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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klauss
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Re: New Chris Roberts game in the works??

Post by klauss »

log0 wrote:I've been playing a bit with thrust rescale functions. Something like this could work: new_thrust_limit = 12 * ln(4 * old_thrust_limit)
I think you need different scales for fighters and cargo ships.
log0 wrote:Maybe it should be allowed to go slightly beyond 10g to be able to escape fighters by dropping all cargo?
Maybe overdrive should?
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log0

Re: New Chris Roberts game in the works??

Post by log0 »

Right, I need to account for max mass(cargo volume) and scale up the thrust towards something within 1.0-0.5g for the cargo ships. Need to play with the numbers a bit.
Deus Siddis
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Re: New Chris Roberts game in the works??

Post by Deus Siddis »

klauss wrote: I think the 1-0.5g figure for cargo haulers at full load is spot-on. For them, I'd cap acceleration a little below 10g, not only pilots aren't supposed to be trained for high-g operations, but the ship's structure will also be operating outside of optimal parameters when unloaded. And it makes fighters always able to catch cargo haulers.
So that means cargo haulers can carry well beyond 10-20 times their own mass in cargo? Isn't that kind of extreme?

It might not hurt to use more of your other earlier suggestion then- making cargo capacity less in proportion to ship base mass.
log0

Re: New Chris Roberts game in the works??

Post by log0 »

Deus Siddis wrote:
klauss wrote: I think the 1-0.5g figure for cargo haulers at full load is spot-on. For them, I'd cap acceleration a little below 10g, not only pilots aren't supposed to be trained for high-g operations, but the ship's structure will also be operating outside of optimal parameters when unloaded. And it makes fighters always able to catch cargo haulers.
So that means cargo haulers can carry well beyond 10-20 times their own mass in cargo? Isn't that kind of extreme?

It might not hurt to use more of your other earlier suggestion then- making cargo capacity less in proportion to ship base mass.
Reducing max cargo load to about 10-15 times of ship empty mass would allow them to have 10g empty and close to 1g fully loaded. And there would be no need for acceleration limiters. I am not that much of a trader. How would that affect current gameplay?
klauss
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Re: New Chris Roberts game in the works??

Post by klauss »

log0 wrote:Reducing max cargo load to about 10-15 times of ship empty mass would allow them to have 10g empty and close to 1g fully loaded. And there would be no need for acceleration limiters. I am not that much of a trader. How would that affect current gameplay?
It's an option, of course. But bear in mind, it's quite common for trains (and in our case, space trains, like the clydesdale) to be way overpowered and carry more than several times their mass. It wouldn't be unheard of.
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Deus Siddis
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Re: New Chris Roberts game in the works??

Post by Deus Siddis »

klauss wrote: It's an option, of course. But bear in mind, it's quite common for trains (and in our case, space trains, like the clydesdale) to be way overpowered and carry more than several times their mass. It wouldn't be unheard of.
That's fine for space trains and Clydesales, you don't really get to fly them in game and they probably never have to reach escape velocity. But cargo shuttles do have to blast up to escape velocity, perhaps sometimes from planets with 3gs of surface level gravity. And they are flown by impatient human players who demand better performance characteristic than you get with a modern day freight train or container ship.

It makes perfect realistic and gameplay sense for cargo shuttles to have much higher base mass to cargo mass ratios than super heavy transport ships do.
log0

Re: New Chris Roberts game in the works??

Post by log0 »

Lets use Llama as example:
255 tons empty + 2000 m^3 cargo volume * 9.0 t/m^3 metal = 18255 tons max mass
Increase empty mass to 500 tons and reduce cargo volume to 1000 m^3 results in 9500 tons max mass. This would mean factor 19 mass difference. Assume 10-11g empty. 10g/19=0.5g at full load should be ok.
pheonixstorm
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Re: New Chris Roberts game in the works??

Post by pheonixstorm »

As it stands I think we need to think real hard on how to define the math for this so anyone who wants to create a ship won't have to worry about this. Let UnitConverter or some other app handle all the calculations. I think UC was designed to figure a lot of this based off the dimensions of the ship in question.

Best way I can think of how we calculate all of this is the difference between a sports car and a truck that both have the same horsepower. The truck can haul a lot more than the car, but the car can accelerate much faster and has a much greater top speed.
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log0

Re: New Chris Roberts game in the works??

Post by log0 »

Another interesting example Ox. Has anyone ever played with one?
accel empty: 3 m/s^2 (seems to be way too low, should be about 30-50)
mass empty: 30E6 tons
volume: 15E6 m^3
mass max: 165E6 tons
mass ratio: 5.5
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Re: New Chris Roberts game in the works??

Post by Deus Siddis »

It's because the Ox is 900 meters long. Each one of those cargo containers you see attached to it is as long as a WWII battleship and maybe 10 or 20 times the volume of one.
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Re: New Chris Roberts game in the works??

Post by IansterGuy »

So this is what I understand is being proposed right now. First there would be an overall governor acceleration limit to protect the ship occupants, with fighters being higher because they would obviously would always wearing flight pressure suits to keep them conscious. Secondly there would be structural limits for each particular ship so that no thruster may be installed greater than the thrusters supports can handle. Also, there could be an overall maximum hull acceleration limit, because given the ships own weight and hull strength it can only safely accelerate so quickly regardless of cargo or what passengers could handle. If this last one is implemented only low quality passenger cargoships would have this unloaded acceleration maximum as the limiting factor. Though is would be useful to limit the use of unmanned drone ships.

This all sounds better than I was imagining at first, thrust and acceleration wise. I agree with the figures most recently proposed. Would need a maximum and an approximate minimum acceleration for each class, to then place all ships of the same class proportionally within those bounds.

A quick note in hindsight about one of my original solutions. The call it Relativity Resistance Field to slow down other objects in high relative motion seems less important if accelerations are significantly lowered like this. Though since I've been making so many possible upgrade suggestions, lets just think of it as a potential upgrade to whatever device protects the ship from micrometeors since I'm assuming none of the ships dodge them or have a way to deflect them.
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Re: New Chris Roberts game in the works??

Post by pheonixstorm »

just hull/armor and shields. ISS uses Kevlar plates to stop micrometeorites.
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Re: New Chris Roberts game in the works??

Post by IansterGuy »

So how will progress be tracked on this? Will a bug tracker be made? Will info be posted in a thread? Can I download some test files from someones Tags folder in the SVN? A big change like this will be noticeable in new revisions and versions. Good thing last version was a stable release.
log0

Re: New Chris Roberts game in the works??

Post by log0 »

My idea is to fix cargo ship stats, so that they make at least 0.5g fully loaded. The next step is to reduce max acceleration of all ships to about 11-10g when empty. For this cargo volume and empty mass might have to be adjusted(see Llama example above). But it should allow to avoid introducing acceleration limits. It would be simply an alternative units.csv.
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Re: New Chris Roberts game in the works??

Post by pheonixstorm »

Llama probably really needs a smaller cargo space anyway regardless of what happens with this. And yes, we will need something on tracker if it hasn't been created already.
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klauss
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Re: New Chris Roberts game in the works??

Post by klauss »

Actually, cargo spaces have been computed with UnitConverter or some other tool AFAIK. So it's not volume the one needing a check, but how much mass you can put on that volume.

We should probably add a "max cargo mass" figure to units csv.
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Re: New Chris Roberts game in the works??

Post by travists »

I don't know about a "max cargo mass" as an absolute, but a max recommended load. Also before deciding on a G limit, what is the cannon for artificial gravity? If you can create gravity fields, you can create what Wing Commander called acceleration absorbers. Fancy bits of tech that reduce the G load on the pilot and perhaps even the ship. With such 20-30 Gs are quite plausible as it is only the structural concerns not human limits. I would not be opposed to upping the thrust for cargo ships and playing down fighters a bit.
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Re: New Chris Roberts game in the works??

Post by klauss »

20/30g aren't plausible gameplay speeds - hence the problem
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Re: New Chris Roberts game in the works??

Post by IansterGuy »

Indeed max cargo sounds like something that you would find in your handy star ship user manual. If vehicle owners exceed specifications they may be a target of a ticket, or in this case shot out of the sky by pirates. Also if a ship is too heavy it should not be able to launch from a planet with greater Gravity than the ships loaded acceleration. Maybe a fuel deduction would make people take launches more seriously.

As I said before, I think it is best to limit both acceleration with the governor, and to a lesser degree thrust due to structural limits. Vehicle specifications have all kinds of specific limits, but most are possible to disregard. So I say just make the ship not fly, or allow landing fuel shortages during reentry to end with a crash. These are the kind of realism details that proper thrust levels would allow.

I think using realistic numbers is actually easier than deciding on arbitrary values, which is why anything that goes faster would need an explanation. Like Rlaan ships gravity drive, or artificial gravity providing inertial dampening/acceleration absorbers to protect passengers. I say exceptions for the governor acceleration limit should not come cheap and they should still be limited by hull stress factors, especially more so for larger ships. This way some gravity drive fighters could be slightly faster but rare and expensive or with some other large tradeoff. I like the idea of tradeoffs it makes every players ship unique.
Last edited by IansterGuy on Sun Nov 25, 2012 12:49 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: New Chris Roberts game in the works??

Post by Deus Siddis »

klauss wrote:Actually, cargo spaces have been computed with UnitConverter or some other tool AFAIK. So it's not volume the one needing a check, but how much mass you can put on that volume. We should probably add a "max cargo mass" figure to units csv.
That would make a good deal of sense since there's a huge disparity in mass per cubic meter between wheat and nickel-iron, for example.
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Re: New Chris Roberts game in the works??

Post by pheonixstorm »

klauss wrote:Actually, cargo spaces have been computed with UnitConverter or some other tool AFAIK.
Yeah, and I don't see it being very accurate either since, if I remember correctly, it calculates that cargo space based on the total size of the size.

The actual sizes of some ships really need to be redone which goes back into revamping all of units.csv I think it was Dues who sent a potential patch on this. The main problem was it made the acceleration values hell when launching from a planet. I can't remember if any of it made it into trunk but it was a good effort as a means to try an attempt on the balance issues facing units.csv
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Re: New Chris Roberts game in the works??

Post by Deus Siddis »

pheonixstorm wrote: The actual sizes of some ships really need to be redone which goes back into revamping all of units.csv I think it was Dues who sent a potential patch on this.
I did; in addition to making reductions to accelerations similar to what we've talked about in this thread, it reduced the size of the larger ships and stations from immense to just huge. For example the largest structure in the game, the starfortress is 10+ kilometers in diameter and so my patch brought it down to a more reasonable 2+ kilometers. The largest ship in the game was 7.5 kilometers long and the patch brought it down to 1.3 kilometers, which is still bigger I think than that carrier in the Star Citizen videos (which is visibly quite enormous in their on-foot gameplay).

Basically, by lowering scale and accelerations at the same time, everything looked and felt about the same in most situations, except combat was now relatively close quarters (i.e. not always beyond visual range) with some actual maneuvering instead of only jousting, even with the faster ships like the Gawain!
The main problem was it made the acceleration values hell when launching from a planet. I can't remember if any of it made it into trunk but it was a good effort as a means to try an attempt on the balance issues facing units.csv
As I tried to explain back then this was entirely a problem with SPEC and how SPEC is affected by gravity wells. I couldn't change this from units.csv because there was no column for it, nor could I fix this from any other text data file I could find. That is where you, the coder, would have come in because changes were needed that would require recompiling. The SPEC velocity multiplier needed to be raised by like 10 fold and the distance that the gravity well of a station or planet affects the SPEC drive needed to be reduced and maybe also the docking distance for planets increased.

So after I made everything a reasonable, smaller size and speed, changes had to be made to SPEC to keep travel times the same. The SPEC-gravity formula was compiled to work with the old balance and it must be adjusted to work with the new balance.
log0

Re: New Chris Roberts game in the works??

Post by log0 »

So how about using @DeusSiddis patch and fix the SPEC multiplier and distance, maybe even make them config physics variables to allow some tweaking?
maze
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Re: New Chris Roberts game in the works??

Post by maze »

As I said before, I think it is best to limit both acceleration with the governor, and to a lesser degree thrust due to structural limits. Vehicle specifications have all kinds of specific limits, but most are possible to disregard. So I say just make the ship not fly, or allow landing fuel shortages during reentry to end with a crash. These are the kind of realism details that proper thrust levels would allow.
I think that's a good point, there's some aspects worth discussing regarding rotation. Actually, it's not only rotational acceleration, but also rotational speed which at some point will end up with structural limits for the ships and its passengers being exceeded. I always wondered how it feels to be sitting in the front of one of those huge area capships when it's taking a fast turn...
Actually, and this is where it gets interesting, rotational acceleration is not only limited by the resistance of the metal and flesh structures, but also by the max push of thrusters and the distance between them. Max rotational speed is only subject to structural limits, and nothing else.

I'm speaking purely from a physics angle here, disregarding both game balance and limits that the craft's computer might implement in order to prevent the ship from becoming uncontrollable. But note that if my ship's computerized control do implement such a limitation on my rotational speed, then as the player of some crazy space pilot I WANT to be able to disable them! Which as of today I can't, obviously.

This being said, as for reducing the size of capships and stations, I understand there's probably a need from a realism standpoint, still I couldn't help but thinking it's a bit sad. I have to say this has me internally conflicted...
maze
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Re: New Chris Roberts game in the works??

Post by maze »

The more I think about this, he more I think that if you decide that the pilot's resistance to Gs is the limiting factor to thrust, then all ships end up with the same stats... Not fun.

If there's a need to provide a believable explanation to pilots surviving very high G values, simply make up one based on SPEC technology.
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