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

Post by TBeholder »

:idea: How about this?
Active warp area is about the size of spherical shields, magnified proportionally to the warp rate. Interdiction by a ship's mass isn't great, but when this warp bubble collides with another or with something massive, it shrinks (and another bubble shrinks too, until they don't intersect).
Then approaching something doesn't take ages, but it's possible to actually intercept a ship without buzzing by it back and forth until you collide, because while empty space allows great warp multipliers, which leads to huge bubbles (e.g. 20 m x 10000 = 200 km) that are fairly easy to hit. With slow enough SPEC ramp-up rate this won't lead to zoom-in - zoom-out blinking, but slowing down for enough of time for a maneuver (whether approach or attack).
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by IansterGuy »

I like ideas Deus Siddis is creating and putting into patches that alter interdiction distances. This is going in the right direction.

Aside from that, we still need to solve the zooming forward and back motion while chasing ships in SPEC.

I like this idea for slowing upon warp bubbles intersection while also sizing the bubble according to SPEC multiplier. I would probably call the wide area that you called the warp bubble, simply a buffer zone or interference zone of the exterior of warp bubble. This is unique from the inner warp bubble where the actual ship resides. I like the mathematical solution, and think it would be very effective for avoiding unexpected behavior at high speeds on fast approaches. In it's pure from the ship with faster SPEC would always get what they want they could stop a ship or run away from it successfully every time unless alternative interdiction was employed.

I also like Klausses idea of matching the speed of a ship in SPEC, I think that there could be an exception to the slowing proportional to how much the ships are moving in the same direction and at the same speed. That way they could near meet each other while moving a fair speed in SPEC before they are stopped completely.

The explanation would be that the warp bubbles would not conflict as much if moving in the same direction. This would allow convoys to travel together in fair proximity and safty. Maybe the bubbles would have to join some how to make this realistic, but that is way over my head. It would open up the ability to fire upon ships in SPEC if that was what was wanted.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by klauss »

Bookmarked. I'll test tonight.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by Deus Siddis »

klauss wrote:Bookmarked. I'll test tonight.
Thanks!

Make sure to test balance_13-6-29 as it has the new interdiction settings and significantly improved maneuverability for the llama and plowshare.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by Deus Siddis »

klauss wrote:Bookmarked. I'll test tonight.
Had a chance to look at it yet?
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by klauss »

Deus Siddis wrote:
klauss wrote:Bookmarked. I'll test tonight.
Had a chance to look at it yet?
Only minimally. Had to fix a column merge bug in VS, and then had no more chance to playtest.

Hopefully this weekend will happen (the testing) :D
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by Shark »

Slightly off-topic, but have some species evolved to withstand high Gs? Alien ships could be designed to be faster and more maneuverable than most human ships. Is this already the case in VS? Can we have a per-species governor?
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by klauss »

Deus Siddis wrote:
klauss wrote: Indeed, go ahead with your changes.
Done.

Combat ships now have full interdiction, stations have 60% (down from 75%) and everything else has the new default of 0.1%. Landing on planets seems to be a bit less time consuming and flying through civilian traffic as well. Unfortunately wormholes don't seem to be affected by interdiction settings so SPEC still drops out at 10 km away from them.
balance_13-6-29.zip
Should be ready to commit.
So... I got around to this, and noted factions.xml shows no difference with HEAD.

Is that correct?
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by klauss »

Also... did you notice AFieldJumpThin is broken? (no asteroids)

That's a subunits thing I think.

Also, the ASAP is completely borked, though I'm not sure it's the patch (though I did just notice it after applying this patch)
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by Deus Siddis »

klauss wrote:So... I got around to this, and noted factions.xml shows no difference with HEAD. Is that correct?
Yes, I believe so. I think you committed the factions.xml change separately some time ago.
klauss wrote:Also... did you notice AFieldJumpThin is broken? (no asteroids)
That's a subunits thing I think.
Hmm, that must have happened when I split up units.CSV. Probably a missing row or column in naturals.CSV or naturals_art.CSV. I will look into this...
Also, the ASAP is completely borked, though I'm not sure it's the patch (though I did just notice it after applying this patch)
What about manual SPEC, is that still working?
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by TBeholder »

klauss wrote:Also, the ASAP is completely borked, though I'm not sure it's the patch (though I did just notice it after applying this patch)
Deus Siddis wrote:What about manual SPEC, is that still working?
I remember there were a lot of conditions and parameters in interdiction and ASAP code. If it's "balance_13-6-29.zip" - raising warpMaxEfVel 10x times can be enough to add a lot of "fun", given that SPEC is a little too choppy even with the last version of my rampdown patch.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by klauss »

Deus Siddis wrote:
Also, the ASAP is completely borked, though I'm not sure it's the patch (though I did just notice it after applying this patch)
What about manual SPEC, is that still working?
Yes, manual SPEC seems to work fine. The ASAP just starts going in circles when it gets close to the target, very weird.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by Deus Siddis »

klauss wrote:Yes, manual SPEC seems to work fine. The ASAP just starts going in circles when it gets close to the target, very weird.
Ah, that is probably because ASAP is maneuvering to get around the interdiction fields of combat vessels nearby the destination. I noticed this during testing, but since ASAP did find a way through after a while, I let it slide in the interest of restoring interdiction. But I may have been too lenient...

If this is the problem, then it is remedied by reducing interdiction values for all small combat vessels to somewhere between half and a tenth what they are in this patch. Unfortunately, this will bring encounter distances down from ~20 km to between 10 and 2 km, but purposeful interdiction will still be more effective than it has been since v0.4.3.
TBeholder wrote:If it's "balance_13-6-29.zip" - raising warpMaxEfVel 10x times can be enough to add a lot of "fun", given that SPEC is a little too choppy even with the last version of my rampdown patch.
After eight hours or so of testing, I found no issues with the increased maximum velocity. I believe this works as well as it does for two reasons:

1. It only matters when you are going cross-system, like between Ataraxia and Serenity. Most of the time the interdiction effect of a distant planet will be the limiting factor.

2. The fastest speed governor in my balance is 400 m/s, which becomes 400 c at full spec. So even though a ship could reach 970 c by turning off its flight computer and using manual spec, ASAP will only ever go as fast as 400 c. Perhaps to be safe I should make ~400 c the maximum effective velocity?
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by Deus Siddis »

klauss wrote:Also... did you notice AFieldJumpThin is broken? (no asteroids)

That's a subunits thing I think.
Looks like that is it, asteroid fields have several subunits of "asteroidsPriv__neutral", which got left out of the split CSV files. Oddly enough, this subunit has many subunits of its own which are the actual individual asteroids. It is only a middleman. I suppose this is so it can act as the pivot point for the rapidly orbiting asteroids in the field.

I wonder though, is this really desirable; do we prefer asteroids moving rapidly on unnatural trajectories? I tried replacing the asteroid cluster subunits with individual asteroids that don't move. It seems more tactical; if the asteroids were given more hull so they couldn't be blasted away so easily, I believe you could actually use them for cover in a fight to great effect. This can't be done with crazy asteroids because you can't keep up with them, they move at something like a kilometer per second in a tight circle.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by klauss »

Yes, I do believe VS should have static asteroid fields.

But do keep the grouping. It helps with culling.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by Deus Siddis »

Alright I made a patch for the patch which should restore the asteroid fields and reduce the interdiction effect of combat craft to make ASAP work correctly (in theory).
fix_balance_13-6-29.zip
Does it fix these issues?
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by klauss »

Sorry for the delay in testing this, I've been up to my eyeballs in work. But, now that I got some time and tested, I noticed oswald's ship is missing. Robin.tutorial.

Also somehow atlantis' upgrade bay is out of stock. Something to do with cargo imports, I'm still debugging this.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by Deus Siddis »

klauss wrote:But, now that I got some time and tested, I noticed oswald's ship is missing. Robin.tutorial.
It isn't missing but deleted; data/modules/quests/quest_tutorial.py on line 145 should point to Robin instead now, not Robin.tutorial, but I apparently forgot to do this. Here is the fixed version of that file:
tutorial_fix.zip
Also somehow atlantis' upgrade bay is out of stock. Something to do with cargo imports, I'm still debugging this.
No idea why; the relevant data looks okay.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by klauss »

Yeah, it was a problem with how I had installed the MPL files. Fixed on my local copy, but SF was having trouble when I tried to commit.

So, gonna playtest a bit with those fixes, and let you know.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by klauss »

Ok... check the attached screenshot for how afield jump thing looks now.

I think it's some issue with scales, I'll check it out tomorrow, if you don't beat me to it ;)
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by Deus Siddis »

I cannot find an explanation for that. I checked the asteroid fields, the sub unit they use and the individual asteroids and all have the same scale settings as they did before.

Did you apply naturals_art.csv from fix_balance_13-6-29? Without exactly that version of that file applied, the sub unit asteroidsPriv__neutral would not have a scale entry and so would not be scaled to 7x. You would then get results like that screenshot, I believe.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by klauss »

Deus Siddis wrote:Did you apply naturals_art.csv from fix_balance_13-6-29? Without exactly that version of that file applied, the sub unit asteroidsPriv__neutral would not have a scale entry and so would not be scaled to 7x. You would then get results like that screenshot, I believe.
I'm reasonably certain I did, though I might have botched the scale column somehow. I'll check when I get back.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by klauss »

Alright, found the bug in CSV merging that broke the scale :D

It's a bit late for playtesting though... I'll let you know how it goes tomorrow.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by klauss »

Ok, another question.

I'm seeing the following missing upgrades in the logs:

Code: Select all

 +++ m/ship_upgrades.py:171 Python Upgrade Error: finding upgrades/Ammunition/Common using upgrades/Ammunition instead
 +++ m/ship_upgrades.py:171 Python Upgrade Error: finding upgrades/Weapons/Beam_Arrays_Heavy using upgrades/Weapons instead
 +++ m/ship_upgrades.py:171 Python Upgrade Error: finding upgrades/Weapons/Beam_Arrays_Light using upgrades/Weapons instead
 +++ m/ship_upgrades.py:171 Python Upgrade Error: finding upgrades/Weapons/Beam_Arrays_Medium using upgrades/Weapons instead
 +++ m/ship_upgrades.py:171 Python Upgrade Error: finding upgrades/Weapons/Mounted_Guns_Heavy using upgrades/Weapons instead
 +++ m/ship_upgrades.py:171 Python Upgrade Error: finding upgrades/Weapons/Mounted_Guns_Light using upgrades/Weapons instead
 +++ m/ship_upgrades.py:171 Python Upgrade Error: finding upgrades/Weapons/Mounted_Guns_Medium using upgrades/Weapons instead
 +++ m/ship_upgrades.py:174 Python Upgrade Error: category upgrades/Ammunition/Common -- getting random instead
And I notice, looking at the upgrade screen, that they've moved. What should I replace them with?

BTW: problem with replacing Robin.tutorial with Robin, is that it's rather easy to kill oswald now. Are you too attached to the idea of removing Robin.tutorial? (cuz it seems like a sensible reason to keep it)
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by TBeholder »

Yes, but a ship can be upgraded from Python mission script just as well.
E.g. data/modules/missions/escort_local.py:

Code: Select all

        escortee=L.launch(self.you)
        escortee.upgrade("jump_drive",0,0,0,1)
        escortee.setFlightgroupLeader(self.you)
        escortee.setFgDirective('F')
        escortee.setMissionRelevant()
...which is kinda hilarious, because your today's diff deals with "Python Upgrade Error". ;)
Last edited by TBeholder on Fri Nov 29, 2013 8:35 am, edited 1 time in total.
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