Here are a couple of ways that I dreamed formation flying while engaging enemies might work.
In the example of the bombing run, the formation leader is an excellent pilot and accelerates fast - but not too fast - towards an enemy cruiser. His wingmates, who normally suck at using “flight assist - off”, all lock on to the cruiser and fire their torpedoes. They rely on the wing leader to accelerate such that the torps all land at the same time, and then swing them around toward a new target without overshooting the battle entirely.
For corvette escort, some bombers and inties need their launchers refilled and hulls repaired in the middle of battle, but enemy ships won’t leave their corvette alone. The bombers and inties set formation fixed at around 800 meters from the corvette. As the corvette dodges around to avoid fire so it can keep healing, the inties and bombers turn independently to shoot at small ships targeting the corvette, to deter them and drive them off while they heal and rearm.
In both examples the formation lead is a pilot you trust to keep you out of danger.
As for the UI, in addition to the little formation icon and message in the upper right, it could say the name of the person / ship you are locked in to formation with, in case you forget. Also, the fact that it doesn’t cancel on re-targeting would have to be covered in the tutorial.
An answer of “formations don’t work that way, that would be too easy or confusing” is fine.
This doesn’t seem as much a problem with formation controls, as keeping track of who you want to stay with. That’s a coordination/HUD issue.
You could be in formation with a friendly hauler, then break off to attack an enemy. The issue is losing track of the hauler, so perhaps you can ‘pin’ it somehow so it stays visible on your HUD.
This launch was … a lot going on. Ha. I’ll just list by the things that come to mind.
Was great seeing so many players. In awe and yet … like common … this game is made for this.
I love all the new influx of streams and videos and people optimizing strategies. That’s great. The community already is growing rapidly.
The Steam Blackout right at the player peak super sucked. It really hit me and made me sad as a long time fan. Let’s hope that this game grows!
Thausands of questions asked and answered. Quite a bit of work.
The HOTAS situation was especially a lot of work. Got a lot of people to work it though.
The game really held up. I have seen many of the little bugs that still persist but people, a lot of them, got ingame and had a blast. Magnificient.
Great work I-Novae Team. The controversial topics also game up. We’ll see who prevails at the end.
Now to the game.
Warp ramming was a big thing in the beginning. The meta is forming before our eyes! Ha.
I have a suggestion to this. Is it possible to change the order that things happen during a warp collision?
Currently it seems to be “ships collide, apply forces and damage, warp disengaged”
Can it be “ships collide, warp disegnaged, apply forces and damage”? Because that would pretty much kill warp ramming and would make more sense gameplay and lore wise.
Yes everyone is in the same space yet ships in warp don’t have the same momentum as ships not in warp. So hitting someone in warp shouldn’t just translate that speed to the other guy, just the warp exit speed really.
Although typing it out … the warp does cancel and transform momentum … you can enter it at different speed and vector you exit it … so yeah.
My other feedback got kind of spread over the last few days.
One little bug I have seen. Low hull health ships hull health indicator disappears. Been a small bug since long. Behaviour seems to be the same for the shield one but there it is fitting. Yet ships that are about to die but not dead yet still have some health …
I have personally troubleshooted one guy with him showing me his screen. I think the issue lies withing people grabbing their controller while trying to bind a button on the joystick. This moves the joystick.
This makes the game think "Ahh what you try to do is “Jystick0Axis2 + Jostick0Button1” and now is waiting for the Axis to return to 0 in order to complete the binding.
What do you mean by “grabbing their controller” ? If they don’t touch an axis, moving the controller shouldn’t cause any trouble. If you hold an axis, then obviously it’ll be detected as a combo with the button, but the player wouldn’t keep holding that axis down in one direction for many seconds as released the button, would he ?
I think the problem is that they do touch the axis.
It appears that was the case for the person I was troubleshooting. Only have that one case though.
I watched him try it several minutes until I realised what must be going on. As soon as I suggested him to look out not to move the joystick while he binds the key it started to suddenly work.
I just tried to reproduce it myself … yet no luck. The game is quite forgiving. As soon as the axis gets near the centre again it finishes the binding process. Might be a dead end though and the source lies somewhere else. Don’t know really. Just wanted to throw it in.
On another note. What is the way to get the '-launcher" in the I-Novae launcher version of the game. There is no game shortcut as the game has to be launched trough the I-Novae launcher. Works well in steam but no idea how it can in the other case.
Some joysticks are off center due to age, so the axis could consistently be firing off. Game should ideally have some sort off cut-off when mapping an axis, over 0.5 reported on an axis of 1.0.
It has deadzones, but I noticed some axis on some profiles use very low values ( sometimes even 0 ). Detection has a threshold of 50% so it shouldn’t detect small “noisy” values.
Just wanted to throw it in.