If they look as good as this:
I’m happy.
And if they, or at least one is as challenging as this:
I’m super happy!
It’s my understanding that what you see in the prototype is what you’ll see in the final game - the only moving objects will be the ships. The bits in the planetary rings will tumble slowly, and that’s it.
There’s not much point in asking about implementation because that’s entirely down to the game engine and the engineers working on it. They could design something that makes spinning planets a nightmare to implement - or as easy as falling off a log.
As for gameplay, celestial mechanics on rails (CMOR) could make the task of getting from point A to point B more involved. I consider that a good thing, but if the gameplay is targeting folks who just want to hop into the game and shoot stuff then it’s probably just a pointless barrier to entry. INS would first implement orbits and spins - and then they’d have to put in navigation aids to help players deal with it.
I don’t see CMOR planetary rings doing anything significant for gameplay.
I support, if live movement of planetary, ring or in-ring/near-ring objects aren’t possible due to the networking problem, to at least randomize those positions between matches.
I don’t see how that makes flying between planets more difficult. They aren’t always where you expect them, but that’s the added fun, that you can’t always apply the same grand strategy as another objective might be closer.
But if I get on topic again. Rings are the least priority to orbit. Randomizing their rotational position doesn’t even bring something like it would for other celestial objects. That’s due to their apparent uniformity. The ring 1000 kilometres around the orbit will look exactly the same. If fighting at high speeds will be possible, people will just match speed with the ring and it will be back to as if the ring wouldn’t rotate in the first place.
Related to the rings: how are currently managed the collision with asteroids and the small associated debris?
From the videos I’ve seen, debris are like in ED and don’t impact the ship in any way. I would love the fact even small debris can hurt your ship.
As for the orbiting and game physics for asteroids, I wouldn’t expect much since the minimal funding was reached and there’s a lot of things to take care of.
It should first be noted that i am not a programmer of any sort.
That being said, I don’t understand why planetary orbits (and any other massive bodies) couldn’t just be put on rails that the client follows, and have the server just synchronize a time stamp so the client knows where to put everything.
Take a look at the thread that talks about moving battlescapes. Moving planets produce moving battlescapes, so the same problems crop up. It’s not a problem of moving the planets, but of having the ships and such move with them correctly.
That’s not the problem. Things orbiting would work out, as they will always be at the same place, at the same timezone for everyone and won’t change their course. They aren’t interactive.
The problem is, the higher the speed of an online player in the absolute coordinate reference frame of the star system, the bigger the positional errors that transmitting those coordinates over a network get.
I-Novae could make objects orbit. They would render fine for everyone even though they are moving at a high speeds. Their movement could be bound to a timecode and not a coordinate update.
Problem comes in when player try to match their speed with such object. As I-Novae is using an absolute coordinate system, the higher their speed gets, the bigger an error a network “lag” or even normal tolerances would get.
Before they have a workaround to this problem inherent to the absolute coordinate system, doing anything near fast moving objects won’t be fun.
Arn Ninjad, yes you can read more about it in the thread that JB linked above.
The problem is not with the objects themselves. The problem is with the players. If you’re using a coordinate system centered e.g. on the sun, then you have players moving at enormous speeds in that coordinate system that are constantly affected by gravity and firing their thrusters, drastically changing their speed and position. It’s not easy to make the server adjust to that. You can see it in one of the streams where the players enter warp and appear to be bouncing due to bad synchronization. Someone with more time and knowledge could probably explain it better than I can.
From what I understand, it’s not an unsolvable problem. There are various things they could try, like bubbles of space or collections of nearby players with their own coordinate system or limiting the rate of change of the acceleration in warp to make the server predicting where the ships will be easier. And they haven’t yet optimized the netcode, so that should also help. But getting orbits done will add to the complexity of the server and take time that could be used on other things that are more important to gameplay. So from what I understand, the answer for now is “We might try to make it work, but make no promises.”
Edit: Double ninja. That’s what I get for trying to write from phone.
1 Like
Triple ninja, not sure we had one of those.
//just joking
1 Like
You should have just gone for it. 
1 Like
Ah, okay, I understand now. If everything is stationary, then combat will tend to be done at speeds relatively close to zero, because combat will be done slowly relative to POI.
It seems to me that is an issue that needs fixing regardless, if interception will ever be a thing.
1 Like
hello guys,
I was just wondering how collisions in asteroids belt / rings are going to be handled ? Are you going to provide an “auto flight assist” that will automatically avoid collisions when flying through it ? Or simply a bypass radar and no collision on small fragment ? Or even more simply no collision at all (the more you read me, the less it’s cool) ?
Asteroid belts are nearly empty.
Planetary rings don’t contain much to threaten your ship, unless they make some much softer than the current stand in.
For the time being, even if you fly right at an asteroid if your going fast enough you will phase right through it. Im not certain but its probably due to collision detection only being processed once every set of frames, and when you go too fast your ship’s mesh never intersects the asteroid so nothing happens.
Hang on… you do go trough the rocks in warp yes. But in normal mode (non-warp) you hit em.
Depends on your speed.
“Warp” isn’t (as far as I’m concerned) doing anything special to how the ship intereact with the world, just how the ship maneuvers.
[quote=“Tjafaas, post:7, topic:1521”]
Related to the rings: how are currently managed the collision with asteroids and the small associated debris?From the videos I’ve seen, debris are like in ED and don’t impact the ship in any way. I would love the fact even small debris can hurt your ship.[/quote]
The plan for that is that debris will never really “collide” with your ship, however they will slowly damage it over time, with probably some kind of shaking visual effect + sound. Amounts of damage will depend on speed.
What will be more tricky is to address the issue of bigger asteroid collisions with capital ships. I have some ideas for that, but technically it’ll be more of a challenge.
6 Likes
I for one very much enjoy collisions with asteroids. If I’m around them and not paying close attention, I begin to hear the warning sound which in turn gets my heart pumping 
You should leave in collision detection for larger asteroids similar to the way it is now.
3 Likes