[request] Ships able to fully rotate to take full advantage of Y axis

[Night91]

This is something I don't remember seeing in X3, but in XR : ships were not able to be vertical, which prevented them to use their "fast mode engine" in this axis, and instead made them use a combination of regular speed on regular engines and vertical strafe, which is wayyyyyyy longer than : align ship parallel to the Y axis -> full power engines to go around 2000m/s till close to destination.

[Solflame]

Are you talking about the "auto-leveling" thing? You can turn that off in the options menu.

That always did confuse me why it was there though...

[A5PECT]

Capital ships in XR were unable to pitch up or down past a certain point. It resulted in the behavior described by Night in the OP.

[Skeeter]

Probably so it didnt look weird fighting like that,, as they might have wanted to keep the cap ships level to fight like they do in most sci fi shows.

[Tomonor]

Yeah, something that was a big immersion breaker in Rebirth (as in many other space "simulator" games such as Darkstar One or Taikodom) was that literally everything was sitting on that damned 2D plane: stations, ships, highways, points of interests, asteroids - you name it. I understand this was done in order to make it easier for... Dunno - not so invested players? I mean, who doesn't understand pitch and roll in space is beyond me. Well, guess it was easier this way to find the docking port of the ships/stations, I guess. Hell, as Solflame mentioned, it was even applied to the player ship by default.

The irony in the whole thing is that even in Reunion our main character lectured an NPC that "Space is 3D - They can come from ABOVE and BELOW" while refering to the Kha'ak alright, but that applies to pretty much everything.

Anyway, while I doubt that some things such as stations will be like that, I too hope that they set the old X3 approach for X4 - let it be messy. Have to search for a station? Maybe it's just above you. Did a projectile hit you in an unexpected angle? Maybe it was under you.

[Tamina]

The planets in our sun system are rotating on a flat disk around the sun, as does the entire galaxy and every other galaxy in our universe.
Yeah, right "3D"

We are so used - as humans - to live on this planet that we are usually always looking in a straight ~70° line to observe the walkable space and look out for threats on the ground and distance. How many planes did you see in the last couple of days?
I like to view this from a psychological point of view and say that a fully 3 dimensional freedom in movement is very confusing for the player.

[Commander_K]

and every other galaxy in our universe.

Not every galaxy. In fact, a significant fraction does not have a disk. Disks only form if a medium is viscous enough during the formation stage of the object. And it only remains a disk if it's not perturbed too much in its existence.

[mr.WHO]

The planets in our sun system are rotating on a flat disk around the sun, as does the entire galaxy and every other galaxy in our universe.
Yeah, right "3D"

Correction in the name of SCIENCE!
Galaxies in our universe DO NOT rotate on a flat disk!
- on small scale (milions of LY) they are bunched together in fairly diverse clusters in various 3D configurations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgo_Supercluster

- on grand scale (bilions of LY) galaxies and their clusters form something that looks like veins net divided by areas of void - it looks more or less like some kind of 3D vein sponge that is uniform across all currently known observable universe (15+ bilion LY).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_filament

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_fi ... Nearsc.gif

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observabl ... small).png

[adeine]

Capital ships in XR were unable to pitch up or down past a certain point.

I guess it was less obvious because you couldn't fly them, but that is still mind-bogglingly ludicrous.

[MegaJohnny]

I guess it was less obvious because you couldn't fly them, but that is still mind-bogglingly ludicrous.

Definitely - what I thought was cool (but even weirder) was that they can get a few more degrees of pitch in the velocity by strafing up/down. I experimented with ship AI modding for a while, and while the nose was at about 45 degrees, they could move 55 degrees down without going crazy. It looked like a weird Y-axis powerslide.

I feel that's a hidden benefit of making a ship flyable - if the player can touch the controls and see it super close-up, there's no room for weird stuff like that!

[Tenlar Scarflame]

I definitely do enjoy that X3 is pretty loose with its notion of "up" (well, stations mostly agree on which way "up" is, but ships don't give any kind of crap), but Rebirth puts a lot of emphasis on hanging out really close to its cyberpunk space cities, and I honestly feel more like a helicopter or submarine pilot than a spaceship pilot most of the time. And I'm already accepting a lot of other player- or aesthetics-friendly physics shortcuts anyway, so... I guess it doesn't bother me a whole lot.

Now, in something like Elite Dangerous where so much work goes into getting the physics at least MOSTLY right, submarine controls would be downright heresy. But I'm guessing X4 isn't going to really be like that.

EDIT

Missed the part where we were ALSO talking about capital ships and their inability to pitch more than a few degrees up or down.... yeah, that needs to be better in X4. Even if they return to "pitch=0" when stationary, they should be able to travel at whatever the heck pitch they want.

[Night91]

Yup, y'all got it right, glad I'm not alone to think this is nonsense, and in XR this situation puts some severe limitations on where in empty space you can build your station so these capital ships do not take hours to travel to and from it. While so much time could be saved taking advantage of real 3D space.

That your ship auto-roll after a while to be paralell with the z/x plane does not really bothers me, it has its utility to not losing your marks, and you are still allowed to go wherever you want.

Another thing that bothers me and always kept we from modding on this game, was the lack of accessibility of some core libraries made to be accessed via a regular true programming language, even scripting, like python, C#, whatever... XML is fine for data, but programming with it seems... overly complicated and not really intuitive at all. But maybe I never have dug enough...

[Solflame]

I can't believe I never noticed that but you're right... dang that is weird and needs to not be in X4.

Especially considering all ships will be player controllable, so hopefully won't be. Actually, didn't we see some combat where we saw two Argon capital ships fighting and one did like a big dive or something?

Also as for scripting and stuff I thought in XR they moved to a lua based system, whereas XMLs are used for things like station layouts in X4.

[Tomonor]

Especially considering all ships will be player controllable, so hopefully won't be. Actually, didn't we see some combat where we saw two Argon capital ships fighting and one did like a big dive or something?

Yeah, after it exploded.

[A5PECT]

Especially considering all ships will be player controllable, so hopefully won't be. Actually, didn't we see some combat where we saw two Argon capital ships fighting and one did like a big dive or something?

Yeah, after it exploded.

Hey, that's not fair.

It exploded mid-dive.

On a more serious note, it did appear to pitch down much farther than what I've seen from XR capital ships (assuming the camera was at least somewhat aligned to the ecliptic).

[Night91]

Also as for scripting and stuff I thought in XR they moved to a lua based system, whereas XMLs are used for things like station layouts in X4.

I did not dig a lot, but from what I get, LUA is indeed used in XR, but for UI, whereas XML is used for scripting. And since I can't get out of my head that XML is made for data, and according to the presence of tags like <do_if> I guess that they have function made in the prog language they used that handles these tags... however have fun creating new functions or classes with that (if I'm right). It feels like going back with ASM when you can use some Python... But enough with the digression, sorry.