I hear you, Chaos. In racing games, I even find it easier to use third person.

Other than that, someone posted something about this game already (about 6 months ago?), and back then I already yammered about the lack of OS X support.

Sounds like it's windows only :P (I know you already said it toshiro)

I'd say racist, but I know it's smaller mac population, so less on it's market.
(I still smite it!!!!)

So it's okay to be racist, as long as you're only racist against a minority?

Yeah, toshiro; I tried racing more "realistically" with first-person view, and it sucks. There's a reason racing games are all third-person (that I can think of).

I play racing games in first-person if I have a dashboard mockup onscreen rather than just a HUD... otherwise I play in third-person.

First-person is more realistic, but it also is more likely to cause motion sickness in some people, which is why I think a lot of people don't take advantage of the first-person views when they are available.

What is this motion sickness?

Most first person views make one feel like they're strapped to the bumper of whatever vehicle they're piloting.

Yeah. It's odd, but I feel more like I'm in the car with third person than first. Maybe because in a real car, I have a sense of the traffic around and behind me, but it takes third person view to give that same sense in a video game. It's more immersive, I guess, since it's hard to fake being really in the car when you're looking at a TV. I love the scene in South Park where Stan's playing a racing game, and he reverses his car and looks behind him away from the TV as he does so.

Three words: Multi-monitor rig :)

But since those do not come cheap and require a sufficiently strong gfx card, the rest of us will keep using 3rd person...

If any of you plays Project Torque (my ingame name is Albert Camus...) and loves the Thunder Alley, that's one place where it does not really matter, unless there are rammers about.

The Project Torque site seems to be down... is there a Mac version?

No :( I have to boot into XP to play it, but it's worth it, so far. Plus, it's free to play. If I play, I'm mostly on Persepolis in Simulation VS or Thunder Alley because all the other servers are full.

The site works for me, by the way.

Yeah, the site is back up. Maybe if I ever find it in me to foul my iMac with Windows, I'll give it a shot. It looks like fun.

VO and Jumpgate (atleast the first one) have almost strictly opposite flight styles. It's rather amusing. In VO, you can turn only a maximum set amount in anyone direction, but you can accelerate faster going in diagonals, up to a maximum speed radially with no drag. In Jumpgate, you turn at the rate of the sum of horizontal and vertical preset maximums, and accelerate only forward to a potentially infinite speed, but suffer a drag which gives you an effective maximum speed. In VO, the movement is borked, and in Jumpgate it's the turning! Weapons in Jumpgate travel very fast, compared to ship size and speed, but since you can't strafe it doesn't help you aim very well. In VO, weapons are very slow, but since you can strafe as quickly as you can move in any direction, you can aim much more easily. The end result is that in Jumpgate, you sort of need to slow down to shoot, whereas in VO you can, and have to do both at once, all of the time. Duels in the former involves taking passes at one another, and endlessly circling each other. Combat in VO has you consistently facing your opponent. Interesting!

Jumpgate doesn't make any mention of ship-ship docking though; when it comes to ship sex, VO has a monopoly. Oh yeah, and its physics engine (or lack thereof) sucks.

Lack of VO physics engine or JG?

I'm going to drag this back off-topic.

Chaos, have you tried PT yet?

Sorry, no. I don't have Windows on my Mac. My brother does, though, on his iMac; maybe I'll put it on his. Only problem is his internet is spotty, he lives just outside of town and gets a wireless signal from a friend who lives just over a mile away (yes, you heard me right).

The VO physics engine far and away out does the old Jumpgate one, and from what I've seen from videos, the new one is exactly the same. VO has things like momentum, and rotational acceleration, and when you bump into things, you bounce off.

When things bump into you, you both bounce off or you bounce farther.

Nice signal strength, does that WAP fry burgers when it doesn't transmit data, PC? ;)

For that matter, I haven't booted into Win for some time now, so you wouldn't have had a chance to see me.
But when you do, be sure to drop a line here or somesuch, then we can race each other.

I'll do that, just don't expect it to happen anytime in the next several months. I've been too busy even for VO lately (aren't summers supposed to be relaxing?), and I'm going to cancel my subscription again at the end of this month so VO isn't a temptation to take me away from what will be my busiest, most important semester this fall. Meh.

And no, it doesn't fry burgers, but I think it accounts for 90% of my town's urban heat island, and it's not even in town.

Eh, that makes two of us, really. The most time I'll have are the first two weeks of September, between internship and semester. But I guess lazing about all summer would have been much worse.

http://www.g4tv.com/xplay/previews/27574/Jumpgate_Evolution_Preview.html

Comparisons.