SpaceSimCentral

Turrets would much improve things.It seems silly not to have auto-targetting and leading turrets, we have them today in real life! As far as I can tell, this is the crux of more accessible combat. If this can track and engage dozens of targets moving at multiple times the speed of sound, then what would a computer a thousand years from now be able to do? Logically either turrets or gimbaled cannons should be able to perfectly lead any target within their firing arcs. There would still be plenty of skill, as accuracy would decrease rapidly at range, and leading could only be based on enemy trajectory at time of firing, but you wouldn't have to be a a human computer to hit something I have some wip pirate code where they fire a few rounds then extort you to jettison your cargo with a time limit, if you fail to comply they attack. I also think they should try to run away / jump if they think they will loose. I've always wondered why pirates in every space sim I've ever played are completely suicidal. I'd think there could be something implemented wherein enemies weighed up their situations before and during combat. Prior to starting anything I'd wager pirates would want to know they had a very good chance of winning, and if things went bad and they lost a couple of their wingmen, they'd just turn tail and run.

A thousand years from now turrets shouldn't ever miss, it should be a question about counter measures you can throw back or use to protect yourself.

someone does not understand combat Pioneer says is not fun because he do not understand the concept!? you think this is good!? I think that it's inevitable.The problem is two-fold though:Flying a spaceship in 3D is fundamentally more complex than controlling, for example, a car in 2D.The control scheme we currently have makes the already complex task harder than it needs to be.So we have both problems, a complex situation that you cannot teach most players quickly enough to keep them interested, and awkward controls that you yourself have stated you cannot imagine using with only a keyboard and a mouse. This tells us that the controls need to be fixed, and that we probably need some kind of tutorial you can turn on and off or practice flying the ship with lots of hints etc.

@robn,I had a go at merging that turrets branch but it's a very messy merge with a lot to resolve.It's pretty involved and I've got too much on my plate already to look into it further

Well I like using WASDRF for translation control, it's the attitude control I think needs work... first I think the default use of RCS thrusters for orienting the craft is wasteful and imprecise... let's toss some control moment gyroscopes or reaction wheels in there![url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_moment_gyroscope[/url] course... for close range fighting you would be better off with the RCS thrusters, they'll push you around faster and frankly you'll be changing vector rapidly anyways for evasive reasons so there's no real savings in reaction mass. If anything it would take extra energy to spin up the gyro's that could be better used on weapons, shields, sensors, etc.So that brings up another point... what kind of ranges and combat regimes are people interested in? The controls for one style might be fine but be terrible for another style. Orbital sniper duels with "primitive" kinetic weapons? Close range beam fights under heavy ECM? Missile and Drone tactical management?

You're confusing two things "controls" i.e. the mouse/keyboard/joystick etc, and "physics". Pioneer uses Newtonian physics and that's not going to change. The "controls"; i.e. what keys we use - they can change.They can change in a number of ways, I'll try to quickly think of some example ideas:We could introduce an additional control mode lower than "autopilot" but better than "set speed",This mode might help the player to fly more like in I-War by helping the spaceship behave a little like a plane,"Newtonian compensation mode" - probably similar to what Braben/Frontier Developments are doing,A "support-pilot" mode, the autopilot is on and suggests what to do but you are still flying?There's a lot of extra information we could display to the player:simulated "space dust",spaceship trails,better direction indicators and range,enemy shield/health statusearlier intercept warnings:"ship detected in intercept course, contact police? yes/no"and so on...Better AI so that fights aren't always fatal for someone as discussed above,An in-system hyperspace drive to give you a chance to escape or reach your destination, but with high fuel cost or other potential problems,...and many more...So to recap, Newtonian physics aren't going away, but there are things we could do to the controls and the flight system to make it, if anything, more realistic -> you don't really think everyone in 3200AD will still be flying these things with a joystick directly controlling thrusters do you? If there's anything EVE Online has got right it's that everything will fly itself... of course we're not going down that route, it's boring  Also I'm no longer a member of the Core Team, I quit a while ago due to lack of time and a few other things, so I can't decide for the Core Team I'm just here trying to explain things to you since I've been involved for a few years

@NeuralKernel,I'm not sure the method of turning matters so much, you could explain ships turning without thrusters using those.However all that matters to the player is that they pitch/roll/yaw. The thrusters are almost a graphical nicety until you get into more involved stealth mechanics. A thruster venting, or a main engine firing will be more visible than a gyroscope spinning internally for example. Aside non-Pioneer: I have a whole game designed around the stealth of various propulsion and control methods that I've been wanting to implement for years. Become too visible, let out too much light or heat and things come to eat you... until you realise you're toast and fire up the main engine for a high speed burn to safety  Maybe we should consider that there are a range of ship sizes, and that some are designed for space only, others for atmospheric flight.For smaller ships it makes sense to have the same close combat, high maneuverability, control scheme. That probably doesn't make sense for the equivalent of a supertanker though.

@Biomechanoid,No problem, it just took me a while to understand that you were confusing the two different things

Yeah, I honestly just figured there was some kind of misunderstanding, too... I think most people here generally assume misunderstanding before malice.Hmm... in game faction language barriers, maybe? "Empty your ship" could be taken to mean "surrender your cargo" or "open fire"...

@robn,I had a go at merging that turrets branch but it's a very messy merge with a lot to resolve.It's pretty involved and I've got too much on my plate already to look into it further :(Yeah, that's cool. I'm keeping it in the back of my head for now too.From memory I wasn't happy with the way target selection worked - it needs to be controllable from Lua. There is some good restructuring work in the branch too that could be picked up, but yeah, its work. No hurry.

Or maybe we can convince the player using joystick to drive a ship on Pioneer spacesim!? I do not think it will be dificult to convince the player that this game needs Joystick.Maybe not. But good luck convincing the new player that playing Pioneer is worth buying a joystick.

I'll add my opinion about joystick and controls. Sorry for keeping the OT.I tried to use a joystick, but I found it awkward (with Oolite however, it's fine). It's too sensible and there's no way to reduce that. I can, however, set the dead zone in the config file, and that's good!So, I'm much more comfortable using the keyboard (and somtetimes the mouse, when I need to point my nose in a precise direction, or keeping it in that direction) with the default settings. If you keep the shift key pressed, it's even possible to turn smoothly.One thing that I'll try to do, is switching the thruster keys and the rotation keys, so I don't have to move my left hand from the rotation keys to the thruster keys when using the mouse.About turrets and mouse pointing, I think that a compromise could be having the standard guns that have limited movements. 30, 45, 60 degrees (maybe they could be upgradable). So they wouldn't be turrets. If you have only the front gun and you want to shoot a something behind you, you still have to turn the ship. Proper turrets that turns in every direction, could be installed on very big ships for better defense (since they cant turn fast as a light ship) and they could be manual, automatic, of crew operated, while that kind of guns, on light ships and fighters. The guns will always shoot where the pointer is... pointing, and you could always turn the ship by clicking the right mouse button. :)IMHO, this will allow different styles of combat, and would not riun the dogfight style (it will, only, make it a little simpler).

Yeah, that's cool. I'm keeping it in the back of my head for now too.From memory I wasn't happy with the way target selection worked - it needs to be controllable from Lua. There is some good restructuring work in the branch too that could be picked up, but yeah, its work. No hurry. I think it might be quicker to reimplement rather than update. Would certainly be worth it... aww, I'm sorely tempted to just put other stuff to one side for a couple of days but it might be that JJ would be the better guy to do it. Why wasn't it submitted as a PR 6 months ago do you know?

I think it might be quicker to reimplement rather than update. Would certainly be worth it... aww, I'm sorely tempted to just put other stuff to one side for a couple of days but it might be that JJ would be the better guy to do it. Why wasn't it submitted as a PR 6 months ago do you know?JJ doesn't really do PRs, but that's ok - when he's working on stuff we end up talking about it a lot in IRC, so it usually gets plenty of coverage. As I said, it didn't go forward because I wasn't happy with the target selection (and it never had a full review, because there wasn't much point when it wasn't finished).Have a go if you like,. I think the best way is to do it in stages. First decouple guns from ships, then introduce manually-controlled turrets (separate mountpoints, cameras and controllers), and finally work on the AI. I'm really keen to avoid any more spaghetti, and this is going to touch a lot of stuff. A big drop isn't the right way for this, I think.

@Tichy,Using the turrets always required a dual skill, flying the ship and aiming the turrets at the same time. it doesn't do away with the dog fighting style you just had to be able to do both. Also they're not omnidirectional, you can only ever cover a hemisphere with one turret at best assuming none of the ship gets in the way and that the hemispheres of a turret on top and one on bottom don't overlap leaving a blindspot. Still plenty of tactics and skill required for manual turrets I think  Auto-turrets could be subject to damage, disruption by EM, once you take them out there might be no manual backup on the cheap models?That way you'd have a choice in increasing cost and weight:Basic turret (default) - manual control only,Basic Auto-turret - cheap, auto-only, subject to light damage and EM interference, slightly heavier, few tonnes of additional mass.Medium quality turret - more expensive, leads target, subject to medium damage and EM interference, can be used manually if damaged or disabled by EM,High / Military quality - much more expensive, hard to damage, EM shielded, heavier due extra shielding another 4 tonnes per-turret (for example) all the best points from above.So in my mind I might have room for 2 turrets, one up, one down, I might pay for both to be equipped with a weapon but only one with an auto-turret because I can't afford both and if it gets EM'd then I'd be locked out of it so I need the other to be manual until I can afford a medium quality turret with the manual backup.

Because I tested enough controls in Pioneer, and i hope to be "in same-frame of reference" I think I can contribute something with the little experience I have playing Pioneer. Maybe you're right and players no longer play with joystick space sims, but I believe many like me still have a joystick (if not, I think they are cheap, and do not need an "ultra" joystick). and now I know why is that for example in my topic people do not try the chalenge, (to travel without autopilot), because I think it's very difficult to do without joystick.But "travel in space" without autopilot (for me) it has a large role in gameplay and pleasure I have when I play Pioneer. It's less that they could have a joystick, than it is that when they first download Pioneer they might not, or if they do it might not be plugged in. I have a couple of gamepads that I could use, but they're never plugged in and I actually like using the keyboard and mouse. So when the player first downloads the game they want to be able to play with the things there hands are already using.Plus we can make the controls better, I'm sure of it.With better instructions shown during loading, or on a quick popup screen or something anyway.

Decoupling turrets from the ship would also work for drones, from a simulation perspective they might have quite a bit in common, maybe handled by the same code? A drone is just a turret you can detach and move around a bit...

 It´s possible to do something like this in Pioneer!? maybe in the future!? There's a lot of things we'll get around too eventually. It just takes a long time because this is all part-time for us, my day job is 40+ hours a week programming and quite high pressure. I get home some days and I can barely think let alone work on code it's a same for everyone. So a simple feature like the atmospheric hull heating glow is something I've implemented in a test engine I use, it's very simple, but it might take a month, maybe 2 months to do in Pioneer. We'll get there eventually.

I'm actually more interested in combat at velocities around 5 to 50 kps and near a gravity well. It's a bit of a leap for most people to think about movement in 3 dimensions... orbital mechanics are sometimes even less intuitive. Frankly I think the ships in Pioneer are WAY overpowered to truly appreciate this aspect of spaceflight, frankly I fly at 5 or 10 percent thrust almost all the time...Which reminds me of a specific control I'd like to see implemented sometime... could we use page up and page down (or whatever...) to set engine output? Instead of hitting F8 and then selecting what the thrust will be when you hold shift, you would tap page up to increase the "throttle" and page down to reduce it. No more full thrust unless you hold down shift, just fire the thrusters at the current setting. That way you could use shift for something else, an afterburner or coolant system maybe? It would also make matching thrust to the local gravity easier, instead of getting it "close enough" and tapping the thruster keys, letting off the shift key quickly, guessing what the thrust percentage to hover with a full ship vs and empty one...

hi,from what I understand you say something like if it were different.I think I could say the same speed. (5 to 50 kps) and take in acount the Newton Laws how the ship/missiles/drones/ wingman behaves in space combat.To combat in pioneer at a speed 50000.00Km / s or 50kps the ship/missiles/drones/ wingman behave in the same way! Or not!?tnx You should know the right question: "Speed... but relative to what?" :biggrin:I think that, when fighting outside atmosphere and orbits, the speed you sould take in account first, is relative to your opponent. You know that better than me