Umm NO /me kills the thread again let the sleeping thread lay here undisturbed

O-tone Xaander:
"To iopaw and all the physics whiners- Go play Vega Strike and try to land succesfully 10 times in a row on different planets. Then come back and whine."
Vegastrike, eh? What next, compare VO with TicTacToe?

Actually, VS has a much more advanced game flight engine than VO.

And its multiplayer branch is coming off nicely.

And yes, landing 10 times in a row on different planets can be done. Did it... hmmm... past Thursday, IIRC.

Basically this would replace the current max speed of a ship with "current max speed without losing structural integrity due to overspeed" and would still allow a temporary 'overdrive' in emergency situations: the higher the current actual speed (over the 'top' safe speed), the higher the probability of structural damage. Might spice things up a little...

I love this idea so hard. Have the damage increase almost exponentially the further "overdrive" you go to prevent abuse... Stamp of Approval, and all that.

I want fuzzy dice in my ship too, and they need to swing realistically.

I am a late comer for this game, and I played only 8 hours on trial, and here's my 2 cents.

The physic mode flying model is weird. If main thrust at the rear of the ship can only produce e.g. 50 m/s speed, the side and front thrust should NEVER be able to match up with rear thrust top speed and acceration because they "logically" much smaller and wont' be able to give as much power as rear thrust.

Jumpgate's ship movement is excellent, but it doesn't have the move up and down nor the strafe left and right. If the combine physic of Jumpgate ship movement with control of this game it would be perfect ship control.

And nymphomaniac cat girls to boot!

ycluk: I'm a little confused. In our game, strafing thrust can never match rear turbo thrust, for exactly the reasons you state. Flying without turbo is basically using the "six-axis maneuvering thrusters."

There was a time when we hoped to make this more dependent on the ship's equipped engine configuration, but that was shelved in favor of more important issues.

http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/17310?page=2#218527

How that applies to this discussion is that currently all axis thrusters work at the same power level, and that Turbo is a special thing, that is kinda hard to figure out. I used to think it was a doubling of N force, but now I am not so sure.

ycluk: I am not sure what you think would be added to the game by taking away strafe. If you don't want to use it, then just don't, but you won't last long in a fight but whatever.

How about a G-Force indicator? Should be easy to calculate and it would be fun to see in the cockpit. I'll go look in suggestions.

this reminds me of the vector indicator discussion we had a while ago:



for any meaningful readout, a 6-axix g-force indicator would require a spheric display such as the velocity indicator; both are actually the same thing really, when you think of it. either you display the acceleration velocity or the g force. both are computed off the same numbers.

I have an addition to the 'slowing down' effect when you stop turbo-ing.

Lets just say that when you're in turbo, some energy that is being used up is for the actual turbo for your engines and some is being used for inertia dampners that keeps your ship's hall intact.

When you go out of turbo, your thrusters immediately take you back to your 'safe' maximum speed because with the extra power to your inertia dampners gone, you may very well fly your ship apart.

while it sounds good in theory, in reality, if you stop accelerating, you stop stressing the ship frame.. the deceleration, however, causes tons of stress.. especially when you see how quickly it decelerates wrt how quick it accelerated..

I think the "turbo slowdown" should be a lot more gradual. i also think that every reference to m/s should be changed to km/s to keep people from goin "wtf? top speeds of 240m/s? thats like 100mph.. you mean spaceships in that century cant go as fast as a ferrarri?"

I have an idea: Let's pretend it's a game, and not a simulator ^_^

Ok, but then better don't call it a "space" game. I'd suggest "3D-scooter" game instead. ;-)

3 axis.

I have seen several interesting points in this thread.

There is no such thing as a perfect void. All space has something in it. Even deep space is measured in hydrogen atoms per cubic inch. At high end speeds, this is a serious concern to real world objects. Hydrogen is not the only thing in space. Micro meteors are relatively rare (in relation to the vastness of space), but, if you are going fast enough, you will eventually find one (or more) objects to collide with. Space is also filled with energy. Gravity waves, radiation, etc. Futuristic ships would require some form of radiation/collision shielding, and it could be quite likely that that shielding would be some form of energy shield (ie: electromagnetic). An energy shield would effectively increase the cross section of a ship, in regards to the mass/energy in the area of space it is traversing, and the resistance against these forces, effectively producing a form of drag.

I also like the idea presented earlier in this thread, that higher speeds incite higher risk. Any kind of shield will have limits, and the closer you approach those limits, the higher your risk of encountering something that surpasses it's limits. This could be expressed as a random amount of damage applied to your ship, multiplied by your speed past a certain threshold.

And finally, everyone appears to have incredible expectations of future spaceships. The ships in this game are not extraordinarily large (and in fact, are quite small), and will have limitations.

I'm not convinced that the method of 'acceletation' ships in VO use would cause much stress. Supposedly they rapidly open up temporary gravitational wells in the desired direction, and fall into them, so to speak. Does gravitational force produce any noticeable stress on local objects? I'd suspect that each particle of your ship would move more or less in conjunction with one another, causing little to no friction. Truly a convenient method of travel.

Turning would be a different story. I'm not sure about the physics on that sort o' thing, but it seems like some shear force would be involved no matter how you do it.

My argument here is that if ships do employ an energy shield for protection against radiation and micro meteors that the shield itself would introduce a form of drag.

We can think of the turbo engines as being a special type of integrated shield/thruster that is designed to produce extra forward thrust while simultaneously increasing the forward shielding, at the expense of addition energy requirements.

The minor discrepancy here is that turbo speeds should perhaps continue to draw power until you have reduced your speed to subturbo. Otherwise, I believe this explanation fits very well with current flight model.

Have I missed anything?

"The minor discrepancy here is that turbo speeds should perhaps continue to draw power until you have reduced your speed to subturbo. Otherwise, I believe this explanation fits very well with current flight model."

That would pan out nicely with Inc's idea in this thread.

Instead, we could make the equipped powercell basically define, based on the recharge rate, the top-speed for "non-turbo" thrust. Ie, the speed at which "normal thrust" caps out would be the place where a 1:1 ratio exists between powercell recharge and thrust energy usage. Above that would require hitting "tab" for turbo, but would increase as a curve from that 1:1 point up to the maximum thrust-output/power-usage point.