Star Citizen Online - The search for more money

If they're so attached to "realism" they should just have the cockpit fill up with fluid; that would allow the pilot to withstand higher g's (and look cool).

There's a fine line between realism and fun, I grant you that, but if you're redding and blacking out all the time, you just need practice. It's pretty damn easy at the moment not to run into that issue. They even have a setting on by default that prevents you from hitting top g's.

Mist_sl said:

Actually the current build's flight model has some ships blacking out way too much. Specifically the gladius.

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oh, I see - is it a bug, or intended?

Blackwulf_sl said:

There's a fine line between realism and fun, I grant you that, but if you're redding and blacking out all the time, you just need practice. It's pretty damn easy at the moment not to run into that issue. They even have a setting on by default that prevents you from hitting top g's.

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While I dont like the feature, I can accept it. Problem is that it is not (currently, in my experience) something that can be predicted. I can in one moment do a full "looping" at maximum burn and not blink, next time I black out halfway thru. That makes it very "unfun". (also the issues with no mass for the ship, odd handling issues with the mouse and other stuff is hopefully due to alpha status. I can not imagine they would actualy ship this game with the current control system).

Faith_sl said:

While I dont like the feature, I can accept it. Problem is that it is not (currently, in my experience) something that can be predicted. I can in one moment do a full "looping" at maximum burn and not blink, next time I black out halfway thru. That makes it very "unfun". (also the issues with no mass for the ship, odd handling issues with the mouse and other stuff is hopefully due to alpha status. I can not imagine they would actualy ship this game with the current control system).

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My apologies - I should have prefaced my previous statement with the caveat that I haven't played AC in the last two or three versions. I do follow dev posts, though, and they've pretty much said that flight mechanics are in flux and will be for the next year or more. They have the goal of having a game that is fun to play, and I'm sure they'll listen to feedback about features that make it more a chore to fly than fun.

Interesting read, and rather topical, considering we were just discussing blackouts, etc.

Star Citizen Alpha 2.0: Flight Model Changes - Roberts Space Industries

Sylas_sl said:

hrm so quantum travel is the fastest travel? i'm assuming there will be like stargates or bridges or whatever that allow you to travel from star system to star system, but inside a system you can only travel 0.2c? So the fastest traveling around speed is 60km/s, am I understanding this correctly?

That explains why the zones are so small. With the zone cap at 2mil km means you can travel across a star system in about 33 seconds.

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Yeah, there are jump gates between systems. Also, note that the zone size is not capped at 2m square km - that's the size of the zone that alpha 2.0 will have. Roberts has mentioned having systems that are potentially billions of square km.

Sylas_sl said:

2mil km seems fine if they are capping speed so low. why on earth would they want a zone that's billions of km across? say it's 2 billion. it would take 9 and a half hours to fly across it.

Another thing I don't get about this game, this obsession with quasi-realism. it's fucking spaceships, in the future and shit. probably with laser beams and everything. Let's make ships go realistically slow (but not really, it's still stupidly fast) but then let's also try and maintain a realistic scale? 2 billion km barely gets you to jupiter's orbit, so we're talking tiny ass little star systems. but let's try for quasi-realism and have it take 10 hours to fly across the zone. Knowing this game you'll probably have to stop every few thousand km to refuel, so that 10 hour trip probably takes 30 hours since you gotta switch modes and precision dock every time for fuel, then get out of your space ship to go pay the teller and shit.

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You're getting worked up over stuff that isn't going to happen. They want the game to be fun, so I can assure you, there won't be any 10 hour trips to complete a mission. They are aiming for a balance between fun and realism. Other shit might make the game fail, but not bullshit quasi realism that makes the game more like playing a spreadsheet than flying a spaceship. Did you ever play Wing Commander or Privateer? Roberts wants you to have a Star Wars experience, not a 2001 Space Odyssey experience.

Sylas_sl said:

you literally just posted that it was going to happen, wtf seriously?

Look we already talked about how the size of zones are meaningless until we know how fast ships travel, the last time some fanboi was bragging about how large the zones were gonna be (may have been you actually), until they learned that 2mil km zone is actually fucking tiny as fuck for a space game.

Now we know how fast ships travel, 0.2c. And unless that changes, that means a few million km is about as large as zones can reasonably be. You can either have faster travel, or tiny zones, but you can't have both, unless you want it to take hours to travel across. So if roberts doesn't want a 2001 experience then why the fuck would he mention a zone larger than 2mil km when speed is hardcapped at 0.2c? Could it be he's full of shit and it's just yet another endless feature creep cus no one is reigning him in?

and you are all like "don't worry that's not going to happen" in a game that has fucking black/red outs, fuel consumption, manually filling up crates with items and then stacking those crates? dafuq. You say they are aiming for a balance between fun and realism but they are so fucking far towards fake realism it's insane.

How fucking unrealistic is it that we'll solve interstellar, faster than light travel before we figure out how to fly ships without blacking out from pos/neg Gs? That shit is fucking retarded.

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You seem really tense, bro. I said "potentially." Wait and see what happens before you get mad.

Edit: Okay, so I've been a bit flippant with you, so I'll elaborate a bit on what's wrong with your viewpoint. You are basing your bellicose criticism of the game on bits and pieces of information that come from a very early alpha of the game and from a design post explaining how things will work in the next alpha. The point I was trying to make when I brought up Wing Commander and Privateer is that Roberts knows what it takes to make a game that is fun. He wants SC to be a game that accomplishes more than any other space game in history, but he wants it to be fun. If you peruse the official forums, you'll find people who have a viewpoint exactly opposite of your own. They want a space sim, not a game. If you pay attention to design posts and official responses, especially listen to all the 10 for the Chairman videos, you'll understand that Roberts is trying to maintain a balance between sim and game, and he understands that playing spreadsheets isn't fun. He wants combat to be like WW2 dog fights, even though it's in space. Does that make sense from a physics standpoint? Nope, but he knows it will be fun. If systems end up being huge, they'll increase max speed. No one on the design team wants 10 hour flights to be a necessity. In fact, during discussions about the Starliner passenger ship, it was mentioned that in order to support that gameplay, they might have to consider flight times as much as 20 minutes, but were concerned about creating trips that long, as it might infringe on the fun factor. I'll look for a source later, when I'm not at work. The point being, if you were following this game even a bit closely, you'd know stuff like this, so I have to wonder, what drives a person to generate so much internet rage over a game they clearly aren't all that interested in?

This;"Ship flight balancing is one of the most difficult and delicate tasks that we have on this project. The move to a 3rd order system and the addition of a dynamically determined velocity mode have necessitated a nearly complete from-the-ground-up re-balance of the ship handling characteristics."

I know this is alpha, but would it not have been more effective to have released only 2-3 ships with AC to nail down the flight system/engine and THEN release the rest of the ships once the system was decided upon (they go on about changing all the ships "stats" in the article)? If they handle all their development work like this, it will take an eternity to get this game out the door.