Re: Do we actually *need* atmospheric shielding?
Posted: Fri Jul 04, 2014 7:58 pm
"Do or do not, there is no talk" - Yoda-ish
Making a space game
https://forum.pioneerspacesim.net/
It doesn't eliminate it, you have a choice to use that cargo space or not, that is your game play choice of cargo space vs utility.DraQ wrote:Sigh. The problem with atmospheric shield boils down to it rendering differences between sleek, atmosphere capable hulls like Wave and completely unaerodynamic bricks like DS miner irrelevant.
If a brick can have sleek atmospheric shield, then what point do hulls like Wave or Venture Star even have?
I think that no flight assist mode should ever override the physics - else we will end up with a cheap ED knockoff.FluffyFreak wrote:So far we haven't had any kind of flight dynamics except Newtonian, partly because of the autopilot issues it might introduce but if we let the autopilot just use the Newtonian methods and allow manual flight to use lift, drag, etc then that could be one way out of the impasse.
True, but if we add more exciting things to do in and around atmospheres, it might make things interesting and atmospheric performance relevant. For example if we can doctor circumstances (through mission design) where player will end up in low planet orbit, and get attacked there, the atmospheric performance might be the factor deciding how player can skew the odds in their favour - if they can handle reentry better than the attackers, they may try dipping in the atmosphere, if the planet is a massive gas giant and player has advantage of thrust and/or lift, they may try to get deep enough so that the enemies won't be able to compensate for gravity and will be forced to break off or crash, if the planet is anything with dense atmosphere, player might try to use advantage of pressure resistance and so on. Then there is actual atmospheric combat.The other thing is that ALL craft are atmosphere capable in the year 3200. So long as their engines are powerful enough they can descend or ascend slowly and carefully enough that drag and heating aren't necessarily big issues.
I can't really agree with that.We have "shields" in the game so the idea of a system that does some mitigation of pressure or heating effects isn't too far fetched given the realms of possibility.
More likely is that there would be a range of projected energy shields that helped mitigate heating, friction, pressure or other things. As well as a range of modifications that could be done to the ships to allow them to visit various kinds of hostile worlds with acidic/corrosive atmospheres etc.
The thing is that if we make a shield worthwhile enough, then it will prevent further refinements in our aerodynamics mechanics to be visible to the player most of the time, because any player getting near any sort of atmosphere will have a stupid piece of equipment overriding their, possibly brick-like aerodynamic profile with an optimized one.It doesn't eliminate it, you have a choice to use that cargo space or not, that is your game play choice of cargo space vs utility.
Also the problem is that we apply the drag and ehating effects equally to all ships regardless of their shape. So it's not the shield that's at fault, it's our data and the way we apply the effect in code.
Sometimes you also need to rethink stuff.That is how we fix things on this project, by moving forward.