Soooooo.... At its core, this suggestion is to double the rate of deceleration vs. acceleration and reduce rearward max speed by half or so? I could get behind that.
I have always thought that the acceleration curve goes up way too quick in relation to mass in Starmade's thrust formulas. Medium-sized ships are too sluggish.
I'm not sure how you could remove the "strafing" effect of fighting in a space game. People like their lateral thrusters. Halve the lateral speed limit as well as the rear-ward? (This would make forward thrust accelerate all the way up to max speed, while other directions are limited to half-max.) With special formulas for angular speeds, this could be fun. And with a server variable, anybody could change the max speed limit rules at will. It would be interesting to see if people change their thrust ratios to compensate, or if they'd just roll with it.
There's a whole calibration menu for that in game for a long time now, you can heavily increase your accelleration at the cost of maneuvering or vice versa, otherwise yes sluggishness will increase as you get larger and that's exactly how it's supposed to be (more mass and larger dimensions = more time required to accelerate and slower maneuvers relative to your profile.
I think directional thrust is a separate issue from the flight model. Both atmospheric and space craft use varying amounts of directional thrust. StarMade simplifies the simulation of directional thrust by pooling all thrust, then letting the player tune the directional characteristics.
I think the OP is really just about the subjective "feel" of piloting a ship, irrespective of flight model or realism.
It bothers me that the 'brake' function does not appear to use full thrust. Mainly because it implies in-universe technical stupidity like having a navigational mini-map with no graduations related to defined cardinal directions.
I think directional thrust is a separate issue from the flight model. Both atmospheric and space craft use varying amounts of directional thrust. StarMade simplifies the simulation of directional thrust by pooling all thrust, then letting the player tune the directional characteristics.
I think the OP is really just about the subjective "feel" of piloting a ship, irrespective of flight model or realism.
No. It is not. Flying sideways at combat speeds IS the problem, or at the very least, a considerable part of it. As described in the opening post.
No one will bother with flashy ace pilot combat manouvers, nor with carefully planned battleship movements when you can just face your target and try to out-strafe it.
One could think, "Hey, let's just allocate 99% of your thrust to forward" but then you'll drift through systems when you try to turn. At the 50-25-25 values I found tolerable, travelling sideways is still quite a valid option.
Here's an idea though; If we stick with the current thrust allocation menu, then make those values apply to both acceleration and top speed!
And, I've said it a short while ago, massively increasing Inertial Dampener strength (perhaps even through a new ""chamber"" type) could provide a low-effort, short-term, and completely optional solution to the problem, which is perfectly in line with current design ideas (make the ship fly as it was built* )
*: Adjusting your thrust output however does conflict with said ideas, as a ship that was clearly built to fly forward can perfectly fly in any direction after a short re-tuning.
I will just agree to disagree, as I enjoy the current flight model.
Incidentally, whenever I want to experience a massive increase in inertial dampener strength I just hold my left shift key down while flying.
But it would really give my little finger a break if Schine would add the ability to toggle the brake.
In the meantime, I'll have fun drifting through space and waiting for improvements to shipboard AI, the addition of relevant HUD guidance information to help me wrangle old Isaac Newton.
What if they incorporated both flight models? As in if you want to fly Newtonian model then you would need to put omnidirectional thrusters. If you only put thrusters on the rear then it would fly unidirectional. Just a thought but I know a few other space building games follow this rule. It did take me awhile to get used to the current flight model but I think it works. However, would like a way to remain in the current system that fight started. Haha
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Some peoples dislike strafe. I said we can have 3 thrust models: light-continous, heavy/efficient-delayed and pulse-thrust for quick evasion.
Also, today, we have vector-thrusters which can change the direction of the exhaust stream - at least for light-continous!
It may not work well for a heavy-thrust engine due to heat, failure to convert the thermal radiation of the exhaust stream back into power, the mass required for pannels redirecting the exhaust, or because their exhaust type is not as easily redirectable as airstreams.
If the issue is heat, the failure to recover some energy or mass, it still makes it plausible to have 10% thrust in all directions, independent of where your thruster sits.
If this is not desired, just explain it as too expensive to maintain, military-only equipment or explicit as impossible for the heavy thrust type, but alternatively you may divert 100-150% directional thrust from the maximum thrust force in the main direction.
To archive light, heavy and pulse thrust easily, here is a quick idea:
Double-Tab a directional key to use pulse thrust. It works more efficient, the less heat% your thruster has.
Single-Tab+Hold a directional key to use light thrust. It builds up as much heat% as thrust% is used.
Double-Tab+Hold a directional key to use heavy thrust. You must hold for 3-5 seconds to charge up. Tab again to power down.
Trible-Tab equals double-tab but uses the high-priority reserve of energy.
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Single-Tab-Extrakey: Set light thrust to minimum (low power for fine-tuning position e.g for docking + trying to cancel planet gravity)
Double-Tab-Extrakey: Set light thrust to max (all available power, power-up heavy thrusters by 10% and divert that force instantly)
Single-Tab+Hold-Extrakey: Set light thrust to +10% per second using only light thrust power.
Double-Tab+Hold-Extrakey: Set light thrust to 100% of light thrusters and after 3-5 seconds start with 10% increasing of heavy main thrusters passive charge. It may be limited to 10% in all directions because of efficient design, heat, ...
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If you charge heavy thrusters with the extrakey, they continue to consume energy until you initialize an action with that key again (changes to heavy thrusters take 1 seconds + 2-4 seconds / (change in charge)ratio to take effect to avoid instant switching).
Heavy thrusters consume power while charged up or lose charge. Light thrusters do not, but are only 50% as energy/thrust-effective.
If you like it, you may quote it in a suggestion thread - I have no time for being a good suggestion-thread-OpeningPoster currently.
And now about newtonian physics.
What we call kinetic momentuum or inertia, is not a fixed velocity, but the declaration of future movement.
Without declaration of future movement, independent objects may not be able to exist in close relative proximitry peacefully.
If you don't declare future movement, you are separated during movement and need to re-enter a normal space, either in an empty field before/aside an object, else you have the option to use a "gate".
For example, quantum communication uses such a "gate" to decode it's trans-light-communication into a receiver.
Warp in sci-fi is usually interrupted by gravity fields. Ships won't collide due to warp being handled like inertia for all users and collision-avoidance or simply by not touching the space containing dangerous materials. In StarMade, it is likely that you declare to occupy the destination before the jump even happens, else you would get simply deleted.
To change the direction of inertia, you need to retreive your previous declaration and make a new declaration.
Waves are fuzzy. They have probabilities over an area with gradients by definition of our physics in "this realm which we call real life".
The probability is to be taken into account by everything affected before a result is optained.
Assume, that everything below a certain Quanta of information/power is discarded, which explains some quantuum physics artifacts.
That certain Quanta could be either a current or future possibility of interaction (the more dense, the further it may reach into future).
Everything that happens is an agreement of change. Unconsent movement/change is an illusion caused by agreements into possibilities with a deeper consequence than that which you are able to remember/think-of.
Likewise every abbortion of movement is a change of the agreement due to higher priorities.
Inertia remains unless changed. But there is an agreement for inertia to exist (like one has written a source-code and this code is used).
To come to a point, Aircraft-like physics would spread the declaration over a different volume of space, thus the primary direction would have a greater change of attention and more power is required to archive same speeds.
To explain things like slingshots over black-holes: The black-hole is responsible for the result, thus it makes the agreements for possibilities that can happen in it's area of influence. The black hole makes the decission what happens to ships passing them and ships only bet on what will happen. The bet is then secured on the laws of physics.
To even be able to use black-holes, you need to study physics in order to archive these possibility.
Everything apart from what others do is bought via lifetime and creativity.
Every shared invention imposes your style onto others by updating the possibilities of the environment and having others adapt to it.
Some inventions are temporary "creative solutions" which allow you to change the imbalance of power.
Everything happens in 5D+
xyz-Space. Time-distance. Power of Agreements and consequences (as in depth of topology).
Because of this, Sectors develope around objects and the perceived space is not the exact distance but the power and time requirements to get a specified location. The transition between them is "fuzzy".
Midage humans didn't know how asteroids path through gravity-fields. Now we even calculate the chance of an object colliding and changing course of an asteroid. Only through focusing power/electricity on this task, we can reach so far into the future to predict our chances and get a way to our destiny.
For objects which are not created to harmonize with this destiny, they attract anomalies to create harmony with their purpose.
Anomalies like calculation errors created by humans, malfunctioning computers or external like effects influencing them which we didin't knew of. Objects colliding, internal gasses break free and change the course, etc. Everything is plausible or impossible to track down.
Objects which are not sentient are controlled by sentience or their actions.
Imagine you can get anywhere instantanously, then you could study UFO-building on a different planet in an interactive "program" build to simulate any time passed by and all possible times thought through.
Depending on the depth of awareness over a possible timezone, it will be more or less familiar/dense and resetting itself in various ways - either hard resets or progressively by simulated "outside parameters".
Actually everything is HERE and you have only to be careful to not make yourself familiar with a concept which disintegrates your integration into the universe/existence. You will lose that branch of your evolution, before it goes against the creators of you.
Space, is a constant we created for ourselves, to understand a certain part of our existence/awareness.
"Outer Space" or "Empty Space" is a constant (constant from our perspective) in which we need to understand the power requirements of not declaring our path beforehand.
We pay either with "power/energy" to save time; or we pay with time to save "power/energy".
I am for a system, where one sector moves with your ship when you depart; and to make it work, we need to define objects which are always separate and objects which attract each other.
Once objects attract each other, they gain a shared perspective of space - the sectors align to merge and the objects are re-included.
Ofcourse you will always align your ships sector to the planet or station you visit, not vice versa. Asteroids will always align their local or shared sectors to you and make corrections while unattended or by conditions like expelling hidden gasses.
I won't lie, I found this post looking up some way to change the flight and AI properties in the config files. I would also like an option concerning this. If the x axis of a ship and its velocity vector pulled towards each other at a rate which varied with velocity, that would make for a fun game-mode. The important part is for these to be environmental forces, not thrusts. There's no combat advantage to pointing your gun in your direction of motion; it's just more interesting that way to people like us.
I'd vote for this to be an option. It would be like an arcade mode. Anyway, back to searching for config stuff.
I think StarMade (or Schema) is trying to simulate the physics like in the series "The Expanse" - if that's so, the current state is alright
Also, I've never had problems with flying in StarMade and I agree with other, it should never be like in FlightSim, Star Wars or any other game with plane like flight, that's just wrong...
The best system I've seen in a space game used Newtonian mechanics under the hood, but automatically changed course for you (using the thrusters) when you rotated the ship. It also let you turn off the automatic course correction to perform a "Shelton slide" as they called it, and fly sideways. If you didn't have enough thrust on the sides of the ship, you'd end up going sideways anyway.
Overall, it was pretty intuitive. Most ships would go sideways quite a bit while dogfighting, but it wasn't annoying. You could reduce your speed in order to reduce sliding, if desired. Plus, if Starmade added something like this, you could go back to manual with the push of a button. There would really be no drawback.
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