Free Drift Toggle and Regular Deceleration

[Jonj57]

Hey all, we all know that when you stop accelerating in any direction eventually magical space wind takes hold of your ships and brings it to a standstill. While, for the unfortunate fool who ends up outside of his ship while it drifts away, it may seem useful it does inhibit a lot of potential combat moves such as being able to drift in one direction at full speed then turn around to engage an opponent from the rear while you use momentum to keep you moving.

So, I propose we have a toggle switch that allows you to (only while in a ship) disable the "drift" so you can perform such moves (or maybe just use it as a crude auto pilot :P) and we get to keep the ship-saving drift. This allows those who like the current system to keep using it and it gives more advanced pilots a new tool to master in combat.

Apologies if this has been covered already, feel free to report/remove it if it has.

 

[AsherMaximum]

It does sound like a good idea, however, I think one of the reasons that drift was put in place is to prevent server lag from tons of objects flying around with no one in them.
Adding it as a toggle option could help eliminate that though; it could be made to automatically turn off when some exited there ship.

 

[FunnyBunny14]

This is this is a really, really, really old suggestion.
And because I can say this, you don't decelerate when you let go of the acceleration button, you lose momentum due to an unrealistic space friction.

 

[Ithirahad]

Hey all, we all know that when you stop accelerating in any direction eventually magical space wind takes hold of your ships and brings it to a standstill. While, for the unfortunate fool who ends up outside of his ship while it drifts away, it may seem useful it does inhibit a lot of potential combat moves such as being able to drift in one direction at full speed then turn around to engage an opponent from the rear while you use momentum to keep you moving.

So, I propose we have a toggle switch that allows you to (only while in a ship) disable the "drift" so you can perform such moves (or maybe just use it as a crude auto pilot :p) and we get to keep the ship-saving drift. This allows those who like the current system to keep using it and it gives more advanced pilots a new tool to master in combat.

Apologies if this has been covered already, feel free to report/remove it if it has.

I'd rather have a toggled BLOCK. That way, you can drift while walking around your ship. For, y'know, RP reasons and all that.

 

[karkinosz]

It does sound like a good idea, however, I think one of the reasons that drift was put in place is to prevent server lag from tons of objects flying around with no one in them.
Adding it as a toggle option could help eliminate that though; it could be made to automatically turn off when some exited there ship.

This is not a concern, if no one is in the sector it will be unloaded regardless of if objects are moving and if they float out of a loaded sector they are unloaded. Anyway I don't think moving objects have much affect on server performance, since its speed isn't changing all that matters is distance moved. You have to do all the same checks for a stationary object.

(offtopic)What probably causes server load / lag in that case would be constantly recalculating new vectors with all the constant acceleration and the fact that the deceleration is not regular but increases the faster one goes. Causing artificial speed limits (pretty much the speed at which the decel drag force = your thrust is your top speed, this fact caused everyone headaches a few patches ago when thrusters were (very rightfully) nerfed)

(back on topic) Anyway it's kind of harmful to any space-based simulation and would love the ability to toggle it. This has come up before.

http://starmadedock.net/threads/no-space-friction-when-accellerating.1715/
http://starmadedock.net/threads/remove-linear-dampening.1904/#post-26970

So feel free to have a look at any solutions posted if they help, nice to have other people do the thinking sometimes (no use reinventing the wheel).