Balancing flight mechanics

General
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As a physicist, rather than a developer, the idea of strongly defined spheres of influence really irks me. I realize they’re probably necessary for technical reasons, but still. It doesn’t mesh with my vision of interacting warp fields.

The way I visualize these things is very similar to the elastic sheet analogy for gravity demonstration in general relativity. In other words, the magnitude of the impact of the interacting fields follows an inverse-n relationship, and the amount of control the external field has on your ship given by the slope of the “well”. Deep, compact wells would be more difficult to escape, but once you’ve managed to flee the relatively narrow interaction radius, you’re gone. Broad wells with shallow slopes allow for greater freedom of movement within them, but the fields remain interacting over a much larger radius.

This would allow ships that want to maintain their entourage without much fuss to deepen their wells, strengthening their hold on ships that are very nearby, at the cost of their hold on more distant vessels. They would still have to escape whichever well they’re currently situated in (it’s not like this is a free pass to run away from a battle or anything), but they’d be dragging fewer members of the fleet away with them.

Unfortunately, I fear the calculations involved in this may make it unworkable. As I’ve just described it, at least, it’s an N-body force problem with variable exponents. Interesting and elegant (IMHO), but it rapidly explodes as you bring more ships into the picture.

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[quote=“Lomsor, post:41, topic:513”]
So how exactly does your (the one in the prototype) differentiate between warp speed and relative speed?
If it is, as you say, a combined system?[/quote]

It’s combined, so there isn’t a difference. You have one engine power setting. At zero power you move at zero speed. At maximum power you move at maximum speed. Those speeds are expressed relative to the current frame of reference and are scaled back by warp disruption.

The simplest treatment of that is a ship sitting in the middle of nowhere, its warp drive completely undisrupted. Its frame of reference is the star system itself, and without any warp disruption, zero power leaves the ship stationary in space while maximum power lets it run around at 0.1AU/s.

In contrast, when you’re at a planet’s surface at zero power, you just sit there, unmoving relative to the planet. At full power, you move at 3km/s relative to the planet. The planet serves as the ship’s frame of reference, and the power setting controls how fast the ship moves in that frame of reference. But the planet itself is moving through space. So the frame of reference is moving.

Now apply that pattern to an arena. The arena is the frame of reference. If you’re at zero power, you don’t move relative to the arena. If you accelerate to full power, you move at 3km/s relative to the arena. Well, how does an arena itself move? It moves according to the power settings of the warp drives of the ships that define the arena. So as a bunch of ships are flying around in an arena at between zero and 3km/s, their warp drives are collectively pushing the arena around in space at between zero and 0.1AU/s.

So how does an arena get pushed around in space? Consider a fleet that is moving along in the middle of nowhere. All the big ships are at half power and headed in the same direction. Within the arena, they’re moving at 1.5km/s. The arena itself is being pushed along at 0.05AU/s because all the ships are trying to go in the same direction at half power - and nothing is disrupting their drives. If half the mass of ships in the arena were trying to go one way and half the other, then half the ships would be going 1.5km/s in one direction within the arena and half would be going 1.5km/s in the other direction. The arena itself would be sitting pretty still in space because the weighted average of everyone’s speed is almost zero (the sum of their velocity vectors is almost zero length).

The penultimate example would be an arena near a planet. The warp drives of the ships are partly disrupted by the planet. This means that the ships are still running around at between zero and 3km/s relative to the arena, but the arena is now slowing down as the ships approach the planet. If the planet is disrupting the drives of the ships by 99%, then the arena is moving at between zero and 0.001AU/s (150,000 km/s). The planet’s velocity also becomes a part of the arena’s velocity, but it’s a trivial component. By the time the arena of ships reaches the 10km mark above the planet, everything has reverted to a newtonian environment. (All non-ships have a 10km radius ADF around them)

[quote=“Lomsor, post:41, topic:513”]
So by capping the relative speed you also capped the warp speed right?[/quote]

Yes. A warp drive at full power that is not disrupted moves the ship at 0.1AU/s.

[quote=“Lomsor, post:41, topic:513”]
You do the same from across the system → aim at each other at max speed → as we get closer our warp fields merge and our warp speeds slowly decrease to zero → we pass each other with a relative velocity 6km/s.[/quote]

Essentially, yes.

[quote=“Lomsor, post:41, topic:513”]
Or does no problem arise from this architecture and it is only in my head? Probably got the concept wrong.[/quote]

There’s no problem. An arena is simply the union of overlapping AFDs - so long as the overlap includes the ship itself. In the following picture, each circle is a ship’s AFD. The ships are not depicted, but they’re dead center of each circle. The blue set of circles is one arena, and the green set is another circle. So long as the center of a circle overlaps another circle, they are part of the same arena. Note that none of the green circles overlap the center of a blue circle and vice versa.

Note that the ships in the two arenas are still heavily disrupting each other, so the ships in the blue area and the green area will see little difference from the purely-newtonian environment found within a single arena, but their shots cannot reach each other. They’re out of range of conventional weaponry. If the green and blue arenas drift further apart, their relative velocities will gradually grow, and in time the ships in the blue arena would see a green task force as mere dots, zipping off into the distance.

The extreme example of that is two fleets flying well apart from each other, out of warp disruption range. If they’re not disrupting each other at all, they can fly around each other at 0.2AU/s relative (each operating at a maximum speed of 0.1AU/s). Again, they’d only see each other as dots.

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[quote=“Kichae, post:42, topic:513, full:true”]
The way I visualize these things is very similar to the elastic sheet analogy for gravity demonstration in general relativity. In other words, the magnitude of the impact of the interacting fields follows an inverse-n relationship, and the amount of control the external field has on your ship given by the slope of the “well”.[/quote]

That’s broadly the way it works. The disruption effect feathers out from the hard edge of the AFDs to about 1 AU. I don’t recall the actual distances. The larger the ship, the larger the AFD and the larger the disruption range. The larger the disruption range, the easier it is to intercept an object.

The hard-edged AFDs constitute the interaction environment that makes up the newtonian arena. Within it, the player experiences ICP gameplay. Move a little outside of the arena and you can’t interact directly with ships in the arena (e.g. shoot at them), but you can move a bit faster, allowing you the opportunity to zoom around to the other side of the arena more quickly than if you drove through the middle. That’s assuming that the configuration and topology of the arena stays the same. You might find yourself flung far from the arena because what you were trying to skirt around moved away from you, or the arena split into two.

[quote=“Kichae, post:42, topic:513, full:true”]
This would allow ships that want to maintain their entourage without much fuss to deepen their wells, strengthening their hold on ships that are very nearby, at the cost of their hold on more distant vessels. They would still have to escape whichever well they’re currently situated in (it’s not like this is a free pass to run away from a battle or anything), but they’d be dragging fewer members of the fleet away with them.[/quote]

I like that, and it is certainly something the prototype could have done. I would only allow players to pull in the disruption field from some balanced maximum, not push it out arbitrarily. That’s because of the opportunity that hugely-expanded warp fields present for griefers.

Pulling in my field says “I don’t want to interact with others who don’t want to interact”. If I pull it in as far as possible, my fleet can stay with me because we’re in the same arena. If someone wants to leave the fleet, they’re gone as soon as they can get out of the arena (so long as everyone in the fleet has pulled in his disruption field). If someone wants to join the fleet, they just approach the fleet like normal because their own warp drive will give them the disruption that they need for the intercept. Once in, the fleet commander would remind them to pull in their field so that the fleet doesn’t accidentally get dragged around by anything. Like a nearby friendly task force.

I’d argue that adjusting a field takes time otherwise griefers would be yanking people’s chains all over the place.

That would mean that if I’m in one of those zero-radius fleets and accidentally drive out of the arena, I’ll have to wait as my warp field expands slowly, allowing me to intercept the fleet again.

[quote=“Kichae, post:42, topic:513, full:true”]
Unfortunately, I fear the calculations involved in this may make it unworkable. As I’ve just described it, at least, it’s an N-body force problem with variable exponents. Interesting and elegant (IMHO), but it rapidly explodes as you bring more ships into the picture.[/quote]

The algorithms involved definitely have O(n^2) elements to them, but they tend to have simple optimizations. I have no idea if the prototype code would survive contact with 100 v 100 fleets. Heck, the networking code that I threw together could only handle 32 connections - and there was no optimization of the network traffic. It was hugely wasteful of bandwidth.

I’d hate to lose the features of this movement system because it really does work well. I did some stress testing with NPCs, but never formed them into large fleets. As I recall, just having 50 NPCs flying around independently didn’t place an appreciable load on the CPU. And they had to be checked on every simulation step to see if they were in the same arena.

Having automated intercepts would nauseate me, particularly if encounters stopped dead in space. It makes no sense to me to build a seamless full-scale star system and then implement EVE Online’s gameplay.

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Sounds like we’re actually on the same page, which is impressive considering my visceral dislike for the “always on” system of yours when you first introduced it!

That’s exactly how I envisioned it, yes.

Oh, absolutely! Field propagation is a thing in all field theories. Mind you, many of them propagate at the speed of light, but there’s no reason a warp field has to, especially in the vicinity of other warp fields.

Other viable variable in all of this are energy and visibility. If energy balance is a thing in game, the energy utilized by the warp engines could be split between field strength (depth) and field radius. Strong, compact fields would show up on censors as a well defined and easily targeted point, while weak, diffuse fields could show up on scanners as a region up to the edge of the feathered region (so, in your prototype, 1AU). Maybe larger, and with a poorly defined shape, so that the emitter doesn’t have to be at the centre of the detected field. In the one case, you get a strong warp field able to hold on tightly to nearby ships, with the ability to drag them all along without regard for any kind of interference from those ships warp fields (an interesting thing to explore might be that fleets are slower than any of the component ships, due to warp interference; this makes scouting parties a truly viable and valuable thing) – in other words, they can reach their theoretical maximum warp values, instead of suffering a fleet penalty, in exchange for more energy – but anyone looking for you can find you from almost anywhere in the system. In the other case, they still know that you’re in the system, but it’s not entirely clear where in the system you are.

So, if rerouting power takes time (and it’s been previously proposed that it should, and I agree), and changing the geometry of your warp field also takes time, I think there’s a suitable penalty to make things interesting rather than exploitative.

Well, that’s actually kind of shockingly reassuring. Fingers crossed, then!

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Those are cool extensions to the basic system. Though I fear a little that such addons could debalance in an extreme way. Just a little though.

Just wanted to point out that, if someone manages to intercept them, an attacker could drop much more closely and wouldn’t need to close in first.

As I understood it, the only penalty would be acceleration. And only for ships that are lighter then the biggest ship in the fleet.

Every ship can reach max warp … heavier ships need longer to accelerate but they can still reach max warp … so if all ships accelerate towards the same destination the smaller ships won’t use their maximum acceleration as they want to stay with the bigger ship. The big ship doesn’t have to pull them and so can accelerate as if alone. Only penalty would be if ships would just stop their engines. In that case the rest of the fleet needs to pull it along, right? Would look pretty cool for sure.

So I don’t see the fleet penalty. No inheren’t fleet penalty. The point of a fleet is to stay together and like it with every convoy or marine fleet the maximum speed is determined by the slowest participant.
I think there shouldn’t be an additional penalty to fleets then that as that would encourage lone wolfs even more.

Smaller fleets will still be nimbler and can course correct easier, also they would be easier to command.

What about differen’t loadouts … could I equip my ship with a drive or warpdrive that has a slighter higher warp speed and, for instance, a lower acceleration or would that be unfavourable?

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[quote=“Kichae, post:45, topic:513”]
Oh, absolutely! Field propagation is a thing in all field theories. Mind you, many of them propagate at the speed of light, but there’s no reason a warp field has to, especially in the vicinity of other warp fields.[/quote]

The warp drive power adjusts only incrementally, which is how the player asks for more or less speed. If the drive went out, the ship would instantly stop dead in space, becoming a non-ship object. In that spirit, changes to the field would propagate instantly, but any change made might only be an incremental one.

[quote=“Kichae, post:45, topic:513”]
Strong, compact fields would show up on censors as a well defined and easily targeted point, while weak, diffuse fields could show up on scanners as a region up to the edge of the feathered region (so, in your prototype, 1AU).[/quote]

I would be very leery of strong, compact fields, despite the appeal of the science. I thought you were suggesting that the fields had a fixed, maximum strength and it was only the field size that changed. A strong, compact field allows me to say to an interceptor “You have made your interception in the last 2 minutes and have gotten within 10,000km, but I’m going to force you to spend another 2 minutes to reach me because of my strong local disruption.” I’d be worried about the pacing of gameplay and fear the reaction: automated intercepts.

If the maximum strength is fixed by the game, then players can be sure that an intercept will never take more than a known amount of time. Better players could reduce the size of their ship’s field so that any other ship or fleet that had brought down its own field size could be intercepted more quickly.

[quote=“Kichae, post:45, topic:513”]
Maybe larger, and with a poorly defined shape, so that the emitter doesn’t have to be at the centre of the detected field.[/quote]

Making fields procedural based on the emitter would be an interesting thing to do and I think it might be practical. Of course, spherical fields only require three multiplies to make a containment check.

Using a procedural field that also took into account the star system would be awesome. You’d be flying along, seeing your disruption field twist and squirm depending on nearby celestial bodies. Or perhaps on some magical background warp field that is largely independent of the bodies. Or is related to magnetism and only includes bodies with large magnetic fields, like stars and gas giants. Aurora Warpus.

[quote=“Kichae, post:45, topic:513”]
In the one case, you get a strong warp field able to hold on tightly to nearby ships, with the ability to drag them all along without regard for any kind of interference from those ships warp fields (an interesting thing to explore might be that fleets are slower than any of the component ships, due to warp interference; this makes scouting parties a truly viable and valuable thing)[/quote]

Interesting, but do you want disincentives for operating in a fleet? I can’t imagine that going over well in a multiplayer game.

I suspect that simple caution should be a good enough reason to send out scouts. Slow the fleet, send the scouts and find out what they’re getting into.

If a fleet pulls in its warp disruption field, then yes, it is turning over control of the pacing of interception to the interceptors. If the interceptors reduce their field sizes, then they can be more aggressive about their interception. But the use of the term “drop” suggests that they would suddenly appear in some way. In a star system, you’re going to see ships approaching from a long way off - unless there are sensor fogs and such. In that case, an interceptor might just as well be a capital emerging from the fog as a small interceptor.

I can imagine a fleet having its own defensive interceptor. It would be a fast ship with a full-size disruption field. If the fleet is menaced, it is his job to join the fleet as fast as possible. That gives the fleet a full-size disruption field, preventing interceptors from picking their own interception schedule. Of course, if disruption field sizes can be adjusted faster than a ship can make an intercept after being spotted on scanners, then it’s a moot point.

[quote=“Lomsor, post:46, topic:513”]
What about differen’t loadouts … could I equip my ship with a drive or warpdrive that has a slighter higher warp speed and, for instance, a lower acceleration or would that be unfavourable?[/quote]

I’m of the opinion that the maximum speed should be fixed and uniform across all ships, and that ships can fiddle with all sorts of other parameters, including acceleration. When changing parameters, the general rule should be that any given class’s parameter should never be improved beyond the neighboring class’s standard. So if a frigate’s acceleration is being pumped up, it should never get better than a standard corvette. A standard corvette should always be able to outmaneuver a frigate. If a frigate’s firepower is being improved, it should never get better than a standard destroyer. A standard destroyer should always outgun a frigate. If you want to beat a destroyer with a frigate, be a better ship operator.

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I used the term ‘drop’ to describe the differnece from a normal intercept with default disruption fields. If both fleets have reduced field sizes they will close in much faster, presumably the AFDs (<- What’s this written out again?) will also be decreased, being able to warp much closer to their target, maybe even directly into firing range.

It really depends on the extend of the difference this tuning of the warp field will have on the gameplay and how the fields are represented. Because if fields directly correlate with ship size, the player doesn’t need a representation as he can derive the field diameters and strenghts from the symbols of his scanner. But if the pilots/captains of the ships have the abbility to alter the fields so drastically it may be hard to plan a tactic in advance. One way would be to allow for a way to obtain the missing information but map clutter can easily get out of hand.

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[quote=“Lomsor, post:48, topic:513”]
If both fleets have reduced field sizes they will close in much faster, presumably the AFDs will also be decreased, being able to warp much closer to their target, maybe even directly into firing range.[/quote]

The AFDs are Areas of Full Disruption. That’s the newtonian area around each ship that makes up the engagement arena. They remain constant in size because they are related to the size of the area in which a ship interacts with other objects in a newtonian way. For example, shooting at them. In the prototype they were set to have a radius of 20 ship radii. A fighter was 30 meters long, so 2015 meters, or a 300 meter radius. A battleship was 2000 meters long, so 201000 meters, or a 20km radius.

The use of the words “warp” and “direct” suggest that you see ship movement as some kind of target-and-jump system similar to EVE Online. In the prototype, ships simply fly around in space seamlessly and continuously. The funky part is that they change their velocity automatically when they get closer to or farther from something they might interact with. The bottom line is that players must fly their ships to their destinations, and that takes fine-tuned control for tens of seconds.

Certainly the size of the warp disruption field used by an intercepting fleet can be reduced to speed the interception, but at some point the interception gets so twitchy that the fleet just can’t complete the intercept. The ships retain too great an ability to alter their velocity. Every little control input throws the fleet around like crazy.

I just tried playing with this in the prototype. The default ship disruption field size is fixed at 0.06AU for all ship types. I tried a fighter intercepting single ships with the field size all the way down to 0.01AU and could still do it, but it was getting pretty darned twitchy at the end. The twitchiness of the controls was slowing my intercepts, not speeding them up.

At no time was there ever the slightest possibility that I was going to drop into firing range with my target within a couple seconds from 0.01AU.

1 Like
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Oh well, I didn’t make it better by trying to explain it … well I understand the gradual system and the change in speed troughout the warp field. Just my words to communicate the diffrence between two differently sized warp field didn’t work as it seem … anyway, thanks for testing this out.

Even with those findings I have to say that in my oppinion I wouldn’t like to see these tuning options in the game, the overall system is great and I’m holding my thumbs that I-Novae will implement it, but the ability to change the size of the warp field is something that allows for the movement system to be used by players, to change it properties how they like it, it makes it a defensive or offensive weapon instead of a part of the system, a pilot can depend on, will stay how they remembered it … one thing I like about the system is that it doesn’t allow for player action, it takes the interdiction out of the controll of the player.

Just my opinion though, maybe if I see the possibilities for different tactics myself I would overcome myself and compromise.
Good thing that it is something that can be added to add depth and more possibilities without the need to rescramble other parts of the game.

As the warp drive is only fully disrupted 10km above planets/moons and the system itself is still newtonian, this still would alow for orbital maneuvers right?

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Holy cow, I leave this thread alone for one night… :stuck_out_tongue:

The more it’s discussed, the more I remember how much I liked the prototype system. It did seem to work well gameplay-wise without sacrificing reality too much. It is interesting to hear some of the theory that went into it, that I did not understand at the time! I-Novae should employ you to sort their flight mechanics out @JB47394!

Assuming gravity is still modelled and has an effect on ships, I see no reason why not. Clearly, the propulsion output of a ship would make it able to counter gravity easily, but if no input was given then by all means let planets pull them in!

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Maybe only when flight assist is disabled …

The reason I asked the question/realization was because of the relative speed cap of 3km/s which is not alwyas enough to achieve a low orbit. Though as warp has a much higher speed cap it should still work. But as you said. It higly depends when and if gravity is applied to ships. I hope it will but would also be happy if it only would be of pressence when the auto-compensation of the flight assist is disabled.

There should definetly be visible effects though. Thrusters firing and such as just hovering above a planet without any signs of forces would weaken the presence those giants have.

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Academically, yes. Gravity is implemented, and orbits can be achieved. But orbits are something that spacecraft do when they have strict energy budgets. Our current spacecraft have very strict energy budgets and scramble to get energy from any source available. So orbital maneuvering is very important to them.

In contrast, warp-capable space ships just don’t care. Sitting in an orbit is a waste of their time. If they want to be near a planet, they go near the planet and just sit there, hovering at whatever altitude they prefer. If there is a big ol’ space station, that would be in geostationary orbit because it doesn’t want to have warp engines (probably just ion drives for orbital maintenance), but ships just drive over and dock. No muss, no fuss.

In the prototype, a fighter was 15G capable. A battleship was 1.7G capable. So a prototype battleship could pretty easily hover over the surface of any of the terrestrial planets. It would have to be careful about getting too close to the gas giants and the sun. But it wouldn’t orbit those bodies. It would just stay back and hover.

[quote=“Lomsor, post:52, topic:513”]
There should definetly be visible effects though. Thrusters firing and such as just hovering above a planet without any signs of forces would weaken the presence those giants have.[/quote]

Oh, that reminds me; the I-Novae guys have said all along that there would be three drive systems; thrusters, warp and jump. I’m guessing that means something like the Elite: Dangerous system and not the warp and jump pair implemented in the prototype. For the record, I am not a fan of rocket-like visuals when it comes to ships capable of interstellar travel. It’s almost as jarring as aerodynamics on spaceships.

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I posed the question/realization as a reassuring sign for those people who would like to achieve orbit. I’m aware of the raw power of infinity spacecraft and the absurdity of using orbits to achieve certain positions. I just want to recheck if the “I want to have my fleet orbit the planet” camp is served with your system.

Well how about the 2010 “lighting up cooking pads” … that’s what I had in mind.

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. . . You’ve lost me here. Why?

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JB split the thread just to answer that question more deeply yesterday, check it out: Depicting spacecraft drives