Hey all, Note: Playing the Reforged Eden Scenario and, while many things are different, this base mechanic remains unchanged as far as I'm aware. Zero G Combat, it really doesn't work does it? The player controls go, well, plain weird, just like the personal Drone controls used to go, as soon as there's no gravity and you have to manoeuvre with the Jet Pack. My latest encounter is turning into pure frustration because of it... I warped to a new system. While approaching the Planet I detected a Pirate Station. I thought that this would make a good orbital base for me, so I engaged. I chose to take out the Power (and likely a number of Fuel Tanks) so I could preserve the Turret so the base would be able to defend its self quickly once it was mine. This went well and I disabled the station. However, it was the next step that's a little broken... I equipped myself for on-foot combat and entered the Station through one of the breaches I'd made. As I was in-range of my CV with its active Gravity Generator, I turned off my jetpack and engaged hostiles just like in any other POI raid. However, as I moved further away from my CV, I was no longer covered by its gravity, so I had to use my jet pack - this is the Zero G combat in the title. It's here things are a bit broken. I have very poor control over my character and aiming is a bit of a nightmare - the game "twitches" my aim, even with no mouse input - so it's a struggle to shoot enemies. The worst, and broken IMO, bit is though how the NPC's all behave like they're in normal gravity! They can run, jump (climb over things) and insta-aim perfectly. If the player had access to a "magnetic boots" boost, allowing us to stick to a surface like there's gravity - but no jumping - then things would likely be fine. As it stands we have no option other than the jet pack if we want to move in zero g. This gives a MASSIVE advantage to enemy troops and make the whole experience really not fun at all. So, that's why I think Zero G combat is a bit of a non-starter. NPC's aren't affected at all by the lack of gravity, no explanation for that, and can run around as normal. The player on the other hand loses much of the control, an almost all fine control (aiming), needed in first person combat. What can be done (devs)? What should be done? What do you think would be a viable solution to this? Should the NPC's be floating around with little control just like the player? Or should the player gain "magnetic boots" to be able to move around just like the NPCs do? Raiding a space POI to secure your own space station should be an epic encounter. It's not currently, despite the amazing POI people have made.
You can try disabling the jetpack each time you stop moving to have easier aim, but... whatever. Some things in this game are just very strangely done, like nobody ever tried playing with the actual adjustments and just threw it to us so we can "deal with it" in some way. Just like the recent "we told you many times we will not do wheel vehicles" thrown in our face while it was the very first time I ever heard about it, and surely @Wayson too since he never missed a patch to ask for "wheels"... So we're dumb, right? And what's next ? Oh... and water making waves in the desert hundreds of meters from the sea and lakes... The "mods" folder not working... Like the HV : why does this clumsy thing take 10 second to get parallel to terrain, whatever the slope or even on flat ground, without zero relation to how we balance the HV ? No wonder players get stuck everywhere and hit random obstacles that don't look like they could cause problems : the HV simply refuses to "pitch" at a normal speed, runs on its nose when hitting a slope, like it's hard coded to stay horizontal even if it's completely inappropriate when riding in hills. Players can break their legs falling from a 2nd floor, but the HV magically "floats" horizontally on a 45 deg. slope... Let's just say I don't have much expectations since things have noticeably slowed down... Drone gave motion sickness to players, now it's the jetpack in space...
Good tip, I'll try that - would likely need to re-bind the jetpack key to a mouse button to make it practical though. I agree, there are several areas which feel a little... unfinished, as if they need a quality pass to tidy up the mechanics / implementation of a given feature. We've discussed wheels many a time over the years and with hover not functioning well, I can see why wheels might be hard. Hovers are indeed weird but it's how they're weird that gets me. Travelling over undulating terrain my HV's will roll just fine to follow the terrain if it dips or rises to the left or right. However, any change in pitch they just cannot handle as well. They might respond ok to an upwards incline, but equally they might just dig in and stop dead. That's still better than how they respond to a downward slope though, i.e. they don't respond! Travel up a slope that then flattens out, with see the typical HV stuck at that angle for an extended period travelling forwards. This will impact top speed and manoeuvrability potentially. It's just plain weird, no doubt there. Refinement is key here I feel. We're way past version 1.0 now, so things like this need to work better. There's a lot of great game here, but these sort of issues do let things down. I don't want to be struggling with controls and or random physics gremlins, I want to be immersed in the moment, be it attacking a POI or simply driving across the landscape. On the player Drone. It is much better to control now, and as a precision tool for building it's much improved. However, it doesn't really feel like a Drone any more, which takes something away from the experience. It's yaw/pitch/roll is ok, it just needs a little more inertia in the movement - just like, you know, a Drone...have Eleon flown many? The Drone is actually something that's begging for more development. It's infinite at the moment which is useful but a little too convenient. Having to build the Drone and outfit it for the given task - Mining, building (Multitool) - would be more immersive. Have it destructible , sure, but give it durability and have it "teleport back" when it takes fire, requiring a repair / replacement if finally destroyed... there's more that could be done with it. It's good that Eleon still add features, special mention to stuff that helps modders / Scenario creators expand their work. They do need to refine what they've done already though and have it be the best it can be. I love the game, no doubt there, but there's a lot of jank that - when showing the game to others - it quite jarring and people find off-putting. I'm hardened to such things from time in early access, many people who see Empyrion for the first time are not, and they react accordingly.
Easy recipe : if Eleon could allow us to set the max hover height of the hover engines, if we could also disable lateral drift (inertial movement) and let the HV follow closely terrain and leave it to the players to learn to drive and design better, then wheels would be a breeze. All we need is to set the hover force to be very strong but very close to the ground (1 SV/HV block max) and then the engine model can simply be a wheel. When looking at the "wheel collider" in Unity it sure induces panic and vertigo, but there is absolutely no need to go there. With the 3 elements I mentioned here (free/ loose "pitch", no side drift, adjustable hover max height) players could build all kinds of tanks/ multiple axis vehicles, which don't even require steering wheels for turning (like the 6 wheel buggy of the late 70s). And the idea is not merely to build vehicles : big or small trucks would be slower than most basic HV, but could haul lots more mass and materials, so they could remain useful up to mid game, and first "hovercrafts" could be more POI_attack things, before accessing devices to match the trucks hauling capacity. Low speed + closely follow terrain (and yes, get stuck on rocks dammit!) but truck can be a life saver (shelter, small early game moving base) and allow slower progression on the starter world(s). There are just a few things they can allow us to do to make big leaps in design and creativity. I'm not just talking about Space Lego contests here, but also story/ progression variety, among other things. Lots of players asked for "something to do later game" but in fact the survival part can be stretched much longer, with slower progression, without getting boring. Players have seen the "end game CV and enemies and POIs" since the beginning of development, so the part that has been missing for many is before that : early stages, complete and satisfying. Presently players just jump throught the initial "survival difficulties" because there are just a few things to do and build to get out of that state. Main hover problem is this one : Despites being able to carry tons, the hover engines are unable to prevent this,and the HV will not get parallel to the ground/ slope without the player's intervention on controls, and this just makes no sense. The damn thing should just fall down to its set height, parallel to whatever is below. And since the HV is so fast, it just collides its dumbass nose everywhere. A slow truck can't do that, and if the max over height can be set very low + strong, then the hover engines at the front will just "lift the nose" according to whatever it encounters : Preventing the wheels from interfering with the ground but still give the illusion of contact is just a matter of visuals : have the "visible wheel" touch the ground at max hover height, but make the collider just a bit higher (use the other mesh as model for the collider): So when the vehicle is on the ground, it slides on the hover cushion, but it shows the wheels digging a bit in the ground : Then just make the visible wheel spin when pressing a key. Presently I used... a mesh particle (1 simple wheel, no axle) and tweaked the settings so the particle spawns in a circle around the "fixed wheel", very short life, very rapid spawn (30 spawn/ sec, follow arc of emission at high rate). At very low speed it looks like the truck is spinning in the dust, and at higher speed the illusion looks adequate. Only two modded thrusters, one front/ one back, to prevent "strafing". So it's just a matter of creating a convincing illusion, and if I can make this with the very limited options we have at our disposal, I hardly see why Eleon sees this as an impossible challenge. They could do 10 times better with very little scripting, and just use the actual hover mechanic, no fancy "Unity Wheel Collider" hell to mess with, no fuzzy flight mechanics, no "bad HV driver/ designer" compensation system : a truck is inherently a "rough ride" but at a low speed I hardly see issues with terrain and collision. If anything, a fake wheels system will have even less issues than the HV. Since asking for "wheels" seems to frighten some people, then I just want to ask this from @EleonGameStudios : just give us a tiny 1x1 ground repulsor engine, with adjustable torque/ max hover height/ radius whatever, and make it so that it disables the usual "flight mechanics" from the vehicle it is installed on (to prevent or limit side drift), and disable pitch so the vehicle "sticks" to the terrain. For the "stop/ start wheel spinning" we could simply have a sample script (like the 2 we have already in the BlocksAndPropsModding project) to bind the "rotate" modifier to be linked with the "forward/backward" keys. .
Amazing work there. It'd be great if Eleon could support this - and vastly improve HV performance as a result. I've mentioned it in the past, but I do like the idea of a slower tech progression and wheels just fit so well with that. Sure, they're slow, can be totally blocked my certain terrain and rocks, but would be cheap from both a build and fuelling perspective while offering good carrying capacities. Plus of course, and this is a big one, the "cargo mass affects top speed" design decision would finally make sense...for this class of vehicle at least
I can't comment on anything RE, as I have never even downloaded it. But I can say, as far as how HV's behave, there are a couple of things I have found that seem to help with their behavior - the use of artificial mass blocks can make quite a difference in HV's that are having trouble with burying the noses, or dragging their tails. The other involves the use of mixed hover engines - large and small, or small and the equally small green ones, to compensate. This can also be achieved by the use of some very creative circuitry designs, to briefly toggle the rear hover pads off and on to achieve a leveling effect for HV's.
This would change nothing : lift the HV nose as high as you can then cut all ship power. Take the external 3rd person cam, don't touch the controls, and see how long it takes for the vessel to come back parallel to ground. Completely off charts.
I'll take a look. I'll also admit, I don't often use the 3rd person view with HV's - usually just with SV's while scouting planets or when landing CV's. I do know, at least with the majority of my HV designs the mixed pads certainly handle better - far fewer instances of the HV nose catching water or bumps on the ground. Might take me a little bit to report what I find - it's that time of year here where I transition from terrestrial to aquatic life - aka I spend about 6 months out of the year living on my boat and I just got her in the water on Sunday.
do you find it moves overly sensitive like too much to try to get your cross hair on target? firstly RE AI in 1.7 is out of this world hard, i wonder if when the armor durability drops even slightly if most protection is gone. try lowering your mouse sensitivity in the menu to half or less, you will find the weird speedy movement stops in space.
I do not, and why would I change my mouse sensitivity? I have it set exactly how I like it. I also do not use Reforged or ANY other mod. 100% vanilla is it for me. It's likely the reason I never see the majority of issues others do.
The issue reported in this thread regarding zero-G combat is 100% a vanilla issue. The Reforged Eden Scenario appears to have changed nothing in this regard. When there's no gravity, NPC's can move around normally - it does not appear to hinder them in any way - yet player inputs feel super laggy. It's like while the game might be reportedly running at a reasonable 60fps as reported by the in-game FPS counter, my input is running at (optimistically) 20 fps at best. This makes aiming terrible and a small mouse input might yield zero movement or it might yield excessive movement. Either way, control is taken away from the player. I'm guessing the AI simply isn't coded to be impacted by a lack of gravity,same as it isn't by excess temperatures, radiation etc. like the player is. However, it's the broken movement for the player in Zero G that's the largest issue. @IndigoWyrd - have you never taken on a space POI having taken out the Gravity first? I.e. by destroying the Generators. In my observations, NPC on the station behave as if nothing has changed, fully able to move shoot and run unaffected by the lack of gravity. The player on the other hand is either stuck in place if the jetpack is off - no "Magnetic boots" which might explain (lore-wise) why NPC movement remains unaffected - but wildly uncontrollable if the jetpack is on. As mentioned, raiding a space POI should be pretty epic and tactically taking out the gravity should at least put everyone on the same (not easily controlled) footing. Obviously, this lack of control isn't strictly-speaking limited to space POI's where the gravity has been taken out. Rather it's any time in space where the player chooses to use the jetpack to move around.
Nope, never. I'd rather salvage a Gravity Generator. I have been in more than a few space-based POI's that do not have gravity (or even power), and I don't have problems controlling myself. I run no mods of any kind, so I can't say for sure if any mods are impacting your experience, but I have made a few changes to some of the keybinds, including binding the key that auto-orients you to one of the thumb-buttons on my mouse, and tapping or even holding this to maintain my orientation is pretty much an automatic reflex action. This probably helps more than I even realize, because I figured out sometime back some number of years and builds ago, about 4 hours into the game for the very first time that zero-g environments behaved strangely and it was very simple to wind up upside down, backwards and at an angle all at once without really realizing it, so binding the orientation key to something literally at my finger tips was pretty much mandatory. I use the same strategy for Space-based POI's I employ for land-based POI's: Find and neutralize the core. This shuts down the entire facility, and readies it to either be taken over by recoring it, or dismantled into resources. Every block is a resource, so I try to do as little damage as possible.
Interesting. I can categorically say that mods have no impact on the degree of control available to me as it was not long ago I was playing a totally vanilla v1.7 game. The exact same issues when in zero g exist. To be clear, when you are in POI's with no gravity you are engaging in combat with multiple enemies such as Zirax Troops, Robots, Sentry Bots and the like, right? You do see them moving around normally, as if gravity is present - just like they would on a planetary POI - and able to run, jump and shoot without any issues? In in these specific scenarios that the lack of control for the player is very apparent to me. Of course, I can control basic player movement fairly well in zero g - I'm able to move around inside POI's using the jetpack for example - but it's very clunky with exaggerated inputs. Bearable, and at least workable, when just moving around, but not when trying to shoot multiple enemies that ignore the lack of gravity. Like I said, one time a slight mouse input might give zero movement, another time my character is facing in the opposite direction after an equally slight input. Genuine low-fps situations make things worse, but they're really rare for me. It's weird and off-putting and needs to be fixed. Equally, which of course exaggerates the issue, NPC's are not affected at all by zero g. I'd often leave a POI's gravity intact - i.e. not take out generators and the like - until I'm done to avoid the poor gameplay zero g offers. So, while I can move around and fight in zero g, it's a rubbish experience with totally different rules applying to the player. Bottom line is that the level of control offered when in zero g is sub-standard. I should feel different certainly, but not like this. As an aside, it's an interesting exercise to do the following: - Be in space, doesn't have to be in a POI, just zero g, and look around. Compare that experience with enabling God Mode then doing the same thing. Every feels smoother, even though FPS remains unchanged. That's ignoring the laggy input that's normal for zero g. I made this post because I'd been attacking various space-based POI's, and it's clear to me that this type of gameplay hasn't had the attention it deserves.
I will certainly not disagree that there are more than a few areas of this pre-release game that are in need of attention. Despite having abandoned the "Early Access" tag some time ago, this is still very much an Early Access title, and one developed by a rather small team, but even large teams, such as those of AAA studios cannot always address all areas of any given title at the same time. I am certainly aware of the "advantages" NPC's have, such as not being impacted by gravity, or a hostile environment, though this is seldom a unique matter to Empyrion. NPC's are often advantaged in many ways in many titles, largely to make up for their biggest disadvantage - being AI-controlled. I am curious though, hearing the input issues you describe, to know if you're playing on Windows 10, and if so, if you have GPU hardware scheduling enabled. If so, can you try turning it off to see if you notice any improvement. If you're not using Windows, I'm afraid I have nothing more to offer there, as my only use for Linux is as a router and web filter.
Playing on Windows 10, 3900X, 32GB DDR4 3600 with a GTX 1070. Drives are fast M.2 NVMe's in RAID0. I have played with GPU Hardware Scheduling and cannot see any apparent difference in either overall fps (I'm usually vSync-locked at 60) or smoothness. Oh, I also don't use any mouse acceleration options or anything like that. I know some people do enable such features - many gaming mice have their own drivers and software for it - but I don't use anything like that. Flying (jetpack) in zero g feels very much like the player Drone used to feel before it was changed. While a wobbly drone was generally ok for placing large 2x2x2 metre blocks, wobbly aim is less suited for aiming precision weapons.
I broke my leg getting off the motorbike in a hurry to get a plant, Chrakkkk it went... Medic! I was on the beach! I know I'm late here but... funny
