I don’t think that’d be practical, especially for small ships. The game is full 6DOF, there are already 6 keys for translations ( front/back, left/right, up/down ) and 2 keys for roll. If the mouse isn’t used for pitch/yaw, then you need an additional 4 keys for those, and you wouldn’t be able to control your ship with a single hand.
Unless you dropped some lateral movement ( like strafing left/right or up/down ) and use these keys for pitch/yaw. But for small ships, in the middle of ogfighting, lateral movement is quite important…
Also the mouse is the only precise input that wast majority of the players have, you simply cannot replace it with digital keyboard inputs that provide no nuance to the controls.
You could have it as an option but it still ends up like playing an fps with keyboard turning and everyone will just absolutely DUNK on you.
Fair points; regardless of keyboard / mouse layout I suppose a controller or joystick will always be preferential in any flight sim game. What controllers will be supported upon release?
Next time we get to play the Beta I’ll mess around with some custom keyboard settings. I’m thinking it may be easier to assign pitching and rolling to the mouse and have the rest on the keyboard. Instead of CTRL + Mouse to look around, I think Scroll Click + Mouse would be faster.
This was my first trial and I was very disappointed. I am following the InfinityEngine since 2007 and always just wanted to visit planets and view the beautiful graphics.
Now this whole game is only about fighting and battle ? I hate this.
I wanted to land on a planet and fly from dark to sun, this was not possible !
Because of pseudo realism. The Ship was way to slow on the surface, everything was instabil and wiggle, and the i suddenly just exploded. WTF !
I just want to have the ability to NOT engage in stupid fights, and just fly around and on a planet freely, without pseudo realism that the whole ship is wiggle all the time until explode
I am waiting more than 10 years to see beautiful planet graphics and now it’s just fighting fighting fighting, why ??
Infinity: Battlescape was never meant to be Infinity: The Quest for Earth.
Over the last few years, the developers have gone out of their way to explain that Battlescape was a separate entity, that it was a game about fighting in a big battle and shooting stuff.
I’m sorry that you missed that, but I’m curious as to how.
You can type “/ghost” in the chat window, bots will leave you alone then.
Did you use the interceptor on the planets? You can fly in mach 2 with the interceptor without it wiggling due to winds.
The more altitude you have the less dense the atmospheres get, allowing for faster travel.
as i said, i loved all the videos and picture since 2007. Seeing planet rings through the atmosphere and then just leaving the planet. Flying from the dark side into the sun, seeing nebula.
I pledged because i loved the engine and wanted to fly myself and see nice planets like a space simulator…
We have stupid fighting all over the place (shooters and stuff), but we don’t have the space simulator graphics of infinity…
Why the focus now is ONLY on fighting i don’t get it…
Just release a version, were you can just explore the universe, a little bit like in “no mans sky” but with way better graphics. That would have done it.
Fighting can be an option aside for some shooters out there, but why waste the engine for only that…
For me, i always hoped to use the engine like in the old videos…
As @Playbenni says, you can type /ghost in the chat to have the AI ships ignore you, and I believe the developers are planning on an empty sandbox mode to simply fly around in the released version.
Making a full MMO or space RPG is an incredibly expensive and time consuming endeavour. (For an example, Eve Online cost a million dollars to finance back in the late 90s, and costs have gone up an awful lot since then.) Battlescape’s success could lead to the developers having the resources to put one together, but for now it’s beyond their capabilities.
Still, if you want to relax while exploring a vast procedural universe today, I’d wholeheartedly recommend you Space Engine.
:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ve0Bpmx8Fk0
:http://spaceengine.org/
It’s very big, it’s very pretty, and there’s no big shooty space fights.
This is what Battlescape: Infinity is, was and was always intended to be by the devs, once the decision was made to create a game smaller in scope which could be delivered by a smaller dev team. They explained this in the months leading up to and during the kickstarter. And beyond for the years of development since the kickstarter.
A game smaller in scope, set against a struggle for resources between competing factions, in a solar system with a 1:1 scale.
There will be mode/s for just solo flight and discovery, and maybe more (in time if all goes well). But certainly the option to just fly solo and explore. Maybe with friends and explore, although I don’t know for sure about flying with friends outside of the combat matches. The above posters maybe know more about this than I.
I write my feedback about why I couldnt play during the beta weekend. I couldnt play because while the installer was installing the game Windows restarted. I dont know if It was related to the installer itself or if my OS was corrupt (I mainly use my Ubuntu partition). Each time It happened I wasn’t actually at the screen so I didn’t see any BSOD… After a few retries i gave up!
Thanks to @cybercritic for giving me the data of his bot. I put the data into the graph I made last time. Fun with excel … yay.
Also both stacked on top of each other for comparison.
thanks for the link. actually i hope the developers make the sandbox option in parallel. i think there should not be much time to spend for it. this would be very nice also right now in alpha/beta
Well, I think the devs are VERY close to a trading system. Seriously, Elite Dangerous just uses a list of objects to buy, they never show the goods. You get a sound effect when the cargo is aboard your ship! ‘Chunk!’ and another when it’s taken off… ‘chunk!’.
But I’d probably go with a passenger type missions. Just have a popup window with available contracts. "Deliver xxxx to xxxx station within 5 minutes for xxxx credits. When the player arrived inside a hit box on the next station, show a success/fail dialog box. You should be able to program this really easy and quick?
I understand this would splinter the fighting force and many pilots would simply opt for the passenger mission, but I think you would gather far more players with this really simple system. (Ghost mode credits = one tenth) It might be tough to leave or enter a hostile station under fire!
Oh and I’d like to see, like Elite Dangerous(sidebar window)., a LIST of selectable system objects,planets/stations… not a 3D mini map.
Sort by population or distance.
You can easily target the planet/station and be on your way.
There’s a lot we could do with the missions system, especially in terms of adding non-combat gameplay ( which a lot of people would like ). But keep in mind the game is not an MMO; by that I mean that it’s match based in a single ( although still gigantic ) star system. When the match ends, everything resets. That means you can’t acquire ships forever like in a sandbox game like Star Citizen or Elite Dangerous.
We’re currently brainstorming about adding long-term incentives to the game, so that there’s some persistency between matches ( probably not credits though ). At the moment the main idea is a faction / XP ranking system which will unlock cosmetic items and ship equipment upgrades. Having better reputation in your faction would also allow access to more complex / difficult missions. But all of that is at the design stage; we’re not gonna implement it before at least 1-2 months. So if you have other ideas that would hook players on long-term progression towards a certain goal, we’re open ears
I love the fact Battlescape is a reset game. Don’t have to worry about credit farming or owning anything.
Reminds me of the old days. Arcade games…NEVER worried about saving anything(maybe a high score)just played because it was fun.
I could easily play 10 hours running cargo/passenger mission…and not care if I lost everything when I logged off.( Maybe get an all time record for the day…Or a statue on one of the planets?)
I play Elite just to fly around.
Battlescape will be the same way.
the universe and simulation systems you’ve created is very robust i think it’d be a shame not to take advantage of it. if not for online, maybe for a single player mode?
I hate this.
also right now in alpha/beta