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Looked like the thrusters on the 300i aren't tweaked to replicate actual physics yet, but mostly for show at this point. When I see back thrusters firing on the rear left and the front end moves to the right, something is a bit out of adjustment.
Hi everyone. I've been reading a fair amount of the posts about the Dogfighting demo we gave during the live stream. I thought it would be useful for me to clarify a few things, as there’s a few misconceptions – mostly because people are forming their opinions on a very limited view of what we were showing. As I know exactly what is under the hood and how it plays I’m going to help you all out with the inside information
• Physics. There’s been a few posts where people think the physics aren't correct or fully implemented yet when they were watching the dogfight. Just to be absolutely clear – the whole game runs on CryPhysics – which is a fully fledged physics system on a par with other physics engines like PhysX and Havoc. Everything is simulated correctly. Any ship movement is achieved by applying impulses to the rigid body of the ship – there are no cheats on position or velocity. It has been like this since the beginning – even before I showed the initial prototype! If you actually looked closely at the dogfighting footage you would indeed see that the ships have inertia – they don’t immediately turn or stop on a dime – just look when someone enters a turn and notice the movement of the asteroids relative to the cockpit view. It’s one of the reasons why there were a few asteroid collisions in the demo. People weren't intentionally ramming or clipping an asteroid they just misjudged their inertia and their turning radius. There are however a few things that make this not as obvious to the untrained eye. Firstly there is no “space dust” to give you a visual cue on your speed and relative velocity vector. Space dust was something I implemented all the way back in Wing Commander to give the player some visual cues as to his velocity and direction of movement as in space you usually don’t have a good reference for your movement as its just normal empty space with no close objects for reference. It’s completely fictional but most space games use space dust (which can look / feel like streaking stars) to give cues as to your movement. It’s currently disabled in our build as we’re refactoring some particle system features, so you don’t get the same motion cues you’re used to on other space games (including all my past ones). Secondly the amount of slide or sense of inertia in your movement is a result of your mass and the strength of your maneuvering thrusters. If you have very powerful thrusters they will be able to correct your velocity vector with very little or no slide. For the test we were playing with values and had juiced the maneuvering thrusters on the Hornet so the dogfighting would be quick and fast as we wanted something that didn't drag for the live demo with lots of “kills” (to show off the nice explosions and damage!). This is definitely not final and will have a lot more tweaking, especially when the G-Force modeling comes on line for the multiplayer (as this will have a big effect on what maneuvers are best) and the energy management interface on our new WIP HUD is implemented (which will allow you to direct more power to the thrusters for a tighter turn at the expense of other systems like your weapons or shields)
• Flight Model. When I see posts about the physics not being correct, or the flight model being WW2 and not Newtonian – it really means that current implementation of the Intelligent Flight Control System (IFCS) is not what people would like / are expecting as there is no cheating on physics (as I describe above). In Star Citizen (and pretty much every other space games – including the “Hard core” sims) there will always be some level of fly by wire where the computer interprets the players input on the controls and translates them in a way to maneuver the ship intuitively. Why? Because individually controlling 8-16 thrusters simultaneously to achieve a desired action is incredibly hard – just doing it in 2D in the classic video game Asteroids was difficult enough – it becomes exponentially difficult with a third dimension. Even in the real world the newest jets and helicopters interpret the pilots input and then manage the control surfaces. Most modern jet fighters are aerodynamically unstable – if a pilot tried to directly control the control surfaces he wouldn't be able to make the 100s of micro adjustments needed every second to keep the airplane stable. This will be even more so going forward. So it’s not so much about being “Realistic” or “Newtonian”, it’s really about how the game (or in our fiction the IFCS) translates the players control inputs into physical actions in the game. For instance the current speed cap is all done by the IFCS – if your ship goes above the top speed (say getting an impulse from a collision while at maximum velocity) it will start to fire retro thrusters to bring you back inside the allowed velocity range. The current IFCS is still a work in progress – currently it is set up very much like a traditional Wing Commander that prefers yaw to roll (although you absolutely can roll as well – it’s just the X axis on a stick is mapped to yaw, Y to pitch and roll is modifier plus X axis.) The newer IFCS (which we didn’t show as its not working smoothly over multiplayer, which has an extra level of complexity due to being server authorative) has a bias towards roll and pitch for turning as it is trying to manage the G-Forces on the pilot’s body and we’re built to absorb positive Gs better than left/right lateral Gs. But why would every IFCS behave the same way? My goal is to have more than one IFCS setting (possibly needing a different avionics package) with different “flight models” and the more sophisticated packages will allow a pilot to switch off and on aspects of the IFCS – for instance letting your fly-by-wire system know that you input is now only about angular position / velocity and not your linear velocity vector, or that your input is now just requesting a velocity /adjustment without a heading change. The goal from the beginning of Star Citizen has always been to allow players to set up and customize their ship the way they want. There will be a huge amount of plug in items / systems that will allow a player to significantly tweak the abilities of their ship and part of this is the flight computer.
Cont'd on next post...
Cont'd from previous -
• Peripherals / player input devices. I noticed a lot of people being concerned that the game is set up like Call of Duty and is just a WASD FPS keyboard / mouse shooter because they saw a few of the team members just using their mouse and keyboard during the demo. Star Citizen is set up to be input agnostic – it supports keyboard, mouse, gamepad, joystick and HOTAS (and pedals!) Most of these can operate at the same time – for instance you can use a HOTAS, mouse and keyboard all simultaneously. This past week in our 6-8 person internal people were flying with a selection of all the above – an X65 Pro HOTAS, an X52 HOTAS, MS gamepad, keyboard + mouse, Logitech Extreme 3D joystick. So don’t worry we’re not biased to any control scheme! If you want us to be, well I’m sorry, our goal is tune the game in such a way that no one input device is the winner – it should be about personal preference, which I think is completely in the spirit of PC gaming that we are trying to uphold.
• First person vs Third person. I saw quite a few posts that were concerned about the third person view and it giving an unfair advantage over people playing first person. Putting aside the fact that everyone has the same range of views, so no one will have something that someone else doesn't, Star Citizen will be just like my Wing Commander games – it’s primarily built for 1st person, but we allow you to pop out to a chase plane view to appreciate the detail and coolness of your ship (and perhaps check the external damage). When in third person mode you don’t have any of your HUD, radar or targeting information available. Make no mistake you will be at a disadvantage trying to fight in third person instead of first person. If you go back to the live stream video you will notice most people were actually performing kills from the first person camera view NOT the third person – that’s completely because in fast moving dogfights your targeting computer with shot lead prediction is pretty vital to scoring a hit on your opponent and your HUD target turn indicator lets you know where you need to turn to get your opponent in your sights. And this is before a new cockpit 1st person view that I've been toying with comes on line – essentially it’s going to dynamically scope your field of view and depth of field based on where you are looking, which simulates what we do naturally when looking around – which I think will add a whole new level of intensity to the 1st person cockpit view.
I hope you find this small info dump useful!
As always thanks for your feedback and support.
if you read the post from Chris you would know
if you read the post from Chris you would know
That's actually pretty damned fast. That's still over 130,000,000 miles per hour, far faster than you could imagine any dogfight happening simply because the ships will not be able to intercept at that speed. Obviously if both craft were already travelling 130,000,000 mph in the same direction they could have a dogfight as if they were both standing still, but if you're even 100,000mph difference in speed, the enemy ship would be out of sight before the dogfight even began.
It seems a lot like a large basis of this game will be freighting things around and people trying to steal that freight off you, so they do need some sort of system for setting up encounters between a freighter and a fighter, I'm interested in how they do that.
Not to get to technical but its actually 1.3 million mph, not 130 million mph. That is still insanely fast though.