Basic tweaks to "playability"

[thedavidmeister]

I've been reading through the wiki listing requested features.

A lot of it is incredibly ambitious but after playing VS for about 3 days straight a few things really stood out that will be a pain for any players, regardless of how amazingly complex and realistic and whatever else the game becomes.

Luckily, most of this stuff should be doable within a single release of VS (except maybe the last suggestion).

- If I'm trying to dock with a station and the local sun is on the other side of the station, I'm flying in the dark, literally. This is a problem mainly for commerce centres that are basically a giant parasol with the dock at the end of the handle :S. A docking headlight would be a very nice upgrade that shouldn't bust the bank either. Just so I can see what I'm doing when I have to, and then turn them off when I'm done.

- A refuel button foremost because the basic repair is too expensive when you're flying a ship with only a few tonnes of fuel and an auto-refuel upgrade that fills up your tanks whenever you dock. If we are feeling adventurous, a ramscoop would be nice, to fill our tanks slowly whenever the reactor is on "idle". I know this has been mentioned before. That doesn't mean I'm wrong for mentioning it here, that means that it is IMPORTANT. Also, an upgrade to increase the size of my fuel reserves.

- "C" should toggle the cloak. As far as I can tell it just keeps setting my cloak to "active" and I can't deactivate it when I need to let my shields recover.

- The autopilot currently dodges other ships nicely, and most planets, but not all stars. Those eerie pink/red suns in particular are quite dangerous. My autopilot will happily plot a course directly through the middle of those stars and then, perhaps more surprisingly, my SPEC drive will plough me straight into the star. The gravity well from the star seems to do nothing to slow me down before my certain doom and I'll hit the star travelling at close to the speed of light.

- I read on the forums that the difficulty rating of the game is based on how many credits you've earned to date. This makes it pretty hard to be a peaceful trader. Surely it would make more sense to base the difficulty of enemies based mostly on your reputation with said faction? The more the local pirates hate you for killing them, the more they would want to commit resources to hunting you down.

- Aside from the limitations of the SPEC drives, where is there evidence of these "Gravity wells". I assume that the logic is that my ship's engines are automatically compensating for local gravitational effects, but shouldn't I be able to override this manually? Most space projects today are only made possible because falling allows for economic fuel consumption. Granted, while I'm docking, I hardly want to be influenced, but while I'm escaping a space-pirate, trying to get close to a planet or jump to another system I can see the skillful use of gravity as quite advantageous. IMO the best reason to do this is that it would help facilitate trading with large masses in your cargo hold.

- The last thing, I'm not sure if this is intentional, but if I have around 3000% mass it takes me quite a while to line myself up to jump, understandably. Most of the time, at some point during my journey, a lone pirate will shoot me with something and I'll go flying off at around 500 m/s, which I won't recover from for quite some time, if ever, because the next pass I make I'll get shot off course again. Wouldn't conservation of momentum require that if I hypothetically were to be hit by the same weapon normally (at 100% mass) I'd be knocked to a speed of 15000 m/s? I think something is wrong here.

[loki1950]

Welcome thedavidmeister yes that last item is intentional it's called real physics What is affecting you is inertia from that mass in your hold coupled with low powered maneuvering thrusters,all the really big ships are the same like trying to fly a brick through thick molasses although it is easy to hack yourself better thrusters just open units.csv with a spreadsheet app watch how you save if you make any edits though there is a specialized app for editing it in the Developer Tools & User Utilities sub-forum called csv_editor v2 there is a version for windows and Linux.

Enjoy the Choice

[kraehe]

Moin thedavidmeister,

- A refuel button foremost because the basic repair is too expensive when you're flying a ship with only a few tonnes of fuel and an auto-refuel upgrade that fills up your tanks whenever you dock. If we are feeling adventurous, a ramscoop would be nice, to fill our tanks slowly whenever the reactor is on "idle". I know this has been mentioned before. That doesn't mean I'm wrong for mentioning it here, that means that it is IMPORTANT. Also, an upgrade to increase the size of my fuel reserves.

this will be likely the target of one of my next patches

- The autopilot currently dodges other ships nicely, and most planets, but not all stars. Those eerie pink/red suns in particular are quite dangerous. My autopilot will happily plot a course directly through the middle of those stars and then, perhaps more surprisingly, my SPEC drive will plough me straight into the star. The gravity well from the star seems to do nothing to slow me down before my certain doom and I'll hit the star travelling at close to the speed of light.

this does not happen in SVN ... I guess someone fixed it.

- The last thing, I'm not sure if this is intentional, but if I have around 3000% mass it takes me quite a while to line myself up to jump, understandably. Most of the time, at some point during my journey, a lone pirate will shoot me with something and I'll go flying off at around 500 m/s, which I won't recover from for quite some time, if ever, because the next pass I make I'll get shot off course again. Wouldn't conservation of momentum require that if I hypothetically were to be hit by the same weapon normally (at 100% mass) I'd be knocked to a speed of 15000 m/s? I think something is wrong here.

even if the cockpit at first looks like an aircraft fighter, your vessel does not turn like an aircraft. You will notice that speed goes up first, if you turn your vessel, and then down again. Now most ships have good forward thrusters, fine backward thrusters, but nearly no side thrust. You wont notice this that much in an empty vessel with several G acceleration. But a Llama with 3000% mass will only have 0.2G forward, lets forget about backward or even side thrust. So, if you want to turn: Turn your ship around completely, and do a home backspace and a few times tab. Wait till speed is down to 10, then turn again towards your target and acellerate with a few tab.

Buy at stations with a nearly empty ship, e.g. robotic servants and medicals sell good at commerce centers and sell the heavy cargo to planets. You cant miss the planet, so you can use asap to push yourself towards the docking height. You might want to upgrade to SVN, so you know when to dock.

An other important thing is to get rid of heavy junk cargo after combat and tractor as soon as possible. Look around for an Ox, they are good customers for the cargo pirates had in their hold. And there is often one directly next to me, after a bounty mission, who is happy to repair the armor if needed and to buy my junk They often also have the next mission, so I visit capital ships more often than space stations or planets. I prefer to trade in light weight items: Pilots, electronics, robotic servants, medical and entertainment. Its faster and more fun to do a few missions and light weight trades, than to idle waiting to jump or dock for ages in a heavy overloaded ship. Btw: 388,398,272 credits and 545 kills without cheating

ciao,Kraehe

[thedavidmeister]

You misunderstand. Please don't say "real physics" in bold like that, I know that you're trying to sell the features of this game but it came across as condescending on the first read-through.

My point is that if a pirate applies a force to my ship that is 3000% mass that causes it to fly off at 500 m/s by hitting me with some kind of projectile then if i were to be hit by the same projectile in an empty ship of 100% mass I should be propelled through space at 15000 m/s. Which is what I said.

I do notice myself being hit by weapons that cause my velocity to spike very suddenly in a heavy craft, but I'm yet to experience a proportionally large spike in velocity when I'm attacked by the very same pilots without the cargo.

I'm asking for an explanation of what is going on here, perhaps it's in my imagination because I played for so many hours straight, but it happened more than once. Specifically, how come I never experience being propelled to 150,000 m/s in gunfights when I have no cargo on board?

If you say it's some as-yet-to-be-discovered high tech super gun that ignores conservation of momentum, that's all cool with me. If it's just an artifact of some code somewhere, thank me later.

Since I didn't actually add anything in this reply that wasn't in my initial post (I'm just making it obvious that I think some communication has broken down somewhere) here is a link to the wikipedia article on momentum.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Momentum

P.S. - Thanks for doing the refuel button, please do some headlights for my spaceship while you're at it. I bet that will take less than an hour to implement (unless you want to actually put some cute little headlights on the front of your craft for the external camera screenshots.)

[TBeholder]

IMO weapons must have "mass" parameter (per shot/per second, just like damage), used to calculate momentum (there's already speed) and obey momentum preservation in this. That would remove such problems. Autocannons would kick and shake lighter ships, tractor/repulsor beams could be made without hardcoded exceptions, normal way (having equivalent m/t = Fpull/vbeam and no ammo to spend). And with little extra effort big thrusters' exhaust will hurt whatever tries to fly through. And part of "phasedamage" effects can be resolved that way.

[safemode]

The flying off at 500m/s crap is an old bug. I'm not sure if you upgraded to svn or not, so i can't tell you for sure if it was fixed or still exists in some situations.

Basically, it was an artifact of a problem with the physics calculations dealing with reaction forces and opcode returning the wrong collided vertexes. We mostly saw this as a collision problem,at low speeds, which is probably why you experience it when you're so huge, since you are likely not moving that fast. Faster speeds would likely cause you to die in these situations, so it wasn't observed in faster collisions. You'd just explode.

I suggest trying SVN. If you still see this problem, then that's the reason and it hasn't totally been squashed...though i believe it was.

[loki1950]

Not sure on what is actually happening in thedavidmeister report there as i have not been able to reproduce it at all and his is the first report of transference of energy from a weapon hit apart from damage that is.So there may be some other explanation on what is happening.

Edit: thx for the explanation safemode now it makes a bit more scene

Enjoy the Choice

[safemode]

I am assuming it's not simply weapons hitting him, but the pirate ship is clipping him. Simple bolts/beams weapon fire would not cause the bug i'm referring to, as no collision is made. No matter if it was an energy bolt, or projectile. As far as the engine is concerned, they are handled by damage code, not collision, and thus wouldn't cause any physics corrections.


we do physics better than some games, but it's not super realistic, for gameplay and cpu requirement reasons. Otherwise, shooting lasers a lot would change your direction too, which it does not in game. Not to mention half the ships wouldn't work right since their center of gravity would interfere with their ability to thrust in a straight line without spinning uncontrollably.

[Zama]

I notice when static damage and hud damage happens near death your drive automatically goes when shots hit you. Some bug happens after you dock repair everything and undock a ship go back to fight before even a single shot hits you touch the tab button slightly your speed suddenly is way too high as though the auto pilot was on you turn to use auto pilot butt its no good cause your needing to slowdown. I am thinking because no one ever seen the bug is cause I was so close to die and able to dock at the planet that it was never assumed anyone would ever fight so close to a dock!

[safemode]

If you're coming out of a planet, then i have no idea what you're talking about. I've never heard of that occuring.

If you're coming from a space station/ship , then without knowing if you're actually colliding with the base, I'm not sure what exactly is being triggered.

One of two things may be happening. You may be getting hit by the base/ship as it maneuvers to avoid being shot. You may be drifting into the ship/station as you fight whatever you're fighting. In either case, are you using svn when this happens, or are you using one of the releases?

It's my assumption, that this occurred either with a release, or an old svn pull. It sounds suspiciously like a bug that occured with the opcode code and damage code not receiving the correct vertexes that collided. This resulted in an insane magnitude of energy imparted onto the smaller vessel, hence it gets flung at high speed. Usually you'd just explode on contact though, unless you had upgraded shields and hull.