[Dragon]

I'd also like to mention that there are 3 high speed  "atmospheric" mods which are, in one way or another, worked on.
DEFCON FreeSpace, by ShadowGorrath (last time I seen him, he was redoing it).
Wings, by Woolie Wool (I don't know how far this one is).
Aces High, by me (stalled due to problems with assets and code limitations back then, but nearing restart).
All of them had working, high velocity flight model (300m/s, around 500 on AB, was the norm in Aces), which was quite playable, although the exact execution differed.

[Shivan Hunter]

Increased rate of fire, projectile velocity and damage, more difficult to hit but devastating when you do.

A thousand times this

It's a hell of a lot more realistic, and while it would have to be balanced carefully, the Syrk demo is a good example of what not to do in this respect (sorry Syrk team but hammering at enemies for a minute before they die, even with secondaries, is not exactly fun). Something along the lines of FS1-style combat, where you're really in danger of dying every second you're in a dogfight rather than just relying on some massively powerful energy shield.

If dying in two or three hits sounds terrifying, maybe introduce gameplay elements like Procyon Insurgency-esque hull repair (or maybe modules- like the "tertiary weapons" thing that was being worked on at one point- that slowly and gradually repair your hull like some armors do in ME1).

[General Battuta]

Equipment is in War in Heaven R2, one of the items is a self-repair system. It is very easily done, whether you want it mountable or simply omnipresent. The easiest.

ed: Also in Wings of Dawn 2 frontin' for my brother Spoon

[Dragon]

Syrk weapons have rather pathetic DPS in addition to their ROF, in Aces High, there's no such thing.
A gatling gun will shred enemy fighters if only you manage to hit them. There's no self repair, but landing a hit is rather difficult.
Of course, you'd also go down if you get under gunfire, but the whole point of defensive BFM is to avoid that.

[MetalDestroyer]

Increasing ships velocity is not a real trouble. The thing is, if you want to modify the velocity in the main Freespace 2 campaign, you need to rebalance each ships, weapons, and also each missions.
For mods or stand alone using FSO, the problem disapear except the fact that enemy ship controlled by the AI will be very hard to hit.

And I really don't like the idea to have auto-aim to balance the problem.
The demo of Beyond the Red Line is a good example of what you want. Or you can also watch some videos I made, here (max velocity is 225 m/s without afterburner, 280 m/s (1 000 Km/h) with afterburner) or here.

For FSO, I think the best value for max velocity must not be further than 400 m/s. I didn't try to go further, but I'll think about it, next time I have the motivation to modify ships tables.

[chief1983]

Keep in mind that the ship velocity is only part of the problem, FotG has ships a fraction the size of FS2 fighters (The A-wing clocks in at a little over 6m long!), and that change alone makes ships drastically harder to hit at any speed.  They also tend to have very difficult profiles.  Look at a TIE or a B-wing from behind, and tell me what the target area is.  I almost miss the XvT hitboxes...

[MetalDestroyer]

Yup, I forgot this crucial point.

[chief1983]

I think it will lead to interesting combat tactics though.  A TIE is much easier to hit if you can catch a side angle, so trying to tail one isn't the most effective way to score a hit.  X-wings would be widest from above/below, etc.  Could lead to some cool behaviors.

[AndrewofDoom]

I would just like to point out that Quanto, Thaeris, Spoon, and I have indeed trying out multiplayer a few times in Stellar Assault FSO in the past. Indeed, autoaim makes hitting anything in multiplayer impossible for everyone except the host because of lag. All the clients had to rely on missiles to hit anything

So, in essence, the higher the speed is, the more of an advantage the host has. If there's autoaim, multiply said advantage by two. Might have to deal with that.

[jr2]

FotG will have significantly faster fighter speeds, and as they are very small, this will pretty much necessitate some sort of computer assisted targeting in many cases.  Wanderer has helped a lot with the code in that area, but we still need a bindable toggle for it (which we can do with the new pilot code).  However, my main concern is that this autoaim would make it impossible to hit a player in multi, since you would need to lead shoot, as we have server side hit detection.  I fear that relying on autoaim for high speed combat is going to make multi very difficult to pull off, does anyone have any evidence for this one way or the other yet?

Have the auto-aim target the lead shot indicator, but have the lead shot indicator take ping into its calculation?  IDK

[StargateSpankyHam]

You don't need auto-aim, necessarily.

Just set the guns to say, between 0.5 and 1 FOF, increase the rate of fire a LOT, decrease energy consumption accordingly, and just scale the projectile speed proportionate to the increase in fighter speed.

I'd love to see capships zooming around at 80-100 m/s, with fighters occasionally reaching 1000+ m/s in afterburner.

Unfortunately, hundreds of KM/sec on capships (and higher for fighters) isn't really feasible - especially since the max beam range is 32 KM.

[Scourge of Ages]

This concept is an idea I'm working on. I'm partway through tabling the ships and weapons up.
I adjusted fighters to about double their FS2 speeds, while at least halving maneuverability, just like has been suggested above.
Right now the fastest fighter clocks 120 mps and the fastest cap at around 60.
I'll see how it works when I start testing.

[Reprobator]

well in our mod our fighter reach around 550m/s in regular flight and we have afterburner a bit like wing commander : no recharge
The afterburner do not provide a "kick", it is quite progressive , In continuous afterburner after 4/5 minute fighter may reach their max speed at 3000m/s
Our fighter are really small so we have a Little autoaim and high rate of fire gun.
The cap ship are about 100m/s the only problem we have with that is : after 1/2 minute of continuous afterburner : the ship continue to be shaken even when afterburner is off....
I'll probably mantis that though 

[Sushi]

Just set the guns to say, between 0.5 and 1 FOF, increase the rate of fire a LOT, decrease energy consumption accordingly, and just scale the projectile speed proportionate to the increase in fighter speed.

Some serious problems that crop up doing this. The main one is the object limit. FSO can only track so many discrete objects, including weapon shots. You get to that limit pretty quickly with rapid-fire weapons.

Furthermore, fire rate is limited by FPS. This means that the actual effectiveness of the weapon can vary wildly with the system it's being played on and whatever else is affecting the FPS.

If you have high-geometry ships in the battle, all of those particles are going to be involved in collision detection, leading to yet another source of slowdowns.

[bigchunk1]

I used to wonder why Fs2 speeds are somewhat sluggish until I played multiplayer. If a fighter is too fast in multi, the right pilot will turn and accelerate to the point where he or she is impossible to hit. This makes the game, especially dogfights prettymuch unplayable.

If you want a modding solution for this, there is a table feature called $Inner_damage_radius $Outer_Damage_Radius or something like that I don't remember the syntax. This allows your weapon to be effective even if you slightly miss the target as it will explode when within proximity. An example of this weapon is the flak cannon, only imagine it on a fighter. Perhaps with or without all those particle effects. Such a weapon is much more easier to hit a target with, add a field of fire ($FOF) and a decent rate of fire and you have a weapon that does not require much aiming at all.

Also, depending on your controls or your experience with flight sims, you might find a speedy ship difficult to pilot. Slow speeds make the game acessable to a wider audience.

In light of these facts, I think freespace retail made a decision to take gameplay over realism. It set the standard, though newer mods, such as Syrk are experimenting with faster and more sharply turning ships.

[MetalDestroyer]

This concept is an idea I'm working on. I'm partway through tabling the ships and weapons up.
I adjusted fighters to about double their FS2 speeds, while at least halving maneuverability, just like has been suggested above.
Right now the fastest fighter clocks 120 mps and the fastest cap at around 60.
I'll see how it works when I start testing.

If you're thinking to modify those for Freespace 2 main campaign, you'll encounter some issue in some mission. Specially the ones concerning to protect transport/capital/others from bombers/fighters/heavy fighters.

[Ryu Gemini]

On the note of faster capital ships, has anyone here played an old game called Klingon Academy?  It may be old, but I always loved that game.  Come to think of it, did any other star trek game ever let you fly around battleship class vessels like that one did?


It could be interesting if someone could make a campaign that is based on players flying capital ships instead of fighters.  For reasons of not being a total bore, said capital ships would have to move at speeds vastly exceeding those of standard FS2 campaign caps (100 m/s or more would work, keep in mind that they would "appear" slower due to the player flying one). 

Any number of interesting things could be implimented for capital ships controlled by players.  Damage control for instance (maybe press a button to bring up a menu for which subsystem gets auto-repaired, or to focus on the hull).  Weapons systems are of course something too.  Perhaps giving players the ability to choose anti-ship turret targets, or partially go a Klingon Academy approach and have weapons that are manually fired from the sides (like a broadside blast from an old 17th century warship).   Give these side-weapons enough power and a long enough cooldown and you could encourage a player to fly in circles in order to use the other side's "cannons" on the same enemy.  Especially so if there are similar weapons facing forward and aft. 

[Scourge of Ages]

If you're thinking to modify those for Freespace 2 main campaign, you'll encounter some issue in some mission. Specially the ones concerning to protect transport/capital/others from bombers/fighters/heavy fighters.

Oh sweet merciful sheep, no, I wouldn't dream of that  There will be custom missions.
Though considering the other projects mentioned in this thread, mine seems a bit tame. Hey Reprobator, you may be interested in this thread if you're accelerating to 3000 mps+ : http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=71965.msg1422116#msg1422116

[headdie]

what do you need to do to stop yourself self destructing?

[Sushi]

This concept is an idea I'm working on. I'm partway through tabling the ships and weapons up.
I adjusted fighters to about double their FS2 speeds, while at least halving maneuverability, just like has been suggested above.
Right now the fastest fighter clocks 120 mps and the fastest cap at around 60.
I'll see how it works when I start testing.

If you're thinking to modify those for Freespace 2 main campaign, you'll encounter some issue in some mission. Specially the ones concerning to protect transport/capital/others from bombers/fighters/heavy fighters.

This sounds exactly like the Velocity Mod I make a decade ago and referenced in an earlier post.

http://www.freespacemods.net/download.php?view.168

It does change the balance of the main campaign, but it's still plenty playable, even on Insane. Velocity Mod does NOT change capship speeds, though, since mission events are often carefully timed based on how long it takes a destroyer or transport to go from A to B.