I want to make a flux capacitor joke so bad but it’s neither the time or place. I’ll be back in the future with one soon™. Just wait!
I will! Don’t wander too far, though . You gotta get back in time! I’ll be here, forgiving the crudity of JB’s model.
Really nice demonstration, and really nice mechanics. The prototype is top notch 
/This was probably discussed in the old forums;
My only problem is that the magically scaling speed still kind of kills the size of the whole thing. It feels weird that reducing your power actually makes you slow down. I’d be much happier if your current power would set your acceleration instead (not sure how this would work in terms of limiting your top speed). I’ve never used the prototype but just looking at the videos it doesn’t look like moving in space, and it doesn’t feel Newtonian either. If nothing else, I’d be happy to have conventional thrusters for flying around in large disruption fields.
Indeed, that’s a nice experiment but we’re still a long way from implementing all those concepts in an actual game, especially as Battlescape will be much more simplified than the MMO.
You’re right that our plan was to use a probability-based jump drive. The idea was that it would take into account the mass of the target you’re locking on; so jumping to a massive O star that is 1000 LYs away would still be do-able; but jumping to a close red dwarf wouldn’t necessarily be easier…
Maybe this could be added to your prototype by changing the width of the tunnel based on this probability. There are a lot of things that could be tested.
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“It’s not a bug. It’s a feature.”
[quote=“Aleon, post:23, topic:709”]
My only problem is that the magically scaling speed still kind of kills the size of the whole thing. It feels weird that reducing your power actually makes you slow down.[/quote]
This is an issue of perceptions. You’re thinking of power as “the amount of stuff being pumped out of the rocket nozzles”, but there are no rocket nozzles. Perhaps I should have put a glowy halo on the ships that increases in intensity as the power level goes up. I wasn’t concerning myself with selling the fiction, just the gameplay.
At what point did it not feel Newtonian? Whenever a ship is at a given disruption level, it is going to be indistinguishable in behavior from conventional thrusters. I demonstrate that in the first couple minutes of the Basics video. Then again, when the Corvette gets a little farther out from the station. I don’t recall stopping in interplanetary space anywhere and just flying around to demonstrate Newtonian motion, but that’s the way it works there too.
For two reasons.
The first is that I made the prototype available for use back in 2009, and it was largely ignored. Downloading, installing and running a piece of software that provides an academic experience (as compared with a true game) is not something that many people will bother with.
The second is that the videos are up, and I suspect that satisfies the vast majority of people’s interest in understanding the movement system. Right now, there are a total of something like 60 views of the Basic video, and YouTube tells me that the average viewing time for the videos is about 3 minutes. So folks really only wanted to see what it was about and not much more.
Playing with the width of the jump ribbon for various reasons would certainly influence the difficulty of the jump. Making the width of the jump ribbon variable along its length would also be fun to try. Imagine that it got narrower the farther along the ship traveled. Or that it got narrower or wider depending on the proximity of stars, resulting in a constantly-changing width. Or both effects. Or wider near the powering ship and narrower elsewhere (to affect fleet and hostile coopting of jump ribbons) Add gear or techniques that the player could use to force widening or narrowing. High jump power to widen the tunnel, low jump power to conserve power in the parts of the ribbon that are already comfortably wide. The system could be made quite intricate.
The prototype does something that I thought would produce organic gameplay. The jump ribbon has a kind of ‘rigidity’ to it based on the maximum jump range of the ship. The Corvette’s jump paths frequently bent crazily through the nearby star field because its jump ribbon lacks rigidity; running the jump ribbon past a star could easily perturb it. In contrast, a Battleship has a long range and a rigid jump ribbon. That allows it to brute force its way past stars along the way to the destination. On top of that, more massive stars bend jump paths more aggressively.
The net result is that it is the configuration of stars is a significant determinant of the success of a jump. Player skill and ship gear also play a role.
The configuration of stars is significant because trying to pass through a region of space with many stars and/or with a high-mass star will likely be more difficult than passing through a region that has few stars or only low-mass stars. The difficult regions would either block or uncomfortably bend the jump path, making it more difficult to navigate.
I thought that the resulting intricacy would appeal to players when they were plotting jumps.
Another variation would be to introduce proximity disruption to jumps (which I did not implement). Players would want to travel through the least populous regions of space. It would also mean that taking those tight bends in jump ribbons would be inherently easier because the star that the ribbon was bending around would slow the ship, giving it more time to maneuver.
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IIRC, there was also talks about making jumps easier when following someone, for example when pursuing another ship through hyperspace. It would also probably make both ships tend to jump out at the same point. It would translate here with an easier ribbon to navigate when following someone.
This brings images of a fleet jump pretty much exactly similar to the Rebel fleet jump in Return of the Jedi.
You have the Falcon jumping first as a pathfinder, opening the ribbon with its oversized engines (making it easier to navigate hard ribbons). Then you have the agile fighters following, then larger ship up to the giant capital ships jumping last, each ship making the ribbon slightly easier to navigate to the previous one.
So, possible side benefit of the system: it makes fleet jumps Star Wars-like as well.
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“I didn’t have time to build it to scale or paint it.”
There’s a readily available fiction that explains this sort of thing: Warp bubbles. It’s typically ripped out of Star Trek’s warp technology, but it works in GR, too (or any other FTL explanation): Your ship moves within the warp bubble without experiencing drag, because the warp bubble is made up of normal space, but the warp bubble doesn’t have to move through space without experiencing drag.
All of the above gets an enthusiastic vote from me.
Yes please.
It definitely appeals to me. I really, really liked how the ribbon was warped by nearby stars. That kind of system – and indeed, all of the above quoted ideas, turn navigation into a skill based game. Navigation actually becomes something to consider, and something you can get better at with experience, rather than simply selecting a destination and flying there.
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I finally got the chance to watch them (I download all my stuff for later viewing, BTW, so according to YT I only “watched” 5 seconds ;)), and I must say, well done!
Yes, we took the jump tunnel thing and definitely ran with it. Here were a couple crude Blender images that I assembled back in July, 2009 to suggest drafting in a jump tunnel.
A couple fighters (grey) following a capital (red).
A frigate (green) in trail that isn’t getting to make a jump for free because he’s too far back to draft effectively.
It’s not high art, but ideally it is enough to communicate the essential point.
Once a tunnel is formed, there is a thing in the game world that can be manipulated, scanned, used, reused, destroyed and so forth. I’m sure there is lots of gameplay value to had there. As I believe I suggested above, such a system would need to keep simple tasks simple, and only make things challenging in advanced scenarios.
It is up to the game designer to decide where various jump scenarios fit along that spectrum.
I have my own preferred fiction, which I use to resolve a number of gameplay issues, and in turn to create new gameplay. I’ve been working on a short story that is based on it.
At the point where you reduced your power level to zero and your ship just went to a halt (relative to the planet (?)), around ~1:40 into the first video. The ship stopping because you cut power implies that if you disable the drive entirely, the ship would suddenly stop (instead of drifting away)(no idea relative to what you stop). Doesn’t seem like Newtonian to me. 
Even if flying around on a single power setting is Newtonian, what’s the difference between turning around using our “warp force” or simply reducing our power to zero and then tuning it up while going the other way?
Note that I’m not thinking of power as “the amount of stuff being pumped out of the rocket nozzles”. I understand how the proposed warp drive differs from conventional thrusters. I’m just saying, I don’t like the behaviour because it doesn’t feel spacey enough. (This is a completely subjective opinion. I just don’t like the idea that doing nothing == not moving because, it’s uncannily close to how atmospheric flight works. ^-^)
(Maybe it doesn’t actually work the way I think? I would love to try the prototype.)
How is ICP like movement possible with this system when turning around makes you accelerate into that direction?
Do we use additional thrusters in that scenario or is it accounted for in another way?
The way it looked, he only accelerated when he turned around because his warp throttle was still up. He also mentioned there was a station keeping button that would let you keep your matched speed with someone. Once you match relative speeds you’re along the for the ride and I think you would just maneuver normally, aka ICP like.
I’m totally speculating but that’s how I understood it. @JB47394?
I just wrote a long reply to you three, but it boils down to this:
The prototype is newtonian. Think of a stock 2D space game with WASD controls. That’s exactly what the prototype does. There’s a speed cap, and there’s all that strangeness of automatic velocity changes as you move closer or farther from a massy object, but fundamentally, the thing is just a 2D WASD space shooter. Just like Asteroids.
Until you can watch the first five minutes of the Basics video and see that that is true, there is nothing that I can say that will explain it any better.
Because “turning around makes you accelerate into that direction” isn’t wewtonian, we know that that’s not what the video is showing. In the video, the ship is moving along in one direction. I turn the ship around and then hit W to power in the opposite direction. The ship will slow down (per newtonian motion), then stop (per newtonian motion), then accelerate in the direction that the ship is pointing (per newtonian motion).
Newp. The station keeping feature is a simple autopilot thing. It’s like an autohover. The moment I moved the ship manually, station keeping was disabled.
As soon as I got within 10km of the Cruiser, I was in an ICP arena with it. That’s why I was able to make a slashing attack on the second cruiser that I intercepted. I didn’t have to hit the station keeping button. I just intercepted, made my slashing attack, and then hung around at a bit beyond 10km.
JB I think the confusion stems from you calling the grey bar a power setting. If you call it a relative-velocity-ometer it’s a lot more intuitively Newtonian.
Stop thinking of the grey bar as a power setting and think of it as a speedometer. (I know JB called it a power setting but ignore him 
)
Watch the first video and see at about 2:28 where JB is travelling away from the planet but spins around to point towards it… the speedo remains constant and at this point he’s not touching W. Then he holds W and accelerates towards the planet - the bar drops to 0 and then increases again as the ship stops moving away from and starts moving towards the planet.
)JB I love what you’ve done. That perturbation of the ribbon is a thing of beauty 
So sad that it’s going to be so many years before we get to experience it ‘for real’!
I agree that the word “power” is the root of the misunderstanding. The long reply that I discarded attempted to clarify that, but “power” is the only word that I could come up with that expresses what’s going on. I don’t buy “relative velocity”, but I think you’re on the right track - that it should be some qualifier on “velocity”. Perhaps “ideal velocity” or “context-independent velocity”. CIV.
Instructor: “Ya gotta check your civvies as you make your approach, son.”
Student: “I gotta what?!”
Of course, it would be a speed value (a scalar), not a velocity (a vector). So “Ideal speed” or “context-independent speed” or some such thing.
Ultimately, it is the fraction of the maximum possible speed (FOMPS*) at which your ship is moving. Because the maximum possible speed changes depending on your context, your ship’s actual speed can change even when the FOMPS value doesn’t.
*Not affiliated with Friends of Menston Primary School.
Thanks. I had a lot of fun with that during testing, flinging it around the stellar neighborhood to see what it would do. I’d occasionally land a course that was just right where it would spiral in on a star, or go out and be perturbed so much that it would loop right back around to the departure star.
I don’t know if it came out in the video, but when I was bending the course, I was only changing my ship’s warp-level course and speed. Everything else fell out from that. I wasn’t pushing buttons to bend the jump course directly.
It occurs to me that the jumps should probably be much slower, and the ribbons rather wider, allowing players to literally fly the ribbons. Right now, ship’s are just kinda flushed through the ribbon to the other end. I’d keep the self-centering trait of the ribbons so players could kick back and relax on straight runs. On the curvy ones, though, I’d want players to have time to fly. Because it would be a skill test, players could challenge themselves, but also use their skills to defeat pursuers who are following in the same jump tunnel/ribbon.
Well, we’ll have to hope for a slam-dunk Kickstarter for I-Novae Studios.
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That’s what I didn’t notice. It’s hard to see from just the reactions of the ship. Also when I said “turn arround and accelerate”, that was the part I thought wasn’t newtonian. But if you had to press a button, then that’s believable.
In an attempt to make it easier to see what’s going on, I’ve put together a 90 second video that shows how the ‘thrusters’ fire on the ship. I hope it gives a better sense of the way that ships move in a newtonian fashion.
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Thanks for clarifying that again visually JB.
Rotational isn’t Newtonian though. But that’s ok as most games alter it in such a way it would act the same way it did in the prototype.
The name choice of “power level” was an unfortunate one indeed. Thanks for making that last video, makes a lot more sense now. ^-^
Now if the forum would let me edit this post the way I like, that’d be great…