Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebalance

Development directions, tasks, and features being actively implemented or pursued by the development team.
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log0

Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by log0 »

Bump. So what happened to this? Any takers?

It seems almost like the amount of action a topic generates is inverse proportional to the amount of replies...
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by IansterGuy »

Ha ha, I was thinking that this thread was kind of quiet for such an important issue, but I think the reason is that there where still some things to ponder about.

I was doing lots of testing with the units.cfg file from Deus Siddis and it is more complete than I thought it was, all the ships move and the game is playable though some things must be broken since lines are missing. Anyways I found it interesting though it is a fair bit more boring because travel times are much longer. Everything should generally be closer so to not take longer, which seems a problem that needs to be solved. If someone intends to test Deus Siddis's old proposed changes I recommend trying the XML of controls I posted at "New keybinding proposal ESDF baised, left hand on home row". Thrust is probably a bit too scarce in the change, but having full thruster control under one hand helps and is a really good example of their relative usefulness.

Some of the things I really liked about the mod was was when fighting ship to ship against Oswald or the Aarea, was that ships where actually in attack range for longer. What I didn't like was that it became apparent that the AI is kinda dumb and does things like turning around right in front of the player, that makes es them too easy. But I think that is purely an AI issues that arised from trying to making AI easier for a flawed system. Ideally the AI should be able to be made as difficult as possible, because otherwise how can there be an action paced game against two intelligent humans online?

Another thing I really liked was how big the capital ships felt even though I think the Lambaa was bigger when you compared them. I'm sure it had to do with how how slow the ship was, but maybe it was essentially that the capital ship filled the screen many times over more often and longer when approached for docking. What I didn't like was that the Llamba was not the only ship that was a lot bigger than they used to be. Owald was flying a Robbin that is supposed to be a fighter and he was almost as humungous as the Lambaa. I think lowering the required upgrade space is important because larger fighters just makes they easier to hit and how can one transport ship hardware if it is all so big? If the game slows down it would balance better with fighters much smaller than the cargo vessels that actually need to be big. The difference would be that fighters maybe be near the same speed but much harder to hit due to their size.

All of this has got me looking at the lambaa and it's size according to the stats. If it was a cube it would be 13 meters long, wide, and high based only on upgrade and cargo volume. I was looking at the model and there are tiny windows on the sides of the ship that are near the right size. If this modification was to make the ship feel more real too, the ship sizes might be looked at. For example maybe less upgrade volume should be required because Oswald flies a Robbin and it is almost the same size as the llamba 9.5m X 9.5m X 9.5m. I know that the main windows are the same size but maybe those large windows on the Llama are a little large unless a double deck. The hole robin ship is too big along with other fighters any way that is looked at.

Finally Ill mention the space stations. Though I like that stations are smaller, I think that they where made too small relative to the ships and the artwork and the textures. The Lambaa does not fit in any of the docking bays, and I think that is wrong. It should should fit comfortably in stations because it is such a common ship size and if every cargo vessel had to use docking clamps and seals it would be such a hassle when ships docking ports get shot up that they would make bigger stations. Fighters would then be tiny in comparison and I think that would be great. Big stations make more sense if it is expected to have a shipyard and cargo depot and they don't exactly have any reason to be small with so much activity around.

I actually think that this subject need more details to be decided upon so that is why I'm bringing up more issues. Ship sizes in particular govern many other aspects so I move for first an absolute concusses on what final ship sizes will be like.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by maze »

Partial solution to the longer travel times is to set SPEC so that it drops you closer to target at a given mass. I guess you could solve the issue of non-SPEC travel taking longer with this. Then there still remains the issue of SPEC travel taking longer.

But anyway, since I'm against re ducing acceleration, I have to point out that G-limits based fon the tolerance of the human body are a bad idea. Let me explain you why:

If human tolerance to Gs was a limiting factor to spaceship acceleration, and if there existed no technology to work around it in VS universe, then bases, planets and capships would be defended by remotely-controlled drones, like it is starting to happen in the real world. And there'd be nothing more anti-climactic.

Fortunately, we know it is not the case, because we know there is some artificial G technology in the VS world. I don't remember ever seeing a fixer free-floating around in the air at the space bar. If you have artificial gravity on the scale of a 10km base, for sure you can have artificial G-dampening wired to thruster output on the scale of a fighter.
log0

Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by log0 »

maze wrote:Partial solution to the longer travel times is to set SPEC so that it drops you closer to target at a given mass. I guess you could solve the issue of non-SPEC travel taking longer with this. Then there still remains the issue of SPEC travel taking longer.

But anyway, since I'm against re ducing acceleration, I have to point out that G-limits based fon the tolerance of the human body are a bad idea. Let me explain you why:

If human tolerance to Gs was a limiting factor to spaceship acceleration, and if there existed no technology to work around it in VS universe, then bases, planets and capships would be defended by remotely-controlled drones, like it is starting to happen in the real world. And there'd be nothing more anti-climactic.

Fortunately, we know it is not the case, because we know there is some artificial G technology in the VS world. I don't remember ever seeing a fixer free-floating around in the air at the space bar. If you have artificial gravity on the scale of a 10km base, for sure you can have artificial G-dampening wired to thruster output on the scale of a fighter.
And now we are right back at the beginning of the discussion. The whole reason for reducing the acceleration is to make (dog)fights more enjoyable. As it is now it's not more than target shooting.
log0

Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by log0 »

IansterGuy wrote:... I actually think that this subject need more details to be decided upon so that is why I'm bringing up more issues. Ship sizes in particular govern many other aspects so I move for first an absolute concusses on what final ship sizes will be like.
Thanks for testing IansterGuy. It sounds like units rescaling should happen separated from the rest of the modification, if at all. I haven't tested the mod yet, will give it a try.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by IansterGuy »

maze wrote:If human tolerance to Gs was a limiting factor to spaceship acceleration, and if there existed no technology to work around it in VS universe, then bases, planets and capships would be defended by remotely-controlled drones, like it is starting to happen in the real world. And there'd be nothing more anti-climactic.
I completely agree that this is what would normally happen, and if everyone remembers I am for adding inertial mitigation devices for many stock high end ships. The question is how much does one reduce the acceleration, and by what on certain ship types. You say don't lower the acceleration at all, but I say we should cap the acceleration with a governor on all ships unless they have "gravatic inertial mitigation technologies" and stock ships like the Lambaa should not have this technology without purchase. Ships seem just way too fast and stay too far away right off the start, and faster ships don't end up feeling any faster, but rather just part of an arms race to have something fast enough to catch the AI shooting you from an invisible distance.

If you think about it though, the robots should be able to outperform humans in every aspect that requires pure calculations, and advanced AI could possibly outperform humans in every way, so that is not specific to accelerations. I don't know if you read about how I wanted to make the Nano Plague back story an element to explain why there is no persistent advanced AI in the universe. Basically the nano plague eats them as part of their ancient programing. They where defensive nanites made late during the ancient's nano war. Their defensive nature made them save energy and therefore tougher than the aggressors so they eventually wiped out all of the other self replicating robots, but by that time the both species where finished having been targeted first by the original aggressive nanobot designs. Whoever is interested in enhancing the backstory they should talk to JackS with his tracker for cannon questions. He wants to keep his best material a secret but I would not mind some exposure on things that effect cannon tech like this.
maze wrote:Fortunately, we know it is not the case, because we know there is some artificial G technology in the VS world. I don't remember ever seeing a fixer free-floating around in the air at the space bar. If you have artificial gravity on the scale of a 10km base, for sure you can have artificial G-dampening wired to thruster output on the scale of a fighter.
I think it would have more to do with gravity per area rather than total gravity of an area. For example how much energy would it require to make a black hole to suck in you enemy? Answer a lot. It even would take a lot of energy to make a tiny gravity well I know there is a method of calculating this. The reason I was proposing SPEC would work efficiently is that the SPEC's bubbled warp wave would be impossibly thin. I was also saying that station gravity would cheat to save energy by using various methods to pull only where needed, like directly on the bones of the people and on all the furniture. With this method the people would stay firmly on the floor but they would not be protected from the dangerous gravity or inertia. Gravity mitigation tech would include artificial gravity functionality, but gravity generators would have a generally to low maximum output to effectively mitigate inertia, their maximum would too quickly be reached as the system started protecting to entire bodies of passengers and sensitive equipment. Deprioritizing non essential things like the the broom closet, crews quarters, crews coffee, then the captains quarters, then a captains coffee, the captains personal on board museum, and last the captains personal open bowl flush toilet.

Jokes aside now, as Klauss mentioned somewhere, even disregarding even any sensitive contents just the cargo weight would stress the hull supports, and that would be a huge area and mass to cover and match newton per newton if loaded. This would use much more energy, and once the gravity system is maxed out it would have to report to the Governor that it can not further protect the contents of the ship and the ships governor would take that into account to avoid breakdowns or passenger injuries.

The question again is how fast exactly? Maybe the highest end fighter should be left near to how it is now, so that maybe players that like the current balance can have their fast ships the same at high levels of the game. All of the other ships should stretch down to a point a bit lower of the starting level of the Lambaa to give players a better reason to upgrade ships. Right now the Lambaa seems it may be a little too good when comparing the alternative ships on paper.

I am concerned about retaining whats good about the current balance as some people have defended it in previous attempts to start this conversation, but I think that the solution is to mostly change the lower early part of the game by slowing down the starter ships by giving them no inertial mitigation. It should be a productive compromise that give something to compare and get feedback on. It could be a good tool to make the latter game just as long and as difficult as it is now. Since there are fans of the old system, maybe it has some long term appeal that is useful for keeping the game challenging? I know that not everything can be retained is things change but I would like to hear specifically what peoples favorite aspects of the current game are, so that we can see how much of that can be retained or recreated.
log0 wrote:And now we are right back at the beginning of the discussion. The whole reason for reducing the acceleration is to make (dog)fights more enjoyable. As it is now it's not more than target shooting.
Dog fights, now that is an interesting notion that I have not really given too much thought yet. What specifically in a dogfight makes it more fun? Are we talking about losing tails or 3d tactical maneuverings. The AI right now will all follow behind the chase they don't really surround the hostile ship too well but rather crash into each other. Personal I think that ships should not be able to SPEC so close to other ships but they should be able to SPEC in front of the case at any velocity they want so that they move toward their chase from the front. This is what I try to do in combat. Though even the human controls could be improved since SPEC does not auto slow down but rather passes normally as I approach the ship. Intercept indicators and separate SPEC speed controls I think would work wonders for tactical maneuvering.
log0 wrote:Thanks for testing IansterGuy. It sounds like units rescaling should happen separated from the rest of the modification, if at all. I haven't tested the mod yet, will give it a try.
Yea separately seems like a good way to simplify this, since they essentially can be changed without changing the raw numbers of the other. Though I think they are fairly intertwined with the feel of the game and the balance if you take into account how how much harder it is to shoot, or easier to emergency dock a smaller ship.

Though seeming to be unrelated also weapon damage and shield recharge rate is set too high to compensate for how hard it is to aim. Adding aiming assistance then lowering shield recharge rate then weapon damage or raising shield strength and never droping shields due to superficial damage completely. This would make it so damage is more predicatively additive and less randomly sudden. The shield would hold longer but the damage would also linger longer. This would give ships time to maneuver and save their allies. I think this would create those desirable dogfights. Because currently it is like you say a target practice, because either a ships armor is damaged in a singe pass or their shields recharge and the last pass counted for nothing.

[Edited wording, meaning, and added and moved sections]
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by maze »

log0 wrote:And now we are right back at the beginning of the discussion. The whole reason for reducing the acceleration is to make (dog)fights more enjoyable. As it is now it's not more than target shooting.
I don't know, I find fighting in my Dosto to be quite fun, and to involve a lot of maneuvering, although it is planned maneuvering, and not the type of improvisation that you'd have in a dogfight. Also, for me the game is so hard that I wouldn't stand a single chance to make it without the cloaking device. So much for dogfighting... But dogfighting anyway has been a thing of the 1st and 2nd world war, after that I doubt there has been much dogfighting going on during the wars of the late 20th and early 21st century. When there has been, I believe it was the exception more than the rule. Besides, acceleration is not the only technological factor influencing the occurrence of dogfights.
lansterGuy wrote:If you think about it though, the robots should be able to outperform humans in every aspect that requires pure calculations, and advanced AI could possibly outperform humans in every way, so that is not specific to accelerations. I don't know if you read about how I wanted to make the Nano Plague back story an element to explain why there is no persistent advanced AI in the universe. Basically the nano plague eats them as part of their ancient programing. They where defensive nanites made late during the ancient's nano war. Their defensive nature made them save energy and therefore tougher than the aggressors so they eventually wiped out all of the other self replicating robots, but by that time the both species where finished having been targeted first by the original aggressive nanobot designs. Whoever is interested in enhancing the backstory they should talk to JackS with his tracker for cannon questions. He wants to keep his best material a secret but I would not mind some exposure on things that effect cannon tech like this.
OK, but note that before thinking AI vs human, I was simply thinking remotely-controlled drones vs human-piloted ships.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by Deus Siddis »

log0 wrote: Bump. So what happened to this? Any takers?

It seems almost like the amount of action a topic generates is inverse proportional to the amount of replies...
It's because there no longer is (or never was) a clear mechanism in VS project politics for deciding anything after a small sample of the community comes forward and deadlocks an issue. It always happens when making a change to game balance or artwork, even if said change seems to be a pretty clear improvement and it's to a part of the game greatly in need of improvement.

Also, for at least for this month I don't have any free time to work on a rebalance involving so many ships as the game currently has.

Two years ago I had more free time and took charge on this issue, posting the old rebalance patch and ready to make further changes to get this thing working for most everyone willing to compromise at least somewhat. But I got stonewalled back then and the effort stalled completely. Same thing almost happened with my faction rebalance that fixed a bug where by defending yourself against violently hostile luddites or uln at the beginning of the game, every faction would become hostile toward you via a long chain reaction of declining relations. A vocal portion of the community crawled out of the woodwork to argue that this wasn't a bug, it was a feature. Fortunately that time Klauss came to the rescue and committed the patch anyway.

So I'm also a little apprehensive that if after putting a good deal more work into a series of rebalance patches, a suddenly vocal and unreasonable minority of the community will emerge to shoot this down. If the VS project has an official voice of some kind, it'd definitely help if it fully and clearly sanctioned the general rebalance criteria outlined in this thread.
log0 wrote: Thanks for testing IansterGuy. It sounds like units rescaling should happen separated from the rest of the modification, if at all. I haven't tested the mod yet, will give it a try.
Note that that old rebalance patch is something like 2 or 3 times more aggressive in reducing linear accelerations than would be the case under the criteria put forward in this thread. Even more so for the larger ships which would be hardly changed if at all under the new criteria.

Also the old patch reduced the scale of large ships and stations which a new rebalance of only accelerations would not do.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by klauss »

Deus Siddis wrote: It's because there no longer is (or never was) a clear mechanism in VS project politics for deciding anything after a small sample of the community comes forward and deadlocks an issue. It always happens when making a change to game balance or artwork, even if said change seems to be a pretty clear improvement and it's to a part of the game greatly in need of improvement.
Oh, but there is! It's called patch-o-cracy.
Deus Siddis wrote:So I'm also a little apprehensive that if after putting a good deal more work into a series of rebalance patches, a suddenly vocal and unreasonable minority of the community will emerge to shoot this down. If the VS project has an official voice of some kind, it'd definitely help if it fully and clearly sanctioned the general rebalance criteria outlined in this thread.
Currently, and de-facto-ingly, I or pheonix are the voice. If he or I decide something goes, it goes. We're careful enough not to de-rail the game or let feature-bloat into the codebase. It's bad enough as it is to make it any worse, but if we see an improvement worthy of getting committed (and we get convinced), that's it.

In fact, I've been the main defender of playability and balance here (even though I haven't had the time to invest in data-wide balance issues).

I'm convinced accelerations have to be lowered. Any patch following the guidelines we talked and agreed will be committed (after some - minimal - playtesting of course).
Deus Siddis wrote:Note that that old rebalance patch is something like 2 or 3 times more aggressive in reducing linear accelerations than would be the case under the criteria put forward in this thread. Even more so for the larger ships which would be hardly changed if at all under the new criteria.
All the more reason to be less conservative about whether such patch would make it into trunk or not. In any case, it would change the landscape a great deal. We'd be free to make fully laden cargo ships (ie: AI cargo ships) as sluggish as we wish, without sacrificing playability.

For that we need the acceleration limit support on the engine. It's trivial, so if anyone commits to preparing a patch, I can commit to creating such a limit (bare in mind I have a healthy backlog of patches to take care of already).
Deus Siddis wrote:Also the old patch reduced the scale of large ships and stations which a new rebalance of only accelerations would not do.
That's probably the more controversial issue. I think an acceleration-only patch should go first, then we gauge its effect, and consider whether to change sizes or not. I'm quite convinced we can't change sizes without a massive investment in new art assets, which I'm not sure we can afford.

That and I'm convinced the engine can be made to support sophisticated detailling techniques that would make the scale more evident. There's the quite popular tesselation, though I'm partial to raytracing techniques myself.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by pheonixstorm »

Acceleration is going to be very tricky to do right, and do it in such a way that it will kill off trading as a viable career choice. I still haven't finished my last thread yet. I put several ideas into it I need to organize. One of which is our current "set" speed vs an actual acceleration speed.

Also there was the fly-by-wire system that was brought up.. I don't see it as a complete fix for a lot of things.. but its a start on how things may eventually play out.. who knows. I do know that at present its not just acceleration that needs to be fixed but all of the accel/maneuver aspects.

Acceleration isn't the only problem.. how our craft maneuver and at what rate also needs to be addresses.. so frieghters will be rather slow with low maneuverability while fighters the opposite, but how do we calculate those rates. How do make sure that any future additions (or remakes) or certain ships retain the same ratio for power/thrust compared to size and classification of a particular ship.

How do we calculate those values for atmospheric vs space only craft?

Do atmospheric craft have a huge linear velocity compared to its forward velocity?? say 4gs linear and 1g forward? If a ship has a sustained speed of 1g and a max thrust of 2g how do we account for additional thrust from afterburners?

I need to re-read the thread.. but those are a few of my thoughts on all this.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by Deus Siddis »

klauss wrote: I'm convinced accelerations have to be lowered. Any patch following the guidelines we talked and agreed will be committed (after some - minimal - playtesting of course).
Okay good, that is what I needed to hear.

I will put on my to-do list the creation of new acceleration rebalance patches based on the guidelines. Linear acceleration can be the focus for the first rebalance, then once that is squared away I'll attack the more nebulous situation of angular acceleration.
In any case, it would change the landscape a great deal. We'd be free to make fully laden cargo ships (ie: AI cargo ships) as sluggish as we wish, without sacrificing playability. For that we need the acceleration limit support on the engine. It's trivial, so if anyone commits to preparing a patch, I can commit to creating such a limit (bare in mind I have a healthy backlog of patches to take care of already).
Actually it seems this probably won't be necessary after all.

Maybe I did my math wrong, but looking at the present units.csv, it seems very few cargo ships actually break the guidelines. The Llama and most "SHUTTLE" class ships do ~5 g, which could be lowered to 3 g or just left where it is. Only deviants like the Franklin, GTIO and ridiculous (50 g) Quicksilver need to be rebalanced. And the heavier ships are fine where they are.

So predominantly "INTERCEPTOR", "FIGHTER" and "BOMBER" class ships will be affected by the linear acceleration reduction.

Angular acceleration is another matter though.
I'm quite convinced we can't change sizes without a massive investment in new art assets, which I'm not sure we can afford.
It depends entirely on the interior docking ports of the model. If the smallest ships can not enter the internal bays relatively easily, then yes, you need a new redesigned model for that ship in order to shrink it down.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by IansterGuy »

maze wrote:
log0 wrote:And now we are right back at the beginning of the discussion. The whole reason for reducing the acceleration is to make (dog)fights more enjoyable. As it is now it's not more than target shooting.
I don't know, I find fighting in my Dosto to be quite fun, and to involve a lot of maneuvering, although it is planned maneuvering, and not the type of improvisation that you'd have in a dogfight. Also, for me the game is so hard that I wouldn't stand a single chance to make it without the cloaking device. So much for dogfighting...[...] Besides, acceleration is not the only technological factor influencing the occurrence of dogfights.
The game should not be so difficult right off the start, to need a cloaking devices. In the long run, an expansion to make planned maneuvering easier would be good for when slower ships are chasing faster ones. Intercept indicators would help find the best way to SPEC in front of a ship and a collision warning system would show the best collision avoidance path. Dogfights would then only occur when one ship cannot escape the interdiction field of the faster ship. For the short term, just passive SPEC interdiction would be required so that humans avoid instant collisions and auto slow downs make for easier speed management on final approach from the front of the pursued ship path.
maze wrote:OK, but note that before thinking AI vs human, I was simply thinking remotely-controlled drones vs human-piloted ships.
O? Well I forgot but I had a reply for that too. Radio waves are Electromagnetic light waves which are generally hard to block, so radio controlled drones would be feasible; but these light like waves only move the speed of light so there would be no radio communication with a drone in SPEC. Though since instant communication seems cannon there would be an alternative faster than light way to communicate. My thought was that subspace channels would be used for communication and that possibly they could be jammed in a similar or same way that SPEC drive would be jammed. This would mean either limited calls for help to light speed, or a requirement to escape the jamming field before calling for help. This along with SPEC jamming would help create more effective ambushes anywhere in space, not just at planets as is currently. Those drones would not be effective unless there was an effective means of keeping the target ship from SPECing away. So they would be only really useful in static defense since they would need to be recollected or ordered and followed by the control ship to the new location for every long range SPEC event.
Deus Siddis wrote:Note that that old rebalance patch is something like 2 or 3 times more aggressive in reducing linear accelerations than would be the case under the criteria put forward in this thread. Even more so for the larger ships which would be hardly changed if at all under the new criteria.
O good, this is what I suspected but hadn’t verified by comparing the two files yet.
klauss wrote:Oh, but there is! It's called patch-o-cracy.
Haha patchocracy works to give influence to those who put in the work, though as I read, units.csv does not patch too well when many people are working on it because it mostly requires large sections to be changed at once. In this way I think it is more difficult, which is why I'm glad Deus Siddis and others want it done in sections.
klauss wrote:I'm quite convinced we can't change sizes without a massive investment in new art assets, which I'm not sure we can afford.
Yea I played the old patch and though I liked the idea of making the Lambaa seem a big as it is supposed to be, I didn't like the changes with the station sizes because of the artwork, and it overall felt wrong to make the station insignificant in size. Especially if they are supposed to be a persistent cargo trading destination. To make cargo vessels seem bigger just relatively shrink the fighters. With them smaller they would be harder to shoot, and would not need to be as fast as they are now, to be near as good in combat. Required upgrade volumes are really large right now.
klauss wrote:That and I'm convinced the engine can be made to support sophisticated detailing techniques that would make the scale more evident. There's the quite popular tesselation, though I'm partial to raytracing techniques myself.
Would be good to use any technique not involving acceleration to make big ships look and feel big, and small ships look and feel small. I don't know much about 2D optics, but there must be a way to shrink the camera to a human perspective. 3D drivers and screens may be used with the game at some point, which would further make something like camera sizes apparent. When something is really big and close one normally needs to turn there head to see it so maybe it's a standardized external view issue.
pheonixstorm wrote:Do atmospheric craft have a huge linear velocity compared to its forward velocity?? say 4gs linear and 1g forward? If a ship has a sustained speed of 1g and a max thrust of 2g how do we account for additional thrust from afterburners?
I was thinking there is no need for velocity limits at all anymore, so that if a slower vessels SPEC drive and communications systems where destroyed or interdicted, they could travel in the fastest possible normal spaces speed to the nearest base.

For atmospheric flight, it would make sense to have one largest thruster needed to overcome any large acceleration of gravity on a heavy world planet. Strong bottom thrusters would make dogfights in any future atmosphere more manoeuvrable.

Afterburners\overdrive would increase acceleration and could possibly put any standard artificial gravity systems of a ship in overdrive too, so that they may even exceed normal governor acceleration limits if those thruster upgrades and governor where included in the game.
Deus Siddis wrote:I will put on my to-do list the creation of new acceleration rebalance patches based on the guidelines. Linear acceleration can be the focus for the first rebalance, then once that is squared away I'll attack the more nebulous situation of angular acceleration.
This sounds great, doing it in segments of most importance first would let everyone look at the changes. Though people should know what temporary imbalances to expect. So they can imagine it working better with any planed solution.
Deus Siddis wrote:
Klauss wrote:In any case, it would change the landscape a great deal. We'd be free to make fully laden cargo ships (ie: AI cargo ships) as sluggish as we wish, without sacrificing playability. For that we need the acceleration limit support on the engine. It's trivial, so if anyone commits to preparing a patch, I can commit to creating such a limit (bare in mind I have a healthy backlog of patches to take care of already).
Actually it seems this probably won't be necessary after all.
Okay it sound like you want to start the balance without using an acceleration governor. I think that is the best way to do it since it needs to work well without inertial mitigation or any complication first. More importantly someone suggested thruster upgrades as individual upgradeable subsystems. So if stock ships where balanced independently as you plan, then a governor could be added at the same time as any thruster subsystem upgrades would be. This would eliminate related temporary imbalances while giving ships more variety latter.
Deus Siddis wrote:Maybe I did my math wrong, but looking at the present units.csv, it seems very few cargo ships actually break the guidelines. The Llama and most "SHUTTLE" class ships do ~5 g, which could be lowered to 3 g or just left where it is. Only deviants like the Franklin, GTIO and ridiculous (50 g) Quicksilver need to be rebalanced. And the heavier ships are fine where they are.

So predominantly "INTERCEPTOR", "FIGHTER" and "BOMBER" class ships will be affected by the linear acceleration reduction.

Angular acceleration is another matter though.
Well that is convenient. Funny how this seems to be turning out to be mostly a combat ship rebalance patch. Though the Lambaa probably needs to be lowerd to that 3 g we could say that top quality ships can go slightly faster than that 4.5g cargo 9g fighter mentioned earlier because lets say stock artificial gravity can somewhat mitigate inertia. So 6g cargo, 10.5g fighter max stock speed as I think log0 originally planed. Thoughts?
Deus Siddis wrote:
I'm quite convinced we can't change sizes without a massive investment in new art assets, which I'm not sure we can afford.
It depends entirely on the interior docking ports of the model. If the smallest ships can not enter the internal bays relatively easily, then yes, you need a new redesigned model for that ship in order to shrink it down.
I'm thinking the size of the docking ports on the model and the artwork is really what needs to align. Size differences are quite noticeable to the player. Both the hanger and the ship in the hanger should ideally be in proportion to the models. There is only so much artwork, but it is pretty good and I like the various scales of the generic hangers. If the Lambaa or any other ship is too big to be shown on a particular landing pad in the hanger or used a docking clamp port instead of the hanger port, then maybe it should ideally not be shown on the pad, but rather hinted to be attached to a docking port accessible by clicking on or near the landing pad called "To docked ship". This is a little more on the topic of walkable ships than ship sizes now, but may give perspective.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by klauss »

IansterGuy wrote:I'm thinking the size of the docking ports on the model and the artwork is really what needs to align. Size differences are quite noticeable to the player. Both the hanger and the ship in the hanger should ideally be in proportion to the models. There is only so much artwork, but it is pretty good and I like the various scales of the generic hangers. If the Lambaa or any other ship is too big to be shown on a particular landing pad in the hanger or used a docking clamp port instead of the hanger port, then maybe it should ideally not be shown on the pad, but rather hinted to be attached to a docking port accessible by clicking on or near the landing pad called "To docked ship". This is a little more on the topic of walkable ships than ship sizes now, but may give perspective.
You know, I hadn't thought about this, but certainly there's some work to be done on base interfaces to make all this make sense. I think we can already make the distinction of internal-vs-external docking ports, base interface code should simply be patched to hide the player's ship if docked on an external docking port.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by log0 »

Deus Siddis wrote:... Angular acceleration is another matter though ...
One could apply linear accel limits here too. The maximum angular acceleration would be restricted to (a fraction of) maximum linear acceleration magnitude at most exterior point: max_ang_accel = max_lin_accel / half_length. half_length can be radius or bounding box values to get different roll, pitch and yaw values. This would make large vessels turn slower automagically. To get max angular thrust you would have to multiply max_ang_accel with inertia, which is mass + fuel_mass atm if I remember correctly.

This change should be done separately of linear accel fixes ideally.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by klauss »

log0 wrote:
Deus Siddis wrote:... Angular acceleration is another matter though ...
One could apply linear accel limits here too.
I don't think so. Those limits are driven by different structural limits (shear vs push/pull)
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by pheonixstorm »

Iansterguy wrote:I was thinking there is no need for velocity limits at all anymore, so that if a slower vessels SPEC drive and communications systems where destroyed or interdicted, they could travel in the fastest possible normal spaces speed to the nearest base.
We still need a maximum thrust rating, which is also the max velocity, though we need a sustained rate of thrust as well as a maximum that a ships engines can produce for a limited time.

For atmospheric takeoff the max burn needs to be relatively high to leave a gravity well. As for space combat though.. what is a ships normal cruising speed? Do ships need to have constant acceleration or can they accelerate to some set speed then drift for the remainder of the voyage? What about the thrust rating for our maneuver jets? Do they draw power from the primary engines or are they independent?
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by log0 »

klauss wrote:
log0 wrote:
Deus Siddis wrote:... Angular acceleration is another matter though ...
One could apply linear accel limits here too.
I don't think so. Those limits are driven by different structural limits (shear vs push/pull)
Gosh, just to get somewhat physics based values instead of pulling them out of thin air. Or are you suggesting to run fem analysis on vessel meshes?
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by klauss »

log0 wrote:
klauss wrote:I don't think so. Those limits are driven by different structural limits (shear vs push/pull)
Gosh, just to get somewhat physics based values instead of pulling them out of thin air. Or are you suggesting to run fem analysis on vessel meshes?
I was pondering something like that for mesher. But no, I was suggesting using common sense at first, based on classes, as was done with linear accel.

Fighters are most likely going to be optimized for maneuvering, whereas cargo haulers will be on the opposite end. Of course it can't exceed linear accel, but I imagine in both cases it would be significantly less than linear accel (more so for cargo haulers).
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by IansterGuy »

pheonixstorm wrote:
Iansterguy wrote:I was thinking there is no need for velocity limits at all anymore, so that if a slower vessels SPEC drive and communications systems where destroyed or interdicted, they could travel in the fastest possible normal spaces speed to the nearest base.
We still need a maximum thrust rating, which is also the max velocity, though we need a sustained rate of thrust as well as a maximum that a ships engines can produce for a limited time.
Well trying to do max speed realistically biased on thrust would be interesting because of Albert Einstein's relativity. Time apparently slows down for objects moving closer to the speed of light relative to another object. Since the game can only have one relative time in multiplayer, the players ship operations would slow down as relative speed to the local sun increases. If the player did spend enough time to approach the speed of light relative to a reference, the thrusters would be operating so slow and continue to slow so that light speed would never quite be reached. I believe that I'm missing a concept here about how thrust works into this, but from what I understand thrust would accelerate the ship the same amount near the cosmic speed limit, but rather the time for the thrusters to act shortens infinitely, so relatively to the reference this ship appears to stop accelerating though locally everyone on board thinks they are they are going full steam about to hit the light berrior but are really just becoming more frozen in time and never quite make it. I am not a physicist and this may be completely wrong or imcomplete, but if a realistic smooth approach instead of a cap on the cosmic speed limit was ever desired using variable thrust output over time would be the only realistic way thrust limits would determine maximum relative velocity. Indeed you did just say speed so, so maybe you did mean adjusting the relative acceleration as approaching the relative speed of light. In that case assuming you meant velocity and making this explanation would be over kill. O well.
pheonixstorm wrote:For atmospheric takeoff the max burn needs to be relatively high to leave a gravity well. As for space combat though.. what is a ships normal cruising speed?
During manoeuvre mode only there could be a max cruising speed for docking. Personally I would rather that instead of manoeuvre mode capping speed, it would simply make thruster controls change the set velocity in the exact same increment as the thruster output. Setting the top speed quickly in maneuver mode would not become a problem because my new controls would set max speed by simply pressing [Shift+Z] and relative zero by pressing [Shift+X] as I have all those nearby shortcuts working well in the keymap now.
pheonixstorm wrote:Do ships need to have constant acceleration or can they accelerate to some set speed then drift for the remainder of the voyage?
Yes but it would be faster to accelerate and decelerate the hole trip rather than accelerate half way then drift then casually into an orbit.
pheonixstorm wrote:What about the thrust rating for our maneuver jets? Do they draw power from the primary engines or are they independent?
This is something that was bugging me. My thought was that the fusion reactors charged the capacitors and that power from various capacitors was used for all ship systems functions. The ion propulsion thrusters would then use most of the additional fuel to create the ions to jettison outward. I don't believe is the case with the power system right now because the other capacitors would have to charge slower depending on when thrusting, or using any other unlisted power usage without its own capacitor.

I much like the current Newtonian physics except the max speed because I was proposing that "Proposal to change the way SPEC drive works for orbit sync". In that case a low sudden speed limit would be noticeable while a speed limit at the speed of light relative to the sun would at least take a long time to reach. It would take infinity longer if relativity was accounted for by reducing thrust infinitely approaching light speed.
klauss wrote:
log0 wrote:
klauss wrote:I don't think so. Those limits are driven by different structural limits (shear vs push/pull)

Fighters are most likely going to be optimized for maneuvering, whereas cargo haulers will be on the opposite end. Of course it can't exceed linear accel, but I imagine in both cases it would be significantly less than linear accel (more so for cargo haulers).
Yea I'm not sure how to account for various thruster strengths around different leverage points around the ship, but maybe Log0's temporary fix would do the job for testing purposes until a better equation, raw numbers, or a better method is set.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by Deus Siddis »

I have begun work on the linear acceleration patch. But I have uncovered what seems to be at least one bug in the process...

First off, the speed governors. Whatever you set them to in units.csv they end up double that in game. Is there a good reason for this?

I have also been having some trouble getting accurate acceleration rates out of units.csv. Am I right to assume, that for forward acceleration for example, you have to divide the so called "forward_accel" column by the ship's mass? Because forward_accel is actually forward_force, right? And for example Llama.blank represents the ship you can buy in game if you sell off all the upgrades, right?

Because making these assumptions, I am finding the game is telling me the ships have acceleration rates ~ 50% - 66% of what I had set them to in units.csv. What is the engine doing with the mass and linear accel numbers? Is there another variable computed in the engine's linear acceleration equation?
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by klauss »

Deus Siddis wrote:First off, the speed governors. Whatever you set them to in units.csv they end up double that in game. Is there a good reason for this?
I think that's some kind of configuration option aimed at making the game easily tweakable in response to difficulty settings.
Deus Siddis wrote:I have also been having some trouble getting accurate acceleration rates out of units.csv. Am I right to assume, that for forward acceleration for example, you have to divide the so called "forward_accel" column by the ship's mass? Because forward_accel is actually forward_force, right? And for example Llama.blank represents the ship you can buy in game if you sell off all the upgrades, right?

Because making these assumptions, I am finding the game is telling me the ships have acceleration rates ~ 50% - 66% of what I had set them to in units.csv. What is the engine doing with the mass and linear accel numbers? Is there another variable computed in the engine's linear acceleration equation?
I think all your discrepancies relate to that difficulty setting I was talking about. All accelerations and speed values are tweaked by the engine according to the difficulty setting (there are a few parameters in the .config I think, but they're all tied to the "difficulty" setting in vssetup).
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by Deus Siddis »

klauss wrote: I think that's some kind of configuration option aimed at making the game easily tweakable in response to difficulty settings.

I think all your discrepancies relate to that difficulty setting I was talking about. All accelerations and speed values are tweaked by the engine according to the difficulty setting (there are a few parameters in the .config I think, but they're all tied to the "difficulty" setting in vssetup).
After further testing it appears you are most correct... And this feature must be deprecated. The is no hope of finely balancing the game until it is.

Fine balance work is a nebulous and time consuming task. And there are already many aspects specific to VS that make balancing even more difficult. But add to everything a feature like this, that adds who knows how many magic numbers and random modifiers to variables and creates a need to balance three games (three 'difficulty levels') instead of one, and you make the task impossible. Never mind the fact that none of the difficulty presets accurately reflects the variables in units.csv. Never mind that it increases speed governors while decreasing accelerations at the same time and vice versa. No matter how it is implemented a feature like this breaks things.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by klauss »

Deus Siddis wrote:
klauss wrote: I think that's some kind of configuration option aimed at making the game easily tweakable in response to difficulty settings.

I think all your discrepancies relate to that difficulty setting I was talking about. All accelerations and speed values are tweaked by the engine according to the difficulty setting (there are a few parameters in the .config I think, but they're all tied to the "difficulty" setting in vssetup).
After further testing it appears you are most correct... And this feature must be deprecated. The is no hope of finely balancing the game until it is.
We've talked about this and I agree. Difficulty should modify weapons and shields, giving the players some handicap, not speed.

Feel free to tweak settings towards the neutral values. It should all be on the config file.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by Deus Siddis »

klauss wrote: Feel free to tweak settings towards the neutral values. It should all be on the config file.
Okay I attached the patch for vegastrike.config to this post. I assume the default difficulty is medium, and so I set that to 1 and 1 for speed and acceleration. So by default the game should reflect what is in units.csv. If so then please commit it.
We've talked about this and I agree. Difficulty should modify weapons and shields, giving the players some handicap, not speed.
It is still an evil but it is a far lesser evil if you make no change to player weapons/defense by default. You should have to set the difficulty to easy if you want a special handicap of any kind.

But what would be much better is an in-universe solution that doesn't break the suspension of disbelief. For example, give a player on easy mode more starting credits or put him in a safer starting system.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by klauss »

Deus Siddis wrote:But what would be much better is an in-universe solution that doesn't break the suspension of disbelief. For example, give a player on easy mode more starting credits or put him in a safer starting system.
That's certainly doable and sensible, but we'd have to severely tweak the dynamic universe system to guarantee safety in those systems. As things are right now, no system is really safe - way too many factions and way too many ways to upset one of them.

PS: I checked the config. Are you sure about harder and impossible? Accel there looks heavily modded. I think we should slow down the game a bit for easiest perhaps, but keep accel and speed unmodded for the harder levels, and instead play with damage values for those.
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