Star Citizen Megathread - Fly FREE thru Dec 14th! Link in OP - Games

[QUOTE=ScottyWired;47396541] I imagine in the final game there will be vehicles beyond even that, like, cutting edge milspec space equivalents of the F-35 which will be insanely hard to acquire[/QUOTE] that's called the F8 Lightning, and the only way to get that outside of being issued one in SQ42 is to somehow waltz into an airbase or carrier and steal one without getting shot down by a billion interceptors and pd guns

[QUOTE=Mattk50;47414070] Uh, actually i just had a thought about how to take the mouse gimbal aim mode and adapt it better to joystick far better than it is now, to actually be viable and "allow joystick users to get in on the gimbals" easier. Obviously deadzones would need to be removed/modifyable, but after that you get normal joystick control, plus the amount you tilt your joystick would also move the gimbals towards that end of the screen a set amount. The player could modify the scaling of how far it should move for how hard of a turn, but it should work pretty well, pretty much identical to the mouse aim mode in quality actually. There would also be auto center for joystick users and mouse users alike as an option. I assume most joystick users would turn this on, or it should be on by default (your aiming and movement is still tied together. Mouse/joystick will always be the best for this) [/QUOTE] This just makes it more complex and at the same time very un-accurate. The best thing they could do is remove gimbals but, and a very big "but", drastically improve mouse relative mode so you don't need to keep on panning the mouse. The mouse community would also like the change, you are able to have more control with the ship.

How will joystick users use turrets? [editline]29th March 2015[/editline] I was just thinking about the way weapons are done in x3 for example. No gimbals, only frontal weapons and turrets. Mouse and joystick are equally good when flying, but if you wanted to target with turrets you either give commands to computer or control each turret with mouse. I might be biased but this would be best way to do it. TL;DR: No gimbals and more turrets with possibility for ai control and manual control. [editline]29th March 2015[/editline] Now that i think, gimbals are terrible idea to begin with.

[QUOTE=creec;47415147]How will joystick users use turrets? [editline]29th March 2015[/editline] I was just thinking about the way weapons are done in x3 for example. No gimbals, only frontal weapons and turrets. Mouse and joystick are equally good when flying, but if you wanted to target with turrets you either give commands to computer or control each turret with mouse. I might be biased but this would be best way to do it. TL;DR: No gimbals and more turrets with possibility for ai control and manual control. [editline]29th March 2015[/editline] Now that i think, gimbals are terrible idea to begin with.[/QUOTE] [I]All[/I] weapons in X3 are gimballed. Enabling auto-aim will give you a few degrees of automatic gimballed aim when you hover your ship's nose over the targeting reticle. In X3TC and the expansion pack, ships can aim up to ~45 degrees off-center (in mouse-follow and keyboard flight modes) but can only utilize auto-aim within a few degrees of the ship's nose. Since autoaim also set weapons convergence, you couldn't really reliably hit smaller targets with high-angle shots in X3TC

[QUOTE=Daemon White;47415060]So... is Aegis Dynamics and UEE / any other separate company in-game actual companies / modelling groups irl too, or is that just a game thing.[/QUOTE] That's purely in-game. "Roberts Space Industries" is just the name of the website, the company developing Star Citizen is CiG, and they have one or two teams working on all the ships in-game.

I don't think anyone I've played with online knows how to land a ship without blowing the landing gear / wings off it. Some smartass took my Mustang after I landed and tried to land on the next platform over, successfully destroying both wings. I took his gladius but apparently they can remotely self-destruct it so that went lovely.

Just to get a feel for the capabilities of other FP members, please rate artistic if you have a super hornet, useful if you have a gladius, and zing if you have both. [editline]abc[/editline] Or optimistic if you're Krail.

Where does "Own a mustang but have a gladius because of the free event" go?

[QUOTE=Daemon White;47415528]Where does "Own a mustang but have a gladius because of the free event" go?[/QUOTE] Nowhere just yet. I wanted to know how many users had gotten ships that had a pure dogfighting focus. They'll probably be the least used in the Persistent Universe, but it's nice to know.

IMO landing needs to feel more dynamic. E.g there should be some sort of suspension cushioning the landing.

[QUOTE=archangel125;47415533]Nowhere just yet. I wanted to know how many users had gotten ships that had a pure dogfighting focus. They'll probably be the least used in the Persistent Universe, but it's nice to know.[/QUOTE] I have a Hornet that I'll probably outfit as a pure fighter in the PU.

I wish they'd put the merlin in already. i'd love to know how it flies.

[QUOTE=Mattk50;47414070][editline]28th March 2015[/editline]Uh, actually i just had a thought about how to take the mouse gimbal aim mode and adapt it better to joystick far better than it is now, to actually be viable and "allow joystick users to get in on the gimbals" easier. Obviously deadzones would need to be removed/modifyable, but after that you get normal joystick control, plus the amount you tilt your joystick would also move the gimbals towards that end of the screen a set amount. The player could modify the scaling of how far it should move for how hard of a turn, but it should work pretty well, pretty much identical to the mouse aim mode in quality actually. There would also be auto center for joystick users and mouse users alike as an option. I assume most joystick users would turn this on, or it should be on by default (your aiming and movement is still tied together. Mouse/joystick will always be the best for this) Im not sure why this hasnt occurred to me before. Im sure someone else in that 400 page argument threads on RSI has thought of this but it probably got drowned out by the shitposting. What do you think about this possibility, Why485?[/QUOTE] The end result wouldn't feel any different from flying with fixed weapons because both controls are tied together. The issue is that the joystick isn't something that's accurate at aiming things. Have you ever played the Star Wars Trilogy Arcade game? The difficulty in that game really only comes from having to use a joystick as a pointer. It's a really poor way to aim a crosshair. When you tie them together, you put the focus on putting a crosshair over a target rather than flying. With a mouse using unlocked gimbals, this is exactly what you want as you're playing to your strengths. With a joystick, it's... basically identical to what you were doing before with fixed weapons which is putting a crosshair over a target. A joystick would gain nothing from it.

[QUOTE=Why485;47417839]The end result wouldn't feel any different from flying with fixed weapons because both controls are tied together. The issue is that the joystick isn't something that's accurate at aiming things. Have you ever played the Star Wars Trilogy Arcade game? The difficulty in that game really only comes from having to use a joystick as a pointer. It's a really poor way to aim a crosshair. When you tie them together, you put the focus on putting a crosshair over a target rather than flying. With a mouse using unlocked gimbals, this is exactly what you want as you're playing to your strengths. With a joystick, it's... basically identical to what you were doing before with fixed weapons which is putting a crosshair over a target. A joystick would gain nothing from it.[/QUOTE] i see what you mean that it doesnt play to the strengths of the stick, but it does solve your main issue which was not locking an area of the game off to joystick users. Mouse users are still locked to turning in the same direction as they're aiming, after all. In some ways it might even be better than the mouse mode, as with the mouse your trying to compensate for your ship following the cursor constantly, with a joystick it should come more naturally. Might try to make a demonstration video.

[QUOTE=Mattk50;47417986]i see what you mean that it doesnt play to the strengths of the stick, but it does solve your main issue which was not locking an area of the game off to joystick users[/QUOTE] It really doesn't because it has no use whatsoever. It's not any better than using fixed guns because you're still doing the same exact thing as you would with fixed guns. [QUOTE=Mattk50;47417986]Mouse users are still locked to turning in the same direction as they're aiming, after all.[/QUOTE] As somebody who played [B]a lot[/B] of Freelancer, this really isn't an issue.

[QUOTE=Why485;47418106]It really doesn't because it has no use whatsoever. It's not really any better than using fixed guns because it suffers from all the same issues.[/QUOTE] The entire point of gimbals is that it lets you change your aim faster than your ship can turn. It lets you track fast accelerating adrfadrfa spammers, this would let you get your guns on point with a flick of the stick and still maintain high quality joystick piloting. [QUOTE]Coming from somebody who played [B]a lot[/B] of Freelancer, this really isn't an issue.[/QUOTE] Actually it's a huge limiting factor. The directionality of your ship controls the function of your strafe axis and even more so in star citizen since each direction has a different acceleration potential due to the thruster config. Moreso if your mixing fixed and gimbal weapons. freelancer has a really poor flight model and is more of an arcade game than anything, though.

[QUOTE=Mattk50;47417986]Mouse users are still locked to turning in the same direction as they're aiming, after all.[/QUOTE] That's how I'm used to flying in games though, so it's fine. [editline]29th March 2015[/editline] If I'm going one way but need to shoot in another, I just turn on decoupled mode and spin to wherever I need to aim.

[QUOTE=Daemon White;47418146]That's how I'm used to flying in games though, so it's fine.[/QUOTE] The idea there was that a joystick user dealing with the same thing is just fine. what i mean by that is a player using head tracking or HOMAS can actually fly and aim in different directions

[QUOTE=Mattk50;47418161]what i mean by that is a player using head tracking or HOMAS can actually fly and aim in different directions[/QUOTE] Oh, right. Maybe there's a way to link head tracking to the CTRL + Tab function while still keeping the standard flight controls?

[QUOTE=Daemon White;47418194]Oh, right. Maybe there's a way to link head tracking to the CTRL + Tab function while still keeping the standard flight controls?[/QUOTE] there is actually. in 0.9 they also implemented a HOMAS mode so you can control the gimbals and ship direction separately with both a mouse and joystick. also works for head tracking. theres a nice video of a guy doing this with a delta here: [url]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_ceCITLyjo[/url] Im gonna borrow a friends joystick later and test some things.

In case anyone doesn't have any headtracking setup but wants to put one together for cheap, [URL="https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/2zwzoz/0_smartphone_headtracking/"]this Reddit thread has two major options[/URL]. The OP is about using a smartphone as a gyroscope to track head movement, but there's also a post about how to built a DIY TrackIR setup for about 1/10th the cost of the official TrackIR package. A bit of soldering and LEDs and a power supply connection, some software calibration, and poof. I'm considering it eventually. Maybe this summer I'll get adventurous with electronics parts.

[QUOTE=Mattk50;47418144]Actually it's a huge limiting factor. The directionality of your ship controls the function of your strafe axis and even more so in star citizen since each direction has a different acceleration potential due to the thruster config. Moreso if your mixing fixed and gimbal weapons.[/QUOTE] It's really not. Your gimbals can only fire in a relatively small arc off your nose, so having your strafe directions always be relative to your nose doesn't make a difference. You're not going to be firing at something behind you with your gimbals. I really can't think of any way to explain it more fundamentally than that. It [I]really[/I] doesn't matter. I mean, yes you can engineer very specific situations where you might want to decouple virtual joystick from mouse while you gimbal aim your guns with the mouse but this never happens in practice. Anything you could accomplish while doing this you were better off just doing an engine kill (Freelancer's identical equivalent to Star Citizen decoupling) and just aiming normally with mouse aim. [QUOTE=Mattk50;47418144]freelancer has a really poor flight model and is more of an arcade game than anything, though.[/QUOTE] When it comes down to the results, Freelancer and Star Citizen's flight models aren't as different as you'd think, which is kind of ironic considering the enormous effort put into the physics. Because of the way the IFCS works, even with all its safeties disabled and in decoupled mode, the two games fly very similarly. Except, Star Citizen is much clunkier as a result of how it derives its results. You still strafe in Star Citizen just as you did in Freelancer, and you still mouse aim (albeit with a poor and clunky interface) the same as Freelancer. The advantage in Star Citizen's model over the simplified Freelancer one is in damage modeling, and honestly that's where the advantages end. You get much more interesting responses to damage than you do in Freelancer because a missing thruster has a realistic effect on your handling. Star Citizen flies as much like an FPS in space as Freelancer did when you play with the mouse, but that's a topic for a whole other discussion. Anyway, back on topic. I decided to spend a few hours and mock up a working prototype of the system you describe. It's a good way for everybody to have an informed opinion on the subject. Is it an effective solution to the joystick gimballing problem? It's a bit goofy, and suffers from the problems I thought it would. It doesn't really feel any better or more accurate, just different. I have a hard time saying this is the solution for joystick gimballing, but it is pretty novel and reminds me of the Star Wars Trilogy Arcade game. For better and worse. If you'd rather play in a separate tab or window, here's the off-site link: [url]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/15133164/FloatingCrosshair/Web.html[/url] If you don't want to, or can't play this in the browser, here's a downloadable link: [url]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/15133164/FloatingCrosshair/Crosshair.zip[/url] [unity]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/15133164/FloatingCrosshair/Web.unity3d[/unity]

[QUOTE=Why485;47418661]It's really not. Your gimbals can only fire in a relatively small arc off your nose, so having your strafe directions always be relative to your nose doesn't make a difference. You're not going to be firing at something behind you with your gimbals. I really can't think of any way to explain it more fundamentally than that. It [I]really[/I] doesn't matter. I mean, yes you can engineer very specific situations where you might want to decouple virtual joystick from mouse while you gimbal aim your guns with the mouse but this never happens in practice. Anything you could accomplish while doing this you were better off just doing an engine kill (Freelancer's identical equivalent to Star Citizen decoupling) and just aiming normally with mouse aim. [/quote] When someone tries to joust at me, my reaction is to halt my forward velocity, strafe vertically or horizontally away from him, then rotate my ship towards him, and eventually behind his original vector while he tries to get back on target, i make it very difficult for him. i do this with fixed weapons, but the main drawback i notice to doing this with fixed weapons is that, with all my strafing trying to avoid his guns, it is sometimes difficult to keep the nose pointed far enough ahead of my enemy to counteract the inherited velocity from my own high speed strafing (on a gladius or 300series at least). Gimbals dont let you fire behind you, but the ability to instantaneously conteract your own evasive maneuvers and still score a shot is very important to me, at least. What im used to doing now is turning per-emptivley but with gimbals you wouldnt have to do that and could lay down continuous fire and can readjust faster. Now, yes, you dont have to strafe in arcs as i described and you could just stay stationary while getting on target. But quite frankly, your a sitting duck if you try it, even if your adrfrfadrf spamming if your foe cant even get on target your in a lot better of a situation. the extra range of motion gimbal aiming provides lets you pull off those complex counter maneuvers without killing your own aim in the process. Like, it really does matter. I dont know how to illustrate it better than that. [QUOTE=Why485;47418661] Anyway, back on topic. I decided to spend a few hours and mock up a working prototype of the system you describe. It's a good way for everybody to have an informed opinion on the subject. Is it an effective solution to the joystick gimballing problem? It's a bit goofy, and suffers from the problems I thought it would. It doesn't really feel any better or more accurate, just different. I have a hard time saying this is the solution for joystick gimballing, but it is pretty novel and reminds me of the Star Wars Trilogy Arcade game. For better and worse. If you'd rather play in a separate tab or window, here's the off-site link: [url]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/15133164/FloatingCrosshair/Web.html[/url] If you don't want to, or can't play this in the browser, here's a downloadable link: [url]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/15133164/FloatingCrosshair/Crosshair.zip[/url] -snip-][/QUOTE] Wow, that's great. I gotta give major props for actually setting up a prototype, i was considering doing something like that but then i remembered it would require effort :v: . Did you already have the basic space game thing set up? I dont think the system is perfect and i dont think it can be as precise as the mouse in the same mode. But i do think it's better than other solutions like auto aim... or at the very least, if RSI doesnt want to do auto aim, they should at least have this mode in so people can use gimbals to a degree of competency even if it's not perfect. it would take more than just a few minutes of playing around to get good at handling, im sure. I don't have a joystick atm but im going to borrow one from a bud who isnt using it later today hopefully then ill give this proto a go.

CIG should really take a look at realistic physics and don't cheat it but design stuff taking account of the realistic physics first and not the other way round. The Gladius doesn't even have a reverse thruster and is still able to reverse.

[QUOTE=Toyokunari;47420646]CIG should really take a look at realistic physics and don't cheat it but design stuff taking account of the realistic physics first and not the other way round. The Gladius doesn't even have a reverse thruster and is still able to reverse.[/QUOTE] Wait, but the maneuvering thrusters on the sides fire forward. It doesn't need a humongous nozzle to reverse.

Except they don't. Thrusters don't necessarily need to fire forward directly to have reverse trust, but the Gladius small manuvering thrusters shows no indication of doing so.

[QUOTE=Toyokunari;47420837]Except they don't. Thrusters don't necessarily need to fire forward directly to have reverse trust, but the Gladius small manuvering thrusters shows no indication of doing so.[/QUOTE] Then report it as a bug. As far as I can tell, the thrust effects are visible for all other ships.

[QUOTE=Toyokunari;47420646]CIG should really take a look at realistic physics and don't cheat it but design stuff taking account of the realistic physics first and not the other way round. The Gladius doesn't even have a reverse thruster and is still able to reverse.[/QUOTE] Designing ships as cool concept art first, and then letting them get all the way to practically public Arena Commander release before somebody thought to see if the thruster arrangement even works at all has happened so many times it's a bit ridiculous. During TNGS, Chris even started to give his own artists crap and said something like "well if you would design it right the first time we wouldn't have to spend so much time getting them to fly right." The Mustang was the most egregious example. It's off-center engines were pointed out the day that it was revealed and how much trouble it would have flying because it would just pitch down every time it tried to fly forward. CIG eventually had to fudge it by tweaking the center of balance and having thrusters constantly firing whenever you accelerate to counter the torque caused by the off center main engines. The Hornet has similar problems. Due to thruster arrangements, it cannot strafe to the side without rolling because the only thrusters capable of providing lateral thrust are on the top of the ship. I made this image a while ago to explain it easier. [img]http://40.media.tumblr.com/9687ead02672f93cc20433c6270bda8f/tumblr_ncxsfhcf0N1r9waklo1_1280.png[/img] Granted, between the IFCS getting significantly better at countering all these problems and CIG doing who knows what to the physics of the ships themselves, most of these problems have been sorted out, but they created huge headaches for themselves by designing these ships the way they were. [url=https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/14244-How-Ideas-Take-Flight-The-Star-Citizen-Ship-Pipeline]The revised ship pipeline that was posted somewhat recently by based Travis[/url] shows that they now run physics tests on newly designed ships as early as the whitebox stage. That's great news and will hopefully prevent another Mustang. The Vanguard's thruster arrangement already looks like one of the most sensible ever created for Star Citizen.

For the Vanguard, there looks like 2 main thrusters at the rear on the vanguard and what look like an intake might be another 2 main thruster infront. I can't stress it enough but combat ships should have powerful reverse thrusters to fully take advantage of 6DOF combat. Also you are right on the Mustang, that is probably why they need to have overpowered RCS thrusters in the first place and making the main thruster seem irrelvant. I got a mustang and it uses the 2 bottom front rcs and 2 top rear rcs thruster in order to fly straight, the pitfall with this design is that the main thruster is limited in thrust output in order to not overpower the RCS thrusters and causing it to pitch down.

The Mustang doesn't belong in Star Citizen.