I never tried it with the gimbal. It might just be the awkward temporary setup I have at the moment, but the interceptor feels far more difficult to aim now than it did before the gimbal was added in the first place.
The direct control mode is not direct control in the traditional meaning of the word, it means your inputs control the thrusters rather than a ‘desired heading’ cursor.
So there is no such thing as a “this is where I’m trying to point at” cursor in direct control mode.
I have long suggested such a control mode however:
When did you last play? Flavien also changed the way direct mode works. It no longer has infinite acceleration but spreads the desired ship movement over more time. This introduces some input lag when and only when going above the ships max acceleration speed.
There has been many more changes though which may have idirect effect on what you are experiencing. Maybe try to nail down what exactly it is. Also try to watch engagement distances and speeds! Due to the new AI the usual engagement has changed. Usually more absolute speed and more distance to the NPCs as they are not always trying to get close to you.
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Unaligned turrets often fire, even when the target is completely out of their firing arc (on the other side of the ship). They should hold fire to save energy.
Edit: the “overcharge weapons” is a bit awkward: it is great to maximize DPS whith a full energy bar, but once it is empty it is counter-productive, as it slows down the recharge of the energy pool and therefore hurts the DPS pretty badly for no benefits. I suggest to deactivate it (for faster charging) when the energy is depleted and reactivate it above a threshold.
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In addition, it stops shield charging even when not firing, which requires fiddling with the menu for switching in combat
My 0.2.4 feedback …
I love, LOVE, the added full 6 axis control in warp. It is so liberating. It’s like playing a fully Newtonian game all over again … but this time freely fling between moons instead of asteroids in a ring. It’s great. It also fixed a minor bug with the previous version (had some kind of lateral control but only when accelerating and only in one direction of the axis).
This addition has allowed me to increase my travel speed immensely, increase my land precision and do cool stuff like drift around a moon more easily. Definitely pushed up the skill ceiling, like it a lot. Even wishing for a “Auto-Assist” off mode (no speed select). 
Limit warp however you want … where to warp, when to warp, how fast to warp. That’s all alright but lateral control is just amazing … please give it a hard thought what other options there are when there’s a conflict with how the game should behave before axing the feature.
New AI is interesting. A lot more movement play. There’s a lot of stuff that could be done but I think the AI is already farther than I would have though possible at this stage. If Flavien wants to improve it I could investigate more. It’s a rather complex topic though and I’m going to leave it for the future.
I’m going to drop my biggest concern now. There are a lot of situations where the limitation of the Netcode show at the moment.
During the Weekend I had a ping between 100 and 200 ms. (As shown in the Debug Framestat Menu.) Usually arround 140. Often it jitter up to 200 and down to 100.
Last time I seen these numbers were, I think, on Wednesday, the server was loaded and there was a lot of teleporting ships. Flavien noted that it may be the server overloaded due to the new turret tracking code.
Maybe that’s fixed now but my ping numbers stayed about the same. Teleporting was less the issue but I was able to see following effects:
- Collisions are really wonky. I did a lot of close fly-bies of capital ships this weekend and it happend quite offten that it looked like I passed the ship but then collided with an invisible box. I was going between 1 to 2 km/s. (Hit and runs)
- The game really badly handles the instant deceleration when dropping out of warp. There’s always a jolt when you get teleportet back.
- Sometimes weapon fire hits target ship but does not register. It doesn’t happen often but it is noticeable. I would guess every 100th hit.
- The switch from low update rate to high update rate is a little jarring. Maybe more steps in between would help … maybe there are no steps but currently it is quite annoying.
I’m ok with the netcode. It does its job. One could now change gameplay to more fit the limitation … or just ignore it and have players with a higher ping experience these drawbacks. I don’t know. I gave it some leeway but it was quite jarring. I would accept some of the issues if the gameplay would really make use of all the potential the gameworld has. (Moving battlescaps, chases, long range (visible and maybe fast) engagement, hit and runs).
I was able to do my hit and runs on large targets and beside that one time I hit, what I guess was, the future position of the cruiser, it mostly went without a hitch.
UI suggestion to make warp more understandable:
There is still an issue displaying how warp operates on the player’s screen (regarding entry/exit speed). I would attach pictures, but I’m on my phone!
It might make it more obvious if the standard speed indicator freezes (perhaps changing colour). Then the warp speed could be displayed on top of it, or to the side in its own way (even if that’s just a blue bar above the frozen normal-speed bar).
Reasonably simple change that would just help understanding.
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That’s not the netcode, that’s the physics; everything is done with bounding boxes. It’s not an issue with small ships but with the large capital ships ( destroyer+ ) when you’re flying close to them with a small ship ( interceptor ), you will definitely hit the bounding box while you’re still dozens of meters away from the actual geometry.
This will get addressed at a later stage, probably between alpha and beta.
This should be a relatively simple fix.
This is not easily fixable. Due to the randomization in the latency, it can happen that you hit on the client but miss on the server, or vice-versa.
The #1 issue there is when a ship jumps from just being an indicator, to being a full fledge actor. Indicators atm are updated once per second. Actual actors, depends on many factors, including size on screen, distance, threat level etc… So it’s definitely possible for a ship to jump from 1 update per second to 16 updates per second or more - which will make the ship quickly jump around. More work is needed on that part of the game, but it’s probably fixable.
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What does everyone think about slowwarping? By that i mean the ability to stay in warp at speeds well below 1000m/s and near instantly accelerate out of any trouble because you do not need to wait for the warp drive to charge as you are still in warp?
You cannot fight while in warp, so currently there is no value in that. What do you use it for?
In my opinion warp should be limited to higher speeds but that’s not an issue ATM.
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You should try it. You can use it for many many things in combat.
As I said somewhere. It’s not inherently bad. They need to decide if they want that. It makes certain maneuvres a lot faster.
You can drop right on top of enemies.
You can change your out of warp vectors direction really easily. Very useful for hit and runs.
If you have the energy you can decide if you want to engage or not.
You can change position inside of the battlefield to any other position in less than 10 seconds.
First should be decided how people should engage and travel to places. When they should be allowed to, what they need to do to be able to etc etc.
Then the warp system can be designed to fit that goal.
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I do all that at 1-2 km/s. Granted, I need to circle a bit longer but it lets shields recharge for the next pass and I can dodge enemy fire.
This! It makes engagements much faster, no need to wait 5 minutes to finally get to the enemy anymore. Just slow warp towards the target.
I like the slow warping, +1 for keeping it.
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It’s an exploit basically, instead of skillfully navigating out of warp, you hit a button.
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Depends how you look at it, I view it more as a fortunate testing result that makes for great gameplay. 
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And allows anyone who can set the warp entrance velocity and press a button to never learn how to slowly exit the warp safely.
To keep that feature in, damage should be applied as a function of difference between warp pre-exit velocity and exit velocity, the more of a hard stop that you achieve the more damage you take.
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I was watching Lomsor and KateClicks streams yesterday. And Lomsors warp attacks on bigger targets and circles around the moons looked way more fun than Kate flying towards a target at way to low speeds because she didn’t want to overshoot. It was a bit like watching paint dry on a wall… 
The thing I’m currently seeing in dogfights with conventional thrust is, if you’re approaching way to fast you will overshoot your target by a huge distance. It’ll take ages to correct your trajectory to come back and continue the fight. In warp you’re way more nimble. I think the point where normal speed ends and warp continues could be adjusted. Or we could use more powerful main thrusters to counter that. Automatic warp above a certain speed could be useful too in these cases. It all comes down to spending more time actually fighting then trying to get to the fight.
PS. Newtonian physics are cool, but if fights end up being joust festivals it’s less fun imho.
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Some issues with Neuwirth base. Hinge showing up through the ceiling:
Placement issues (it’s the most interesting site I’ve seen for a base BTW):
Edit: switching target should be possible as soon as the kill notification appears.
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So my Discord bot collects server player data, made a quick graph to illustrate the player population, you can clearly see the impact the patch and the alpha weekend had on it. Below is a link to the raw data if anyone is interested.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/abmlg3xwsodkigi/server_log_file.txt?dl=1
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