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Hosted Projects - Standalone => Wing Commander Saga => Topic started by: Light on August 22, 2009, 03:12:25 pm

Title: Scaling of speed, distance and ship size in FRED2
Post by: Light on August 22, 2009, 03:12:25 pm

I was wondering about how the different ships scale with each other and with the distances marked in the mission builder and TBL files. That is, if I for example create at weapon with a velocity of 1000 in the weapon.tbl file, would it cover one kilometer in a second both in as indicated by the distances is in FRED2 and relative to the ships size in game play? I am asking because I remember reading that thare was a problem with this in Freespace 2 at least as far as the size of capital ships go relative to other objects.

Title: Re: Scaling of speed, distance and ship size in FRED2
Post by: karajorma on August 28, 2009, 05:09:05 am

I don't recall this being an issue. 1m = 1m unless they've done something silly with the scale in this game. :)

Title: Re: Scaling of speed, distance and ship size in FRED2
Post by: Aginor on August 28, 2009, 07:16:41 am

Wing Commander measures speed differently, not in m/s or km/h or something like that.

Title: Re: Scaling of speed, distance and ship size in FRED2
Post by: karajorma on August 30, 2009, 08:52:22 am

They lied. Time the amount of time it takes to fly the length of a capship and then work out if that's correct. :p

Title: Re: Scaling of speed, distance and ship size in FRED2
Post by: Aginor on August 31, 2009, 02:33:42 am

Yeah, I know. But Wing Commander Fans expect it to be that way, since that kind of speed was used in all Wing Commander games.
The maximum speeds of ships are canon values.

There is even an explanation for those strange speed values:
The unit "kps" doesn't mean "kilometers per second" (as you might assume) but k******* per second. It is another unit.

I don't care if the values are meters per second, others do. And since WCS wants to make the Wing Commander experience as close to the original games as possible there is not much of a choice.

Anyway, speed values are a little bit ridiculous in almost every game. Everything is moving quite slowly, compared to how physics in real space work, but since we break the laws of physics anyway (friction in space, sound in space, etc.) I don't care.

Is there a mod with the FS engine that works with real newtonian physics?

Title: Re: Scaling of speed, distance and ship size in FRED2
Post by: Dragon on August 31, 2009, 08:37:07 am

Babylon 4: The Minbari Project works that way, it uses custom FSO build, but I don't know if it's (highly experimental) prologue still available.
I don't know if it's dead or not, as I couldn't find any news on their forum. (on Proxima Fleet)
That's B5, not WC nor FS anyway.
Modding it is really difficult.