[General Battuta]

Hey folks. I think I've got a lead on a major issue with glide behavior.

It's possible to cap a ship's maximum glide speed at its maximum cruise speed, rather than its maximum afterburner speed. This is to prevent exploitative tactics in which you can lock a ship in permanent afterburner by gliding while at AB speed. We can't just let everyone slide around in the danger zone all the time.

Unfortunately, there's a pretty simple exploit to get around this. If you engage glide after releasing the afterburner key, but before you decelerate below your maximum cruise speed, you'll stay at your current (afterburnery) velocity. This is a really easy highway to the danger zone. It seems like the glide speed cap only realizes you're afterburning while you have the afterburn key pressed!

This is bad and degenerate for a lot of missions. Can anyone repro this behavior, and if so, can we find a fix?

[AdmiralRalwood]

This is technically a feature request. I can bump it up my to-do list if you need this sooner rather than later.

[General Battuta]

I think it's important to have. It breaks a couple of existing missions.

[X3N0-Life-Form]

So that's what's going on! I just assumed there was some bug with the Custos-X that would sometimes cut my speed back to max after doing the burner-glide thing. Looks like the bug is the other way around

[niffiwan]

I always thought this was intended behaviour, I actually rely on any glide capable ship being able to do this!!!

[AdmiralRalwood]

I always thought this was intended behaviour, I actually rely on any glide capable ship being able to do this!!!

It is the intended behavior, as mentioned on the Mantis issue; since it's counter-intuitive to many, however, it makes sense to introduce the alternative via a game_settings.tbl flag.

I'll try to find some time to work on this soonish.

[karajorma]

I always thought this was intended behaviour, I actually rely on any glide capable ship being able to do this!!!

I don't see any logical reason why you shouldn't be able to glide at afterburner speed either, so it's definitely a feature.

[Phantom Hoover]

>logic
>fs2 speed caps

[jr2]

Would this be best to implement as a per-ship switch or a per-mission switch or a per-mod switch or all of the above?  Like should you be able to override a per-mod switch to allow a certain mission or certain class of ship to do this?  It might be able to be a feature; not sure what techno-jargon would have to be resorted to to explain it, but it would be fun if done correctly, I would think.  (Perhaps to incentivize using a ship with other drawbacks, or to introduce a player to the advantage of certain piloting styles or somesuch.)

[Phantom Hoover]

We already have a good way of dealing with this implemented, the problem is that it's just not working properly.

[jr2]

Ah, I see.  The fix is glitched?

[General Battuta]

I always thought this was intended behaviour, I actually rely on any glide capable ship being able to do this!!!

I don't see any logical reason why you shouldn't be able to glide at afterburner speed either, so it's definitely a feature.

Would this be best to implement as a per-ship switch or a per-mission switch or a per-mod switch or all of the above?  Like should you be able to override a per-mod switch to allow a certain mission or certain class of ship to do this?  It might be able to be a feature; not sure what techno-jargon would have to be resorted to to explain it, but it would be fun if done correctly, I would think.  (Perhaps to incentivize using a ship with other drawbacks, or to introduce a player to the advantage of certain piloting styles or somesuch.)

I see there's some confusion here. This is not a feature and it's definitely a bug. First, let me do what I should've and be explicit about the name of the feature that's broken:

$Glide:                     YES
   +Dynamic Glide Cap:         NO
   +Max Glide Speed:         40

This ship has glide. It does not use a dynamic glide cap. It has Max Glide Speed defined, which is the maximum speed it's allowed to travel when gliding.

Why, Karajorma might rightly ask, does this feature exist? What logical reason is there for a ship to have its glide speed restricted to its max cruise speed (or lower)?

The answer is gameplay. Imagine you're flying a frigate or a big gunship. The player might want to strafe alongside a target, bearing their weapons on it. Or they might want to go really fast to evade incoming missiles or get somewhere. But we don't want to let them do both at once: this is a degenerate tactic for our mission, since it's clearly optimal to glide everywhere at AB speeds, take all power out of engines, and put it in guns/shields.

If your ship has equipment or abilities relevant to AB recharge, this is even worse. They're now extraneous, since you don't need to worry about AB recharge except when you're changing directions.

So we add '+Max Glide Speed'. But Max Glide Speed is a lie. It should actually be named 'Max Glide Speed If You Press Glide While Holding Down Afterburner, Otherwise Don't Worry About It.' With quick fingers the player can ignore Max Glide Speed.

This is a broken feature. One way or another, please fix it!

[karajorma]

Ah, I see your point now, it's that specific table setting (which we didn't use in Diaspora) that is broken rather than the way gliding is handled in general.

[AdmiralRalwood]

I see there's some confusion here. This is not a feature and it's definitely a bug.
[...]
This is a broken feature.

As I said on the Mantis issue, this is most certainly "working as intended", even though it's counter-intuitive and leads to degenerate gameplay. If you look at the part of the code responsible for glide caps (both dynamic and absolute), you see this comment:

Code: [Select]

// Only do the glide cap if we have one and are actively thrusting in some direction.
This code (and the associated checks) were added in r8628 by Sushi on March 27, 2012, with the following commit message: "Gliding bugfix: only 'decay' glide speed when actually thrusting."

So as much as this behavior may annoy you, it was most certainly intentional. Now, it shouldn't be hard to add in the alternative behavior (I was going to use a game_settings.tbl flag, but now I'm wondering if people would prefer the ability to change this behavior on a per-ship basis), but it's still adding a new feature rather than fixing an existing one.

[General Battuta]

Ask Sushi what up with that, I guess? If it's not important behavior to preserve that simplifies things greatly.

[Spoon]

Now, it shouldn't be hard to add in the alternative behavior (I was going to use a game_settings.tbl flag, but now I'm wondering if people would prefer the ability to change this behavior on a per-ship basis), but it's still adding a new feature rather than fixing an existing one.

I'd like to be able to define this on a per-ship basis.

[z64555]

If somebody does end up making it so that the ship speed decays to below the glide cap, would they be so kind to make it so that said behavior is optional?

FringeSpace wants to be able to hold their top speed while gliding, as this is the same behavior as in Tachyon. Novalogic balanced this behavior by making the energy reservoirs charge comparatively slow, and energy transfers were lossy (I think around least 15% energy loss)

[General Battuta]

I'm not sure I follow, z64555. Can't you just leave your Max Glide Speed high, or undefined? How would this change affect you at all?

I'm not sure I get the desire for a glitchy Max Glide Speed at all. Can someone help me understand why you want the following behavior?

• Ship cannot glide above normal cruise speed if glide is engaged while afterburning
• Ship can glide above normal cruise speed if glide is engaged after afterburning, but before decelerating
• Ship cannot accelerate above normal cruise speed if afterburners are fired while gliding
• If gliding above normal cruise speed, decelerate to cruise speed if you try to accelerate

Why would anyone want this weirdly specific, roundabout edge case? Why not just...increase your Max Glide Speed, or don't set it at all? Why let a player glide at high speed with a keyboard trick, but forbid them from gliding at high speed if they use the normal, intuitive controls?

[The E]

Yeah, I'm with GB on this. The behaviour you want is already available; making the Max Glide Speed behave as advertised instead of the way it works now is certainly desirable.

[AdmiralRalwood]

Well, if nobody wants to keep the current behavior, then the "fix" is as simple as reverting r8628.