Space combat QOL
Posted: Sun Oct 23, 2022 5:44 am
It's very hard to get the ship waypoints oriented since whole arrow business is so coarse, it just jumps around. You'd really need to be able to draw a vector where you'd like to point the nose at. Or just click on waypoint and then do "x marks the spot" to give the aimpoint.
Something simple like the mouse just goes x/y and mousewheel does Z would take a load off the fiddly difficult to control arrow we've got right now. You probably would need one of those 3D controllers that mechanical designers use to make the controls work properly with the current scheme.
If we can get a 3D grid, it'd help a bit.
There is a padlock command, that's hidden in "special commands", perhaps it should come out of there? The downside of that command is that you then can't burn. I can see where you're coming from with that as pointing nose at target and burning isn't the best idea in newtonian space. But perhaps we need a couple of additional commands such as "close in" to a given target. Or, say, close in towards an "x marks the spot" position in the 3D grid you just added for us. With burn control widget so I can say "close in to the target with 2kps burn" or something to that effect.
Finally, you can get oscillation when you have two AI objects closing in towards each other. If you're old enough to remember Elite: Frontier, that game suffered from it big time. It had this autopilot mode that was supposed to close in with a selected enemy ship, only the problem is that the said enemy ship was ALSO using that same mode. What would happen is that the ships would wildly oscillate in yo-yo fashion of accelerating to a great speed and passing each other far too fast to lay any fire.. And then flip over and apply braking burn for the next loop. I think something like that might be happening when you allow AI to control ships as the xenos are making high-dV turns and your ships are then trying to compensate which makes xenos change their flight path and .. You see where this is going![Rolling Eyes :roll:](./images/smilies/icon_rolleyes.gif)
I don't know what's a reasonable solution to that problem. In any case the speeds don't get out of hand like that here but your ships definitely think waving their butt at the enemy is the way to go. Sorry guys, but you don't have a torch drive that can be weaponized yet. With Elite: Frontier the solution was to simply switch off the autopilot, ignoring what the manual says. That way the AI would use it's close-in autopilot and would nicely plot intercept and synchronize speed when close by. You could then use lateral thrusters manually to wiggle the ship while pointing your nose at the enemy.
Something simple like the mouse just goes x/y and mousewheel does Z would take a load off the fiddly difficult to control arrow we've got right now. You probably would need one of those 3D controllers that mechanical designers use to make the controls work properly with the current scheme.
If we can get a 3D grid, it'd help a bit.
There is a padlock command, that's hidden in "special commands", perhaps it should come out of there? The downside of that command is that you then can't burn. I can see where you're coming from with that as pointing nose at target and burning isn't the best idea in newtonian space. But perhaps we need a couple of additional commands such as "close in" to a given target. Or, say, close in towards an "x marks the spot" position in the 3D grid you just added for us. With burn control widget so I can say "close in to the target with 2kps burn" or something to that effect.
Finally, you can get oscillation when you have two AI objects closing in towards each other. If you're old enough to remember Elite: Frontier, that game suffered from it big time. It had this autopilot mode that was supposed to close in with a selected enemy ship, only the problem is that the said enemy ship was ALSO using that same mode. What would happen is that the ships would wildly oscillate in yo-yo fashion of accelerating to a great speed and passing each other far too fast to lay any fire.. And then flip over and apply braking burn for the next loop. I think something like that might be happening when you allow AI to control ships as the xenos are making high-dV turns and your ships are then trying to compensate which makes xenos change their flight path and .. You see where this is going
![Rolling Eyes :roll:](./images/smilies/icon_rolleyes.gif)
I don't know what's a reasonable solution to that problem. In any case the speeds don't get out of hand like that here but your ships definitely think waving their butt at the enemy is the way to go. Sorry guys, but you don't have a torch drive that can be weaponized yet. With Elite: Frontier the solution was to simply switch off the autopilot, ignoring what the manual says. That way the AI would use it's close-in autopilot and would nicely plot intercept and synchronize speed when close by. You could then use lateral thrusters manually to wiggle the ship while pointing your nose at the enemy.