Blaspheming against the flight model.

[Han_Zen]

Well they did - about 25-odd years ago, and it was called Frontier: Elite II

And it was very popular.

And some people got gud at the Newtonian flight model.

And the others just blamed the flight model.

And I just noticed your avatar and it made me smile

Regards o9

It was easy to get gud with the FE2 flight model. It was not very hard.
They main problem was that it didn't matter in combat if you flew good. Only aiming was relevant. Aiming was extremely easy with ultra fast pitch and yaw.
Your oponents were usually dead while still a pixel big.

 

[PhanttoM]

Once I played the original Independence War I could never go back to non-6DoF games like the Freespace or X-Wing series.
In Independence War 2 (also newtonian, 6-DoF, no hitscan weapons), I used to take out cruisers by flying in reverse while maintaining 5-6 km distance.

So no, going to a full-on newtonian flight model, won't change the "flying in reverse" tactic.
Faster yaw won't change jousting fights - heck it will make it worse, since you can just make the turn directly.


A full-on realistic flight model would mean every ship handles like an Imperial Cutter and worse (Ratio between maneuvering thrusters and main thrusters), and many other things I won't get into because it will end in a needless wall of text.

Now excuse me, all this talk has made want to reinstall I-War 2.

 

[Rubbernuke]

Once I played the original Independence War I could never go back to non-6DoF games like the Freespace or X-Wing series.
In Independence War 2 (also newtonian, 6-DoF, no hitscan weapons), I used to take out cruisers by flying in reverse while maintaining 5-6 km distance.

So no, going to a full-on newtonian flight model, won't change the "flying in reverse" tactic.
Faster yaw won't change jousting fights - heck it will make it worse, since you can just make the turn directly.


A full-on realistic flight model would mean every ship handles like an Imperial Cutter and worse (Ratio between maneuvering thrusters and main thrusters), and many other things I won't get into because it will end in a needless wall of text.

Now excuse me, all this talk has made want to reinstall I-War 2.

Don't forget the mods: https://www.i-war2.com/

If memory serves one allows you to start outside the story arc and freeplay like Elite: edit https://www.i-war2.com/downloads/download/39-particle-systems/20-free_form_mode

 

[Moritasgus]

The FE2/FFE flight model was very easy to be effective in, because the NPC AI was utterly terrible at it, and the NPCs had nowhere near the weapons or shields a player in the same sort of ship would have.

You could sit behind any of the big ships, casually adjusting thrust and pecking them to death, because:
- they didn't have turrets fitted to their turret mounts
- they didn't have anything fitted to their aft mounts
- they insisted on trying to get clear before turning round (which they couldn't, because you had better acceleration) rather than spinning, reversing, and swatting you in a millisecond with their plasma accelerator or 20 MW beam laser
- they had pretty terrible aim even when you were in front of them
- missiles had torpedo-like ammo and multiple lightweight counters so could basically be ignored after the very early game

Alternatively, you could take a big ship yourself, fit a plasma accelerator turret and a bunch of shields, and instantly destroy any ship large enough to carry any weapons large enough to threaten you, because they wouldn't bring their own insta-death beam (if they'd remembered to fit one) on target quickly enough.

Pretty much this...
The two forms of combat in FE2 were jousting or speed matching and flying parallel with an AI that's not really trying to do anything. Jousting is an incredibly frustrating form of combat, speed matching is exactly the same thing the OP is complaining about with the current flight model.
Now translate that into an MMO, PvP would be jousting no matter what happened. Even an expert pilot in Newtonian would be constantly trying to adjust to an erratic human who is accelerating towards them because you can almost guarantee that's how the casual gamer would fly. You can't adjust quick enough against a person who is always turning to face you while accelerating towards you, you either reverse at the same speed/acceleration or get flung into jousting.

With his other point about long range fighting, my opinion is that shooting at something you can't even see makes fairly dull gameplay. It also breaks the pirate style career because it assumes that both pilots are there for the fight, long range combat simply doesn't work against a ship whose only intent like trader is to flee because they'd just pump countermeasure, missiles and FSD out.

 

[Soulstain]

So which game out there does it 'right'? I see all this yapping about arbitrary mechanics, poor decisions, etc... yet no one cites any examples of how it's actually been done 'the right way'.

Evochron Legacy

 

[PhanttoM]

Don't forget the mods: https://www.i-war2.com/

If memory serves one allows you to start outside the story arc and freeplay like Elite.

Thanks, but unnecessary — I have several old savegames that I kept from when the storyline became "free play". Both before and after getting jumpdrive/Patcom/corvette.
I-War series is among my favorite games of all time, so I have just about everything in backups - My #1 priority mod has always been custom Jafs, so he can pick up more cargo.

 

[Mephane]

While I am also not completely satisfied with the flight model (in particular the lackluster compromise that is FAOFF, hence I recently proposed a new, third flight mode, SAON), I don't think the flight model should be touched in any fundamental way at this point, as that would be quite unfair to any player who actually loves and prefers it the way it is.

 

[ROSS-128]

I basically automatically assume people mean "newtonian" when they say "realistic" talking about flight models in space. I've played enough Children of a Dead Earth to know how little acceleration even an NTR will get you on a kiloton+ ship.

Though I've also played enough of that game to know that your RCS doesn't need to be nearly as strong as your main engines if you complement them with thrust vectoring on the mains. Mostly because CoaDE still doesn't have usable RCS code (the flight computer is quite dumb and will burn all RCS at full thrust continuously just to maintain a forward heading, quite a nasty bug in a game where every ounce of fuel counts) so I typically have to rely entirely on thrust vectoring. Fortunately the inability to strafe, hover, or reverse is irrelevant to a kiloton sardine can that only has 0.3gs of acceleration but is buzzing past you at over 12km/s...

Though getting a good TWR is quite a lot easier on smaller ships for obvious reasons at the cost of a frighteningly small fuel reserve. It's pretty safe to assume even the most aggressively newtonian sci fi will typically have hilariously powerful magic engines that snobbishly sip fuel with their pinky raised, for the same reason FTL is such a common handwave: they need it to get around such vast distances in timeframes shorter than "geological".

Anyway though on any ship with at least two engines, thrust vectoring can take care of most of your turning and rotating needs. If you only have one engine, it'll let you yaw and pitch but not rotate. With twin-engine thrust vectoring you only need your RCS thrusters for strafing, or low-energy precision turns.

 

[Luniticisi]

I wouldn't have backed ED if the flight model wasn't "Planes in Space" ... that's why I absolutely hated FE2 and FFE.

 

[Knightshark]

Well, i like the fight model. But i would like it more if Yaw would get a boost in FAoff. I am aware that this in not a popular thing around here.

 

[Morbad]

I disagree with everything.

 

[Knightshark]

I disagree with everything.

Does everything include yourself?

 

[Morbad]

Does everything include yourself?

Are you objectifying me?

 

[Knightshark]

Are you objectifying me?

Would you like that?

 

[jasonbarron]

Say what you will about the flight model, but I still enjoy it more than any other space game I've tried my hand at. At least for combat. I have no interest in being a space turret.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

I basically automatically assume people mean "newtonian" when they say "realistic" talking about flight models in space. I've played enough Children of a Dead Earth to know how little acceleration even an NTR will get you on a kiloton+ ship.

Indeed. And even "Newtonian" is pushing it for a description of what people are after - in FE2/FFE a lot of the ship exhausts would have been at significant fractions of c to get the necessary momentum transfer, which means there's no point in fitting lasers. Once you're ignoring both of Newton's 2nd and 3rd laws for the sake of convenience, you're not Newtonian any more.

It's a different flight model and one people can certainly prefer. But "realistic"? No more so than what Elite Dangerous has.

 

[Morbad]

Would you like that?

Bringing us full circle, I'd have to say I'd probably find it disagreeable.

Say what you will about the flight model, but I still enjoy it more than any other space game I've tried my hand at. At least for combat. I have no interest in being a space turret.

I've played games where one could actually be a space turret, but it was usually a bad idea as doing so meant that any relative motion was left to your opponents and since they could control, and thus anticipate their inputs, while you could not, you got the short end of the stick. There was always incentive to move, so your opponents had as hard a time shooting you as you had shooting them.

All other things remaining the same, I don't think having pitch and yaw equivalent, or decoupling rotational movement rates from throttle would change all that much.

 

[GraXXoR]

I am generally a fan of the flight model but have two main gripes.

1)not really a fan of having to keep boosting to fly in a straight line at max speeds..
IMO they could have compromised where turning at boost speed slows you down but allowed you you fly in a straight line without repeatedly boosting. It gets old very quickly.

2) Not enough difference between the biggest ships and the smallest ships... The big ships are big dogfighters and the small ships are small dogfighters...
IMO The big ships should be bigger, tougher, more powerful and much less agile.
The medium ships are about right.
The smallest ships should be much faster with speeds of 1k~2k and require the bigger ships to mount turrets and proximity defence turrets to protect themselves.

While not the flight model per se I have a corollary

IMO it should be the RELATIVE speed difference that is capped and not some weird "Etheric" frame of reference... allowing ships to continue to accelerate when in open space to the minimum supercruise speed 30km/s (say) but use the same technique as coming out of planetary glide to slow down to combat speeds when within 10 kilometres of a station/surface or another ship that is flying in a different (relative) direction.

This would allow epic chases at epic speeds without 60km/s collisions.


Oh, and Yaw is nerfed...

 

[KellyR]

Its a game not simulation, a realistic flight model doesn't makes it fun for most nor it makes any business sense. what concerns me is all combat takes place WVR.

WVR? What's that? Seriously. I have no idea what WVR means in this context.

Also, those who say people need to get "gud" need to learn to spell. It's "good" not "gud".

 

[PhanttoM]

<snip> Once you're ignoring both of Newton's 2nd and 3rd laws for the sake of convenience, you're not Newtonian any more.
<snip>

Space sims (and a lot of games in general) have always been in dire need of more objective descriptions. Pretty much all 90's and early 2000's space flight games were called "space sims", but a lot of them didn't even have basic 6 Degrees of Freedom — we're basically stuck with the catch-all genre name space sim.

Let's face it, describing Elite Dangerous' flight model as "airplanes in space" is as inaccurate as anything else — because airplanes can't stop in midair and go into reverse, or strafe in different directions. [insert all the other little things here]


In general, I like Elite's approach which is unrealistic, but with a tiny amount of realism mixed in. (like drifting and tumbling around when engines are disabled or FA-OFF)
I just wish it had a few more nuggets of realism thrown in.