Elite : Dangerous .... Space is big

[Dystopia]

Elite will appeal to those with a scientific mind set. The speed of light is referenced a lot in the game, both in speed of the ship, to distance to other planets (as in 1,300 light seconds away, or 390,000,000 km away).

1. Normal sublight speed. Limited to 500m/s. The main reason for this is multi player. Having two (or more)players approach each other in normal space at 1,000’s of km/s just wouldn’t work in a game. All combat takes place at this speed.

:facepalm: Seriously, "appeal to those with a scientific mind set" and "500m/s speed limit" don't go together very well. Also what's supposed to be so scientific about measuring distances in light seconds instead of kilometres?

 

[Dystopia]

SnowGhost[/url]":di2taue2]

Dystopia[/url]":di2taue2]

Elite will appeal to those with a scientific mind set. The speed of light is referenced a lot in the game, both in speed of the ship, to distance to other planets (as in 1,300 light seconds away, or 390,000,000 km away).

1. Normal sublight speed. Limited to 500m/s. The main reason for this is multi player. Having two (or more)players approach each other in normal space at 1,000’s of km/s just wouldn’t work in a game. All combat takes place at this speed.

:facepalm: Seriously, "appeal to those with a scientific mind set" and "500m/s speed limit" don't go together very well. Also what's supposed to be so scientific about measuring distances in light seconds instead of kilometres?

I didn't say it was a simulation. If you want that, go with kerbal Space program or frontier : Elite 2. There are numerous changes made in the name of game play over realism, or having to deal with reality.

Maybe you want to complain about exceeding the speed of light as well. Or the fact that time dilation doesn't happen. Of that the 'G' forces that a sidewinder can apply to the pilot are deadly (about 20g)

Way to miss my point. The point was that those two statement are incongruous, not that the latter is necessarily bad.

As to light seconds over kilometers, if you're not aware that 1 ls = 300,000km then you're going to have some difficulty in figuring out how far away you are from your destination. If you can't work out that travelling at 20c is 20 times the speed of light, then it's not for you. I'd expect most people at Arstechnica to know what 'c' is (No, not the programming langauge). But if you ask random people, they'll probably tell you it's the 3rd letter of the alphabet and not be able to add anything further.

Except you didn't say it's more convenient, you said it's more scientific. It isn't. It's not even especially convenient either, since you can handle large numbers the I-War did i.e. by switching to scientific notation when the numbers get too big.

I'm glad to see the 500 m/s limit. I remember playing Elite:Frontier with full newtonian combat, and it was just space jousting with 3 second engagements followed by a minute or two while you did a 180, decelerated and re-accelerated.
For gameplay reasons, I want dogfighting to be good.

That happens because either the players don't know how to play properly or because game balance favours hit and run attacks over sustained engagements too strongly.

The first will solve itself because better players will beat the ones that rely on the jousting tactic.

On the other hand if balance is the problem, then you need to change the way the game works. If jousting is optimal then it's probably because it's too easy to land a catastrophic hit with only a few shots. Thus the tiny firing window you get from extreme closing speeds is both necessary to avoid taking such hits and is sufficient to dish them out. Take a look at this video. There's your problem right there. Lasers at a range close enough that they might as well be hit scan, with perfect precision and a couple of shots are sufficient for a kill. It's no bloody wonder jousting is optimal under those conditions if the engine allows it. It's not the Newtonian flight model, it's the gunnery model.

It's obvious that you can have a Newtonian flight model without fights degenerating into jousts because I-War did just that. The crucial differences were guns that were much weaker relative to defences, a fast auto repair system, large missile racks, low acceleration and a heavy focus on systems damage. Consequently in I-War attempting to joust would result in you blasting past your target, failing to kill it and a lengthy period of low speed as you braked and reversed course, at which point you'd get half a dozen missiles in your face. And then those missiles would be followed up by your target, having fully repaired in the meantime, having not mirrored your headlong charge, pummeling your spinning, crippled arse with guns until you blow up. I-War didn't enforce a speed limit contrary to physics, you just naturally kept to speeds you could control in a dog fight because doing a Jeremy Clarkson impression was very far from optimal.

It is not possible to have an internet based multiplayer game in which players are interacting with each other at speeds much above those of WWII fighter aircraft. Latency causes the differences between what the two players see to become too extreme above those speeds. Even WWII fighter speeds cause problems. Elite 2 type speeds would be impossible to sync. One player might be right behind another and shooting while that other player couldn't even detect the one shooting at him due to being out of scanner range.

I never played Elite 2, and frankly it doesn't matter because the specific numbers aren't the point. You don't need an artificial speed limit to make this work. Your problem is that speeds are too high? No, it's that those ludicrous speeds are too easy to reach. Because acceleration is too high. Allowing your ships to accelerate at 20G means they hit speeds that are way too high for the game to handle? Then don't have them accelerate at 20G, drop that figure down to, say, 1G. Now instead of instead of capping speeds to a few 100m/s because of magic drag in vacuum, you'll have players staying at around those speeds because combat control becomes too difficult above them. Or if it's scanner range that's the problem, then boost that. Increase or decrease ship sizes if gunnery accuracy is the problem. It's a fictional world, you can adjust whatever properties you need to.

These problems are not intractable if think your way out of them. Now if you want WW2 fighters in space, then that's fine, do that. That's a legitimate creative decision. Just don't give some lame excuse about a Newtonian model being inherently unviable.

 

[Dystopia]

Happysin[/url]":3447220u]

It's obvious that you can have a Newtonian flight model without fights degenerating into jousts because I-War did just that.

Huh? Damn-near all my IW1 fights turned into jousts.

'Cause you were doing it wrong. The Dreadnaught can dance if you master your lateral thrusters. Circle strafing will give you far better control over your range than simple charges ever can. Set your throttle to zero and keep it there. Use your overrides for forward/backward thrust. Map your hat switch to lateral thrusters. Then you can make effective use of your 6DoF. Keep your forward velocity under 1000m/s in the last 10km when closing on an enemy and start sliding sideways or vertically (go underneath your target if he lacks lower shields, as patcoms do). Roll/pitch/yaw to keep your nose pointed at your target, while leading him a bit. Reverse your engines as you do this until you're about perpendicular to your original heading, then start thrusting forwards again. Open up on him with your guns at about 3km from him. The result will be that you'll sweep around your target in an arc and your high apparent angular motion will make you hard to hit without robbing you of firing opportunities. Best of all if the target tries to joust then you'll be able to unload into his unshielded parts after he overshoots you. Jousting isn't a strategy, it's more a failure to control your ship properly. I-War will reward you if you remember you're in space. Even if you want to do a hit and run attack you should still fly a semi-circle around your target as you pass.

Karnak[/url]":3447220u]Accleration numbers that are low enough to not cause the problems are not adequate for a space game. WWII fighters have accelerations that are much too high for your purposes. Those accelerations work for WWII fighter games because drag stops the aircraft from getting too fast, but put a Spitfire Mk XIV in a dragless model with the same acceleration it has at 180mph (close to peak acceleration) and you'll be doing thousands or tens of thousands of KPH before you know it, much too fast for multiplayer interaction considering the effects of latency. To do what you suggest we'd probably need to limit acceleration to something like Foker Eindecker (very early WWI fighter, 1915) levels of acceleration.

You're missing the point. Acceleration is not the only variable the developer can control. There's nothing about thousands of KPH that makes the game inherently unplayable, lag or no lag. It's the combination of those speeds, targets that are only 10m or so long, short weapon ranges and completely manual aiming that cause the problem. Incidentally this is why this sort of fighting will a complete non-starter in real life. But the point is there's no reason you can't make the ships bigger, make shots travel farther, add a degree of auto aim or place a greater emphasis on missiles. It only becomes a problem when you set your universe up such that players have to shoot flies under conditions that are conducive to shooting nothing smaller than an elephant. Or to put it another way, setting up a 1m target on a 100m range is no different than setting up a 10m target on a 1000m range, especially once you take gravity and wind out of the picture.

He's also trying to fit the I-war model onto a completely different game. In Elite: Frontiers, you could be attacked at any time. Thus, you could be traveling using time compression at several kilometres per second simply to cross a solar system and get where you wanted to go. You seldom got to choose where and how you wanted to engage.

And that's different from I-War's LDS how exactly?

 

[Dystopia]

Happysin[/url]":rsb9w25r]

'Cause you were doing it wrong. The Dreadnaught can dance if you master your lateral thrusters. Circle strafing will give you far better control over your range than simple charges ever can. Set your throttle to zero and keep it there. Use your overrides for forward/backward thrust. Map your hat switch to lateral thrusters. Then you can make effective use of your 6DoF. Keep your forward velocity under 1000m/s in the last 10km when closing on an enemy and start sliding sideways or vertically (go underneath your target if he lacks lower shields, as patcoms do). Roll/pitch/yaw to keep your nose pointed at your target, while leading him a bit. Reverse your engines as you do this until you're about perpendicular to your original heading, then start thrusting forwards again. Open up on him with your guns at about 3km from him. The result will be that you'll sweep around your target in an arc and your high apparent angular motion will make you hard to hit without robbing you of firing opportunities. Best of all if the target tries to joust then you'll be able to unload into his unshielded parts after he overshoots you. Jousting isn't a strategy, it's more a failure to control your ship properly. I-War will reward you if you remember you're in space. Even if you want to do a hit and run attack you should still fly a semi-circle around your target as you pass.

That's all well and good, but we're talking about online multiplayer. I severely doubt that you're going to get a player population dense enough to understand "they were doing it wrong". As such, if other people are jousting at you, lateral control is of very limited use, unless you are already traveling roughly the same rate of speed in the same direction. So it's great that it's an option, but it's one that is unlikely to translate into PvP much.

Of course it matters. Assuming the game does not in fact enforce jousting as the dominant strategy, then countering jousters in this manner, or something like will allow you to win pretty consistently, provided the hardware* disparity isn't too great. If the jouster gets the jump on you then he has an edge, but that's true of any surprise. If he doesn't have the element of surprise, then he's imposing some pretty severe limitations on himself. Namely the small firing window, the uncontrolled overshoot, the difficulty of dealing with your high apparent motion and the window of vulnerability after passing you. If he jousts at you and you react by circle strafing him he is forced to make a choice. Either he commits to his charge and has to land very good hits, under difficult conditions, while making himself a very predictable target. Or he abandons his charge and responds by maneuvering, either for a better firing position or for a better defensive one. The latter is a difficult option to execute thanks to his high momentum, and it gets harder the longer he waits to try it. Thus you have the first mover advantage. You're now forcing him to fight on your terms.

Jousting is just like the lame strategies favoured by noobs in other games. Even if they are effective against a lot of players they'll be beaten by someone with a better understanding of the mechanics.

*I mean in game hardware i.e. your ship.

 

[Dystopia]

Karnak[/url]":35swrz60]

Dystopia[/url]":35swrz60]

Karnak[/url]":35swrz60]Accleration numbers that are low enough to not cause the problems are not adequate for a space game. WWII fighters have accelerations that are much too high for your purposes. Those accelerations work for WWII fighter games because drag stops the aircraft from getting too fast, but put a Spitfire Mk XIV in a dragless model with the same acceleration it has at 180mph (close to peak acceleration) and you'll be doing thousands or tens of thousands of KPH before you know it, much too fast for multiplayer interaction considering the effects of latency. To do what you suggest we'd probably need to limit acceleration to something like Foker Eindecker (very early WWI fighter, 1915) levels of acceleration.

You're missing the point. Acceleration is not the only variable the developer can control. There's nothing about thousands of KPH that makes the game inherently unplayable, lag or no lag. It's the combination of those speeds, targets that are only 10m or so long, short weapon ranges and completely manual aiming that cause the problem. Incidentally this is why this sort of fighting will a complete non-starter in real life. But the point is there's no reason you can't make the ships bigger, make shots travel farther, add a degree of auto aim or place a greater emphasis on missiles. It only becomes a problem when you set your universe up such that players have to shoot flies under conditions that are conducive to shooting nothing smaller than an elephant. Or to put it another way, setting up a 1m target on a 100m range is no different than setting up a 10m target on a 1000m range, especially once you take gravity and wind out of the picture.

Sorry, but you don't know what you're talking about. You really don't.

It isn't about hitting the enemy. It is about the universe being presented on person A's computer being too divergent from the universe presented on person B's computer. If the differences are to large, and the higher the speeds the larger the differences are, it becomes a problem for the game. ~400mph aircraft already have noticeable problems. I speak from years of experience in that kind of game, as well as conversations with the developers of said game.

You're still missing the point. Consider what happen if you added a zero to every number. Nothing would change because everything would be the same relative to everything else. If using large numbers has some sort of magical properties why did Starlancer's netcode work? The fighters in that game flew at ~400km/s, yet the game didn't implode. Because it's an arbitrary number, what matters is their relationship to each other, not their absolute magnitude. Any game's netcode is going to have to tolerate some level of variance between clients and that tolerance is going to be proportional to the size and speed of things. The problem doesn't arise because you adjust the speed of the ships, it arises from not also adjusting other things to compensate.

Maybe an analogy is order. Say I want to make a cup of teriyaki sauce. I'd need 1/4 cup of each soy sauce, mirin, sake and brown sugar. Now suppose I wanted 4 cups of teriyaki sauce. If I tried to achieve that by just adding another 3 cups of soy sauce, then the result would be crap. If on the other I added another 3/4 cups of each ingredient then the resulting sauce would be exactly the same as the first one, just that there'd be more of it.

You also have to make the game fun. Firing missiles from a dreadnought at other dreadnoughts is relatively limiting. You could make a game like that, but I am not sure you'd get as much interest or sales. It is kind of immersion breaking for every player to have their own personal dreadnought or superfreighter.

Because space fighters are so realistic. Yet we don't generally hear people crapping on Freespace for being immersion breaking. It's fiction, you can have whatever sort of ships you want to be common.

Also you seem to have missed that "Dreadnaught" was a name, not a class. The Dreadnaught in I-War is the lead ship of the dreadnaught class corvettes and is a relatively small ship in its universe. In age of sail terms it's maybe a 4th rate frigate.

HappyBunny[/url]":35swrz60]I get that at this point you're just trying to argue that removing the speed limit could be technically viable, but you're basically arguing here to change the entire game to get something which would play similarly except not have a fixed speed cap. That's a bit absurd, don't you think?

Yeah, I'm just attacking a bad argument. If the developers like the gameplay effects of the speed limit, then I haven't got any argument with that. It's the argument that it's that way because it has to be that irks me.