ED sub-light speed physics are super-unrealistic

[Boomer Kay]

I think when someone says "the flight model made for a horrible experience in Frontier", they're just remembering their experience in the first part of Isinona's video where he specifically entitled it "What not to do" - you basically were flying Newtonian all wrong!

I didn't even mention the fight mechanics .. well .. maybe the "pew pew" .. so yes, from 4:00 on in your videos, the fight looks like a "dumbed down" version of what we currently have in the game.
Everything before and after that is pure, hour long, fast forwarded and auto pilot enhanced physics .

 

[Sir.Tj]

#GodTractorBeams

Naturally...

However, it was explained a long time ago why there was speed limits imposed in game, I'll have a search around and see if I can find the posts discussing it.

IRC the main reason was to make the game more fun., after all it is a game.

And who let Mike slip his restraints this time? Ed, Zac..... Bueller?

 

[Genar-Hofoen]

And that is why you lose.

Whoosh!

 

[Arkpit]

For a space sim I will allow some breakage of physics, like to achieve FTL.

However "Elite: Dangerous" is not advertised as a "Space simulator" if I'm not mistaken?
I've always seen the game as an "action game" when it comes to the actual gameplay but that the world you are in is as simulated as humanly possible.

So arguing about realism in a game that is not a simulator by definition is kind of pointless no?
I may be mistaken though but I've never seen Frontier themselves advertise that Elite is a simulator.

 

[Mike Evans]

There has been plenty of discussion on this topic before including my own reasons for implementing the flight model the way it is (if someone can dig those out that would be grand). At the end of the day a realistic approach to space flight would necessitate a completely different game and thus experience that we weren't setting out to make in the first place. We never began the design of elite trying to be as realistic as possible nor did we try and do a Newtonian flight model then find out networking would mess that up. Instead we wanted to create a cinematic flight experience that was intuitive and familiar and it turns out that anything other than that would be a lot more problematic to implement anyway so it was fortunate we didn't have to.

 

[Sir.Tj]

if someone can dig those out that would be grand)

Here you go.

It will be likely ships will have varying top speeds (it we're having to limit it we might as well make the most of it and give each ship a bit more character) so you would likely get away once you're not visible to the eye or sensors of the pursuer.

When I see people refer to the 500m/s speed limit as "arbitrary" do you think we just plucked that number out of thin air and claimed that'll do? Well in case you do let me assure you that it's a purely technical limitation. Any faster and the slightest bit of network lag or packet loss between peers would render the experience unplayable and crap.

The most interesting discovery to come out of this however is that it's too fast for a good dog fight and something like 150m/s is actually far more appropriate and fun.

I would also like to reassure people that you'll be able to yaw in E D so there's no need to compare the flight model to that of a broken car.

Ninja'd by Mike!

*Ahem* let me elaborate anyway!

At the risk of pulling the pin again, I think it's only fair to add that the 500 metres per second cap (and at this point I feel obliged to add that this number *could* change based on unforeseen technical limitations) must be seen as a "maximum conventional speed"; individual ships will have their own, slower, top speeds.

The upshot is that if you are in a ship with a faster top speed you will keep pulling away and if in a slower ship you will lose ground once both ships have maxed their speeds.

Now is this "realistic"? No. But then, neither is the 500 metres per second cap, so I'm not worrying, because: is it useful? Very! It allows ships to get away and catch up. It allows us to have additional ways to differentiate ships. In effect it's us designers going, "let's try and turn this frown upside down!"

And as Mike quite truthfully highlights; in our testing so far, speeds over 200 metres per second very quickly turn into something approaching the love child of medieval tilting and demolition derby. I can assure you, this is a lot less interesting than it sounds.

Hello Maxeren!

Is 500 metres per second fast enough? Good question. The issue is scale.

Flying past ship-sized asteroids at 200 metres per second definitely feels very fast. Scarily fast once you realise you can't instantly change direction.

Increase those asteroids to the size of tower blocks, and suddenly you feel like you're pootling along.

Take them away altogether and you have literally no impression of speed other than what your HUD is telling you.

However, run into a small ship going the other way and you will be briefly and rudely reminded of just how fast you're going as it changes from an AR element to a full screen's worth of unforgiving metal in a heartbeat.

So, although the basic answer is: "yes, 500 metres per second is more than fast enough for dog fighting etc.", the big challenge for us is to ensure that the player always has enough context, so what they experience matches what the game is trying to sell them.

This is why we're looking at all sorts of audio/visual/mechanics to help provide that context.

Original thread can be found here. Linky link

 

[Mike Evans]

Where was the post about Elite being romanticised science fiction and we wanted it to feel like star wars

 

[Yaffle]

Where was the post about Elite being romanticised science fiction and we wanted it to feel like star wars

Thanks for taking my quote out of context guys! Yes it was related to Newtonian flight model in that I was assuring someone that we wouldn't be implementing a separate game mode that has a fully Newtonian flight model even if for some reason the entire community changed their minds about it just now and decided to take part in the poll.

I still stand by the fact that the game engine respects newtons laws just fine (the planets do fully; the flight model does within the limits of networking considerations) and thus the "Newtonian Physics" mentioned in the FAQ are also present. It also pretty clearly states we're going to have a fly by wire system (read: a system to massage and change player input into whatever forces we need to get the flight model we like) and that the degree of which will be tuned how we like (which we've done).

At no point did we ever say the game was going to have a Newtonian flight model and if we did want to say that we would have made it clear we meant flight model as in a Frontier style one. Instead we made it clear we wanted an Elite style flight model from the get go so that coupled with the fact we never once mentioned fully "Newtonian just like Frontier!" should have been plenty of warning to check what the game was actually going to offer.

This one?

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

As for those saying the Frontier: Elite II flight model was "rubbish" or "made for bad gameplay" - utter tosh - you simply weren't thinking in 3D...

I'm very sorry my preference differs from your preference, but the Frontier: Elite II flight model was indeed utter tosh

I just disagree with the flight model decision and I think the reasons given for it are pretty much invalid.

That's because you simply aren't thinking in 4D

 

[Mike Evans]

This one?

No, I don't think it was that, but it's still a good shout getting all this in one place again.

 

[Sir.Tj]

Where was the post about Elite being romanticised science fiction and we wanted it to feel like star wars

I think it received a XXX rating and was considered far too steamy for a game forum.

 

[Robert Maynard]

I found these ones that I collated into a previous post:

When I see people refer to the 500m/s speed limit as "arbitrary" do you think we just plucked that number out of thin air and claimed that'll do? Well in case you do let me assure you that it's a purely technical limitation. Any faster and the slightest bit of network lag or packet loss between peers would render the experience unplayable and crap.

The most interesting discovery to come out of this however is that it's too fast for a good dog fight and something like 150m/s is actually far more appropriate and fun.

I would also like to reassure people that you'll be able to yaw in E D so there's no need to compare the flight model to that of a broken car.

There is a difference between Newtonian Physics and Newtonian flight model. One is built on top of the other. Yes we have taken control away from the player to truly move their ship in a Newtonian way for game play reasons (except for being able to drift along at your current velocity but arbitrarily point your ship where you want).

However my post was clarifying that we do in fact have a Newtonian physics engine which the post I was replying to implied we didn't. What we don't have is the control method layered on top to make it fully available to the player to use. Instead we provide more traditional controls and various flight assists that shape the flight model how we want it to be.

"Will you have Newtonian physics in the game?

Yes. The degree of the fly-by-wire to override the feeling of skidding is something we will carefully tune."

Nothing about that statement is a lie. We have Newtonian physics, and we have fly-by-wire control method layered on top. We have carefully tuned your ability to move how you desire using the fly-by-wire system out of the flight model because we believe it's a better that way.

I'm not a programmer or engineer (I'm a designer) and I never worked on the original games and they're massively old. What worked and was perceived as good then doesn't necessarily apply any more so it's up to us to reassess what works and what doesn't in the now. Often what worked then still works but not always. I've said many times here on the forums that total realism really isn't what any of us (the design team) are going for. Elite is a romanticised science fiction and other than the realistically populated and scaled galaxy and star systems everything else is designed to provide a good game. If it happens that it comes out seeming plausible or even realistic then that is a bonus. Also if we can use fiction to make a mechanic more realistic or plausible then we will. I get slightly annoyed when I see fans declare that we're trying to make the most realistic space game possible because we really aren't (Kerbal Space Program is probably the most realistic I've played). If I had my way I'd have scaled the universe and star systems down to a comic scale (something akin to the way No Man's Sky is doing it) but obviously that wasn't a decision the design team got to make but it's something we've had to deal with (and meant that super cruise became a thing as it was needed to ensure there was a point to the massive scale of everything; all that realistic space would be wasted if it were just boxes and corridors ). Look at any mechanic or feature in our game and it quickly becomes apparent that any veneer of realism is paper thin and doesn't stand up to close scrutiny but the game play is pretty good for it (in my opinion).

I also said that when you have higher speeds you basically don't see your opponents any more as you become more reliant on GUI widgets given that dog fights become more and more spaced out. We didn't like that one bit and one of the design goals we had was to encourage dog fights at extremely close ranges (a knife fight almost) as that had the most visual impact and also provided ways to predict and assess your opponents thinking (by how they roll; as you turn by rolling and then pitching; and by seeing their engine flare up). The slower we made the ships the better our internal dog fights became in both feel and in the kind of manoeuvres we were pulling to try and out wit each other.

Another design goal was to absolutely minimise the amount of visual aids and widgets on the HUD too Seriously you may think it looks a bit busy now but I can't imagine how cluttered it would have become if we had used GUI as a crutch to enable dog fights at extreme ranges and speeds.

 

[Yaffle]

There is also this bit:

The 500m/s limit is a limitation to prevent ungainly artefacts (positional jumping and what not, you know the score) of dropped packets in the networking. We picked it because it's low enough to make the impact of various packet loss effects acceptable. Faster speeds would result in worse artefacts. We didn't pick the speed to "help" with anything but in all honestly from a combat point of view 500m/s is considered too fast to have a tense and close quarter dog fight anyway (something we're actively trying to achieve) so we have lower top speeds for various ships.

The reason packet loss is such a big deal is because there isn't a central server that has total authority of everyone's position. Instead the players in the peer to peer network are managing themselves but this also leads to issues of clock synchronisation and packet loss that is harder to deal with than in the central server model most multiplayer games are based off of.

The second issue that causes the limitation is the fact that we're not actually doing everything purely Newtonian. If we were I've been told that we'd have a higher cap on the speed because it would be easier to predict the physics involved. However we're complicating the flight model somewhat with "magic" forces and effects to get the flight to feel right and fun to us, which has the side effect of increasing the complexity of the predictions.

However as we're never going to do a purely Newtonian flight model and thus require the additional complexity to create the flight model assists and effects we like we're stuck with this speed cap at around 500m/s. The only way to increase this would be to change the peer to peer networking model to something more traditional which again is unlikely to happen.

Basically we'd have to create a whole new flight model (perhaps like you've described) and a whole new networking model to do something more akin to what you want. It's basically a whole new game engine.

 

[xyphic]

I think when someone says "the flight model made for a horrible experience in Frontier", they're just remembering their experience in the first part of Isinona's video where he specifically entitled it "What not to do" - you basically were flying Newtonian all wrong!

If 99% of people playing the game play it in a particular way, and if that way leads to a "horrible experience" then it's the game that's wrong, not the player. Because fundamentally a game must be fun, and while a certain learning curve is acceptable, there are limits. My own experience of FE2 was that I enjoyed it *despite* the flight model.

Imagine what would have happened to ED if Frontier had shipped it with only the FA Off flight model. Yes, you'd get a few players like Isinona willing to put the time and effort into learning it, but the majority of players would simply give up out of frustration and the game would have died a long time ago.

 

[Zelos1983]

Elite is not a simulator and it's not about realism. It's arcady.

People shouldn't really feel like they are in space.

This issue has been presented to FD a long time ago, yet they still have failed to address it.

But, guess what. We get a HUD clock. So you don't have to turn your eyes so much as to see the clock in the systray on the monitor next to it - that you can't use for E anyway. Totally worth it ;-).

Edit: The worst part is that Frontier got it all right back then with Frontier - Elite II. And now they couldn't built on that due to their own "technical limitations" that they introduced by waiving the offline mode.

 

[Genar-Hofoen]

I'm very sorry my preference differs from your preference, but the Frontier: Elite II flight model was indeed utter tosh

Objection! No valid counterpoint given!

That's because you simply aren't thinking in 4D

Oh you!

Stop making me give you rep points!

 

[lemny]

If your spaceship kept accelerating without reaching a top speed, then as soon as you would turn you would black out. I think you even can black out in some of the smaller ships if you turn hard enough while going very fast. Why you don't blackout in hyperspace I justify by thinking we're in some kind of Alcubierre bubble.

Nope... you are thinking of an airplane where the speed matters because the acceleration for changing the velocity vector comes from the force of the air floating around your wings.
In Space it doesn't matter how fast you are. The force only comes from your thrusters, no matter of you actual velocity and your acceleration is always the same.

 

[Genar-Hofoen]

If 99% of people playing the game play it in a particular way, and if that way leads to a "horrible experience" then it's the game that's wrong, not the player. Because fundamentally a game must be fun, and while a certain learning curve is acceptable, there are limits. My own experience of FE2 was that I enjoyed it *despite* the flight model.

Imagine what would have happened to ED if Frontier had shipped it with only the FA Off flight model. Yes, you'd get a few players like Isinona willing to put the time and effort into learning it, but the majority of players would simply give up out of frustration and the game would have died a long time ago.

Well see, I completely agree with those points, and like you said with Frontier: Elite II , I'm enjoying playing ED *despite* its flight model

I think I even said as much in my final paragraph

Regards o7

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

Objection! No valid counterpoint given!

Ok, fair enough.

How about mostly tosh?

Oh you!

Stop making me give you rep points!

Stop giving me rep points! That's no way to disagree!

*kicks pebble*

 

[Zelos1983]

I'm enjoying playing ED *despite* its flight model

Same for me. The flight model does not work to the advantage of E.
But it really matters most for combat pilots, who feel the full impact. As an explorer/trader, I can accept the arcadyness easier.

But now that I want to make the Combat elite, the game gets really horrible and unenjoyable. Especially thinking of proper Scifi shows like BSG (reimaged) and B5.