Turbo tap was dumb.

-homestar"myfingershurt* runner

double post...

Only runners really need the medium engine, I use a heavyengine with a heavy battery, which is fine for fighting, not fine for jumping.

Against divercity in engines is good.

Arolte the cent, vult, and valk take huge maneuverability hit using a med engine.

I've taken flak before from speaking up about the flight characteristics of ships other than the Valk on the grounds that I have to spend hours and hours flying them before I have an informed opinion.

I don't believe that that's true, but its going to be really useful to thrust that stupid line of reasoning back in the face of someone right now.

I _have_ spent hours and hours flying the Valk and I have spent time in the Valk with every engine in the game (including light and free engines). The Valk does take a big hit in manueverability switching from the heavy to the medium engine. Perhaps its not as pronounced as it is with a Hornet or Rag, but if you are familiar with the flight characteristics of the Valk you definately notice it.

Anyone that spent adequate time testing the Valk would know that.

Yes, it is true that heavy ships are pretty much forced to take the heavy engine, while light ships can take less powerful engines in order to gain other advantages, but you know what? That's been true since 3.1.x. The only reason some people are complaining now is that until recently, there was no real advantage to ever taking anything but a heavy engine for anyone that had macroed boost tapping or who was reasonably good at it.

This was broken. What we have now is just not quite balanced. That's an improvement.

I'm really get sick and tired of hearing about making the medium engine better. Basically, that arguement is simply 'there should always be one best engine which is good for everything', and its being driven into the ground. It's no longer, 'Hey, I've got an idea'. It's become certain peoples personal crusade to ram it down everyone else's throats.

For the most part, most players I don't think noticed that boost tapping change to a great degree because most players weren't abusing it in the most broken manner.

The principal point of the medium engine seems to be avoiding the superships. I don't see and haven't seen the need to switch from the heavy engine on my Valk otherwise, nor do I think the whole community is suddenly switched to medium engine/fast recharge (a combo I've always used for trading and in ships like the Vulture and Centurian). I've got two points to make regarding that:

1) The superships are kinda cheesy, and hopefully the devs know that and its just a short term solution until the AI is more robust. Once NPC's have (again have) the same engines/weapons we have access to, the absolute need for long periods of turbo speed in combat will reduce. The heavy battery has a deep energy reserve (I'm back to 3.1 style never running out even using energy weapons), and recharge is fast enough that you can burst turbo and make up the cost on the turn.

2) The real problem here isn't the balance of the engines. The engines didn't change and the devs intuitive balance of the engines is finally working. The problem is that the engines where never balanced before and that the devs solution to boost tapping was in my opinion too heavy handed. I think it is perfectly possible to both bring boost tapping back in a limited way that would give heavies more running time AND solve the problem of ships cruising infinitely at or near thier maximum speed. And the existing acceleration curve of ships (that is to say, ships already accelerate more and more slowly the closer they get to thier maximum speed) should make implementing a more finely tweaked deceleration curve that allows boost tapping below certain speeds but not above them possible.

However, there really isn't going to be any solution that lets heavies exploit the turbo model in order to have all the turbo that lights enjoy without taking a penalty elsewhere.

No, I wouldn't go too far and say the engines are perfectly balanced now. The medium engine still needs to consume more energy, since it has near infinite turbo properties with a fast charge battery. I also think that using a tier system with constant increments (a speed increase of 20m/s for each engine up for example) isn't exactly the best way of balancing the engines. Testing the balance of engines is more of a matter of trial and error.

As I mentioned earlier in another thread, the best way to go about this is to simply have three of the same ship (with efficient engine, medium engine, and heavy engine respectively) lined up for a race. The speed and power consumption of each engine should be adjusted so that the ships should just BARELY be nose to nose with each other as they recharge and boost again throughout the duration of the race. Granted they won't be close to each other the whole time, but rather they would catch up and fall back at various points of the boosting race, so not one engine is clearly superior over the others. But players can still choose whether they want an engine with endurance or an engine with speed.

That's not to say the efficient engine will become useless if it is balanced this way, because it'll still have the advantage of holding its place for the longest time (in addition to retaining full boost while jumping wormholes). I'm just saying that this is what I personally think are a good set of balanced engines--one where there is no clear winner if ships of each config were to boost in a straight line for a long time, yet retaining those unique properties in short distances. Of course your opinion may or not agree with mine.

Throttle-controlled turbo...that's the key. It's been proposed elsewhere, but here's my take on it:

Why is it that you can throttle your main engine to a certain percent of maximum, but not your turbo booster?
The main engine would still *not* take energy, but turbo would, unless turbo-throttle was at 0%. The current engine classes would still have their uses...I'd say that all the engines would need to have their turbo drain modified some for this idea to work.
If you wanted to run across sectors, you'd find the equivalence point between your battery's output and engine's input (but some combinations wouldn't have such a point - they'd have something to make up for it)

Arolte: "The medium engine still needs to consume more energy, since it has near infinite turbo properties with a fast charge battery. I also think that using a tier system with constant increments (a speed increase of 20m/s for each engine up for example) isn't exactly the best way of balancing the engines."

-Hear hear!
(although I don't necessarily think they should all be able to pace each other exactly, don't forget about torque as a balancing factor)

Celebrim: "I'm really get sick and tired of hearing about making the medium engine better. Basically, that arguement is simply 'there should always be one best engine which is good for everything', and its being driven into the ground. It's no longer, 'Hey, I've got an idea'. It's become certain peoples personal crusade to ram it down everyone else's throats."

-Preach it brother! Testify!

Oh b.t.w there already is a limited boost tap built into the current system. You can boost tap with a medium/fast charge combo and stay around 150-160 m/s without ever running out. I've discovered this while spacing bots.

You can use an efficent and keep at 160 m/s anyway...and have battery to fight with too.

The only problem with the efficient is the deceleration speed. If it had a *normal* decelleration, it'd be fine. But as it is, it decelerates EXTREMELY fast and is a bit of a problem if you have bots on your tail and you want to turn at high speed.

Arolte: Well, I'd accept that there might be limited adjustments that need to be made to the engines, but only after we arrive at something like final accelleration/decelleration curves. There won't be much point in making really fine tweaks to the engines if the accelerration/decellaraton model undergoes another change on the scale of the one that elimenated infinite boost tapping.

Phaserlight: Really? I guess I shouldn't be too suprised that for some ships with some packages infinite turbo tapping still existed. I thought I noticed the same thing, but it was at the much less useful speed of 70 m/s.

What ship where you in? Were you macroed?

My basic idea behind the balance is that ships should break even in acceleration/decelleration at some reasonable percentage of thier maximum turbo speed. This would let you 'boost tap' to go somewhat faster than your cruising speed but would mean that someone with a full battery could hard turbo to close with you (at the cost of draining the battery). The fast ships have an advantage in the acceleration curve (obviously) but the 'advantage' of decelerating faster (manueverability) is sometimes disadvantageous, where the slow deceleration curve of heavy ships is an exploitable to become an advantage. Admittedly it is a complex solution and it definately raises the question of whether or not it is better to scrap the whole system and replace it with a simplier model with nearly identical flight characteristics (namely, double the maximum cruising speed of ships and increase the cost of turbo for that final 30% boost in speed), but my initial impression is that boost tapping _when used in a less than fully exploited way_ was actually helping gameplay. Of course, even that is debatable and arguably I'm just so experienced with the old system that I'm slow to change and hestitant to adopt new ideas.

Efficient Engine/F-C battery- 160m/s no energy draw

Medium Enging/F-C battery- 140m/s (unmacro'd, I'll show you ingame anytime), little to no energy draw

...

The only problem is how slow the efficient is unturbo'd

When using a vult with a fast charge battery/medium engine I can normally stay around 150-160 m/s for a very long time without running out. I can recharge the battery fairly quickly while going 140 m/s.

Boost tapping is still in, just not to the extent it was before. You can no longer maintain full speed and recharge your battery completely, which is as it should be, but you can however maintain a somewhat lower speed for near infinity while boost tapping.

/me would macro if I could, but I can't :(.

I advocate the creation of a second throttling subsystem...not just establishment of a turbo balance. Besides, if you don't make it so that you can statically control your afterburner like a throttle, someone will do it anyway using a macro that boosts every x seconds.

Cmdr. Freeman - nice idea, I like it.

It's not really possible to create an alias to do things like this yet, as there's no way to control the timing of the aliases being called. Possibly some complicated machinery could i.e. Perl script running in the background piping out new aliases to a fifo that get loaded ingame repeatedly via an alias that repeatedly calls /load, and I haven't tried this, so I'm not even sure if it's actually possible or what kind of drain on the CPU that would have, or whether there might be problems with syncing. I might do some related tests today (maybe do an ingame clock or something).

*edit*

Ingame clock works, as it is one shot.
Run the following shell script in the background while vendetta is running:

#! /bin/bash
trap 'rm -f "clock.cfg" >/dev/null 2>&1' 0
trap "exit 2" 1 2 3 13 15
mkfifo clock.cfg
while true; do
echo "alias pdate \"echo `date`\"" > clock.cfg
sleep 1
done

Then in game,
alias date "load clock.cfg; pdate"
and then /date will echo the output of the date command to the console. Pretty simple, but maybe someone can think of a better use for it - a "number of players on each team" script probably isn't so hard.

Anything that needs constant reloading, or fine in-game timing seems pretty much impossible. I can create situations where I can cause vendetta to freeze entirely for a given time interval. That is, sound skips, graphics freeze, no input handled, which is not quite a bug, as I'm loading an empty fifo, which is supposed to block. A "/sleep" equivalent, however, doesn't appear likely in the current alias scheme, so throttling will have to either wait for Cmdr.Freeman/a1k0n's very nice ideas to come into place, or at least until we get /sleep <x> which would allow for some basic control in this area.

Ah yes, boost tapping. The reason that you could recharge energy while boosting was because there was a bug in the engines. When you released the key, it would slowly disengage turbo (in other words, turbo was partially engaged for some time) while drawing no energy (or maybe partial energy in proportion, not sure).

So for the 2348903902th time, we aren't going to bring it back. It was a bug we fixed. I always thought tapping tab to go anywhere was kinda dumb (and obviously you still have to do that to get anywhere). So maybe there should be a "main engine throttle" which is separate from the "impulse drive controls" (what we use now for maneuvering) wherein you can partially engage turbo and reach an energy equilibrium while boosting.

I guess that's taking Cmdr. Freeman's idea to the next level.

Warp 7 Mr. Sulu. Engage!

Hey, if you do do that re-charge\turbo drain equilibrium thingy, will the fast charge battery + efficent engine still be the fastest for turboing with out energy drain?

/me goes to test

Could be. You can use the full turbo, rather than only half or three-quarters of it.

a1k0n, from the way you describe this "bug," it sounds like it was a half-assed inadvertent almost-implementation of my idea. =P

Anyway, interesting proposal...so you're saying that the maneuvering jets would have one throttle and the engine would have another? That might have issues in arcade mode, since you by default don't get as much control over maneuvering jets.



From an in-game view, I think it should go something like this: you have your main engine / main throttle...at about 90% of speed / throttle, afterburner mode becomes available (say your engine is "warmed up" for it). Your speed / throttle indicator starts flashing blue to show you that afterrburner is ready. You can then choose to activate afterburner by hitting the second thrttle up key...this causes the flash to go solid blue as an overlay showing afterburner throttle level. You can fine tune it until you find where engine demand = battery output. Your ship should lurch forward in an almost lag-like fashion when afterburner kicks in. (Note: the preceding is an in-game sketch of what the finished product of my idea would look like - I can go more technical as situations warrant)

Also, to help pursuers out, how about a "radar gun"-type option on the HUD? Something that tells you your target's relative speed (e.g. +20 or -10 floats right above their target box)? As you changed your speed, you'd see the value decrease until it hit 0 - at which pointyou'd be going as fast as the other person.