The game should make it easy to do these things, the worst thing you can do is blame the player for ‘not getting it’. It’s a slippery slope, because everyone becomes an idiot at some point with that mentality.
You can already do that right now, just remap the IncrTargetSpeed / DecrTargetSpeed events to W / S and remove the keys 1-0.
If the consensus is that it’s better than the current default mapping, I can do the change. However after testing it, I find it a lot less intuitive than the current scheme, especially in close areas where you’ll bump into walls all the time. But if you test it and find it to be an improvement, please let me know.
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What is the increment? I would be ok to use that if it is exponential like with the number keys. Or map it to the mouse wheel instead, I rarely need the precision it gives.
The 0-9 being used for setting speeds is a little excessive, but I like the strafing controls the way they are. Could we instead keep those, and have a “Select next preset speed” button? E.g. press ] to cycle through 100… 250… 500… Etc. And [ to cycle back. Mouse wheel could still control it more analogue-y, and it frees up the numeric keys for weapon-related stuff (which is perhaps more familiar to people).
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Absolutely; however which keys would you use to increase / decrease to the next speed level ? If you use 1-2 ( where it’s closest to the hand on the keyboard ), that leaves 3-0 for weapons or other functionalities… but these keys being very close and starting at 3 ( while 1-2 is for target speed ) might confuse new players.
Allright, the target speed cycling has been implemented and will be available in the upcoming patch ( in a few hours ). Event names are “NextTargetSpeed” and “PrevTargetSpeed”. I’ll bind them to F5/F6 for now.
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I personally will try target speed cycling on the mouse wheel. I feel like the way the wheel works now doesn’t really work that well and would be better as two buttons (the manual set speeed up/down).
How do other 6DOF games handle this? How does Decent do it?
I think the whole concept of the target speeds is unintuitive* and should (and can) be done away with entirely. (For warp and non-warp)
W and S should accelerate/decelerate the ship as they do currently.
FA should ignore your forward/back speed and just try to eliminate drift, ie try to align your total velocity vector with your forward direction, but only while a thrust input is pressed.
*Even if you don’t think it’s unintuitive, it still adds unnecessary interaction complexity.
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So kinda like disabling flight assist but only on the forward/backward axis? I really like this idea especially in warp.
How does one totally, absolutely stop then though? Special button?
So your last sentence says that flight assist will be off when not touching translation controlls?
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I would say target the thing you want to stop relative to and press the match velocity button…
but I think it’d mainly be new players who’d want to ‘stop’ so a convenience button to match velocity with the nearest big mass without having to select it would be good.
Edit:
About to drive home but I’ll address this later.
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Or how about double tapping S (backwards, decrease speed) sets target speed to zero, any further increase/decrease input deletes the target speed. That target speed would then be the last target speed avaiable.
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I know that the UI is on your priority list: how high is it? Key / Control binding through UI would go a long way avoiding tedious changes like these.
Nice, I think that will help. I see myself binding those possibly to my additional mouse buttons on the side if possible (though I will test effectiveness of default mapping too).
But… Doesn’t the whole speed thing currently rely on target speeds? They’d have to rework the entire flight model and we’d have a very different-feeling game. With such great speeds involved, the only way to travel is choose your speed and wait for the ship to catch up!
At least we have a choice of a gradient (via mouse wheel) and incremental set speeds. The latter can simply act as a ballpark setting which is then fine tuned. Speaking as someone who’s mouse wheel is not very good, I rely on the increments quite a lot.
I think as I understood it would change from “set target speed” to “target speed adjust automatically to current speed”.
But that’s only part of the idea of Hrobertson.
So you use your W and S and the target speed automatically adjust to the current speed of the ship and stays there.
There are some possible problems though. What if the Person looks retrograte and presses W? Is that somtehing they can understand easily?
Playbennis idea of double pressing S would be a nice addition. That would set the target speed to zero and as long as you don’t touch W or S the ship will stop.
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I just tested it real quick and it sucks for the reasons you mentioned.
hrobertson’s would be worthwhile testing I think.
This would basically behave like the usual speed acceleration/deceleration right know but instead that the speed decreases automatically once we stop pressing acceleration it just stays at the reached speed like it would using a target speed setting. With these changes normal flight wouldn’t feel that much different but the whole target speed thing could be scrapped.
EDIT: Lomsors last post explained it better
Not at all. When actually playing (rather than testing) I fly entirely with FA off which doesn’t use the target speed. Target speeds are just a FA system.
Nope. There’d be no such thing as a target speed.
You’d control your acceleration, not your speed, just as you do in a car or aeroplane. You’d press the forward thrust button to accelerate. In air, air resistance would slow you down unless you accelerated to counter it.
Under no circumstances would the computer keep you at a certain speed.
@Playbenni’s explanation is correct.
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I like that even better.
So basically all that would need to happen to implement this idea is to stop the automatic deceleration when using the current speed increase/decrease functionality and to do away with all target speed setting and only leaving the target speed zero setting in. Right?
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Yeah, on paper it sounds like a nice idea. Will experiment it, it sounds like it should work and stay quite intuitive.
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Here is an additional idea.
Since we now abolished the whole confusing target speed input layer and only have the “set speed to zero” remaining:
How about having a second special input that replaces all the practical functionality the target speed thing ever offered!
A button to toggle “maintain speed”. With this button we could also cruise in atmosphere without having to press the increase speed button constantly because obviously the air slows the ship down in atmosphere.
Just set aside a key for “maintain speed” or have it toggle by double tapping the increase speed button (W).
Would need testing to see if this may be accidentally triggered with double tap I think, but maybe its worth a try.
This could also be toggled in the same menu were flight assist and the other stuff is toggled.
The “maintain speed” thing would replace most of the old target speed functionality while beeing entirely optional and non-confusing to new players.
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@Lomsor and I just had a chat on Discord and he pointed out that in an atmosphere maintaining a certain speed is often desirable. To address this, a double tap of W (or other binding like Ctrl+W) could set a target speed of your current speed. If you later pressed W or S again it would cancel that ‘maintain speed’ so you’d have no target speed.
With the exception of when the above mentioned ‘maintain speed’ setting is active, yes.
It could be made an option in the settings but I think it’d be good for this to be the default behaviour.
A scenario: (In vacuum)
- The player points at a station and presses W for a bit to accelerate to ~500m/s.
- They then release W and their ship continues on at that velocity (this is just like FA off).
- They then use their mouse to point their ship at a planet. Their ship velocity remains unchanged - They are still flying directly at the station at 500m/s. The velocity vector must be made more apparent in the HUD✚.
- They decide they want to go to the planet so they press W and begin accelerating towards the planet. FA uses the side thrusters to cancel the lateral velocity they had towards the station.
This introduces the player to Newtonian motion but gives them the convenience and intuitiveness of simply pointing where they want to go and holding W (an unconscious component of all FPS).
✚ @Lomsor and I also agreed on the deficiency of the prograde and retrograde markers only being visible when your view is aligned with the velocity vector (which is less than 33% of possible ship orientations). Better visualisation of velocity vector relative to orientation is required! This is something that could potentially be a component of the sensor view as it is in other games.)
Edit: @Playbenni, Haha. We arrived at the exact same idea. Must be a sign.
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