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Dilmah G:
Yo,

Strygon and I got into this. My thoughts from disco posted here as a quote, along with some gameplay footage of Strygon and I bumbling around.



--- Quote ---key things for me were:

- love cockpits, i think the idea is great. flight mechanics are cool and even though it's not where my heart lies, i can appreciate it. and you've clearly done a lot of good work revamping the missions which was nice

- hud gauges. good job getting these onto their own bespoke "displays" in the cockpit but even as a trackIR user playing in 1080p the text was a bit too small. in addition, i think HUD integrity is mission critical information and should be in a more intuitive position. looking/glancing down to check hull integrity is a bit suboptimal in the middle of a dogfight and positioning it somewhere closer to the centre of the HUD or higher in general my be better

- eyepoint. the default eyepoint imo is too low to enable the appropriate visibility to conduct a turning dogfight, as you can see in the video. not quite sure how you elevate the 'seat height' for lack of a better term in your footage  but that was a big limiter for me and definitely impacted gameplay. you may be limited by the actual structure of the cockpit as well which isn't cool, but just something to think about at the very least

- need for directional thrust. you can hear strygon and myself discussing this in the video but at the moment i don't think the AI fly in a way that requires the player to employ directional thrust. i'm not an AI behaviour guru but guys like darius/strygon/ETP should be able to lend a hand here i would think

- tutorial. may be worth having some kind of tutorial mission where there's a very brief explainer of where all the important info is in the cockpit. took me a criminally long time to work out where hull integrity was, and it may be helpful also to try keep things in generally the same direction the player looks in without the cockpit mod, so that way those habits have a smoother transfer to cockpit ops
--- End quote ---

Strygon:
I've posted a shorter version of my thoughts on the mod in the #multiplayer channel of the Discord, but I feel for organization's sake it's best to post a more elaborate version of my thoughts on the mod.
Do note, I've played through both Single- and Multiplayer, six missions in the former and four missions in the latter, played at Medium.

And please note, this is simply my opinion and point of view regarding this mod and how I see it as a modder with a fairly good degree of experience in most modding fields, excepting Scripting, but also as a player who has a fair few mods under his belt.



Cockpits, HUD and Visual Language

One of my main gripes with this mod before I even picked it up was the reordering of HUD elements in a way that didn't really seem all that beneficial and was more just "change-for-the-sake-of-change" material. Some of that can be attributed to simply having to adapt to a new layout, and I am willing to admit that, but some changes plainly don't make sense from a UX standpoint.

General Issues

Let's address the big issue first.

Everything's too small.
While I was playing through a mission with Dilmah, I struggled to tell whether the Hull Integrity on his fighter was 52% or 92%. Additionally, names of certain ships were barely readable.
The other cockpit mod seems to fix this by increasing the font size for HUD elements, while whole gauges seem to be shrunk here to fit the physical gauges.

Bad use of screen real estate.
The ETS gauge is put in a position where it is almost fully hidden from normal view from the player without additional use of view controls, while the Wingman indicator or the escort list get an unnecessarily large amount of screen for themselves, a good portion of which never ends up getting used.
The target view box is relegated to a tiny screen in the mid-upper left corner while the lower center-left larger screen is instead given to the Directives Window, which does not need nearly as much space, yet gets it anyway.  Not only does this mess with old habits formed by FS fans, it also makes it much harder to actually assess the state of your target, which is way more critical and needs much more information output than a simple directives window.

Hull Integrity Indicator

Your Hull Integrity is probably the single most important variable to watch out for during gameplay, for very obvious reasons. As such, it is incredibly important that the player can easily look at it and not have to filter through any clutter generated by other interface elements. The base game does this by planting it firmly and immediately north of the center of the screen, far away from other HUD elements. The player can read the gauge very easily and doesn't have to filter out irrelevant information first, potentially costing valuable miliseconds in a close encounter and just generally making good use of screen real estate.



Kills, Auto-Indicators, Countermeasures

These three gauges have been moved to the center dashboard and their text replaced with icons. On paper that doesn't actually sound like a bad thing.



However, you tell me what all of these icons mean.
The skull is fairly obvious (though I find it tonally unfitting but that's a different conversation entirely) and you could reasonably extrapolate that C * M probably stands for CounterMeasures. I was at a loss however for what these other two icons meant and only figured it out because there were no other gauges for auto-speed or targeting.
It would be preferable to just have the old default text gauges in place of that, as it will at least immediately tell the player what it's supposed to mean.



The Cockpit

Lining up with what Dilmah said about eyepoint issues, this further leads into my next point, namely that as it is, the Cockpit acts as a massive visual obstruction that seriously damages the gameplay experience, rather than a tool to further the immersion.
As it is, you can barely see over the dashboard, and in some fighters like the Apollo, you can hardly see your own shots, making it much more difficult to actually hit anything.
Note, this is not realistic even by current day fighter jet standards. In aircraft like the F-16 for example, you can quite easily view over the dashboard and get a better view of the situation, because battlefield awareness is absolutely crucial.
Technically such a concession on losing some of that awareness is already being made by having cockpits in the first place but as it is implemented in this mod, it's done in such a way that reduces said awareness far too much to make it worth the immersion.



A new flight model

An Introduction

In the Discord server a lot of talk was thrown about regarding this mod's flight model and how it requires new adaptations to missions to fit its faster pace and higher degree of action. Having played through a considerable amount of missions, I can more or less say with certainty that the gameplay hasn't really changed much from how it was before. The engagement distances remain the same, time to kill remains the same and the difficulty and tempo hasn't changed much, if at all.

What is combat pace anyway?

DISCLAIMER: Because the initial release post is incredibly unclear regarding what this mod is actually about, I'm going off of some assumptions here. If Serial wasn't gunning for a high-speed fast paced adrenaline mod, feel free to ignore this entire segment.

When talk of fast paced combat within Freespace mods is thrown around, there are a couple mods I find make for great case studies regarding differences in flight models and how that affects combat pace and completely changes how a player acts and reacts to their environment and incoming threats. Those mods being:

-Warmachine
-Solaris
-Dimensional Eclipse

and to allow myself to toot my own horn a little:
-First Contact War

Those mods incorporate speed in a way that really goes wild with pace in a way never seen before in Freespace. However, once one digs into their programming, it becomes obvious that there was far more to it than just increasing everyone's flight speed. And now having played through this mod, I'm beginning to see that a lot of work going towards a fast paced mod here is plainly missing.

One thing you'll see across all these other mods I mentioned is that in the middle of a dogfight, you must always stay on the move. Not just straight ahead flight, but constant evasive maneuvers. If you lose focus for a couple seconds, the entire battlefield will have changed too much to keep up as easily and you might find yourself shot to pieces.

This can be achieved through a variety of adjustments across the ships, weapons and AI tables. Ships can be made to react much faster, weapons can have larger ranges and faster velocities, missiles can get better tracking to counteract the greater range of evasive maneuvers possible by the higher ship speeds, the AI tables can be tuned much tighter to make enemies significantly more aggressive.

No incentive to use mobility options

The main point I'm trying to get across is that the flight model will need much more work to truly be a new style of gameplay rather than just FS1 but with higher speeds. Not once during my playthroughs did I feel any reason to use sidethrust or glide. Even the afterburner felt redundant, I could just overclock my engines and achieve higher speeds than afterburner ever could.

It also seems that enemy ships did not receive any adjustments to their table values. In Dilmah's third video you can hear me jokingly refer to the "SR-71 Strategy" by just outflying enemy fire. I did in fact just turn up my engine power and fly past the escort swarm around the Taranis and only ended up getting killed through careless flying and repeatedly ramming the Taranis.


Additional Gameplay Elements

Broken Multiplayer Experience

Serial said at some points that he playtested this in Co-Op with a couple other people but I find that difficult to believe primarily for one key reason:
When me and Dilmah played it, each time either of us died the game would completely give out and require a total restart on us thanks to some HUD-related bug that messes with observer mode and throws a massive wall of errors at us.
While it is more or less serviceable in singleplayer, I cannot in good faith call this mod playable in Multiplayer while this critical bug is in effect.

Zoom Feature

I would also like to take a moment to talk about the Zoom feature and its implementation and usefulness within the context of this mod.
While it looks and sounds nice and I was mildly impressed when I first tried it out, I quickly realized it had absolutely no use whatsoever in the mod. There is not a single weapon that has enough of a range to warrant or require the ability to zoom in.

During some discussions me and Dilmah were initially under the impression that you could also use this to zoom in on your gauges, which would have been an interesting way to deal with the issue of the text being barely readable. However, this was not the case, the cockpit remains as it is while you're zoomed in, which just looks plainly weird.

Half Life 2 Overcharged: A parallel case

I'm going off on a bit of a tangent here, but seeing this and then the list of new upcoming features (I'm not holding my breath on the VR implementation by the way and neither should anyone else) I'm suddenly reminded of this rather recent modding drama in the Half Life modding community, namely surrounding the mod called "Half Life 2 Overcharged".

HL2 Overcharged suffers a lot from the same issues I highlighted here: Numerous ideas that sound potentially interesting on their own but put together in one place and not given nearly enough work to properly mesh and synergize into a cohesive gameplay experience.

Conclusion

On this note, my key advice to Serial for going forward with this mod is to first go back and continue working on the existing elements until it all meshes together and makes for a good gameplay experience. Just like with HL2 Overcharged, there are good ideas here but they need a lot more work until it can really shine. It is also a good idea to go back and review the HUD layouts for a more user friendly gameplay experience.

Grizzly:
Wrt AI using side-strafing, the AI Profiles table has numerous settings that control the AI using glide and sidestrafing behaviour. If you want more finetuned control, you can use a lot of those values in Ai.tbl itself.

Take a look through the entire documentation, as there's a lot of stuff there that's interesting. Blue Planet makes extensive use of this table in various forms, as do Solaris and Diaspora (which have a more authentic-feeling flight model themselves). When adding BSG-style physics to FS2, of particular note are the following flags:

$AI Turn Time Scale:
Controls how fast the fighters turn. If you're making everything faster but not touching rotational speeds, the AI needs a bit of a leg up in order to "catch" enemy targets.

$Glide Attack Percent:
$Circle Strafe Percent:
$Glide Strafe Percent:
$Random Sidethrust Percent:

These all control how much the AI uses the side-strafing and glide features. Even vanilla AI has limited side-strafing capability as the shivan fighters use it (you may have seen the Mara make weird turns, that's them using that), but in order to unlock the full potential of the AI here, you have to use the table.

$use additive weapon velocity:
$use newtonian dampening:

These settings make physics of FSO behave a little bit more realistically. Additive weapon velocity in particular can change a lot of things, as your weapons will go faster as you go faster.

Nightmare:
I can't tell how far you already seperate that already, but I'd suggest you to split the development of immersive cockpits and actual gameplay changes into 2 things that can grow independent of each other. Judging from the previous feedback, it does not seem necessary to create (or just promote) both things right at the same time as two sides of the same medal when there are relatively few (or no) benefits from that, but numerous potential issues.

Also, if you're looking for immersive gameplay I'd add Diaspora to Strygons reference list which has the things like external custom guns and cockpits you're trying to implement into FS.

SerialMascot:
I don't know where to begin


I played Diaspora and many of the features used are from Diaspora.
I have already implemented each of those flags in AI profiles.
I have warned players that visibility will be a serious problem without freelook translation, but lunar sage ignored the sticky post, and seems to be demanding some kind of "megaproject" that I'm not interested in as well as using this thread as platform to promote his own uncompleted magnum opus. Beyond that, I'll hold my tongue.
I'm just going to continue to add stuff one thing at a time, just like I have been, and try not to break the other stuff. If you want to play, play. Get TrackIR tho, until VR is ready.  Input is always welcome, whether or not it's positive.
That having been said, Lots of the critiques have been really helpful and I ignore none of the input, and most of it is well though out. If i get a request from like two people for something, that's usually enough.
No idea about any multiplayer bugs. (besides observser cam) We play every weekend. It was fine yesterday idk.
It is 100% acceptable to give an uninformed opinion, but I'd encourage you guys to at least watch the "Serial Speaks" youtube playlist....

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