I have been playing this game for years now and I have been long awaiting physics to be added to the game. I was excited when they added base destruction physics and assumed ships would be next. Are there any plans to add flight physics to this game, or will it always feel like im flying a paper plane that can high speed crash into the ground with nothing to worry about. Thanks
Pleasy make not everything as easy to break as for example space engineers has it, it's no fun to have half the ship missing just because you hit a tree. Also a shield should protect against impacts...
Flight physics and crash damage are two VERY different things. I'm fine with flight physics, as long as I can slap thrusters in every direction an fly like a drone...this is the future and in space after all. I am not in favor of crash mechanics. This is a game, and while I take pride in making a perfect landing, we don't have all the sensory feedback to actually pilot and not crash from time to time. This is a game, not a flight simulator, and in my opinion we don't need so much realism that a slight error in judgement will ruin the ship.
I agree to some degree and disagree to others. Yes, this is a game, not a flight simulator. We shouldn't need the reflexes of an actual pilot to play. If you want something somewhat like that, there's Elite: Dangerous. BUT... I do think if you're inattentive, or badly damaged enough already*, distracted or whatever the circumstance might be, a full-0n impact should do some damage, even if it's not a firey explosive end to a cockpit career. We can't forget to put the landing gear down, that's automatic, but it is possible to go full nose-dive, geo-breaking when you get there, and walk away completely unrealistically damaged, or carelessly plow into the side of a space-station, CV or what have you without consequence, and I have a hard time buying that. Yes, shields should provide some measure of protection against an impact, and I'd be willing to say that the price of that impact should be a collapse of your shields and damage to your shield generator - after all, that's not what shields are intended to do in the first place. *Let's look at this for example: So what happened here? I'd gone into orbit, to look for more materials. On my return to the planet, I had a run-in with a Plasma Drone that managed to take out my engines, fuel tanks and one generator, which left my ship completely without power, but with plenty of momentum. I was already on approach for my base, seen in the background above, and simply fell to the planet below, coming to rest in the position shown. The impact, IMO, should have damaged those blocks coming into contact with the ground - I'd even accept destroyed those blocks and damaged blocks further "in". Ship should have fallen over as well, but hey, I'll take "stuck in the ground sideways" as reasonable enough. Impacts certainly injure us as nearly everyone knows, or will find out at some point - broken leg anyone? There's no reason an impact shouldn't damage blocks. However, I do know this is something of a trick to pull off in Unity. It was something Craneballs wanted to do in Planet Nomads, but never got around to implementing. Certainly not impossible, but knowing this lot here there will be a few areas of contention in any initial implementation: 1. It will be exploited by PvP players - small ships ramming larger CV's or BA's to collapse shields to make them vulnerable. 2. PvE players may also take advantage as well, using expendable HV's against enemy POI's that are shielded. 3. It's a change, some people will simply complain, others will want a toggle to turn this off, as they just can't abide changes of any kind. So some careful handling and planning would need to be done - the masses of colliding objects should be taken into consideration. A smaller object impacting a much larger object should have much less of an impact (pun intended), on the shield of the larger object, while potentially destroying the generator of the smaller object, or inflicting significantly more damage on the smaller object than the larger one. Planets, obviously, always win in these circumstances, and while adding a terrain deformation at and along the impact sight would be an exceptionally nice touch, I would not call it "necessary". Likewise, the speed of the objects should be a factor as well. Simply "swapping paint" with a station or landing pad, due to misalignment shouldn't be particularly damaging to either, if at all - perhaps a small (2-5%) shield drain, would be sufficient to differentiate between a simple navigational miscalculation and an intentional (or even accidental) ramming. Also worth paying particular attention to: if the "impact" is made by landing gear, this shouldn't be calculated or considered as an "impact", but rather an attempt to land, even if the pilot is "coming in hot", that is, landing at high-speed, however... a full-throttle landing might impart some damage to the vessel's landing gear or pads and still be reasonable. As you can tell, this opens up a very large can of worms - many considerations, many factors, and lots and lots of programming, bug-fixing and tweaking to really get right, but I think the end result would be well worth the efforts - a bit of realism where needed, a nice "don't fly recklessly" and a touch, just a touch, of player challenge (not ramming into things) with some minor penalties for those who choose to simply keep doing what they've always done, and we'll end up with an even better experience overall.
You've changed my mind, I like this. Still don't want to explode because I bumped into a tree, but properly implemented I could see how this would add realism, and probably make me a better pilot (or I'll just stay in space). Also, bumping into a Polaris trade station will probably piss them off, so I'd have to land about a kilometer away and walk.
As it stands now the game is way too buggy to have damage for bumping into things. Yesterday, out of nowhere, my SV couldn't stay in the air. So in a damage system I am taking almost constant damage for no good reason.
Not sure what you are asking for here with "flight physics". Do you mean better damage simulation when colliding with terrain/ obstacles ? Or do you mean better simulation of flight dynamics (aerodynamics, drag, etc) ? Or do you mean proper inertia (blocks flying everywhere after explosion in space, for example) ? The "base destruction physics" is not "real" because blocks do not collide with players, it's a pseudo-physics animation that only runs a few seconds completely separate from the game, and it then spawns a few colliders for blocks so the player can pick them up when the animation stops. There's currently no such thing as "moving colliders" in the game, apart from what the game generates for moving ships, and even these can't collide from inside (no walking on moving ships), and no elevators. I can imagin if bases collapsing had colliders for all individual blocks, the game would play in slo mo during the animation.
I find it funny that the terrain cannot damage the ship, but predators or other animals on the terrain can actually
Terrain used to damage ships on collision, but only if the playfield was marked as PvP (in the yaml file). This is not the case anymore, at least in vanilla and singleplayer, and I can't trace back where and why the change was made in the zillion release notes. Predators and animals are entities, so they have these "damaging" properties, like weapons, but terrain is not an entity. Changes may have been done to terrain collision rules to solve some other problem, I guess.
Yes, bugs happen. Report them so they can be addressed and eventually we'll get this beast smoothed out and polished.
Unless you hit a tree the size of a small skyscraper, I wouldn't expect a ship to explode from the impact. Damage some blocks, break glass, sure. Dink your shield gen by 10%, sure. Now maybe a small hover-bike might go all Imperial Counter-Teddybear Trooper on impact, but that would be about it.
Agree- we need better flight physics. Personally I find it easier, not harder to fly when the behavior of a vessel feels natural rather than this weird glitch arcade like thing we have. As for damage on crashes etc - yes - it would be nice, but a bunch of caveats: Trees: Trees need to be made easily destructable first - pretty much anything with higher mass should destroy a tree on impact. A T4 heavy HV for should be able to pretty much just drive straight though them and barely notice - same with any CV (including landing on it). This also mean fixing all the stuck on tree glitches. OTOH, a small HV or SV should take some noticable block damage, and maybe not destroy the tree. I have seen real car wrecks (after the fact) that have severed a mature tree (no idea what speed it must have been going), and several that just wrapped around it which is what we usually see - either way - trees need to be reasonably destructable by impacts. We can already blow them up, so it cant be that much trouble to fix? Blocks: Blocks from different structures coming into contact with one another can cause really wierd glitching and bumping at times - this needs to be fixed. Ground: Vessels sinking into the ground on impact and getting stuck because of cheap way ground collision appears to be done - needs to be fixed. Vessels being moved back up high into the sky I guess because of some other bug that was never fixed - also needs to be fixed. Probably also tons of other stuff that needs to be fixed, rewritten etc before they could possibly consider adding any kind collision damage as I suspect just adding collision damage to what is currently would quickly get irritating especially with current slow repair systems and lkack of any auto repair for bases (ship crashing into base - landing too hard etc). Also agree - space engineers is far too sensitive to damage (small scrapes with miners being near catastrophic for eg) and of course its damage calculation are very intensive - not something we want, so some kind of middle ground needs to be found.
