Xit wrote:There is a lot of confusion about this, everyone always seems to get the wrong end of the stick whenever I mention it. To clarify:
@ loki1950 - at the moment I generally get up to a good high velocity to escape from gravity wells, and then go right into SPEC. Right now I just use the afterburner because it's a fast way of doing it, and I can leave the set speed at 0, so during SPEC I drop to 0 over time. It works okay, but it's a silly way of doing it IMO.
that's the kind of bugs i'm talking about. 0 velocity should result in no movement, no matter if spec is on or not. If we want to give autopilot the ability to change velocity that's another story.
I have controlled SPEC in the past (0.43) by slowing down my (lets call it thruster velocity) but this is slower and expends fuel, wheras just turning down the multiplier would be much more efficient, and allow us to choose thruster velocity separately, which is why it should be visible in cockpit.
controlling spec to that degree is really a bandaid over a problem that should get fixed, not swept under the rug. The problem is that we treat the ship as if it was moving at the velocity that SPEC has you percieve.
Rather than doing a transform in space of the ship moving while in spec, we should just be decreasing the distance,between the ship and it's destination. When that distance is 0, we drop out of spec and appear at the edge of the object's gravity well. We can handle objects getting in the way by doing a ray collision every frame between our current position and the destination and the same distance behind us. When we have a collision, we drop out of spec at the distance we had at that moment that an object got in our path. Each frame we do a transform to the new distance we are from the target.
This works logically even when something passes us from behind where we would drop out of spec, because technically, to compress space, we have to expand it, and we would be just as blocked from doing that if something was behind us as if it was in front of us. This also makes any sort of overshoot impossible, as autopilot would drop out of spec at 0 distance, so we know exactly where we'll be when we do the transform.
@ cap601 - it's the SVN from about 2 weeks ago, I do use the autopilot when I'm lazy but it makes mistakes and I don't like it much. It doesn't feel like flying.
every space fighter game has autopilot, many just hit a cutscene. All our autopilot really does is take the shortest route out of a gravity well and then spec to the destination. That's all you'd do without autopilot anyway. Unless you dont like the idea of being able to move around while specing. The whole dynamics of moving around while in spec is really really complicated if we want to stay consistant.
We ought to just say that the principles of SPEC make it impossible for the navigational computer to make it's realtime course corrections regarding the curvature of space at the distances we'll be heading in if spec flight is not mainaining a single direction. We would have to drop out of spec, make the course correction, and then spec off. Consequently, we cant spec without a target, because the spec engine requires two points of reference to make it's calculations and create a stable SPEC warp. Right now, the nav computer doesn't allow the input of coordinates, so we have to select targets. The target itself isn't what we spec to though just it's position at the time we start spec, so if it moves, we dont move with unless we drop out of spec and spec again.
that's how it should work in safemode land.
@safemode - when you say "leaving the velocity alone" do you mean the reported velocity will be the same as before entering SPEC, and then we'll have a multiplier for SPEC alongside? That's pretty much what I'd like to see....
reported velocity would be what it is if you were in plain space. You could alter your set speed, and that would change your apparent spec speed, giving you your ability to slow spec down, or speed it up. setting your speed to 0 should cause you to slow to a stop, even while still being in spec mode. Of course set speed and actual speed are different, thus using afterburners in spec should increase your apparent speed even more.
The autopilot does all kinds of cheating and oes indeed need a fair bit of work, does it still toggle SPEC rapidly to cheat on capacitance?
As for the ETA, does this come back to the debate on whether course change during SPEC should be allowed?
spec capacitance i believe has been effectively disabled, by making spec caps un-diminishable.
Ed Sweetman endorses this message.
