Great to hear some of the thinking behind the warp. Thanks Flavien.
I would definitely make the coefficient a bit higher, to make the acceleration more rapid. As a travel method, warp just feels a bit too sluggish I think!
I figured out how the direction handles! It’s harder to turn during warp while accelerating/decelerating. Now I understand it, I quite like trading off acceleration for changing course. As ever, there’s probably more UI work that can be done to make warping clearer.
Edit for clarity!
Warping inside low atmosphere essentially feels like cheating at the moment. This is partly because of the low-limit on warping, which will be increased (good!).
However, I think warp should not be able to function right down into atmospheres. Or if it can function, have damage slowly increase the thicker the atmosphere gets (also depending on speed).
High warp speed + low altitude = large damage (encourages normal flight)
Low warp speed + low altitude = low damage (decision to make about how far to push your ship)
Any warp speed + high altitude = no damage (safe to switch modes)
I would decouple this from airspeed, and have that limit only apply to normal flight. Warp should be capable of going any speed, but resulting in damage. Emergency drop out could be kept at extreme atmospheric speeds.
I set my target speed to about 400m/s and use the forward reverse thrust toggle on the space bar to control my relative velocity.
That reminds me of another thing. When you use and cancel reverse thrust a few times close together, the on/off messsages all queue up and it can be hard to work out what state you’re currently in. I’d prefer it if there was just a single warning message that stays activated all the time reverse thrust is activated.
I wouldn’t impose any lower or upper limit on entry speed, or disable the shields, but I would disable all manoeuvring and make it take slightly longer to power up.
What do you map to Forward and Back?
There are three axis and most people use three fingers for movement.
It is common to want to thrust on all 3 axis simultaneously, but obviously there is never any need (or point) to thrust in opposite directions on the same axis.
I’m therefore trying this layout, each finger is responsible for an axis:
I considered the following layout but I wanted to always use the same finger to thrust in any particular direction. eg Switching from WED to QWD would require changing fingers on the W key which I don’t like.
I simply swap the mapping over with the R/F keys. I rarely use them though, using the space bar almost exclusively to control my forwards and backwards thrust, unless I want to go beyond my currently set speed.
In combat being able to intuitively strafe along both perpendicular axis is extremely helpful.
I remember an old underwater shooter where it would do that when you were facing a boss - though it wasn’t something you decided, it was imposed for those particular scenes.
The only thing I did was roll about 40 degrees so sunlight was no longer shining inside my canopy. Because the HDR then thought there wasn’t enough light on screen, it over-brightened the picture.
I think it’s fine to have a degree of this, particularly in the dark of space. But whenever you have the light side of a planet, or a station in view it just looks weird.
Not sure if this was covered, but having NPCs send out communications is okay, but it makes their icons on the HUD scale up and down. This makes it pretty hard to read the details of a target that happens to be in the same location when in warp (see: going to the big npc furballs). It’s kind of hard to see the distance to target info when this happens.
Seeing/hearing the voice coms of enemy NPC’s is funny sometimes, but it’s a little annoying IMO.
Reading the HUD can be a little difficult sometimes, especially when against certain backgrounds.
Of course, poor NPC interceptors inside of stations. Interestingly, I did manage to clip into a station, even though I wasn’t even trying. It was one of the stations near Sarake, I’ll find it again to see if I can’t reproduce. I got instantly wrecked by the 5 or 6 NPC interceptors in the station so fast it was funny. I didn’t even last 3 seconds.
That reminds me, I dislike the way that the name tags are animated to wobble up and down. It’s very distracting, not what a HUD should be designed for.
Even though I agree with it not being there yet I really like the direction. Something new I haven’t seen before.
Maybe drop the text and just make the icon scale.
Also. Please find a way… Some way to not show distance markers.
Some symbols. Nothing precise. When I want precise readings I lock and look at the fixed target info HUD area.
Geometry issue on Axathen Station (Cinder orbit I think). These 4 hangars cannot be exited (interceptor/bomber) and trigger self-destruction on corvettes.
@Argo: yeah, these are the same crashes I had last time I streamed. OpenAL crashes. I’ve added some additional checks in my local version, but so far haven’t been able to reproduce it.
While trying to go to the low-orbit gas giant station, I thought "hey, I’ll just go there at full warp and let the emergency warp-out sort things out for me.
Then…
Did I just bounce? No, actually I’m now at the other side of the planet. And I’m still accelerating. Metallic hydrogen, wormholes, eh same thing to me…
Night side is pretty though!
On capitals i like how turrets work, the big improvement to capital ship control i would suggest is better freelook support. Often you want to use ctrl to freelook at to target an enemy, but you quickly/easily lose track of where to move your mouse to turn up/down/left/right while looking in an unusual direction. adding an extra center point during freelook so you know how far up/down your pitching based on your mouse position even if the nose direction indicator is off screen or offset might help.
On the destroyer at least, the weapon convergence spread seems big and oddly shaped, as if your turrets are aligned only horizontally but have a vertical spread, might just be the arc limitations.
i feel like the gimbals even applying to interceptors in the small cone kinda removes some of the feel of direct control/aiming. I’m also not sure what it is, i figured the AI and player aim being equalized like this would make fights more even, but instead ai are now much stronger! (though maybe thats just their infinite energy) Often the little aim pips jump around and that might not be happening on the ai’s end, might explain it. Or it might be harder to aim with the assist than without it.
Some small convergence is needed but thats an easy calculation, just take the distance of the target and the distance from the center of the ship of the weapon and then all the projectiles will impact at the same place and time, thats without any assist making ppl feel like they’re not rly aiming their guns
