First Ill say Hi to all of you!
As many others ive seen and gasped at the previous clips from Infinity and have been somewhat depressed to see it fall into nothingness.
But I only recently learned (Thanks to Rubinsson and the swedish gaming site fz.se) about Battlescape and that this amazing game and engine is ressurected in this new incarnation that sounds in just about every way awesome!
Im definitly pledging but still working out how high im going
I have a question though, in the full game will we have extensive control over the ship and its systems and cockpit, more towards flightsims such as DCS and Falcon4, or will Battlescape take a more simplistic approach and not feature as much options and controls?
Im looking forward to the game no matter the path it heads, but the simentusiast inside me cant stop to think about how amazing this would be if the ship features was as extensive as a regular flightsim.
Don’t quote me on anything as I’m not a developer and I’ve not heard much regarding this topic, but I would imagine they’d be aiming for a relatively simplistic approach but they emphasize that Battlescape is more of a simulation than a game. But I don’t think you should expect fidelity like in flight sims where you actually have to flip switches and press buttons to activate simple functions.
That’s just my interpretation of their mentality.
One of the aims of the game is to be able to jump in and have 30 mins of fun before you have to head out somewhere. So I imagine they’d tend more towards accessibility and not have a 15 minute long checklist and start-up procedure for starting your spaceship up.
However with the possibility of modding the game engine, such a complicated in-depth simulation type experience isn’t beyond the realms of possibility.
Yes I understand they cannot go full flightsim as it would narrow their target audience too much and cripple themselves.
But I do hope there is room for some more advanced configurations and control of the ships during flight.
But mainly im talking about semi-sim features. When spawning into a game, instead of being dropped in a powered up ship in mid flight youre placed in a cold ship stationed in a hanger.
Of course, a simple buttonpress can bring your ship online and youll be out in space in matter of seconds, but at least for me it does add alot to the experience.
Things like that.
I see where you’re coming from. I think Elite: Dangerous did a fairly good job of satisfying most people by including a pre-flight checklist that can be turned off if you don’t want that level of immersion.
I would like the power on sequence to be a bit more complex than just everything turning on at once, but it should still be as easy to initiate as pressing a button.
“power on sequence” probably has a wide array of meanings to different people. I suppose it would look cool if it took a couple seconds with random text displaying on a screen somewhere inside the cockpit, similar in nature to a computer when first turned on (POST messages, and a second later linux bootstrapping).
With that said though, ignoring the game for a moment, I still think it’s plausible that a military spacecraft would have some degree of pre-flight procedures to get it off the ground. These are space ships we’re talking about, not cars.
Yes something like that! Have the screens/HUD run though a quick startup routine while audio effects tells us that the engines and ship systems is coming online!
Elite dangerous has a feature where you can restart you ship to repair damaged modules. Its a very nice and immersive effect that I wish they would implement everytime you load into your ship (like starting the game or changing ships).
Mechwarrior Online has something like this too whenever you begin a match.
While system is sure to get more automated with advancing technology, I think there will always be required by an operator to actually start all those systems up in a more manual matter.
I’m not so sure. In the end it is a collection of sensors, servos, valves… etc. like any other modern electro-mechanical machine. I work with such machines a lot and own a few myself. With how they are designed, and how the design will continue on the track of being completely self-contained without needing user-input to function. Just turn on and go, even for advanced machines.
So yeah, in the future I think it will be a boring “turn on and go”, with maybe a few seconds to maybe a minute waiting time.
It depends on the use of the ship. A civilian shuttle would be “turn on and go”. Any other vehicle that is subjected to heavy use (e.g. mining gear) or that is subjected to combat would tend to have more complex startup sequences. Not because it would be cool, but because there are good reasons for doing so. Those scenarios require that the operator have enough knowledge to spot and work around inevitable problems. So the startup sequence represents an kind of basic competency check for the operator. If you just push the start button you probably don’t know that there are turbopumps and if you don’t know that, then you don’t know how to reset the turbopumps when your drive starts failing.
As for what Infinity:Battlescape will do, we’ll just have to wait and see. I suspect that they won’t put much into the startup because they have much bigger fish to fry.
Well, there is this flight-assist, which makes the ships control feel more arcade like. This flight-assist is actually using the newtonian physics and simply helps you managing all manuvering thrusters at the same time. However, afaik you can switch the assist off to get the full control…
Currently our prototype has two system: Flight Assist on and off. With Flight Assist On, it took me a couple days but I feel like I have a good grasp of my ship and am now able to pull off some interesting maneuvers helped by some fly by wire compensation vectoring. I tried about 5 min with flight assist off both in atmo and space, and I can tell you it’s a wild beast to tame, gonna take a lot of practice for me to even nail simple maneuvers.
This might just come down to how people learn or choose to play, but I can imagine many dogfights might naturally end up as jousting matches. Obviously there is a significant difference in spaceflight dynamics with flight assist on and off, but if most people will be flying with it on, I don’t feel as though they should be able to turn as quickly as with it off. It seems to me that currently (in the Hellion at least) you can pretty much just turn on a dime and then drift or retro burn. This level of maneuverability should be an advantage of disabling flight assist and the reward of the extra challenge. Then the people who are using flight assist will have smoother, less chaotic dogfights.
Ive already seen how the flight seem to handle on the previews and it looks really nice but im talking more about other systems in the ship, such as radars, sensors, hardpoints, communications and power/electical management and similar.
Will we have extensive control over these systems or will they be fairly simple automated functions?
