[qzmufu]

Hi,

I just played Wing Commander Saga - I hope to be in the right forum here - and I would like to suggest giving the motion algorithm another glance. So far, when changing directions, ships seem to turn around a point located somewhere at the centre of the ship. On large vessels, this looks somewhat odd, as, intuitively, a spaceship with its engines located at the rear would rather turn - well, its hard to describe - with its thrust working against the inerta of its moving mass.

Regards

[chief1983]

But how does the capital ship turn in the first place?  What's the thruster placement for course adjustment?  They don't generally have thrust vectoring nozzles for their main engines, as far as I can tell.  However, moving the ship's center to the location that would achieve the right effect might help this.

[MatthTheGeek]

IIRC, ships turn around the 0,0,0 coordinate of the .pof file, and some FS ships are not centered just to take what you're talking about into account.

[qzmufu]

Yeah, I noticed the non-centered fulcrum on some ships, but the reason why I didn't suggest putting it to the front is that ships in space don't really turn around fixed points. Rather, an end of the ship is accelerated into a new direction, causing the ship to change its orientation.

Admittedly, I'm not sure about this - I'm not a physicist. Long story made short, the movements appear unreal, I think.

[qzmufu]

It's probably a little bit like pushing a shopping-trolley. Just with less resistance.

[The E]

Well, yes, but there are several things to consider here.

1. FSO treats ships as objects moving on rail tracks.
2. In order to do "realistic" ship movements, we would need to know where the maneuvering thrusters on the ships' hull are placed, and how much force they can exert. Neither information is so far provided or read by the engine.
3. In order to do this correctly, we would need to switch the physics engine from the current implementation to a more textbook force vector model, which is a lot of work that none of us are really crazy about starting.
4. In addition to all of the above, the implementation (if this is ever implemented) needs to be optional or include an emulation mode for the current way of doing things, as our first rule for FSO states that no changes to the gameplay of FS2 are permissible.

[chief1983]

Well, there's that one guy that keeps sitting down to put Bullet into FSO, and then having a nervous breakdown, only to reappear after several months of hiding in a corner.

[Dragon]

I think that if improved physics were to be implemented, data about manouvring thrusters could be provided via tables (maybe even using existing manouvering thruster system, modified to allow thrusters without graphical representation and defining maximum force they can exert).
It could also be made optional by using AI profiles.
It would certainly be welcome, but most likely very difficult to do.

[Bobboau]

you could just use the glow size as a weighting factor for how much thrust they use, this would require AI changes though.

[Dragon]

Graphics should not affect gameplay, you may want a huge thruster for looks, but it may have to be weak for gameplay reasons.