SpaceSimCentral

AcesHigh wrote:
maybe we should get back on topic
Semi on topic anyway. Gee Aces, WHY DON'T YOU TELL US HOW YOU REALLY FEEL...
AcesHigh wrote:
I noticed some of the "roundish" skyscrapers are not so round... that one that is acqua green... and is tapered all along (gets thinner, gets thicker, gets straight, gets thinner... etc) doesnt has that many polygons. I think the "tube" from which it is made is about 8 faces... of course, all that tapering adds extra 8 faces everytime the thickness changes. It LOOKS more rounded because there is some sort of Gouraud shading at work
On Pioneers scale of doing things, an 8 sided circular skyscraper is MORE than enough really, thats 16 triangles for just the sides alone. better to leave that structure as having non tapering sides, or more futuristic shape would maybe be a truncated cone, a more insteresting shape (still thin and elegant) for no more triangles a structre with 4 tapering sections would have 64 triangles, plus 6 more to cap it at the top (hopefully i don't have to mention that the cap at the bottom can be deleted. IF you apply such a regime to an entire city you can be spending 3 times more than you need you, easily.
AcesHigh wrote:
that other building, which sorry to whoever made it, but its hideous... the one that its twin towers, each one made of several discs not aligned... like if it was a 2 year old kid putting the discs one over the other... that one is really a "triangle" eater... each disct has probably over 20 faces.
That's the "hockey puck" building and its responsible for half my power bill when playing pioneer. if you mean 20 sided cylinders, its probably not far off that. and there's how many in each structure? 20 per tower and 2 towers, i often see pairs of them next to each other also. So to convert a 20 sided 'puck' to triangles, there's 40 on the sides... cap sections add up also and well, i'll save some time, there's 80 triangles in that.. times that by 40 and you have 3200 triangles over 2 towers structure. Which i guess is some sort of a frontier in-joke. IT could be replaced with something that has maybe 40-60 triangles, which with the right tiled textures would look even more scaled and do a much better job of illustrating a future city.To be fair though, its pretty easy to replace with something better so if it really annoys you, make a different one - find the hockey puck building and overwrite its .obj with something of similar proportions, i'm sure rob would listen to reason about replacing it in the next build. Ah and now to go offtopic, that wonderful world when men were men and scared of going on very slow moving trains.
AcesHigh wrote:
Now... I must admit, I am not the biggest Frontier fan so I dont know much about its controls... but I find them to be dreadful... you have to control your ultra advanced ship, on Earth´s atmosphere, as it it was the god damn Lunar Lander Game (which was obviously based on the control methods of the 1969 Apollo 11)???
you have more control in pioneer than in frontier, but only to the extent of being able to blast and manuvering engine at will. problem with that is, you can only use them at full power, so sometimes performing a delicate manuver like attempting to shell a chickens egg with a jcb bucket that you're directing with a NES joypad. its a question of scale, the controls are scaled for getting you around a galaxy, or at least a solar system, they are not scaled for sainsbury's carpark.
AcesHigh wrote:
My point is that you can barely appreciate the cityscape with the present control scheme...
it's awkward but i can get around ok, its easy to lose it and crash though due to the ship being able to pick up so much speed in a short amount of time. Analogue keyboards would be a great help here.
AcesHigh wrote:
I mean... we are in the year 3000... or 4000... something like that. How about some computer STABILIZERS on the ship? So it can mantain altitude? Really... let us fly in the atmosphere of planets as if it was a DESCENT game, (I mean the game called Descent)... I am under the full impression that the ship maintains speed when you turn off the throtle, as if it was flying in a vacuum!
what would be nice would be throttle-able engines, then you can shell that egg with the teeth of the bucket. proportional control. the other thing you're talking about is more like a primative 'flight director' - autopilot basically.. maintains alt, heading etc depending on which bits of the director are enabled. also on similar lines to cracking eggs with giant mechanical implements, a deadzone for joysticks would be great - pioneers implementation seems to assume that all joysticks are perfect (or perhaps i just suck at setting the things up?), and i'm sure lots of functions could be mapped to something like a xbox 360 joypad, which gives 2x analogue sticks, as well as analogue triggers - you could put a lot of thruster control over those twin sticks.

Coolhand wrote:
the controls are scaled for getting you around a galaxy, or at least a solar system, they are not scaled for sainsbury's carpark.
I lol'd - so much that my three-year-old daughter came and hugged me and asked if I was ok and "did you see that laughing pear again dad?" But yes, to summarise:* The current buildings aren't pretty. If you want nicer ones then make some yourself or encourage others to do so.* Recent builds (and thus alpha 11) allows manual adjustments to set-speed mode, so you can do some very fine movements around cities etc.* We don't have atmospheric friction/aerobraking. Its an open question as to whether we should or not.

robn wrote:
* We don't have atmospheric friction/aerobraking. Its an open question as to whether we should or not.
Could you clarify there Rob, i find skimming planetary atmospheres great for a shedding a few km/s off my speed for free. There does seem to be a fairly nice simulation of general drag and friction, do you just mean an aerodynamic model?i really think there should be an aerodynamic model, even if its very simple, i'd like to be able to perform orbital plane changes by ducking into the atmosphere and using that to change my course and feel the effects of flying in general.to keep it simple, make the flight model like that of a disk, so it doesn't matter which way one is pointing, but for example flying backwards and pointing the nose down would generate lift... or flying sideways to port while also banking the ship to port would generate negative lift. assume things like stability are handled by flight computer. It doesn't need to be xplane quality fluid dynamics to add to the experience.

Coolhand wrote:


robn wrote:
* We don't have atmospheric friction/aerobraking. Its an open question as to whether we should or not.
Could you clarify there Rob, i find skimming planetary atmospheres great for a shedding a few km/s off my speed for free. There does seem to be a fairly nice simulation of general drag and friction, do you just mean an aerodynamic model?
There, you've made a liar out of me. I should check these things more closely. There is a simple implementation of drag based on atmospheric density and object size. It certainly doesn't seem to do much at ground level. Presumably that's at least partly to do with our ship thrusters being so ridiculously powerful.
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to keep it simple, make the flight model like that of a disk, so it doesn't matter which way one is pointing, but for example flying backwards and pointing the nose down would generate lift... or flying sideways to port while also banking the ship to port would generate negative lift. assume things like stability are handled by flight computer. It doesn't need to be xplane quality fluid dynamics to add to the experience.
Whenever this kind of discussion comes up I think of the Panther, which is basically a flying box. It seems that any kind of aerodynamics should not apply in that case. Once we start making exceptions though we end up needing a way to specify/determine that a ship is shaped such that aerodynamics produce useful effects. I'm just not sure thats a level of complexity we want or need to go to.All that said, I've made it clear that I'm no expert in this at all, and for all I know its trivially easy to implement.

robn wrote:


Coolhand wrote:


robn wrote:
* We don't have atmospheric friction/aerobraking. Its an open question as to whether we should or not.
Could you clarify there Rob, i find skimming planetary atmospheres great for a shedding a few km/s off my speed for free. There does seem to be a fairly nice simulation of general drag and friction, do you just mean an aerodynamic model?
There, you've made a liar out of me. I should check these things more closely. There is a simple implementation of drag based on atmospheric density and object size. It certainly doesn't seem to do much at ground level. Presumably that's at least partly to do with our ship thrusters being so ridiculously powerful.
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to keep it simple, make the flight model like that of a disk, so it doesn't matter which way one is pointing, but for example flying backwards and pointing the nose down would generate lift... or flying sideways to port while also banking the ship to port would generate negative lift. assume things like stability are handled by flight computer. It doesn't need to be xplane quality fluid dynamics to add to the experience.
Whenever this kind of discussion comes up I think of the Panther, which is basically a flying box. It seems that any kind of aerodynamics should not apply in that case. Once we start making exceptions though we end up needing a way to specify/determine that a ship is shaped such that aerodynamics produce useful effects. I'm just not sure thats a level of complexity we want or need to go to.All that said, I've made it clear that I'm no expert in this at all, and for all I know its trivially easy to implement.
Well so far as massive bulky ships are concerned, even a brick, will - if propelled with enough force, with the right attitude - generate a lifting effect. My description probably makes it sound too trivial...I expect you could base the effect on the ships direction of motion, its motion vector or whatever you call it, and the attitude of the ship in relation to that. Using this difference to determine how powerful a thruster-like force to apply to the ships up / down axis (based on the angle of whatever sides leading edge is (whether its an actual leading edge is not important, only that its leading into the "airstream"))You could assume also that all ships are bit more slippery going forwards than they are in any other direction, with the most drag being induced as a side effect of the above lift process... but thats kindof a separate thing i would think. However as a consequence of the lift process, as the leading edge, or all edges i guess, approach 90 degrees perpendicular to the airstream, its generating "lift" now as a braking force, whether the ship is top or bottom facing to the airstream. so essentially, the lift increases with the angle of incidence, whether thats nose up or down, front side or back facing the airstream, except past a point, that lift is doing nothing but slow you down. but i'm sure none of that probably makes sense, and its probably a stupid way of doing it;)*edit* another thought http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lift-to-drag_ratio a basic implementation of a lift / drag ratio as a multiplier could be set for each ship, so certain designs which look more like an aircraft would generate more space shuttle levels of lift and boxy shapes generate very little lift for their larger drag... though none of the ships in pioneer would make particularly great aircraft so all would probably have poorer L/Ds than real aircraft.

as an alternative / refinement of the idea, perhaps just treat the flightmodel as always being oriented to the airstream. if you are aligned with the airstream - by flying directly into the airstream, whether thats nose, side, back etc, key thing is the ship has a flat attitude to the airstream - then the lift is neutral, you are in plane with airstream.if you perform any pitch manuver then you take the ship out of alignment with the incoming air. In real life this would generate a lift vector. pitching and rolling will also have the same effect, but rolling along will not affect things.so to work out how much force to apply, you need to work out the angle that this flat plane (an imaginary plane through the middle of the spacecraft bisecting it horizontally) now has to the airstream (how the ship is actually oriented is at this stage not considered, the nose could be yawed off to the side, half rolled over or the entire thing could be flying ass end first, upside down into the wind) then apply a thrusting force on the ships up or down axis accordingly. you could also use this difference between the angle of motion and the angle of the ship to approximate drag differences based on aspect/attitude. And being able to multiply this effect by a L/D number(which is really just an arbitrarily chosen number to use as a force multiplier) (and also being able to change a ships drag individually) would allow for a large difference in handling between craft in an atmosphere. eh, maybe i'm just explaining the same thing?

infact, if it works, you might want to use that same process but on the yaw axis , because 'side slipping' will also generate lift, even in flat and level flight, if you yaw a vehicle, it will generate what is basically lift, which pulls to the ship to the side... in which case the total lift vector will a function of these two values.

so how's work going on the cities? I've got to say, once proper cities and a decent combat engine have been implemented, we'll have a fairly magnificent game on our hands

robn wrote:
Whenever this kind of discussion comes up I think of the Panther, which is basically a flying box. It seems that any kind of aerodynamics should not apply in that case.
Was thinking about this robn and I have come up with a way around the aerodynamics problem. What you say is correct, a Panther like craft would essentially be like flying a brick. But, dont all the ships in Pioneer have shields? With a shield in place you could shape it to any aerodynamic form you liked around the hull of the ship. Then even a brick like Panther could generate lift. Just my thoughts

The panther would generate lift. Not efficiently, but noticeably.

any ideas for splitting the panther into 3 calsses ( a fast smaller freighter with guns) a all round ship and then a cargo cargo big fat target

Wouldn't it be easier to just design three separate ships? You could even label them as Panther derivatives if you like. Personally, I consider the Panther Clipper to be a bit of an icon. I'm sure everybody here who played Frontier more than a little would have flown a Panther, and would have gone through the tedium of assembling a crew for it. You might come across some popular resistance.

sorry yes that was my idea 3 classes of panther. Just a suggestion

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Wouldn't it be easier to just design three separate ships?
I did eventually plan on making a better Panther Clipper, hence why the one we currently have was named the Panther Trader... I was planning on jazzing it up some and then calling that version the Clipper.But I'm easy, its up to you guys...

s2odan no thats a good idea, perhaps a ship specific special weapon to

Ey, guys, focus.The conversation is about the aerodynamical flight of the ships.. And the convenience of adopting a surface flight model

surface flight mode, well the current one is easy enough to do. Would require changes to the autopilot etc, the original idea of the thread is the modular starport - how about 3 new classes of "storage sheds" small medium and large and may eventually be player placeable for some colony or storage modules

ollobrain wrote:
surface flight mode, well the current one is easy enough to do. Would require changes to the autopilot etc, the original idea of the thread is the modular starport - how about 3 new classes of "storage sheds" small medium and large and may eventually be player placeable for some colony or storage modules
The original idea of the thread is the modular city idea.Ok let´s Speak about The original idea of the thread as it was "until now". I am sorry.

Ollobrain, you seem to be consistently asking for some sort of empire building feature to be built into Pioneer. That wasn't part of Frontier, but it is an interesting idea. When you look at the ideas expressed here...http://pioneerspacesim.net/wiki/index.php?title=Gameplay_ideas_requiring_engine_support#Network_features...it doesn't seem too far fetched.

think outside the box