Elite: Dangerous

[Kem0sabe]

Crispy, this thread obviously needs your deft touch of moderation

 

[Bradylama]

Don't think bullshit should evoke nerdrage?
Then GTFO.

If you rate unrealistic space physics as bullshit, then the amount of games you could actually play would not even number the fingers of a single hand.

Kerbal Space Program isn't completely realistic either, especially regarding the amount of force those tiny little thrusters could actually emit. You're full of it m8.

 

[DraQ]

Okay, that's a good response.

But aren't you taking it a bit far, even for... you?

Don't think so.

ED has legacy of not just Elite, which was incredibly simplistic space trading "sim", but also FE2 and FFE that got the physics, at least on a simplistic, ship + 1 gravitating mass + 3 degrees of translational freedom + engines producing acceleration from nothing (constant ship mass) level impressively right, as well as it's own unfortunate KS promises.

FE2 ran on 286, Atari and Amiga, FFE required PC, but still a hilariously low-end one by today's standards, both allowed stuff like conventional space travel at pretty much arbitrary velocity, including switching between moving frames of reference actual orbital movement (in realspace) and physically correct spaceflight physics with purely technical concessions of not having variable ship mass (due to different payloads and expenditure of propellant), not modelling rotation physically, and not accounting for more than single dominant gravity source at any given time.
Both didn't specifically fudge or tweak any aspect of physics directly.

It would be perfectly reasonable to expect flight physics mirroring those games but with technical limitations gone (including all celestial bodies in system in gravity calculations is trivial and amounts to summation of at most N vectors where N is the number of major objects per ship/projectile/dynamic object - it doesn't involve solving n-body problem since the gravity sources are all on-rails and stuff affected by gravity dynamically is effectively massless as far as its own gravity field is concerned, while forces masses and rotations are part of any reasonable physics package these days) as was promised, while the excuses leveled at the fandom were bullshit given that a vector of 3 64bit precision ints is perfectly sufficient to represent any reasonable coordinate and velocity in a planetary system with fixed granularity fine enough for any discreteness to be unnoticeable by a human, while eliminating precision problems caused by large values in floating point calculations and given that any change of position of a dynamic body in such physical system would be easily decomposed into expected change accurately predictable from current velocity and deviation from it that is, in turn, limited by ship's max acceleration, making relative velocity of two ships irrelevant when it comes to precision of the general simulation. At worst it would require some workarounds for collision calculation, but any inaccuracies at extremely high velocities would be undetectable by a human.

In short, we're fed bullshit, so we rage, nothing new under the Troll With Twenty-sided Die.

 

[Bradylama]

They were also titles that allowed for time acceleration so flying anywhere wouldn't take an entire lifetime, so if you can come up with a way to model that experience in a game designed for multiplayer functionality be my guest. X3, oft brought up in these discussions, did the same thing.

Now maybe you'd have a point to argue that this is all a bunch of bullshit if this was a title designed by committee to appeal the widest audience like Fallout 3, but it's not. This is still driven primarily by the original creator of the franchise, and it stands to reason that the decided upon game mechanics reflect his vision. You can complain all you want about how you don't like these decisions and that you would have preferred a sequel to Frontier: First Encounters, but that's not the sequel that the actual creator of the series wanted to do. So the claim that there is some kind of objective wrongdoing being done to the gaming public or to fans of the series is just plain wrong. Fans of the original games have expressed their satisfaction with the state of the sequel in this very thread as being authentic, so at the end of the day you're just sperging out because they didn't design the sequel that you wanted. It doesn't matter if they could model the game the way you wanted them to, they chose not to because it didn't fit the design vision.

 

[J_C]

Well, like you said:

In physics you don't get HUD showing magically divined "right" value of speed.

You get infinity different velocity vectors relative to infinity different frames of reference and there is not a single one that would be in any way special.


Why? I don't fucking care.

The choice of value displayed is a convention dictated by convenience, not physics.
According to physics it has and can have no bearing on ship's rotation.

You do know that there is a difference between rotation speed and turn speed, don't you? Speed has no effect on the rotation of a object. You are right. But we are talking about the turn rate of a ship, which is a completely different, and has a lot to do with speed. I think you are talking about something like the ship going in a straight line, and starting to spin around its own axis. But it keeps going forwards. That is rotation, and it has nothing to do with speed. Turn rate is when you go in a straight line, and change direction by turning. The speed of changing heading is affected by turn rate, and it is affected by speed.

Ok, what exactly do you mean by "change inertia" because I don't think it means what you think it means.


Maybe you should try reading it first?

Maybe I expressed myself poorly with my english, although I don't think so. As I said, we are not rotating around our axis, but chaning our heading from 0 degrees to let's say 45 degrees.

http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/33511/how-will-you-measure-speed-in-km-hr-in-space
Maybe you should try reading it first?

Why? All you did was parroting that "what is speed in space duuuuuuuuh", I just showed you the possible answers.

In the end, I wasn't arguing that Elite applies physics right, but saying such bullshit that the turn rate of any object is not effected by its speed is fucking bullshit. Let's make your stand clear, and please answer this. You are basicly arguing that if an object with 1 tonne is moving forward with the speed of 500m/s, it can change its heading by 90 degrees the same time as an other object with 10 tonne, moving at a speed of 5000m/s.

 

[DraQ]

They were also titles that allowed for time acceleration so flying anywhere wouldn't take an entire lifetime, so if you can come up with a way to model that experience in a game designed for multiplayer functionality be my guest.

Just throw in FSD or whatever, like they actually did. It's shit but if you want MP and CBA to implement partly separate mechanics for SP and MP (time compression and FSD) you just have to work with that.

The thing is, even with FSD, you may still want to fly normally on short distances - circumplanetary spaces with stations in orbit, moon systems and so on - there is a lot of stuff you can do perfectly well in real time.
Meanwhile, in ED you can't even Gagarin because speed limit.

Now maybe you'd have a point to argue that this is all a bunch of bullshit if this was a title designed by committee to appeal the widest audience like Fallout 3, but it's not. This is still driven primarily by the original creator of the franchise, and it stands to reason that the decided upon game mechanics reflect his vision.

Yeah, and as we have discovered multiple times already, people, even visionary geniuses, just break with time and accumulated fame.

It's now pretty evident that DB has, and that DB is currently broken.
He is no longer the same visionary that coded 250k lines of assembly language that became Frontier.

So the claim that there is some kind of objective wrongdoing being done to the gaming public or to fans of the series is just plain wrong.

It is objective wrongdoing because the product delivered doesn't match promises given to get it funded, and the disparity can't be chalked up to something understandable like hitting technical limitation, it's because someone decided that fuck whatever he promised to the fundraisers if it conflicts his Vishun(TM). It's that simple.

Fans of the original games have expressed their satisfaction with the state of the sequel in this very thread as being authentic

Translation: It has Lave in it.

I have seen fans of the original games expressing their satisfaction with Fallout 3 too.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

You do know that there is a difference between rotation speed and turn speed, don't you? Speed has no effect on the rotation of a object. You are right. But we are talking about the turn rate of a ship, which is a completely different, and has a lot to do with speed. I think you are talking about something like the ship going in a straight line, and starting to spin around its own axis. But it keeps going forwards. That is rotation, and it has nothing to do with speed. Turn rate is when you go in a straight line, and change direction by turning. The speed of changing heading is affected by turn rate, and it is affected by speed.

changing flight direction vector might require energy depending on speed, but rotating the ship around is only a matter of manouvering thrusters.
all of elite's ships' manouvering thrusters suck big time. that's it.

 

[DraQ]

There is no reason for rotation to be dependent on current velocity and there is no real relationship between rotation and changing your trajectory (turning) with aerodynamics out of the picture.
So if you're going too fast to turn at given rate you should rotate just the same, but with ship starting to drift noticeably.

So, a 180 rotation should take the exact same amount of time regardless of how fast you're travelling, which is useful when, for example, tracking a target in a fight with fixed, forward firing guns.

 

[praetor]

That's a pretty big "other than", don't you think?
Especially when this speed cap falls well within velocities achievable while dogfighting and is one of the main factors differentiating ships from one another, while also falling well below most velocities you might be specifically interested in achieving, like ones required to stay in stable orbit around most bodies.

It's almost like saying "other than the patients death the operation was successful".

no it isn't. it would be like saying "other the the patient losing his memory, the brain surgery was successful. he's still living and functional, he just won't be the same person ever again" because it's similar but not the same (yeah, the "ship is most manoeuvrable at X thrusters setting" is kinda stupid and i have no idea if it has some in-game explanation, but afaik that's only with FA on), and i'd say it's actually a bit more fun, engaging, interesting and perhaps even more tactical than FE2/FFE. plus, it's more than reasonable to assume those thrusters are puny and only there for fine manoeuvres/ship-to-station/ship-to-ship interactions) and far from enough to achieve FTL speeds (there's the FSD for that and every ship can achieve the same speeds with the FSD, there's not limit afaik, but i didn't go over 130c). with FA off it's basically the same thing except that little speed counter says 300 (m/s) instead of 30Mm/s and the engagement distances are somewhat shorter (and you have to "pull out" the ship out of supercruise for combat so you can have many vs many fights only at predetermined locations which is kinda stupid). so yeah, this:



isn't really all that different from this:

It would be perfectly reasonable to expect flight physics mirroring those games but with technical limitations gone (including all celestial bodies in system in gravity calculations is trivial and amounts to summation of at most N vectors where N is the number of major objects per ship/projectile/dynamic object - it doesn't involve solving n-body problem since the gravity sources are all on-rails and stuff affected by gravity dynamically is effectively massless as far as its own gravity field is concerned, while forces masses and rotations are part of any reasonable physics package these days) as was promised

In short, we're fed bullshit, so we rage, nothing new under the Troll With Twenty-sided Die.

no, it wasn't promised and no it wasn't reasonable to expect it 'cause this isn't a sequel to the Frontier branch of Elite (plenty of open and/or free remakes etc there so there's really no need for another, official one just with fancy graphics), but a more direct sequel to the original with some of the advancements from the Frontier games (namely the whole milky way). in fact, if you actually read the KS page you'd have seen this:

I loved the richness of the galaxy, but with the benefit of hindsight I think the way the ships flew detracted from the joyous immediacy of those in “Elite”.

(although to be fair there's also this:

Q: Will you have Newtonian physics in the game?

A: Yes. The degree of the fly-by-wire to override the feeling of skidding is something we will carefully tune.

but considering both, the best you can argue is "mixed signals" not "they promised us improved newtonian flight mechanics compared to FE2/FFE")

yes we were fed bullshit, most of the game is shit (just not for the reasons you mentioned) and the rage is justified, just not the bullshit rage you and other 'sperglords continually spout that has nothing to do with the actual missing features that were promised (offline being the biggest and most obvious)

 

[J_C]

changing flight direction vector might require energy depending on speed, but rotating the ship around is only a matter of manouvering thrusters.
all of elite's ships' manouvering thrusters suck big time. that's it.

There is no reason for rotation to be dependent on current velocity and there is no real relationship between rotation and changing your trajectory (turning) with aerodynamics out of the picture.
So if you're going too fast to turn at given rate you should rotate just the same, but with ship starting to drift noticeably.

So, a 180 rotation should take the exact same amount of time regardless of how fast you're travelling, which is useful when, for example, tracking a target in a fight with fixed, forward firing guns.

changing flight direction vector might require energy depending on speed,

Thank you for admitting that I was right MadMax. Cause all I said was this, it was not about rotation speed, not about how Elite implemented physics, just this:

changing flight direction vector might require energy depending on speed,

This:

changing flight direction vector might require energy depending on speed,

This:

changing flight direction vector might require energy depending on speed,

Now fuck off.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

only problem is we're talking about why the fuck elite's spaceships turn (without changingflight direction vector) slower the higher the speed.

 

[J_C]

only problem is we're talking about why the fuck elite's spaceships turn (without changingflight direction vector) slower the higher the speed.

Actually the argument started with this:

I've yet to hear a good explanation about why ships turn rate varies with their linear speed, and that's just the first thing that comes to mind.

So we were not talking about rotation speed but turn rate. Because those are not the same thing. Stop mixing them up goddammit!

 

[Duellist_D]

The expansions play quite differently you say.



None of the ships in E: D fly the same either, which makes me wonder again why you think it's a contrast.



NPC manufacturers will never produce strategic components to construct your own private navy. That's all left up to the player. It makes sense that the player would have to construct his own factories to produce on a sufficient scale, but not that literally nothing is available on the market. On top of that, the player is the only person in the galaxy who constructs new factories, so the manufacturing economy lacks any dynamism whatsoever.

Yes, the expansions play different. Posting smug smilies doesn't make up for the evident lack of knowledge you show.
And again, which X3 game did you play?
Because the "only Player builds new Factories" part is utter bullshit since at least Terran Conflict.
The GOD Script-Modul removes and rebuilds NPC Factories and every single part you need for your fleets is built in NPC factories.
Thing is, production speed is really slow since there are no closed loops present, thus generating an incentive for the player to do his stuff.

 

[TripJack]

So we were not talking about rotation speed but turn rate.

nope im p sure dbx was talking about what you are calling rotation speed, which does vary with travel speed in ED

 

[J_C]

nope im p sure dbx was talking about what you are calling rotation speed, which does vary with travel speed in ED

Maybe, but it is not my fault that people are not familiar with the basic terminology of flight. I was talking about turn rate.

 

[potatojohn]

So apparently they updated their code of conduct to ban all swearing. Fascinating

You agree to not: Be insulting to any person via obscene, offensive, hateful or inflammatory comments via the in-game text or voice communications.

That's fine I'll just do it in private chat where only consenting adults can hear it...

by playing the game you give Frontier your express consent to monitor and record your communications.

Geez, well maybe I can say frigg or something instead how's that?

You agree to not: Use sexually explicit or harmful language including the use of misspelled or punctuated words to insinuate, represent any of the above - also known as "masked swearing"

Well f... I mean that's really unfortunate. But I guess I can just politely express my displeasure with players who I think aren't very good at the game then

You agree to not: Be abusive to other players based on race, sex, religion, nationality, disability, sexual orientation, age or other criteria that offends other users.

 

[Bradylama]

Because the "only Player builds new Factories" part is utter bullshit since at least Terran Conflict.
The GOD Script-Modul removes and rebuilds NPC Factories and every single part you need for your fleets is built in NPC factories.

I.e. it took three years and an expansion before a user-made script module fixed the economy of the game. You completely lack any sense of perspective regarding the current state of this game, by comparing it to a title that's been out for 9 years and was practically the only space sandbox on the market. Now you're heaping blame on Frontier Developments for not having the same scope a mere month after its release.

I was playing Albion Prelude, if you must know, with the expansion mod.

It's fucking comical seeing a Codexer criticize a game for not having the Skyrim Treatment, where everything is "fixed" by user mods.

 

[Weirdstuffinspace]

Draq

 

[SuicideBunny]

funny thing just happened. i was scooping fuel at the midway point of my rares route while browsing the codex and typing "it's also fucking comical to see a codexer who thinks that mods fix anything in skyrim" to post in here, when i noticed an interdiction in the background. once loading finished i deployed hardpoints and prepared to warrant scan the other ship, only to see the eagle blow up before i even finished facing it..... fun times. also gotta love all those death com messages from system authority vessels that try to get behind you while scooping up real close and plummet into the sun while doing so.

 

[DraQ]

i'd say it's actually a bit more fun, engaging, interesting and perhaps even more tactical than FE2/FFE.

That's actually not much of an achievement, because combat in FE2/FFE was dead simple and, frankly, it sucked (and how could it not if it consisted of zapping each other with hitscan lasers in the most uncluttered environment imaginable?).
The thing is that it could have easily been made far more interesting and complex without compromising the physics, which, despite of scarcity of Newtonian spasims, can still be easily proven with games like I-War.

isn't really all that different from this:

Those two vids actually prove my point - if fudging the physics was meant to make combat less like FE2, it failed, losing physical correctness and gaining nothing in exchange (go team FD!).
Same with velocity cap - all it seemed to achieve was that a reasonably fast ship could accelerate to its speed cap turn backward (FA off) and keep pelting the pursuer with weapon fire with pursuer being unable to do much of anything (because of flying at speed cap), whereas without speed cap the pursuer would be able to overtake a ship flying backwards and attack its broad over/underside (has glorious and unerring FD fixed it somehow, if so what else did they break in the process?).

it's more than reasonable to assume those thrusters are puny and only there for fine manoeuvres/ship-to-station/ship-to-ship interactions) and far from enough to achieve FTL speeds (there's the FSD for that and every ship can achieve the same speeds with the FSD, there's not limit afaik, but i didn't go over 130c). with FA off it's basically the same thing except that little speed counter says 300 (m/s) instead of 30Mm/s and the engagement distances are somewhat shorter

Nigga, please, what FTL speeds?
Do you even realize how fucking fast the light is?
No one is speaking of reaching even a significant fraction of c using conventional drives. In original Frontier ships had theoretically-human-tolerable-for-short-time-but-still-fucking-mental accelerations and had delta-v budgets allowing for keeping them up for entire travel times and still rarely exceeded 0.1c. Pioneer (open source Frontier remake/inspired game) has much more modest accelerations (still more than sufficient for dogfighting) and delta-v, so you generally don't exceed 0.02c .
Speed cap in FE2/FFE had no way of influencing actual gameplay, whereas speed cap in ED is smacj dab in the middle of actual gameplay.
It's like saying that there is an absolutely no practical difference between a wide open world sandbox and a corridor shooter because in an open world sandbox the world still has to end somewhere.
It's retarded and full of shit.

If a game is about fucking spaceships, then speed counter only going up to 300m/s is a big problem because today's fighters can go much faster than that, despite being powered by primitve combustion engines that can rarely accelerate them above 1G AND despite having to fight against aerodynamic drag all the time. It's also because speed counter shouldn't go up to any sort of upper limit. How much you accelerate in space isn't limited by any sort of hard ceiling, in particular it isn't limited by your thrust (in fact efficient engines giving barely more thrust than a fucking flashlight may be your best bet for achieving ludicrous velocities because of limited propellant reserves and because of how momentum and energy work). Nearing c you still aren't reaching any sort of hard ceiling but the things are just getting more and more freaky as you accelerate and only for external observer at that - from your own perspective you just keep accelerating indefinitely.

300m/s is also way below anything reasonable for space maneuvering, because at 300m/s you can't really get into orbit around anything too massive to leave by a car - if 300m/s is your new c, then pretty much any body worth mentioning by name is practically a black hole for you.

Anyway, the only kind of ceiling you may have to deal with is running out of propellant but that doesn't give you any exact value - you may run out of propellant accelerating to max velocity equal to your delta-v budget or you may accelerate to half of it, then run out of juice coming to a halt.
In fact, having casual FTL in your game (FSD) makes a good excuse for limited delta-v budgets (you don't really need more than is required for STO, OTS and some orbital maneuvring/combat in between, just like you don't need good running shoes if you're driving a car), which is convenient, allowing you to put your max velocity limit somewhere players won't ever see but still many orders of magnitude below c, but by "limited" I mean something on the order of tens of km/s at least, so you should in principle be capable of accelerating to tens of thousands of m/s at which point you'd be out of juice and drifting helplessly.

(plenty of open and/or free remakes etc there so there's really no need for another, official one just with fancy graphics)

You already have Oolite too.

(although to be fair there's also this:

A: Yes. The degree of the fly-by-wire to override the feeling of skidding is something we will carefully tune.

but considering both, the best you can argue is "mixed signals" not "they promised us improved newtonian flight mechanics compared to FE2/FFE")

Exactly. This implies adhering to the physics closely, but putting an intermediate layer of (hopefully optional) automatics between hard and unforgiving universe and possibly clueless player, rather than tweaking shit willy-nilly to arrive at first mainstream implementation of physics of prosperland
(hopw roewur ne).

(offline being the biggest and most obvious)

Non-bizarro physics is just as big and just as obvious.
Coincidentally, if it wasn't for those two points I would have bought ED, but either one would have been a dealbreaker for me, let alone both at once.

nope im p sure dbx was talking about what you are calling rotation speed, which does vary with travel speed in ED

It's pretty self explanatory.
It's just that according to normal logic:

1. Evident miscommunication occurs
2. Error is detected and corrected
3. Discussion proceeds regarding the actual, rather than wrongly perceived subject

But according to fanboy logic:

1. Evident miscommunication occurs
2. Error is detected and corrected
3. OLOLOL ILL KEEP DISCUSSING WHAT I THOUGHT WAS THE SUBJECT RATHER THAN ACTUAL ONE BECAUSE IM SMRAT AND UR RONG!!!!1

Fanboy logic trumps all.

 

[Bradylama]

funny thing just happened. i was scooping fuel at the midway point of my rares route while browsing the codex and typing "it's also fucking comical to see a codexer who thinks that mods fix anything in skyrim" to post in here, when i noticed an interdiction in the background. once loading finished i deployed hardpoints and prepared to warrant scan the other ship, only to see the eagle blow up before i even finished facing it..... fun times. also gotta love all those death com messages from system authority vessels that try to get behind you while scooping up real close and plummet into the sun while doing so.

Have yet to see this happpen. It's good to know that heat modelling works on the NPC ships outside of normal space, even if the AI can't deal with it.

 

[J_C]

It's pretty self explanatory.
It's just that according to normal logic:

1. Evident miscommunication occurs
2. Error is detected and corrected
3. Discussion proceeds regarding the actual, rather than wrongly perceived subject

But according to fanboy logic:

1. Evident miscommunication occurs
2. Error is detected and corrected
3. OLOLOL ILL KEEP DISCUSSING WHAT I THOUGHT WAS THE SUBJECT RATHER THAN ACTUAL ONE BECAUSE IM SMRAT AND UR RONG!!!!1

Fanboy logic trumps all.

Fuck off retard. You are the one who can't use basic terminology, I was talking about turn rate the whole time, and you only made yourself clear at the end of the argument about rotation speed. After that, I left the discussion.

 

[DraQ]

Fuck off retard. You are the one who can't use basic terminology, I was talking about turn rate the whole time, and you only made yourself clear at the end of the argument about rotation speed. After that, I left the discussion.

Fuck off retard. You are the one who can't infer shit from basic context.

Now please go fall onto a planet in your 300m/s capped shitcan and die.

 

[J_C]

Been there, done that (but with a sun).

 

[J_C]

I have a question to those who owned the original Elite. I have the game on emulator, and the size of the game is only 200 kbyte. Was this the size of the original game, or is this a compressed file for the BBC Micro emulator?