Perhaps I've been flying wrong way in wrong place with wrong ship, but nevertheless the "anyone" is not completely true.


Devs do not have time to "play 10 to 20 minutes" and hope that whatever they do is the thing that reproduces whatever some player encounters. How many saves can you check in a day? What if none of them reveals any issues? Not that day.

Yes. Some issues are very hard to reproduce. The closer we can get to that and the more precise our description is, the better the chance that devs manage to deduce what might be the actual issue.

They don't need to check any save, they can simply use the save game creator and start a game with a fleet in any hostile sector and just simply observe how fleets behave it's clear as day how broken it is and it's certainly not save game specific.

[Valhalla_Awaits]

If you have saves which reproduce physics issues, it might be a good idea to post them.

This can help the devs identify and solve edge cases or oversights with the physics.

That could be difficult, as saving the game changes things. For instance when I got to the end of a mining escort mission, the mining ship couldn't dock at the station because the ship in front of it in the queue was stuck partially inside the station (I waited about 5 minutes to see if it would work its way free). I was going to post a save here, but saving+reloading caused the ship to pop out and everything went back to normal.

Very very true. Reloading a game save often fixes many game crippling issues. I had the same problem trying to provide the devs with a gamesave of the broken scrap processors they added in 5.0. STILL broken to this day I might add if you assign multiple deliveries to one till you reload the save, then they work again, for a little while then repeat the issue.

[FanUS]

I'd be for not simulating drones, but that would remove the ability to destroy them when attacking a ship. This can be an issue if you're trying to board a ship that can repair itself very quickly if it has drones, for example a construction vessel.

I imagine some sort of setup where deployed repair drones are perpetually anchored to their parent ship, so there are no collisions while the latter is maneuvering. There's the player's "gravity well" mechanic when flying an S or M ship near an L or XL ship. NPC ships have a version of it that activates when they're ordered to dock at large ships.

You're not supposed to be repairing during a fight anyways. Repair is only activated when out of combat by the crew. You just need drones equipped. If you engage in combat, repair stops unless you create a special class of ship where the turret fire heals rather than damage. The heal and damage stat is actually in game file. In that case you have a dedicated healer ship that target friendlies with those turrets.

[jlehtone]

I guess you haven't noticed it yet because you don't have a lot of ships of your own. Once you do, you will definitely notice it especially if you fly around with your fleets a lot.

True. I don't. (Game says: "Ships owned 858"). I do fly around, but most of the time with no fleets. Have not done that yet in 6.0.
I did fly Zeus that has 16 fighters as the fleet, but those did stay docked. The "most objects in action" in 6.0 so far has been
my corvette, four frigates (not in fleet), NPC L Freighter, and boarding pods. Smooth as silk.

Can hitting something make my ship spin? Yes, but that did happen already in 5.10, so can't call 6.0 "different".

[FanUS]

I wouldn't go as far as saying the physics engine is garbage, but there are definitively issues. When a S ship can embed itself into a L then prevent the bigger ship from maneuvering, it gets a little bit annoying. The lesson I've learned is to not be part of any fight which involve more than one L ship, as they will inevitably ram into each others and combine.

Right and I wouldn't say it is garbage either. I am certainly not agreeing with the OP's tone. Once they fix these issues I am sure it will be very cool

It would be helpful, but it really doesn't take much to reproduce. All you got to do is send a fleet commander attacking a station, watch the fleet get tangled up and doing crazy spins stacking. Watch the drones come out and you try and maneuver that ship. We're not trying to talk badly about the game, all we're doing is pointing out issues and hopefully fixes can be implemented.

In general, capital ship movement feels awkward. They like to fly to a spot and just spin around in combat, and it takes away from realism. ideally, ships should fly like ships do and maybe try and circle a target rather than doing some really crazy spin maneuver even if no other ships are nearby. This is one critical aspect of the game the dev team really need to focus on. They make or break a gaming experience.

See if we can help make the ship movements more well thought out and organize. Or at least behave like you would expect a navy ship to behave. I kept suggesting have a redesign of fleet commander AI and that shouldn't be difficult.

Problem right now, there is no real command structure. Subordinates should never act on their own. Fleet commander should be issuing scripts to each subordinates to run. And, commander can issue a wide range of scripts for each ship in the fleet to act. A subordinate's job is basically fly in formation and wait commander order. This way you have one AI directing a fleet rather than individual AI trying to do things that's sometimes very conflicted such as multiple ships trying to zoom to a same spot doing the same thing. If you have a true fleet AI, that fleet AI can assign attack positions to avoid collision of friendly ships similar to coordinate attack, things will work a lot better that way when they are well organized.

Ships need to be able perform simple orders effectively. When they are ordered to attack position, they should be calculating heading, and engaging travel drive based on ship stat. It be a pretty complex math function but you can get accurate current speed, distance to target and deceleration speed and determine when to disengage travel. Some mechanics might need to be adjusted such as how quickly reach max travel speed if you take the Star trek warp technology as example, ship go to warp almost instantly.

Say it takes 2 seconds to reach travel speed, it's much easier to calculate your current speed that's not fluctuating, the distance to target and deceleration speed to arrive at the distance required to disengage travel and not over shoot. I tried to mod the engine and get ride of charge time but often times some capital ship still lag behind by a lot and for some odd reason they prefer normal flight over travel even if long distance.

Somebody needs to sit down, and redesign the behavior logics on paper. Start with basic movement and formation.

[Admiral Sausage]

Here's one that's... somewhat reproducible: quicksave.xml.gz

You are inside the Argon Prime shipyard. Outside, your Shark has been penetrated by one of its subordinate Rays in a most inappropriate manner. I reloaded this a few times and saw one of the following things happen:

• The two ships drift away from the station for ~5 minutes, until they are quite far away. At this point the Ray magically teleports out of the Shark, then both ships teleport all the way back to the shipyard.
• Both ships remaing entangled indefinitely (at least for the 7 minutes it takes until I'm bored watching).
• The Ray manages to wriggle its way free, sometimes in only a few seconds, and sometimes in a couple of minutes.

Each time I reloaded, I immediately opened the map, selected the Shark, and pressed F3 twice to get a good view of the ships.

There's a Thresher docked on the Shark trying to exchange wares. I don't think this is related, as plenty of ships get stuck together without any docked ships involved.

This is a particularly slow bit of the galaxy, only rendering at ~45fps for me. I haven't noticed if there's a correlation between frame rate and violations of the laws of physics.

[adeine]

This is a particularly slow bit of the galaxy, only rendering at ~45fps for me. I haven't noticed if there's a correlation between frame rate and violations of the laws of physics.

It seems like there is, but it's situational. There's a slowdown that can happen around collisions (when objects are in direct vicinity), but it's highly dependent on the geometry and angle of the two objects in relation to each other. You might have objects fused together and be fine performance wise, or not even collide at all and have the game slow to a crawl as you skim past another object.

save here which may demonstrate the effect.

[ezra-r]

What I noticed recently since I came back to play in 6.0 is:

• In a Space suite it is next to impossible to get inside one of those Wrecks with container, since the minimum touch of a wall in there propels you at thousand of kilometers per second away, tried several times.

• A minimum touch with another ship will make your ship spin without you being able to stop it, the more mass the ship the bigger the spin and the longer it takes for the ship to stop spinning, for example I decided to invate Xenon Sector with a Raptor, most of the time It would simply not respond, be stuck to some ship or spin without control. The spinning effect seems to last less if for example I am in a Katana

• I've seen 3 Rattlesnakes dating around the park in Argon Prime holding their hands together, as in flying stuck to each other unable to unstick for a few kilometers

[Mightysword]

Right and I wouldn't say it is garbage either. I am certainly not agreeing with the OP's tone. Once they fix these issues I am sure it will be very cool

I would hope so. I have about 80h so far in 6.0 and I think I can say with confidence that I don't see any improvement. In fact, there seems to be more issue than before - ironically - the very issues that the new engine was supposed to fix. Maybe it's just my playstyle - I use autopilot ALOT, and I find myself stucking inside more stuff more often than ever. For example, during the course of the HAT mission chain, I think I got stuck inside their station like half of the time when the auto-pilot try to dock. All the old issues (like you just spin around or heavily drag if your ship clip something, or you touch a wall with your space suit) still present if not worse. The teleportation band-aid is also introducing some funky behavior in some of the story mission like:

Spoiler

Show

I just did the Torus mission again last night, and there are a couple parts that after you get out on your space suit to flip the switch, teleporting back in and you'll find the ship had teleport to another random position inside the Taurus. Or there seems to be some kind of invisible wall in the wreck of the X3 PHQ during the Paranid mission

.

[xrogaan]

No, that's not fair, there is an improvement. Capital ships have now a tendency to pull appart when they are too close together. Went on a Xenon purge with a dozen of destroyers and none of them got stuck. Where as before they would combine if 3 of them where in the same fleet. It is somewhat hard for me to get stuck inside anything, despite the auto pilot epic fails. I just bounce, spin, and quickly recover.

[jojorne]

Playing 6.10 HF5 and so far I managed to make 3 K spin dance unable to attack. Striiiikeeee!!! Was funny as hell

They flip upside down than they spin on their side. I think it happened because they or touched the gate or a ship spawned on top of them.

But overall I do think that the new physics engine improved the game by alot despite the new bugs.

[ajime]

Large Ships are having a tough time getting unstuck once they collided, especially if one of them got rammed from the gate and you are in that ship watching as the horror unfolds. it's even dizzier if both of them are spinning.
It seems the workaround which was applied is to throw the ship far far away from the gate once this collision detection is happening. that inevitably shoves it into a deathtrap or inefficient fleet action/formation.
When you are stuck inside a geometry(god forbid). its even worse to get out with the new engine.

[CBJ]

It seems the workaround which was applied is to throw the ship far far away from the gate once this collision detection is happening. that inevitably shoves it into a deathtrap or inefficient fleet action/formation.

No, the fallback places it as close as it can without colliding with anything.

When you are stuck inside a geometry(god forbid). its even worse to get out with the new engine.

Again, no. The fallback will kick in and get you out, which wasn't possible with the old system. It takes longer to kick in than for NPC ships, though, to avoid throwing you out for simple near-collisions.

[Scoob]

No, the fallback places it as close as it can without colliding with anything.

That might be what it's intended to do, but sometimes it will move a ship a significant distance. For example, I have a Defence Platform a little over 20km from a Superhighway exit point. Xenon ships enter the system and might be teleported just to the right of the exit as I look at it (fine), or they might be teleported a little further behind the exit (less fine, as they then take a while to fly around the exit). Several times though, a Xenon capital ship entering the system is teleported over 20km to BEHIND my Defence Platform. Things then go very badly for my DP, as it's Defence Modules are near the Superhighway exit, so they fail to get proper LoS when the invading Xenon can literally teleport past them.

While I LOVE watching my Defence Platform destroy incoming ships, if they arrive while I'm OOS, then I teleport to the DP to watch the fireworks, I can never be quite sure where that ship will teleport to.

Note: this can happen when it's just a lone Xenon Capital ship arriving, nothing else obstructing the Superhighway exit. It's like OOS, it places the ship perhaps a little too close to the Superhighway exit when it arrives. Then, when I teleport there to watch, it moves the ship too far. It's odd really, sometimes a Xenon Capital will arrive with momentum and come flying out of the gate - these would need to be relocated away from my DP, as they've basically flown right into it. Another Xenon Capital ship will appear and be stopped, right at the Superhighway exit, then be moved much further than needed when I teleport in.

It's not consistent behaviour, even with just ONE ship arriving. Having a ship be teleported to behind your front lines like this can hurt lol.

[CBJ]

That might be what it's intended to do, but sometimes it will move a ship a significant distance.

Please read what I wrote again; I very specifically said "as close as it can", not "always very close". Sometimes that may indeed be a fair distance away. Finding a free space is not a trivial task and, like most algorithms in the game, it has very limited time to decide. If the result isn't always optimal then that's something it has to live with, and since it's a fallback anyway, it's not that high a priority.

[Scoob]

Please read what I wrote again; I very specifically said "as close as it can", not "always very close". Sometimes that may indeed be a fair distance away. Finding a free space is not a trivial task and, like most algorithms in the game, it has very limited time to decide. If the result isn't always optimal then that's something it has to live with, and since it's a fallback anyway, it's not that high a priority.

Well,you say "as close as it can" (which is fair) and I mention the 20km of empty space between the Superhighway exit and my Defence Platform, yet it still chose the other side of the DP - which is actually closer to 25km from the arrival point. This suggests that it isn't working quite as intended. I'm not being pedantic here, there's a large amount of empty space near the Superhighway exit but, sometimes, L-Class ships are teleported an excessive distance. I guess I'm just surprised at how far away the "close as it can" logic decides upon. If there are other obstructions, like Fighters streaming from the Superhighway exit - Fighters often arrive in force prior to a Capital Ship or two arriving - I can see why a ship would validly be moved so far from the exit, even if it's not ideal. However, when this occurs with just that Capital ship arriving, and 20km of empty space before my DP, well, it's a little odd.

I get it's a fallback and likely not a high priority for you guys, which is fine, but I just want to ensure that accurate feedback is given in regards to what I'm seeing in game. Seeing a ship moved a couple of km to avoid clipping a Gate / highway exit / Asteroid / Station / other ships is fine, even if it is quite jarring when approaching that ship at speed. Seeing a ship moved over 20km when the exit area is empty is a little odd. I wonder what the relocation logic thought was in the way.

Note, this more extreme example of teleporting invariably happens when I teleport to a sector to observe a fight. OOS, the ship looks like it might be a little close to something but, upon teleporting to the sector, the ship is moved a significant distance. I'm sure you can appreciate the difference between a Capital ship being between the Gate / Superhighway exit and a Defence Platform, and it bypassing all that lovely defence to appear behind the station when I teleport in, is significant.

Anyway, I'm generally really happy with the new Physics Engine and the not insignificant performance improvements its brought to the game. It has some gremlins still, but it's generally pretty solid. This excessive distance Large ships are sometimes moved when, to the human eye at least, there's ample free space, can be a pain though. I thought my example of ships able to bypass Defence Platforms a solid case of things being moved a too far.