Please guys, let’s not make it more complicated that it needs to. My time is limited and I can’t implement everything to please everybody. Especially considering the flight model seems quite robust and appreciated at the moment. I can’t recall any beginner having any trouble with it ( unlike the warp ), so really the only reason I’m even touching is because I want to free the 1-0 keys. If it wasn’t for that, I feel my time would be better spent in other systems that are barefuly functional or missing.
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At first I was on board with the idea of having W/S just accelerate and decelerate your ship and getting rid of the target speed stuff, but there’s been some compelling points made.
Some points:
- Maintaining velocity in atmosphere would be a chore without some sort of “cruise control” functionality.
- If you want to get to a target speed, you might be holding the W button a lot. Not only will this eventually wear your finger out, but new people might just end up pressing it all the time and I think this would exacerbate jousting behavior.
- Boost becomes linearly aligned with your facing directions. I believe FA can adjust the lateral and linear thrust to give the best adjustment to achieve your target vector, meaning boost will be more efficient in aligning you to your current direction.
- A FA that doesn’t change your velocity vector to your heading unless you are actively pressing the accelerate button is effectively just throttle assist. People that expect to change velocity direction just by changing their heading and expecting FA to eventually move them towards it will be confused. I’m not against testing this functionality for people that want it, but it should be a toggle option in a menu somewhere.
Current proposal:
- Change mouse scroll wheel behavior to cycle through the 0-9 set speeds as standard behavior
- Add a modifier button for fine grained control of velocity setting i.e. “modifier+scrollwheel.” I would suggest left-alt as default and move countermeasures up to one of the number buttons that should be open now. You can move missiles up there too while you’re at it. ( I would also make left-alt a general purpose modifier button)
- For testing purposes, move the quick comments radial menu up to one of the function buttons (it’s nice, but I don’t end up using it that much) and add a radial menu in it’s place where we can toggle experimental things like cruise control functionality. Might be a little more work, but that way we don’t have to wait for a patch to revert any thing we don’t like and we can actively compare something to the old functionality.
We will eventually need to be able to change all of our settings in game, but I think we can all focus on what the best default buttons should be for a new user.
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I only use the 1-0 keys for managing warp speed and sometimes for flying in atmo. Fly exclusively with flight assist off for space flight.
I know that I’d like all the controls for speed to be based in the W and S keys. SHIFT+W/S for boost. CTRL+S for station keeping. Double-tap W and S for “floor it” and “hover/stop”.
I’d also like the process of setting my flight assist speed to be part of those controls. I find it wholly unintuitive to press W to accelerate up to my desired speed only to have the default ship behavior be to countermand that and drag the speed back down because I didn’t set a target speed via other controls.
So I see it working like this:
- I press W to accelerate to my chosen speed.
- I turn and the ship tries to fly like an aircraft, keeping the same speed.
I might throw in the idea that the flight assist might force me into an aircraft style experience, limiting my ability to turn the ship because the thrusters cannot meet the requirement of point 2. So I might be able to throw the nose of my ship around so that I can shoot at stuff, but if I reach the limit of some angle, the ship won’t turn any farther because I’d depart the aircraft style experience.
From there, you run into the question of how powerful the belly thrusters should be on something like an interceptor. Make them strong enough and you can perform 9g aircaft-style turns in space.
From there, you can limit the flight assist so that it does less and less for you. Instead of being a strict aircraft simulator, you start to get more freedom to slip and slide your way through space. When you’re ready to take the training wheels off entirely, you set the flight assist level to zero and you can slide backwards if you want.
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Double tapping S or W for a speed setting would be a total nightmare when you want preciscion flight around obstacles. ‘get a little closer’ > ‘smash at max acceleration into station hanger wall’ is not a fun conversion of input to output.
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@Flavien: Thanks for telling us. Yes this got a little out of hand. I think TheLazyJaguar is onto something more in the direction you are looking for.
@Thelazyjaguar I made an input configuration that does what you describe. It needs an additional script though to cycle trough the speed settings. The script doesn’t know when you respawn, enter warp etc… You can reset it if you want. Tap “Right Shift” to reset the script. You don’t necesarily have to reset the script. Sometimes it just jumps from setting 1 to 5 for instance in situations like described above.
Edit: Patch 0.2.7 made this Obsolete. There’s now an ingame event that does what the script has done.
@JB47394 I made an Input configuration that does what you describe … somewhat. LeftCntrl + S does not do station keeping as well as there’s no automatic target speed setting. Use LeftCntrl + W and LeftCntrl + S to adjust Target Speed as well as Double Tap W and S for “Floor” and “Stop”.
You can both download the files from here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ig6cqgpsLxH-U2Jf6m2xzS2Mfx-lY1S0
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Which is why a ‘maintain speed’ button has already been mentioned several times.
People don’t have a problem holding W in most games… FPSs, MMOs, driving games.
Regarding jousting, if someone can make the decision that they want target speed 500m/s rather than 50,000m/s because that’s a more manageable speed, then I think they can make the decision to take their finger off W based on the same criteria.
My suggestion makes no change to boost. Not how it is activated, how it behaves or what you can do with it.
I disagree. Flight Assist is Flight Assist, the fact that it functions only when W/S are pressed doesn’t change what it does.
Plus I did say this could be an option - it’s not intrinsic to the proposal to scrap target speeds.
I’m all for options and user preference, but I don’t find ‘people are used to something so if it changes they’ll be confused’ a compelling reason to not change it. This is pre-alpha, people should expect changes.
I’ll say again, I’m not proposing a change here. I’m saying keep the current behaviour.
I would agree if you could only boost in the forward direction, but the fact is you can boost in any direction.
In most FPS if you are standing still and hold the sprint button, you don’t start sprinting.
Just to be clear, the second system is what is currently implemented.
While some of us have slightly different ideas of how to achieve it, we all have the same desire for Battlescape to be the best game it can be and our proposals are made only with that as the focus.
We are all conscious of the fact that you have to prioritise, but it would be a shame if systems that are merely OK become de facto accepted because there have always been more exciting things to discuss like shields and weapons.
Warp has always been a source of dissatisfaction and warp is basically the target speed system laid bare. So I hardly think this should be a low priority. As I’ve said, I think replacing this in both warp and non-warp would be a great change.
However, above all I hope you stay open to changing all systems and we don’t arrive at beta once those ‘barefuly functional or missing’ systems are implemented and find ourselves stuck with unsatisfactory systems that have been in from the start but have never been top of the priority list for improving.
PS. I fricking love this community!
Edit:
Sure it’s not a difficult system to understand, that doesn’t mean it’s a good system. People that don’t like it can use FA off and so have no need to complain about it. In warp they are forced to use it so we get the complaints.
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Just for the record I do not want any change in non-warp flight as of now.
If any significant control change is made I’d like an option to keep what exists now.
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I quite like the idea of giving scroll wheel bigger increments then having a modifier for precision throttle. I don’t consider the scroll wheel’s fine adjustment something i’d be using during combat to set speed anyways(and i dont think any would, but i may be wrong and if so say so), so a modifier for travel purposes seems like a good comprimise.
3 Likes
Hi all,
I tried using scroll wheel to map IncrTargetSpeed-DecrTargetSpeed. I think it’s fine, except it won’t work if you scroll fast. It could be a good solution to use scroll wheel as virtual throttle percentage.
Best regards, Olivier
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I honestly think a system which lets you see what every keybinding is mapped to would be really useful combined with an intuitive tutorial.
Just for the record I do not want any change in non-warp flight as of now.
If any significant control change is made I’d like an option to keep what exists now
Warping is actually fun and easy to learn I found. It was trying to use a bigger ship that had me confused at first.
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