Darn, I'm starting to like this idea. :)
(replying to Soulless)

With friction I meant both the drag (not sure if they mean the same in english) and the ensuing heating. The idea was that it would be enough at first to just fly in a 'jello' rather than try to approximate the intricacies of aviation dynamics.

About squaring the velocity... It adds no complexity but makes the acceleration, top speed and heat buildup scale differently. Non-linear scaling would really make it different from space flight.

The simplification in heat dissipation would be dropping the concept of ambient temperature: no need to calculate temperature differences. My argument is that the conductivity of low density gasses and vacuum are insignificant. Yet I propose adding a similar variable: radiation... :/ OK, the end result seems pretty similar except heat dissipation rate _should_ be inversely proportional to the temperature of the ship hull and systems.

Agreed, even gas giants grow up slowly. :) Forming gas or solid planets should be rare, though.

Mining the gas clouds sound interesting. :) Shouldn't they shrink? Initially I could live with abstract non-shrinkable representations of gas reserves. Rendering a load of these transparent clouds would stress at least some older graphics cards.

I though planetary flight woulden't be possible if ships flew too slow(which the way the developers wanted to do it).

Ships would be required to fly fast enough in order to fly in the planets atmosphere.

roguelazer: my guess is that the engine power is in units of kilo newtons. Some kind of historic typo I believe.

@margoth.

Actually radiative cooling goes as the 4th power of the temperature, but is very inefficient compared to convective gas flows, which are much better at cooling.

Think of wind chill (and don't get started on the evaporation).

Furious, thanks. :) I got confused in my engrish once again. Non-linear is the idea here.

Tilt: True, ships in VO can't reach a velocity for a stable low earth orbit. They do have the speed but lack the aerodynamics for proper atmospheric flight. Yet they may be able to levitate and fly around using their engines.

okay, im back, I'll start going through answering those queries i can

Yes rogue i had thought that the low thrust might be a problem, but hey - like i said, good gameplay > realism. IE, we just make the gravitational field strength of planets low enough that ships can maneuver - though high enough that they'll have real trouble without either wings or specially adapted thrusters (like for example on an atmospheric mining ship) as some ships just aren't made for atmospheres.

Always remember we can set the values as we like to get the intended result.

In reply to margoths post:

Hehe im glad you are liking the idea - so far the only problems have been in how it would be executed rather than the 'would this be fun to have' catagory (which i hope means most people think its a cool set of ideas :P) - and we've solved a few of them on the way :)

The thing about this is that the aviation dynamics would be half the fun. The good news is that the drag forces would constitute 90% of said aviation dynamics - after you've added 'nebula' sectors (or whatver we're calling them) then its a short (and very simple) step to include gravity and lift - thats all the extra you need for atmospheric flight.

Actually yeah i sort of realised after my post we shoult square the velocity for that equation - so yeah:

Drag force = velocity^2 * coefficient * density

I just wanted to stress again that it is also VERY important to include different coefficients for different directions of motion if you want a ship to fly anything like an aircraft. The most aircraft - like ship of the current set would almost certainly be the vult (followed by the cent probably) and it would have very high coefficients of drag for every direction of movement except forwards, which would be pretty low - it would also have low coeffs of lift in every direction except forwards, which would be the highest of all the ships.

Like you say, in the end your system of heat dissipation would have nearly the same end result - but i'd rather include ambient temperature because of the possiblities it opens up for variation in sector temperature. Plus its easier to just include one equation for heat gain/loss than to include (and therefore have to balance) an equation for each.

As for 'nebula sectors' this was just a random idea i had while thinking up the rest of this (i often get a bunch or related ideas all at once - its just my rather odd brain :P) that i thought would be cool to include. Its all about fun gameplay really, so all you have to say is 'look, its a REALLY REALLY dense nebula okay? Just go have fun in it' :P
However you are right in saying that there would be far less nebula areas in real life that are this dense for very long than would possibly be in game, even if we only include a few. Its all about fun, though. Heck, say the WH's cause them like they do ion storms, i don't know, as long as it works its fine by me :P

As for gas clouds - well they wouldn't shrink cos they'd be EXACTLY like a roid and they don't shrink at the moment - if they bring in roids shrinking (they said they might) then these could too.

They wouldn't be transparent so they'd be easy to render. It'd be exactly like a roid in every way exept for colour and that they wouldn't have any kind of clipping - you could fly straight through them.

As for your later post - yes actually i think the lack of the 'K' in the thrust values probably is a typo after working it out. Take a corvus vult - thrust 230N supposedly (old value - haven't been on for a couple of days) - mass 3800Kg. Now if it was actually 230N, then the acceleration would be
230N/3800Kg = 0.06m/s^2
now that stikes me as a little low when it can get to 75m/s in about one or two seconds when empty. In fact at 0.06m/s^2 it would take 1250seconds to get that fast - roughly a throusand times longer than you'd expect. Funnily enough if the thrust was in KN this would be 1.25 seconds - about the true value.

Ie - yes its a typo and the thrusts should be in kilonewtons ;)
But as i said before - it doesn't really matter when you can pick your gravitational field strength to suit your needs.

In response to tilt152

Too slow to fly how?

If you mean that they wouldn't be able to reach orbital velocities - remember that it depends on your sectors frame of reference - if your frame of reference is one that is orbiting the planet at howver many thousands of miler per hour, then the ship is doing this and the reading on the ships sensors is just its velocity within that frame of reference.

If you mean that they wouldn't go fast enough to generate lift, are you aware that even just 55m/s is 198Km/hour?
or about 120ish miles/hour

And thats SLOW in vendetta - an aircraft can easily fly at the speeds things like vults do and slower, less aerodynamic ships wouldn't have to go fast anyway - they have thrusters for that.

But yes some ships would be both too slow to fly and wouldn't have the lift OR the thrust to stay up - they're what you call spacecraft with no atmospheric capability - in other words, don't try to use them in an atmosphere ;)

And i'd just like to thank you guys for thinking about this and throwing all the problems you can think of at the idea to see if its possible - keep up the good work. :)

All i need now is for dev to come along and (sadly after having to read the whole thing :P) declare that its possible with the current game engine, and we'll be on the road to having another cool game addition way off in the future. :)

Soulless1: While 55m/s is 198 km/h,consider this: A Boeing 747 has a cruising speed of 907km/h. A Concorde had a cruising speed of 2150km/h. At 198 km/h, we would not really cover a lot of territory. Heck, a F6F-5 Hellcat had a cruising speed of 270km/h. That was introduced in 1922, mind you. So a ship like the Centurion which has effectively no lift-generating wings probably couldn't fly at speeds that low. Maybe on a planet with a low gravity and a super-dense atmosphere, but not on an earth-style planet. And certainly not with enough power to get to an altitude of 3000m. Although Turbo does deliver a maximum of 864 km/h, which might be somewhat more useful.

I was mainly thinking of the turbo - but yes i was just trying to prove the point that while the speeds are a little low - it is easily enough for flight. Remember that while the max cruising speed of a boeing 747 may be 907km/h, it does not need to go that fast to fly. It can take off at more like 100km/h i believe, of at least somewhere close to this. And it is an atmospheric craft of course.

Heck, I'd be in favour of increasing maximum speeds (not accelerations) across the board anyway, at least to the point where atmospheric terminal velocity would be what determined your top speed while in an atmosphere more than any arbitrary number.

But even leaving things where it is, the devs have already stated their reasons for including the max speed and that they realise its not realistic, so i don't really see that as a problem here. Whether or not they decide to increase speeds generally is pretty much a separate issue and is up to them.

Also do remember that i gave 55m/s as an example of a low top speed, to show that a reasonably aerodynamic craft with even that speed (we don't have any yet though) would at least be able to get off the ground (boeing 747's can *fly* at that speed even if they can go much faster if they want) and gain height, and a lighter more aerodynamic craft such as the vult with a top speed of 65m/s would be fine.

The restriction doesn't really come into effect until you want to go somewhere - flight itself (and altitude gain) can easily be achieved with the speeds we have now.

I'm glad nobody's flamed this thread yet. It's an interesting idea.
Implementing atmosphere rendering code would not be hard, at a distance it's already implemented (look closely at Itan, for example) and close-up it would be easy to implement with fog.
-:sigma.SB

Its probably cos this isn't a buff/nerf thread, and more optimistically because nobody hates the idea :P

Maybe also because flamers don't have the patience to read my huge clump of text to find out what they should be flaming :D

'Implementing atmosphere rendering code would not be hard, at a distance it's already implemented (look closely at Itan, for example) and close-up it would be easy to implement with fog.'

Oh cool, thats good to know.

there goes another hurdle :)

That's just a texture on the planets. Fog would really need to use GL_FOG and fog textures. Although. The devs -do- know Cg. So they could write a custom shader for it. :)

Actually i was just thinking of using the textures that the backgrounds use for the 'bottom' and 'sides' of the sector, with stars as the top, and then just have the foggy sorta effect with a few cloudy textures done like the ion storm effect.

I think solra was pointing out that when you look at the background textures they do actually change over time.

'Fog would really need to use GL_FOG and fog textures. Although. The devs -do- know Cg. So they could write a custom shader for it. :)'

Sadly i don't know that much about this sorta thing. How would the result of your suggestion differ from the one i was thinking of rogue? I presume you know more about it so you have a better idea what would work.

Yeah, the backgrounds are semi-rendered (the planets spin). But the way I was thinking, they could use actual fog to simulate a dense atmosphere. It could cause a FPS hit, but it'd look great. Plus, we'd get effects like stations and other objects outside of clipping range vanishing into the fog rather than just abruptly disappearing as they do now. Let's see what my OpenGL Programming Guide says about the matter:

"Computer images sometimes seem unrealistically sharp and well defined. Antialiasing makes an object appear more realistic by smoothing its edges. Additionally, you can make an entire image appear more natural by adding fog, which makes objects fade into the distance. "Fog" is a general term that decribes similar forms of atmospheric effects; it can be used to simulate haze, mist, smoke or pollution. Fog is essential in visual-simulation applications, where limited visibility needs to be approximated. It's often incorporated into flight-simulator displays.

When fog is enabled, objects that are farther from the viewpoint begin to fade into the fog color. You can control the density of the fog, which determines the rate at which objects fade as the distance increases, as well as the fog's color. You can also explictly set a fog coordinate per-vertex for fog distance calculations, rather than use an automatically calculated depth value."

To add fog, all you need to do is put a call to GL_FOG in a glEnable() call.

OR you could use Cg and ARB_vertex_program/ARB_fragment_program to write a custom shader program for much more realistic and "cool" looking atmospheric effects, at a rather higher FPS hit.

The FPS hits are what i was mainly concerned about - it might be better to go with the simple with good performance rather than the great looking to begin with, and maybe improve it later when there's more time.

Maybe the devs could make it a video option that toggles between the two styles? you'd have to be careful that one of the rendering types didn't have better visibility than the other though...

It would probably be selectable via a config option we already have: Glow. rglow is a custom shader written in Cg. I imagine they could both be toggled on/off via the same setting. Ion storms have a rather neat rglow effect, btw. Try going into one with it off, then turning it on. Purty.

yes, but you'd need to have it set so that when rglow was off it would use the simple effects me and solra mentioned - otherwise you could just turn the fog off by turning off rglow and railgun everyone to death :P

Okay, can anyone think of any more possible problem issues?

This thread is being quite useful :)