SPEC drive changes

[peteyg]

Time compression is a debug/developer feature, and not a game feature. You're either playing an old version, or you have edited the game yourself.

I hate non-combat mode, personally. I think that we should make SPEC zippy enough so that people don't get bored out of their skulls and use it to shave a minute off of flying between planets. Because non-combat mode is a nice feature (unlocking the artificial speed constraints your flight computer imposes on your ship)... but it's really really messy in practice.

[CubOfJudahsLion]

I hate non-combat mode, personally. I think that we should make SPEC zippy enough so that people don't get bored out of their skulls and use it to shave a minute off of flying between planets

If that's a petition, second'd.

Somehow I'm uncomfortable with these two speed settings, even if know they're not arbitrary (combat speed = safety and maneuverability, flight speed = attempt to minimize travel time.) This post means no respect to the hard-working coders, and should be seen as just another bit of 'brainstorming'. I see both 'modes' are just limits for the impulse drive (flight mode too. The only true speed limit ever = speed of light.)

Flight mode is still very time consuming in several circumstances (like in the proximity of a star. Are those Kahan skippers nuts?), and since its top speed and ramp-up and down times are long, it's quite dangerous and human-error-prone (no, I'm not asking for acceleration changes that potentially screw up combat balances.) The speed range of turbo (speed override) is somewhat limited and unidirectional.

Here's an alternate proposal--hold that decomposing vegetable. Tell me what you think:

• As peteyg said, how about the SPEC drive completely replacing flight mode?
• Or, if that is out of the question, how about non-uniform accelerations? You know, where speed and distance are functions of force, or energy, and there's a max throughput. This'd justify increasing speeds over time, which you only have the chance when proximity safeguards are inactive.
• Instead of just 2 speed settings, have a collection of easily accessible throttle settings in linear, geometric or even exponential progression. Increasing or decreasing the max speed is frustratingly slow right now, and many of us would settle for less perilous speeds--far below 144000.
• Those don't set MAX speed, just throttle settings, so you can manually override preset speed (using the tilde?) Turbo becomes one with manual override, and is bi- (or multi-) directional and limited only by your accumulator/reactor capacity.
• Safeguards may be a toggle switch; when activated, they automatically modify throughput to take you to safe 'port speeds'.
• When flying in constant velocity, engines should appear inactive, demonstrating adherence to newtonian principles.

All right. Discuss/agree/disagree/pelter at your preference and convenience.

[kilolima]

It makes logical sense that a ship can get up to any speed as long as the thrusters are on... and the delay to get up to max non-combat speed seems appropiate, but an autopilot to take out the tedium would be nice. Then non-combat mode would be useful in escape and chase situations, and ship acceleration and maneuverability would affect how well it works. Also, you would have to completey disable SPEC when near another ship. Make up some sort of "crossed beam" theory (ala Ghostbusters). This would solve the nagging problem of SPEC-enabled missiles, they can't work becuase they can't get close enough to targets without using thrusters.

[Halleck]

JudahsLion makes some excellent points. I think having some throttle presets based on exponents calculated from your maximum "combat speed" would be nice. Basically you could have docking speed, combat speed, and optimum SPEC speed. Either that, or just make it easier to modify your throttle setting with the + and - keys. Maybe after you've been holding + for a few seconds, your set speed will increase at a faster rate, and go even faster a few seconds, etc.

Also, what kind of curve is the current spec dropoff at? Ideally, it will be steep enough to catch you from overshooting, but gradual enough to let you go along at a nice clip until you get withing docking range.

By the way, I'm playing around with my SPEC config values at the moment and I'll post them if I hit on something nice.

[eddit]

In my limited use of the SPEC drive, I must say that the initial slow stat in combat mode and the overshoot of target in non-combat mode are the two major anoyances. However, I still like the idea as a way of gettign rid of using the old F9/F10 time compression trick (Which must be removed before any multiplayer thing ever happens).

Why not, instead of flicking to non-combat mode when you want to head off to a wormhole, etc, have an sudo-autopilot / assisted travel mode using the SPEC drive. Here's my idea of how it would work.

1. Select your travel destination the usual way.
2. Lock on the destination.
3. Engage the "SPEC travel mode". This take over control your mouse (or whatever) to ensure that you are traveling in the correct vector and accelerate towards the maximum velocity as well as engaging the SPEC drive.
4. As the spec speed starts building up, the velocity will automatically start dropping back towards combat mode speed.
5. When you get within a set distance, you drop out of "SPEC travel" mode into normal SPEC mode at normal combat speed.

This way you san set the default SPEC speed higher from the current 9.

[Halleck]

Yep, I think we all agree that some sort of automated SPEC would be nice.

As to the method you've suggested- I've tried something similar manually and it works well. After throwing on my SPEC, I took off the speed cap and set it to 2000. Then, I held down my afterburner to get out of the planet's gravity well. As my SPEC drive warmed up, I eased off the afterburner (which had me travelling at around 5000 at this point) and watched as my speed dropped back to 2000 while my SPEC finished ramping up, sending me on my way. An auto-SPEC could use this method.

[jackS]

Yep, I think we all agree that some sort of automated SPEC would be nice.

Working on it. Very busy with RL at the moment. Don't expect anything usable for a while. Not actually certain the approach I'm taking will work that well yet

[SadFace]

i dunno if anyone has heard of this buuut, has anyone heard of having an id-war way of warping in space?

it goes somethin like this: you wait like 10 seconds before warping, and you are not to touch your controls in anyway or you cancel your in-sys warp.

when the in-sys warp kicks in, you see a freelancer styleish warp rings as if u were flying through a tradeland in freelancer.

now that would be interesting for vegastrike.

[cuni]

a small bug with SPEC: if you deactivate it before the warmuptime has elapsed, warmdown starts off at the maximum multiplier in that area and decreases from there, instead of using the actual multiplier you are at.
in other words, warmdown falsely assumes that you have already completed warmup. this causes a sudden jolt if you quickly enter and exit SPEC mode.