Flight Performance

Originally posted by Roi Danton

I mean firstly the Hull/Shields. I had good changes against TIE's (except they didn't fired rockets), but the area damage after I destroyed a TIE is horrible (I was about 0,5km away from the fighter and had 50% hull damage as he exploded).

you meant because Ties don't fire rockets? (They don't have any missiles at all and shouldn't be firing them.)

Ok, I'll reduce the area damage value and als have pog place the explosion exactly inside the exploading Tie instead of between you and him

Furthermore a combat against a station is like "Kamikaze" ... I'm dead after a few hits. Even the B-Wing, a heavy bomber, has on close distances no chance against stations (and my bombs are shoot down by the station (besides weaker torpedos) if I don't fire them at my target on very close distances).

No, you don't have to play "Kamikaze"
Ok lets be sure we talk about the same thing:

"Bombs" are the big round things that come out of your ship when your press the key "G" They move towards your target at the speed you had as you launched them

"Seeker Torpedoes" are guided torpedoes with medium damage. They will be destroyed by a stations Point defence Turret. They are quite usefull for ship combat.

"Torpedoes" are high damage unguided weapons. The have a range of 30 km and need to be fired as you are standing still.
They will not be shot by the PDT.
They knock at least 4 hit points off a station per shot.
(To aim torpedoes use the zoom on your weapon "energy bomb", then switch back to the torpedo and fire it)

The "Energy Bomb" is a very slow high energy bolt you need to be moving less than 250 m/s for it to lock on a target.
It has a range of 15.3 km and will take 3 points off a station at that range (stations only have 15km fire radius you your are safe to camp and fire at them). (it takes the bolt around 8 seconds to reach the target at that range)
At 4km distance the damage is twice as much as at 15 km.
You can hit a station with the Energy Bomb even though the target is not locked (it just has to be targeted). So, you can make short range attacks if you are pointed straight at your target the moment you fire the weapon.
The short range attack strategy is a bit "Kamikaze" but if you are lucky you can: Weave in, dodging the stations fire. At about 8km away straighten out and point your nose exactly at the station, fire the Energy bomb at 5km distance, weave out dodging the stations fire coming from behind.

Note: If someone else on your team is attacking the station at the same time, it won't fire every shot at you.

So I would let the inertia and I think on lower speeds it makes more fun than it currently does: hitting is a case of luck resp of the quality of your target tracking computer. Furthermore the newton physic gives more tactical ways in 1vs1 battles.

Ok we'll try it

Maybe than it's easier to control and the reference lines could be removed (if possible).

umm, I'm confused. At the moment, with the mod activated, you should not be seeing any hud reference grid lines at all (the orange lines flowing through your screen). So, therefore: it is possible to remove them.

Btw, the Babylon5 series uses the inertia effect as the most important way of fighting in their CGI sequences, so for this it MUST be included.

Sure, we'll keep that in mind, for the B5 mod and won't reduce inertia there.
We can't really reduce it anyhow, because it's the engine. We can only compensate it somewhat (if we want to) by increasing speed and decreasing ship mass.

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Sorry for the muddled post before, but I had much stress due to university and personal things.

@TIE's and rockets: Sorry, just "Luke" in the A-Wing fired rockets, not the TIE's itself (btw, the Imperator is named Palpatine).

@Area damage reducing: That would be good ... my ship should just be heavy damaged when I'm very close to the exploding ship or should be nearly destroyed if I flying through the explosion.

"Bombs" are the big round things that come out of your ship when your press the key "G" They move towards your target at the speed you had as you launched them

"Seeker Torpedoes" are guided torpedoes with medium damage. They will be destroyed by a stations Point defence Turret. They are quite usefull for ship combat.

"Torpedoes" are high damage unguided weapons. The have a range of 30 km and need to be fired as you are standing still.
They will not be shot by the PDT.
They knock at least 4 hit points off a station per shot.
(To aim torpedoes use the zoom on your weapon "energy bomb", then switch back to the torpedo and fire it)

The "Energy Bomb" is a very slow high energy bolt you need to be moving less than 250 m/s for it to lock on a target.
It has a range of 15.3 km and will take 3 points off a station at that range (stations only have 15km fire radius you your are safe to camp and fire at them). (it takes the bolt around 8 seconds to reach the target at that range)
At 4km distance the damage is twice as much as at 15 km.
You can hit a station with the Energy Bomb even though the target is not locked (it just has to be targeted). So, you can make short range attacks if you are pointed straight at your target the moment you fire the weapon.
The short range attack strategy is a bit "Kamikaze" but if you are lucky you can: Weave in, dodging the stations fire. At about 8km away straighten out and point your nose exactly at the station, fire the Energy bomb at 5km distance, weave out dodging the stations fire coming from behind.

Note: If someone else on your team is attacking the station at the same time, it won't fire every shot at you.

Exactly these explanations have to find their way in the manual of the Mod!

At the moment, with the mod activated, you should not be seeing any hud reference grid lines at all (the orange lines flowing through your screen). So, therefore: it is possible to remove them.

Sorry the 2nd, I simply didn't realized it that they aren't visible in the mod - but I think this is a good indication that they aren't such important. I had absolutely no orientation or speed problem (though I'm far from an I-War 2 beginner I wasn't in an I-War ship for a long time now).

Btw, I won't reduce the inertia at all b/c due to the "lightweight" fighters it isn't that strong. Furthermore with inertia you get a better difference between the control of fighters and cap ships (if they will be included).

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The blast damage has been reduced: You should get no more than 2-5% damage in a small fighter now. That way it's still worth it to dodge the shock wave but it won't damage your ship too much if you hit it.

but I think this is a good indication that they aren't such important. I had absolutely no orientation or speed problem (though I'm far from an I-War 2 beginner I wasn't in an I-War ship for a long time now).

Cool! So, we should be able to leave it like that without the Hud reference lines.




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Some interesting Test notes:

First on weapons: To get repeatable hit ratios the ideal bolt speed seems to be around 7.5 times the ships max forward velocity and the bolts length roughly equal to the velocity. (More testing may refine these values further). Range is determined by the bolts life_time x bolt_speed. The main quad lasers on the X-Wing (1000 m/s velocity) have 8000 bolt speed, and a life_time of 1.2 giving it around 9 km max range.

Reduced flight speed doesn't really give us what we are looking for, as far as I can tell:
I reduced the max velocities of the X-Wing and Tie Fighter by 50% down to 500 m/s and also reduced weapon range by about 50%.

The result in battle with a bot was, the average standoff distance was only minimally changed from around 2.8 km to 2.5km. and you don't see the other ship any better. Very occasionally you'll get a glimpse of the other ship in a quick pass by, but it's still not large enough to really recognize it during the short time (a split second) it's in view.
At this speed bots seem to have an advantage too. The kill rates were reversed from 1:3 to 3:1 for the bot in a TieFighter! (maybe it adapted to the change faster than I could?)
Last not least the battle was no real fun, because things were just too slow and you can't dodge incoming fire.

As an extreme I tried to scale speed to 1/10th of the original speed and went down to 100 m/s. It took 7 minutes to even engage in battle because the ships spawned around 45 km apart.
Theoretically we could reduce the scale on the maps too, and make them lots smaller, but flying around between the asteroids at that speed is just plain boring. (You don't get that swooping feeling.) To achieve some kind of flying sensation, we would have to reduce the size of all map objects too!

Battle was totaly a case of luck and no dodging possible at all. To make dodging possible, would have to reduce the bolts speed extremly!Meaning, we would have a bolt speed of 750 m/s which is only about 2/3 of the "energy Bombs" speed (and you've seen how slow that is) They would just seem to literaly float past you.

I.e., I think we need to think of a different approach!

The next dev version will have the 500 m/s version of the X-Wing and the Tie for you to test out, so you can form your own opinion.


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Just a quick note to say that when I last played the mod, and it had no HUD lines, I hated it. I felt like I wasn't even moving. Personally, I think the HUD lines represent something far more important than the inertia effect: Speed. Flying SW ships without the sensation of speed seems pointless to me. I'd rather have inertia effects than no feeling of speed. And vet EoC players might not like having the lines removed.

Now as I understand it most of you guys come from, and assume everyone else comes from, the X-Wing games. I've never really played these, so I don't know what kind of a flight model they use, but I don't really mind a mild bit of inertia. I think that EoC over-does the inertia thing, but that's not the point. My question is; just exactly how much of a problem is the inertia effect going to be? Is it so important to eliminate it completely and totally? Would it be acceptable to retain some inertia as a trade-off for the sensation of speed? And are we really going to be compared to the X-Wing games? I think, really, the best way to answer these questions is in beta tests with larger groups of people. Maybe we can put this off until we can get a chance to try multiple flight models with a large group? Then we can see what everyone likes (and dislikes) most.

By the way, it's not correct to say that SW ships displayed no inertia. They simply displayed the equivalent of atmospheric inertia (meaning that they fly like aircraft instead of spacecraft), they still had to take time to speed up and slow down.

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If you fly around between the asteroids on the "Attack the Imp Base" map you'll have the best means to evaluate speed and inertia effects. i.e The sensation of speed can/should also be obtained by carefull map design. To make it really good, we'll need to make some/most of the inert map objects smaller (which will improve frame rates too)

We can't do away with inertia completly and imo we do need a little for psuedo- "realism" but: The Hud lines are fully un-typical for Star Wars: You never see anything like them in the movies or in any other Star Wars games. (except briefly when you go into hyperspace)



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