Quasi Flight Assist?

[wiz]

Some pilots find it useful to use FA on and then to make turns or specific combat moves they momentarily switch FA to off for the duration of their manoeuvre and when completed they switch FA back on again to continue with combat or whatever they were doing.

That's what I've been doing this evening while trying out my new stick: I bound FAOFF/hold to an easily reachable button, so that I can press the button, maneuver to roughly face the enemy in the quickest possible way, then I release the button, FA kicks in, the ship's attitute stabilizes almost instantly and then I just have to adjust the throttle and give a nudge of pitch and yaw to get the enemy back in the crosshairs where it belongs.

It's fun as hell and I take back all my previous complaining for the lack of yaw.

 

[laforge]

Incorrect.
FA Off mode is a Newtonian flight model i.e. How the universe actually works at the low speeds we encounter.

/sigh

A flight engine must at least reflect the invariance of mechanics with respect to galilean transformations to be considered Newtonian. Flight assist OFF does not satisfy this condition because of a speed limitation (and other things) wrt. some reference frame. So it is not Newtonian. Is that really so hard to grasp?

 

[Commander Dave]

/sigh

Really ?
Wow. That's nice of you.
Anyway, whatever. It's no skin off my nose. Although I do wonder what your associates think when you sigh at them too. Must be great for them. Oh and for you of course.

A flight engine must at least reflect the invariance of mechanics with respect to galilean transformations to be considered Newtonian. Flight assist OFF does not satisfy this condition because of a speed limitation (and other things) wrt. some reference frame. So it is not Newtonian. Is that really so hard to grasp?

Perhaps for someone without the relevant knowledge, yes.
But not for me.
You have to remember that this is going to be a game and relativistic motion is not implemented in any form. So what's left for models ?
Yep. Newtonian.
So that's what it's using or as close an approximation as possible given the constraints.

I'm taking the liberty of ignoring the more exotic models out there and adding zero technical detail. It's not required and almost no one will need it.

 

[Commander Dave]

That's what I've been doing this evening while trying out my new stick: I bound FAOFF/hold to an easily reachable button, so that I can press the button, maneuver to roughly face the enemy in the quickest possible way, then I release the button, FA kicks in, the ship's attitute stabilizes almost instantly and then I just have to adjust the throttle and give a nudge of pitch and yaw to get the enemy back in the crosshairs where it belongs.

It's fun as hell and I take back all my previous complaining for the lack of yaw.

It's a really cool technique.
I'm not quite there with it personally as I don't have a decent control system at the moment but it does make a difference, at least in my perception, to the rotation speeds of my Cobra.
I do prefer the atmospheric flight feeling and I reckon the amount of yaw available, even though there have been some complaints about it from people more used to an x/y movement system, I reckon it's about right.
It allows for fine control and maintains the feeling that I'm actually flying through space.
Most importantly of all, for me, is that it feels like the original Elite did. And it does feel like it. It's fantastic.

 

[laforge]

Perhaps for someone without the relevant knowledge, yes.
But not for me.
You have to remember that this is going to be a game and relativistic motion is not implemented in any form. So what's left for models ?
Yep. Newtonian.
So that's what it's using or as close an approximation as possible given the constraints.

I was not even talking about relativistic mechanics...

 

[Shepard]

Not so sure I agree. I believe what you guys are talking about is perfectly accurate, but only for sims like I-War and Evochron Mercenary. Here with ED, while the concept is the same - and what I think the op is talking about - is that the ship becomes EXTREMELY unstable in flight assist off. Sure you can point somewhere, but you'll be all over the place in an instant. Pitch, roll, and yaw continually drift, and even with firm control on the stick, oscillation becomes a bitter struggle from over-compensation of even the lightest control inputs. Aiming with fa off, as far as I can see with alpha 1, is practically impossible... at least with my ch joystick/throttle setup. Perhaps others are having a better go at it, but I can relate fully with the op.

Turning it off for just a moment is an excellent way to get a bead on that hard turning enemy (that and vertical/lateral thrusters) but only for a moment... then it's back to ON to continue the fight. The devs aren't kidding when they say "flight assist OFF"! I imagine that's what it would be like to fly a modern fighter without fly-by-wire - unstable. I'm not so sure this instability should be so in the vacuum of space, but I'm no engineer, what do I know.

Although, I'm not complaining... I'm finding it exhilarating to use the OFF mode just at those prescise moments to get back a positional edge. It adds a sweet mechanic to combat in ED that must be learned and mastered.

If you want to be good at using FA off - it's possible, but as everything else will require quite a lot of practice. When you fly, you can see that your ship is constantly using maneuvering thrusters to correct your flight path. If you do FA off you pretty much turn all the corrections off. Comparing to BG vipers even sidewinder is a bigger ship. Slow yaw and different dynamics won't allow you to swing your ship around like vipers did in BG. Most of the ships in ED well majority are focused on trading. Between 5 ships that alpha 4 currently has, only 1 ship is actually a pure fighter. The other 4 are pretty much meant for trading.

People need to remember that even though ED will allow a lot of choices, the big focus of the game is trading between different solar systems. Everything else that comes, comes from trading. Explore to find better trade routes, fight off pirates to protect your goods, bounty hunt pirates so that traders can run safely through systems etc etc. it's all about trading. But that's just one of the perspectives. If there was no trading in Elite it would have been very boring space shooter.

Trading is what drives the rest of the game and shoots adrenaline into your blood, because there is a danger to loose all your goods, to be shot down from the space and start all over again only because you ended up in bad interdiction and you enemy had a bit of a better hand.

 

[zzz]

@laforge

The speed limit has nothing to do with a newtonian flight model.
Your ship computer just stops (for some unknown reason) his thrust when it reaches max. 500m/s, or maybe engages an equal counter thrust.
You could say the original elite has a full newtonian flight model, you can't prove the opposite.
The ships could have a permanent flight assist and thrusters which produce thousands of g's, so it would feel arcade like.


There is an open source game called pioneer space sim, I think many of you know it. But maybe you don't know that you can tweak your ship thrusters in the gamedata for your own (realistic?) flight model, it's all in Lua.
Although the combat is somewhat broken, you can get a glimpse of flying/fighting with no speed limit and a flight model which suits you.
It has assisted and non-assisted flight.
Try it, it's fun

and

hello to the forum.

 

[zzz]

@laforge

The speed limit has nothing to do with a newtonian flight model.
Your ship computer just stops (for some unknown reason) his thrust when it reaches max. 500m/s, or maybe engages an equal counter thrust.
You could say the original elite has a full newtonian flight model, you can't prove the opposite.
The ships could have a permanent flight assist and thrusters which produce thousands of g's, so it would feel arcade like.


There is an open source game called pioneer space sim, I think many of you know it. But maybe you don't know that you can tweak your ship thrusters in the gamedata for your own (realistic?) flight model, it's all in Lua.
Although the combat is somewhat broken, you can get a glimpse of flying/fighting with no speed limit and a flight model which suits you.
It has assisted and non-assisted flight.
Try it, it's fun

and

hello to the forum.

 

[laforge]

@laforge

The speed limit has nothing to do with a newtonian flight model.
Your ship computer just stops (for some unknown reason) his thrust when it reaches max. 500m/s, or maybe engages an equal counter thrust.
You could say the original elite has a full newtonian flight model, you can't prove the opposite.
The ships could have a permanent flight assist and thrusters which produce thousands of g's, so it would feel arcade like.

Welcome to the forum. Sorry for my short response, but there are already countless posts about this matter in which your argumentation (i.e. ship computer contraints) is already proven to be vacuous. Perhaps you will find the discussion.

I also dont think Pioneer has MP feature. Its a remake of E2.

 

[Dante80]

For the tenth time..speed limits in regular flight are not a design "choice" but an inevitable certainty. There is not other conceivable way to make multi-player dogfighting work. Not now, not for the foreseeable (5 years +) future. No buts, no ifs. .-

Arguing that the flight model is not "newtonian" because of limitations like that is an exercise in absurdness...same goes for yaw limits etc. These limitations are not based on the physics model the game has.

 

[laforge]

For the tenth time..speed limits in regular flight are not a design "choice" but an inevitable certainty. There is not other conceivable way to make multi-player dogfighting work. Not now, not for the foreseeable (5 years +) future. No buts, no ifs. .-

I dont understand why this is yet still to debate? Of course you can make dogfights possible in a Newtonian environment (even WW2 dogfights take place "are in a Newtonian environment".) By the contrary: there is no convincable argument against it. Not even a technical argument that this is in general impossible for such a game, since the positions of all objects even at large relative speeds are perfectly predictable for all times. The only problem is that this topic is hard for people to imagine if they dont see it by example.

If one code fails this doesnt mean all codes must fail. But here some people extrapolate dev statements about their particular game (ED) to be general statements of every possible flight game. For me this is just typical fanboy drivel.

Arguing that the flight model is not "newtonian" because of limitations like that is an exercise in absurdness...same goes for yaw limits etc. These limitations are not based on the physics model the game has.

It is not absurd. Other games very sucessfully include the invariance wrt. galilean transformations into their engine. Even if FFE2 and E2 are not exact simulations of reality, but they implemented this simple fact well enough to be considered 'Newtonian'. A speed limitation in ED is not even the only thing, the whole ship handling depends on the speed wrt. completely arbitrary reference frames. Either you understand this or you dont, I wont bother with this discussion here anymore

 

[Dante80]

Laforge..please try to understand. I will say it another time.

You cannot have "newtonian speeds" in space dogfights since the server ticks (p2p with one player as the server) and the amount of bandwidth needed for multiplayer are not enough for you to have players interacting through twitch style combat. This holds true for all multiplayer dogfighting games in space (where speed is not an issue, only acceleration is). You either have to limit the number of players, or the amount of bandwidth each player has to communicate at each server tick.

You are confusing WW2 style dogfight games where all ships have speed limits and design limits with a game in space.

They are also very boring, but thats another discussion really. FD specifically DO NOT WANT to have newtonian space duels in space.

FE2 and FFE are single player games. ED is not.

 

[laforge]

Laforge..please try to understand. I will say it another time.

You cannot have "newtonian speeds" in space dogfights since the server ticks (p2p with one player as the server) and the amount of bandwidth needed for multiplayer are not enough for you to have players interacting through twitch style combat. This holds true for all multiplayer dogfighting games in space (where speed is not an issue, only acceleration is). You either have to limit the number of players, or the amount of bandwidth each player has to communicate at each server tick.

Sorry but apart from the fact that you have not provided any reason for your claims, you seem to confuse code with basic principles. A basic principle is that only the user input has to be updated via a network. This user input information is independent of the interpretation of a program (and especially independent of any form of relative speed). It is a matter of your code how this data is interpreted and what you are going to exchange via your network.
I can give you a simple example which would blast every bandwith because of a bad choice of information exchange.

You are confusing WW2 style dogfight games where all ships have speed limits and design limits with a game in space.

No, you can include this sort of playstile in a Newtonian environment (i.e. a game without speed limit) if you include friction in atmospheres.

EDIT:

FE2 and FFE are single player games. ED is not.

There were two parallel discussions, my response was about whether or not a game is considered 'Newtonian'. And this doesnt have anything to do wether or not it has MP functionality on top of it.