Artificial Horizon and other stabalization needs

[lazarus78]

Space is very disorienting. This is a simple fact. With little to base our posistion on, its easy to get turned around. Luckely, many many years of aviation has tought man how to mitigate this.

1. Artificial Horizon. A ball of sorts that orients itself to show "up" and "down" as well as your rotation. This type of thing is intigral in flight sim games, as well as Kerbal Space Program, and even NASA. Starmade is no different.

http://www.pilotfriend.com/training/flight_training/fxd_wing/images2/16.jpg



2. "Leveling out". Given that when you press C, it auto-orients your yaw, picth, and roll to "Galactic North", as I like to call it, it would be nice if it were possible to just level out WITHOUT orienting you to galactic north. A simple key to level out your pitch and roll, but not your yaw.

I mention this because of one simple frustration. Wanting to level out while facing something. I want to look at a planet and level out without having toworry about my ship flipping 180 because im facing away from galactic north. I just want to level out where I am facing.

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3. "Lock axis". It would be nice to be able to lock rotation along a specific axis. IE: If I lock the Z axis for my ship, I can only turn left and right, but still move forward, backwards, up and down. In essence, your ship would act like a submarine. This will also prevent your ship from rolling slightly when making turns.

4. "Snap to axis". This option would allow you to snap your ships facing to a particular axis. IE, if I am looking downward at a planet and i snap to the Y axis, my ship will just rotate to now face along the Y axis. Same for the X and Z axis.

 

[NeonSturm]

I think it is called ecliptic and in sol systems usually the plane on which planets travel around suns (or the average) (planes of planetary-year orbits)



+1. It should be a visual sector overlay like in X3-Reunion and previous X2.

 

[lazarus78]

I called it Galactic North because i was trying to tell give directions before the waypoint system was added, and pressing C and having your ship orient along the axis with a set heading was the only way i could think of doing it, since you will always face that direction when you press C no matter where you are, so that named seemed fitting. XD

And thank you for the support.

 

[BeefBacon]

These are features that, now I think about it, I\'m sort of surprised aren\'t already in the game.

+1 and so on.

 

[xino]

Too often I will find something I want to go to on the 3Dmap only to head the wrong way because there is no directional info in the map.

However what would a navball/artificial horizion orient you to? There is nothing in space that has an up or down, left or right.

 

[lazarus78]

As I call it. When you press C, it auto-orients your ship. The direction it attempts to orient you can be \"north\", and subsiquently, you are assumed to be level, meaning an up and down can be established. In space terms, it would just be a way to orient you to something, andthing, providing comonality for ships and objects interacting with one another.

IE: Notice in Startrek and most all sci-fi space shows, all ships appear to always be on the same plane, oriented the same way. This is highly unlikely, but possible with something defining a common \"up\" and \"down\".

 

[AlveKatt]

You can press ctrl to do a much more controlled roll. Which solves a lot of these problems.

Personally, I would want the direction ball to be integrated in a radar update. The current radar is not very useful. I have no doubt it\'s just a placeholder until the game gets something better though. The current prebuild work seems very focused on optimizing the engine, I don\'t doubt interface updates will come later.

 

[lazarus78]

Ctrl is helpful, yes, but its not percise enough for me. I want to be able to snap to the different axis and have a defined up and down that i can level out to. the only ccontrol we have at this level is \"C\", but you are forced to face one direction which is frustrating when I want to quickly level out and look at soething I am facing, or fly into a dock that is not oriented \"north\". I do not want to fly my ship in and have it all rolled and angled weirdly. Call it OCD if you must, but I like my ships to be straight.

I know it is still early in development and they are working mostly the core mechanics of the game, which is why I wanted to bring this up now rather then after they have the system finalized.