For those of you not in on the alpha, I thought I'd do a quick fly around, tail-chasing another (NPC) Sidewinder whilst in the multiplayer free for all scenario, so you could get a look at an AI ship close up without laser blasts obscuring it and to see how they manoeuver. You'll notice that there is a rather nice heat haze blur effect from the engines of the Sidewinder amongst other things as it flies about.
You can see (and hear) how you have to juggle the throttle a bit to stay with other ships if you don't want to overshoot (you can either listen to the engine pitch changing or watch the throttle indicator to the right of the scanner to get an idea of how the throttle is being juggled). This is also a good demonstration of how you can rapidly transition from following something visually, to checking its position on the scanner to re-acquire it fairly quickly, even if you don't have Track IR (which I do have incidentally, but I have not found it critical to use in order to stay with most targets, as this video shows). The scanner is on its short range setting incidentally. Another thing you will notice, is the thrust vectoring jets on the ship popping on and off, which can give you a clue as to whether it is about to change its turn rate or direction, in much the same way as you can watch the control surface deflections on an aeroplane if you are following it to make it easier to determine where it is going to go, which is something I've done quite bit in real life when flying close to another aircraft, so that's kind of cool that you can do that in ED as well.
The stick I was using here was an old Saitek Cyborg EVO, which has a built in throttle lever; I had mapped vertical thrust to the number 3 and 4 thumb buttons. I'm occasionally using a bit of upwards thrust to pull back onto the target when it disappears up out of the canopy frame in tighter turns. As you can see, if you do a lot of rolling to keep the target in the upper quadrant of the windscreen (much like you would in a classic aeroplane dogfight), then you can usually get away with only using upwards thrust vectoring to keep with the thing, rather than having to vector in lots of different directions. This means you don't lose energy and inertia, which can be fairly useful in multiplayer much of the time, since might you want to be able to boost out of there quickly if someone gets on your six o'clock, and you don't want to be doing that from a standing start.
This vid was taken with FRAPS and I was getting around about 60 frames per second.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuD3YkrwF0k&feature=youtu.be
You can see (and hear) how you have to juggle the throttle a bit to stay with other ships if you don't want to overshoot (you can either listen to the engine pitch changing or watch the throttle indicator to the right of the scanner to get an idea of how the throttle is being juggled). This is also a good demonstration of how you can rapidly transition from following something visually, to checking its position on the scanner to re-acquire it fairly quickly, even if you don't have Track IR (which I do have incidentally, but I have not found it critical to use in order to stay with most targets, as this video shows). The scanner is on its short range setting incidentally. Another thing you will notice, is the thrust vectoring jets on the ship popping on and off, which can give you a clue as to whether it is about to change its turn rate or direction, in much the same way as you can watch the control surface deflections on an aeroplane if you are following it to make it easier to determine where it is going to go, which is something I've done quite bit in real life when flying close to another aircraft, so that's kind of cool that you can do that in ED as well.
The stick I was using here was an old Saitek Cyborg EVO, which has a built in throttle lever; I had mapped vertical thrust to the number 3 and 4 thumb buttons. I'm occasionally using a bit of upwards thrust to pull back onto the target when it disappears up out of the canopy frame in tighter turns. As you can see, if you do a lot of rolling to keep the target in the upper quadrant of the windscreen (much like you would in a classic aeroplane dogfight), then you can usually get away with only using upwards thrust vectoring to keep with the thing, rather than having to vector in lots of different directions. This means you don't lose energy and inertia, which can be fairly useful in multiplayer much of the time, since might you want to be able to boost out of there quickly if someone gets on your six o'clock, and you don't want to be doing that from a standing start.
This vid was taken with FRAPS and I was getting around about 60 frames per second.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuD3YkrwF0k&feature=youtu.be
Last edited:
