My one and a half cents (inflation takes it's toll): When I first saw the engine torque setup for part of the flight control I mentioned that the perfect setup was a brick (picture sugar cube with thrusters at all the corners), and I see that is still true. (Some more explanation of the relationship of torque strength in regards to the distance and angle to the planes coming across CoM by our math experts here would help new comers greatly; it was done before but has been buried by more recent posts. I would but my communication skills are lacking.) That said; with much practice with the new fight controls and thruster placement, I have been able to make very flyable (smooth in all directions) ships, though RCSs (using far less than the old system) are still required to make them smooth. For myself, shapes of ships now seem more restricted then before, but I'm holding on to the hope that things will get more balancing and we're given a little more control over the torque. I agree that the max speed being related to mass alone feels just wrong, and suggest that it be change to acceleration deficient by mass in space, with a balance between acceleration and max speed being affected in gravity, to seem more logical.
While these features are cool from an architecture standpoint, from a gameplay standpoint it seems to me like it adds a lot of complexity which might be eating up a lot of processing power which might be able to go into something else like better AI or higher max speeds. While I am not familiar with the internals of the game, I have an alternative which I think would give most of the benefits with a lot less effort: An aircraft/spacecraft thruster mode toggle. How it would work is that spacecraft mode is the default, but when your craft is in aircraft mode, turning the mouse left and right has maybe double the tendency to bank the craft as usual, a craft without forward thrusters by default constantly flies forward at half speed unless you hold W or S, and all thrusters siphon off half their force to be able to redirect it in the other directions, with a bias toward down and behind, so that the craft can stay in the air and move forward fast, but any thrusters mounted in other directions wouldn't become totally useless The addition of torque mechanics has a particularly big downside in that it would make craft design much more complicated and inaccessible for new players, and limits the possible design options if they want an efficient design, such as for tiny ships or PvP combat. They have this in Avorion, where because of this and the fact that thrusters and RCS do not scale well to large ships in Avorion, the tendency becomes to either build giant cubes, or have really really slow turning ships. Also, since RCS does not get a similar torque effect, it can be hard to try and counteract the jerkiness you get from unusual thruster positioning or too many thrusters, however the upcoming A12 sensitivity limiter may largely solve that.
I used to be an avid builder but after the new flight model came out, I'm lost. I can't for the life of me figure out how to get decent yaw, for example. Tried building bricks, experimented with thruster placement and numbers but none of it makes sense. I think it is also sad that creative designs are much harder now. What I loved about Empyrion in the first place was the freedom to make crazy looking ships, and thrusters were mainly placed to look cool and glowy
It seems that you basically only need one RCS per ship now, and you get most of your movement from thrusters, proportional to how close to the edges each directional thruster is and how well they balance each other out with respect to the center of mass. If your craft's center of mass is not near its geometric center, then you would not want to place thrusters near the corners, otherwise some of them would cause a lot more torque in one direction than the other. Also while thrusters seem to be affected a lot by their position now, RCS does not seem to change based on rotating it or placing it in different spots as far as I can tell.
Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately I tried this out this evening and it was just a couple of hours of more confusion. I didn't notice any difference to the yaw when I added an RCS. I tried yet again putting the thrusters as you described but couldn't get even a shell of a ship that turns normally. What's even more annoying is that I get something that's looking good (statwise), then do a couple of little tweaks in the design and it shaves off almost double figures off some of the turning stats. I wouldn't mind these changes so much if I could figure out how to counter them. Even watching jrandall doesn't help!
What's the CPU efficiency say in the main ship stats screen? Your ship performance is multiplied by this percent, and RCS take a lot of CPU, so adding more can actually wreck your ship. You may want to play with the new CPU feature turned off, because ships over size class 4 are basically unusable with it now.
I'm all ok with how the CPU works - I'm trying to make a small SV for carrying a bit of stuff early game and it's at around 11k out of 15k CPU so all good. The only thing left I can think of is that my expectations of what is possible to do with e.g medium thrusters, warp drive, bit of cargo are way off. Does everything just need way more thrust now? Amount of thrusters doesn't seem to make much difference on the build - sometimes reduces the stats rather than increasing which is confusing... But anyway - I'm just one person - but that's my feedback to the devs since they asked I know I'm not super techincal with games but I'm not a complete bonehead either (though Empyrion is starting to convince me otherwise)
If stats are going down instead of up from adding thrusters, it's because you've exceeded your CPU limit and are being penalized for going over, which reduces the effectiveness of all thrusters. Also, thrusters are currently inordinately heavy, so by placing one it also moves your Center of Mass towards them, making turning with those thrusters slower. RCS are less effective than thrusters for turning, which is where RedScourge is getting stuck. He's still got his head stuck in the past, trying to turn a ship with RCS instead of thrusters. You can turn a 50kT battleship faster with a pair of L-Thrusters than you can with a half-dozen T2 RCS.
You wouldn't happen to be at 110k out of 15k and not noticing the decimal place being out by 1 by any change would you? I came back to this game after a 4 year break and wasn't even aware that they had changed the flight model until I got curious about how to build super efficient designs and started reading up about it, so the only thing I can think of is that your ship is so massive that the added thrust of the thrusters is nowhere near enough to offset the sheer weight of your design. Or maybe you loaded a perfectly reasonable little ship with 300 kilotons of cargo and did not realize that cargo weight affects ship performance now. I recently made a 29k CPU SV here and it's just fine: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2011687231 Please post a screenshot of the ship's info screens (when you press P while sitting in the cockpit) or better yet upload the blueprint so someone can inspect it and try to see what's going on.
I'm not stuck with anything, I merely observed that old ship designs in the Steam Workshop use a ton of RCS and perform like crap unless you remove most of them and add the new CPU parts, and that the new flight model, cool as it may be, might be so complicated for the game to simulate that it takes too much of the player's computer performance to allow the devs to build far better AI or to crank up the max ship speeds or something. Perhaps you confused me with someone else in the thread?
@RedScourge I had a look at your ship and it had only 34 yaw. Isn't that shockingly bad for any SV, cargo or fighter? I mean no offense to the build - I'm just wondering if barely being able to turn is the new norm? I'm been trying to improve on 45 yaw which feels godawfully slow. But I noticed even jrandall's stock blueprint Merc has only 39 yaw and can barely turn a corner either. That aside, I might start a new post where I ask for specific help on the build but I'm not making any total noob mistakes like not having a CPU extender, and it's not loaded with anything except 1 tank of fuel. I've played for years, watch plenty of vids, keep up with the Empyrion news and was not dropped on my head as a baby. I'm not trying anything more fancy than a T2 ship with about 5k storage and a couple of little guns. It shouldn't be this hard, but the game is making me feel really stupid which is a huge fun-killer. Some qus: If thrusters are supposed to be placed in a certain place due to centre of mass, but are themselves so heavy that they change the centre of mass, where do you put them? How can you plan a build in terms of design if you are always having to move thrusters to place them in terms of centre of mass? Is it best to add thrusters first or last? Are you supposed to have some massive wings going way out with thrusters under them? Do all thrusters affect the yaw or just some? I've got about 7 hours of trial and error on this ship so far and got nowhere. I've built dozens of ships in the past (pre flight model) without a problem. I've looked at other builds to try and learn but when I go back to my own ship it doesn't seem to add up. Maybe I'll just wait for Alpha 12 and hope things are a bit more balanced Thanks for the replies and help anyway!
30-45 Yaw is a good amount for a balance of being able to turn while still allowing you to be able to actually target an enemy ship in your crosshairs without it flying all over the place past it. It's better than you'll get in most medium or large ships in Avorion for example. Here's a tip that will REALLY help you I think: Use the Pilot Mode switch in the ship control panel, you may find that you prefer it, especially for turning. Hitting the O key to quickly re-center your focus becomes extremely helpful in Pilot Mode, as you gain the ability to turn without flinging the mouse repeatedly, while still having the ability to aim. Often I use Pilot Mode when navigating as it makes turning way easier, and then turn it off just before combat as I find normal mode better for combat when I have 30-45 yaw and pitch, but you may find that unmanageable if your yaw is well above 50 unless you have a DPI adjustment button on your mouse to chop your DPI way down. My answers to your questions: 1. they don't change the center of mass much once your ship is armored. The point is not to place them precisely, but to ensure that you have another thruster opposite the center of mass to mostly balance it out, so that your left turning isn't way slower than your right turning, etc. 2. This is not a problem I've had, generally I dig a hole in the armor once the design is mostly complete and stick the thrusters in near the end of the design process. 3. I generally add them last, though sometimes I use a line of thrusters to separate ammo storage from cargo storage and then this can dictates some of my thruster placement. 4. Wings are totally optional, best not to depend on them for lift unless you specifically want a fighter jet style craft; I generally just use small ones for looks 5. Yaw is primarily affected by left-right thrusters, though if you have very uneven placement, other thrusters may cause a bit of yaw.
Many new starter cores with there own sets of flight controls is what the game really needs, more than ever. Each new core, a new category on workshop. True specialization, specific blocks and abilities for each new type of class of ship. SV fighter category SV scout category [ current SV starter block ] SV bomber category SV dropship category SV Stealth Category Look at that, 30 seconds and true diversity and true specialisation, something that thousands of players would jump to fill those categories with new builds, rather than having to repair hundreds of BPs just to comply with CPU and the flight model, multiple front pages for Empyrion on workshop with each category getting its own page, as Steam currently works anyway. A really motivating reason to go and build NEW things for tens of thousands of Empyrion players, that right now, thousands of them are not even playing the game anymore because of CPU and the flight model, and the potential for them to bring new players is also gone, that system I proposed for true specialization is a reason to build, motivation, the very thing the game was built on in the first place and precisely how Eleon did it the first time around also, and to this day, we have 3 classes of vessel, SV, HV and CV, all cloned flight controls from eachother. Thats an EPIC fail for any game with so much flying. A truly missed opportunity. The ability for devs to add things later that we can never see coming, real suprise. For example, devs need a special ship for end game, create a new starter core with the special flight control abilities, and bam, story mode made easy, giving devs complete control of there game and story and direction and giving you a suprise you really were not expecting. The devs cant do this with the current CPU flight model system, not without 10 times the effort and work hours. The devs also said in the 11 patch notes that hey do there best to not make such changes that it effects everything previous, so things stay compatible, but 65,000 blueprints later and thats getting harder to believe. But the real ironic in all of this, the survey, almost the same numbers that like it and dont like it or dont see why it was needed at all, is how they worded it, so it wouldnt look as bad. A distinct advantage to one side, the new players will still do the survey as they discover the forum, but players leaving the game because of CPU, a huge chunk not counted on teh survey the true numbers I suspect are much higher for not liking it. But through all of the feedback, all of the hate towards the feature, it lives on, like Satan and that monkey on ones back.... Talk about dividing a player base, complete success in that regard. Why cant the game have both at least, let players truly decide. See how many stick with CPU and the flight model and how many go for building on new cores. Lets test that or are we to afraid.? Whats the game got to loose by creating a heap of new categories and new flight controls ? Interesting when you put it that way yes.
I would be glad if they just started with creating and implementing mere 3 variations of the flight/movement model. Basicly focussed on the respective types of vessel - HV,SV,CV. Not so much that the structure of the formula changes, but the parameters within in corrolation with each type. They can add those variations to the cores standardly. That would help alot. Then added with the new sliders in the make for further fine tuning. Seems like the best way to go with the least amount of dev work.
A better way than creating a buttload of new core types and wrecking existing blueprints would be to just add more options when publishing blueprints, add them to the Steam search, and add new blocks for each new ability, and only allow one or two special ability blocks on the same ship.
Well thats how you tie in the CPU system, its used as a booster system, and that system opens the door to build such devices, and those devices can have multiple tier levels, so a shielded recon ship could have 4 or 5 tiers of shield strength , all of that would tie in really well with new cores, the new cores are not just for new devices to be put on, the cores are mostly about new flight controls. A core for example, for prop planes, atmo jet planes, space ships, that sort of thing, this system would bring a massive amount of true diversity and specialisation to the game, its such a shame we went the other way, restricting building and mangling the flight controls into one fits all. You simply cannot have true specialisation without new flight controls. The CV is a clone of teh SV flight controls, and the HV the same with some parameter changes. Those parameter changes, on new cores is how the game gets true specialisation. To be able to walk into your hanger bay and choose between a real bomber or what we have now, there is no comparison, what we could do on new cores is so much more valuable, and bringing more things to build into a building game is really a no brainer anyway. Instead of this list below, we have CV, SV and HV flight controls, all very similar in how the yfeel and react, and turn rates etc. Rather than the diverse system below, SVP - prop flight controls. SVAF - Atmo Fighter SVSF - Space Fighter SVR - Recon SVB - Bomber SVSB - Stealth Bomber SVSF - Stealth Fighter CVC - Corvette CVF - Frigate CVD - Destroyer CVB - Battleship CVSC - Super Carrier HVS - Scout HVM - Medical HVA - Attack Class HVAR- Advanced Recon And this is just a short taste of the top of my head right now, imagine what all of us could come up with if we all had input to that feature....... The amount of specialisation achievable with that system absolutely blows away our current system. Not even a close comparison. This game could have borrowed tens of thousands of players from teh flight sim genre, massive boost for sales and a huge diversification of the game into other genres, the best strategy, the most profitable one.
The CPU stuff is about encouraging people to build smaller bases and vehicles to not overwhelm servers. If they just increase the T2 and T3 breakpoints for CVs add a T5, and the ability for server owners to selectively enable or disable T5, that would solve just about every CPU concern. I came back to the game after not playing since 2017 and the only nuisance I noticed was it was hard to turn a complete 360, and when I had enough turn on my ship, then it became too hard to aim during combat due to the craft becoming too twitchy. Once I discovered the Pilot Mode switch in the ship control panel, and the O key to quickly bring the ship back to the horizon, this resolved 90% of my issues. Not sure if there's a hot key for toggling Pilot Mode, but that would solve 99% of the problems that most people are probably having. The rest could probably be solved by adding another hotkey to allow you to customize where the O key brings you back to, so you can have the O key flick you back to any arbitrary bearing and orientation you'd like, and then reset it back to default with a rapid double press or with yet another key. As for adding cores, it's a terrible idea in terms of compatibility and complexity, because it will be yet another incompatible change that wrecks all existing workshop blueprints. Better to simply add blueprint subcategories and add specialist blocks instead of specialist cores, then it's just a matter of slapping a new block onto an existing blueprint to add abilities or tweak its handling somehow. There's just not a need for dozens of flight models, and if anything this would be counterproductive. One flight model, the pilot mode toggle, and maybe a few more hotkeys is plenty, while not greatly increasing complexity for players or developers.
Server owners should have the right and power to allow whatever they like performance wise, adding features that severely restrict building is what kills building games. This game had the opposite opinion for the longest time, the game founder wanted to remove grid limits and everything but we managed to go the opposite direction and restrict building instead, its the very worse formula for such a game in this genre. You obviously did not read the original proposal, but basically my proposal does not effect one single build on workshop, we are adding new cores not changing the old ones. So your wrong about that, but what the deevs did with CPU, 70,000 worhsop builds in need of updating, and I doubt 60,000 will ever be updated because most of them got pissed off and left te game, you can work out why if you read the forums at update 11 and onwards. So tell me, why are you not screaming at teh devs for ruining 70,000 blueprints ? You were willing to take a swipe at me or my proposal for that, but not one post towards the devs for what they have already done to workshop with the CPU update, come on dude, be fair. This feature becomes effectively, a way to force us to build how they see we should build, we had a game where we could build how ever we liked on any core we liked, what I proposed is an expansion of that, CPU and the flight model are a massive restricting of that. This feature ruined 70,000 workshop builds. This feature divided our playerbase like nothing Ive ever seen in Empyrions history. This feature to this day still costs us players and causes bad reviews and narky forum posts. It really should be obvious that restrictions like this are not how you build a really successful game, Empyrion should be aiming for platinum sales, it absolutely has the potential to get there, with the right features. When we short cut things, to restrict things to better performance for 20% of the overall playerbase, MP, it not only looks bad, it IS bad. This feature vs what I proposed is so much less diverse, dont have to add any real specific devices to extend specialisation, etc, but truly the worst thing about the feature is how it restricts how you build, rectangle is all the go now, infact its basically the average shape for everything with any real performance, oh joy, look how much that diversified the game, lousy lousy lousy, it could have been so much better. When your starter block is what defines your flight controls, lets use an SVD, SVDropship, a ship for carrying an HV to the planet, the starter cores flight controls have a x4 boost to any thruster you place facing downwards, making that core truly worth building on, on high grav planets its the only core worth building on, it gives a distinct advantage for building on that type starter core. That opens the door to use CPU for the extender blocks, specialised blocks, like extended radar and things like that. Instead of having 3 flight categories on Steam Workshop, we could have had 15 or more. Had this game attracted a huge chunk of flight sim players I have absolutely no doubt in my mind at some point Yak and Spitfire flight controls would be requested. Followed by FA18 and a few others that are super popular to fly. This game is not just about space. It has a multitude of planets to populate, diverse flight controls would have made all of these planets so much more interesting. Space in this game is the most under developed. Flight in this game is an absolutely HUGE chunk % of what players do, making that far more diverse and interesting would have been the way to go over restricting the game for MP servers. Curious, what does a Spitfire fly like on Pluto, well go find out. But you cant do that now. Thats a random example of the top of my head in 2 second, the playerbase has a much more diverse imagination than I do, imagine what they would come up with. We could have had flight controls that take us through the eras of tech. From prop tech, to jet tech, to rocket tech, to hyper speed space tech , to warp tech, to fold space tech. The whole game is connected together via its use of the games transportation system, ie, the SV, HV and CV. What a lousy choice. 1 set of flight controls for each type of vessel and absolutely NO classes on each core. The current system does not define classes in any consistent way, which means it has no real class system. The class of a flying vessel in almost every game with multiple planes is done via the starter core, or in flight sim games its the same thing, the starter core is just whatt hey started with when creating the flight controls, they have 2 dozen starter rectangles, they add flight controls to each, all are different, hey presto flight sim game born. Empyrion doesnt need to aim to be a flight sim, we have space flight we can do as we please, as we have from day one, and the original flight controls for space were fine, but this games atmo flight controls are atrocious, and thats where the game really falls on its butt and fails, because players spend a massive amount of time on said planets and to not take advantage of new cores and new tiers and new real classes and truly expand on the game and its diversity, we just lost literally thousands of sales which could effect its development longterm. Player starts game on planet, researching the tech to move through the flight techs to get to rocketry to make orbit, I mean you cant beat that for a formula, its been shown time and time again, levelling up through tech is the best way for such games in this genre, and that the artificial point system we use to level up is lacking in creativity and immersion, its boring basically to just collect points to unlock stuff, its better when its tech based. I been with Empyrion from pretty early, this is the first real mistake Ive seen the developers make. And thats mostly because this feature is forced on people. Its default in creative, that should tell you all you need to know about the devs intentions for it in the future. What does that mean you might ask, well its a way to force most people to comply with CPU rules when they build. Over time, more will be on CPU and the rest will eventually leave. This leaves in the long run an overwhelming majority that then want CPU because its all they have known. But that will never change the fact its not the most diverse feature and did not bring specialisation at all. All we can do now is dream of what could have been, Sitting on my chair at my base, on Akua about to do some gardening for food , Spitfire and Yak scream past chasing eachother in a dogfight. I can hear a jet in the distance inbound. I hear the sound barrier bust a crack of thunder as an HVDrop ship appears above on a 45 degree angle headed for a POI in the distance, [ yes the game needs sound barrier effects also ] in teh distance I see a couple of folk about to launch there Saturn Rocket, the Spitfire catches my eye as the Yak fires on it with cool looking tracer fire, theres a huge explosion to my right, the Saturn has exploded on take off, the HVD has seen the explosion and aborted the POI attack and is headed my way, but before he gets here, the atmo jet shoots him down, turns out its an AI controlled atmo jet patrolling the POI........ Are but none of that can ever happen with the current system. So we are left with a choice as players. Do we wait for the next great game to get this right, or do we try to help the Eleon devs to see the light in the mistake of restricting building in this game. I know some of these posts might come off as, maybe condescending in some ways, but thats not my intention, flight is half of this game, its really something we should strive to get right and not restrict and not make less diverse through the actual flight controls, like we have. And so far, I really dont think the devs see the potential of that proposal over what they have put in the game which kinda baffles me considering, its the very same way they built the game in the first place, starter core, attach flight controls to that, build ff it. Maybe different people in the coding team, I dunno, but something changed form wanting to create a game of building freedom to restricting the utter cr_p out of it. Anyway, its very sad when your favorite game of all time, takes a road of restrictions over really opening up the game to much much more, we are quite literally at a cross road here , but its a cross road were are all being forced to travel down one road, we have no real choice without new flight controls on new starter cores and new classes on Workshop. Thats the very definition of specialization and diversification of the game.
Mate have you ever heard of the phrase flogging a dead horse? You keep saying the same thing over and over like a broken record. You keep writing the same wall of text. All I can see from what your saying is more confusion and more work to an already complicated game. I really like the simplicity of making vehicles we can make now. Nothing is stopping me from making all the things you are talking about with just using my imagination. Your the only one I have seen in here who want to turn this game into a flight simulator. Now I can't speak for everyone in here. I feel many would agree with me that the flight system still needs work yet. None of us know where the game is going. How about we just wait and find out. If this game is really a problem for you the way it's going, nothing is stopping you from creating your own game. You can create your own simulator just as the dev's have created there game. If you don't know how to program then find someone that can and have them help you. My wife and I did and created our own 3d studio. Created our own 3d engine, created our own worlds and sold them to company's all over the world. We started out in our lounge. With the effort you have already put in to change this game into something it's not you could have already started your own company and been on your way to creating the idea game you want. This is all my own opinion.
