You should be involved in this game.
Test Pilots Required
- Thread starter Xelene
- Start date
You should be involved in this game.
I know you have got the people you need but I'll put my name forward anyway! Got 360 pad, mouse/keyboard and X52 pro set up (for the future!)
Love sci-fi space combat
e: Failing that, do you have a website or forums or anything that I can follow this on? Definitely would be on my "to get" list!
Love sci-fi space combat
e: Failing that, do you have a website or forums or anything that I can follow this on? Definitely would be on my "to get" list!
Soldato
- Joined
- 17 Nov 2005
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- 3,108
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- Swindon, UK
Developer/s. Is this you in this video with your game?
Skip to 5.55. This was in the same year as Tetris was released. 
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I think those two things clash tbh
I know you have got the people you need but I'll put my name forward anyway! Got 360 pad, mouse/keyboard and X52 pro set up (for the future!)
Love sci-fi space combat
e: Failing that, do you have a website or forums or anything that I can follow this on? Definitely would be on my "to get" list!
I'll be posting a build here in a day or few, it's very definitely Alpha. You are in a 50km bubble and will have a few rectangles and spheres to fly around.
Why? Xbox pad is a very common widely available and cheap controller that has two full analogue axis, force feedback, a limited third axis and 8 or 10 digital inputs. It's a great controller. Mouse and Keyboard are suboptimal for this kind of gameplay, joysticks are rare.
Sounds pretty interesting.
If you in need of a publisher, not one of those big evil types but one that lets you do your own thing drop me a trust
Maybe later, this is a gameplay and control experiment currently.
Note, the ships motion is entirely Newtonian. We're layering a fly by wire system over the top of the real physics to make it feel more like dog-fighting. You can flip 180 degrees and fly backwards. As soon as you engage the computer it will try to make flight feel like an atmospheric plane.
EDIT: This is what i'm asking you to test, how strong should the fly by wire be? What feels right.
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Developer/s. Is this you in this video with your game?
Skip to 5.55. This was in the same year as Tetris was released.
Nice and nerdy. Go watch Battlestar Galactica episode Scar. That's where were going with this.
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Same here, I've got a PS3 controller hooked up to my PC though.
Honestly, at this point we would like any and all feedback about how the ship controls. This is a few day or week cycle to make the flyability of your ship the best it can be.
A few people have signed up for Alpha testing and they will get early builds more frequently and be asked to perform certain tests.
This is a very early test render of Europa and Io transiting Jupiter. All three bodies, and the Sun were drawn at 1:1 scale - 1m in this engine is equivalent to 1m in our solar system. Europa is 1,560,000 M in diameter. Jupiter is roughly 800,000,000,000 M from the Sun. Every single body in this scene is drawn to actual scale and the engine is precise enough to draw items that are a few millimetres across.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kgs9orsNAE
Getting an engine to draw that range of scales is pretty hard actually, your graphic card certainly doesn't like doing it and there's all sorts of cheats involved. In that scene Jupiter is warped much closer than you think and shrunk to a fraction of its real size.
The hardest part is making a ship fly in a fun way. I kind of mentioned this before, but if you had a WW2 fighter it would take 2 or 3 days to cross the surface of Jupiter at full speed. If the ship flies much faster, and could traverse Jupiter in say 20 minutes then it would be moving so fast that you would have no chance to target and shoot another ship.
The Elite sequels (Frontier specifically) had full Newtonian mechanics, it was two ships flying at a significant fraction of the speed of light towards each other and jousting. Did I hit him? No, lets spend 2-3 minutes readjusting our velocities and try another joust.
The Wing Commander games adopted air physics and slowed the speed down. They were unrealistic for sure, but a key point was it was a game. You could bank away and get on the tail of an enemy to dogfight.
This simulator is fully Newtonian, but you have a flight computer assisting you. It will apply thrust to make your ship go in the way you point. You can flip direction on a dime and you will fly backwards. If you are going really fast it will slow your turning rate down so that you don't get pulped by inertial forces, but if you are going slowly it will turn on a dime. If you really need to turn, then disable the nav computer and flip - it will try to fix your attitude and velocity when you re-engage it.
The test pilots are going to give feedback on how strong the NavCom is and how fast the fighter should be.
(In Battlestar Galactica, a viper can do a 180 turn in 0.35s is that too fast, too slow?)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kgs9orsNAE
Getting an engine to draw that range of scales is pretty hard actually, your graphic card certainly doesn't like doing it and there's all sorts of cheats involved. In that scene Jupiter is warped much closer than you think and shrunk to a fraction of its real size.
The hardest part is making a ship fly in a fun way. I kind of mentioned this before, but if you had a WW2 fighter it would take 2 or 3 days to cross the surface of Jupiter at full speed. If the ship flies much faster, and could traverse Jupiter in say 20 minutes then it would be moving so fast that you would have no chance to target and shoot another ship.
The Elite sequels (Frontier specifically) had full Newtonian mechanics, it was two ships flying at a significant fraction of the speed of light towards each other and jousting. Did I hit him? No, lets spend 2-3 minutes readjusting our velocities and try another joust.
The Wing Commander games adopted air physics and slowed the speed down. They were unrealistic for sure, but a key point was it was a game. You could bank away and get on the tail of an enemy to dogfight.
This simulator is fully Newtonian, but you have a flight computer assisting you. It will apply thrust to make your ship go in the way you point. You can flip direction on a dime and you will fly backwards. If you are going really fast it will slow your turning rate down so that you don't get pulped by inertial forces, but if you are going slowly it will turn on a dime. If you really need to turn, then disable the nav computer and flip - it will try to fix your attitude and velocity when you re-engage it.
The test pilots are going to give feedback on how strong the NavCom is and how fast the fighter should be.
(In Battlestar Galactica, a viper can do a 180 turn in 0.35s is that too fast, too slow?)
Hi,
I'm just in the process of getting some forums and such up and running. In the meantime, here's an interim build that has the core controls setup.
http://smkd.net/builds/080613.rar
Controls:
Left & Right Triggers - Roll
Left Analogue - Yaw & Pitch
Left & Right Bumper - Set desired speed
Info:
This is a focus build around getting the game controls feeling right, collision detection is turned off so you can fly through the two objects in the scene. Graphics are placeholders also.
The two objects in the scene are a long rectangle, it's 10km in length and 500m across the other sides. The sphere is 10km in diameter, much smaller than a real planet.
The flight controls are Newtonian, with a computer assist. The computer will attempt to correct your heading but it can take some time to compensate for current inertia. At lower speeds the ship will be much more precise (in areas such as Asteroid fields you'll want to dogfight at much lower speeds if you don't want to be smashed).
I'm interested to know whether:
You'd prefer roll and yaw switched over in the controls.
Whether the ship accelerates and decelerates quickly enough or not.
Whether the turning circles in the various axis are quick enough or not.
Is the computer course correction about the right sort of strength?
Next build will have a toggle for the computer assist - so you can fly backwards for dogfighting, and hopefully a barebones cockpit that you can glance around. I'll also put in some better furniture, to get a more useful perspective on scale.
I'm just in the process of getting some forums and such up and running. In the meantime, here's an interim build that has the core controls setup.
http://smkd.net/builds/080613.rar
Controls:
Left & Right Triggers - Roll
Left Analogue - Yaw & Pitch
Left & Right Bumper - Set desired speed
Info:
This is a focus build around getting the game controls feeling right, collision detection is turned off so you can fly through the two objects in the scene. Graphics are placeholders also.
The two objects in the scene are a long rectangle, it's 10km in length and 500m across the other sides. The sphere is 10km in diameter, much smaller than a real planet.
The flight controls are Newtonian, with a computer assist. The computer will attempt to correct your heading but it can take some time to compensate for current inertia. At lower speeds the ship will be much more precise (in areas such as Asteroid fields you'll want to dogfight at much lower speeds if you don't want to be smashed).
I'm interested to know whether:
You'd prefer roll and yaw switched over in the controls.
Whether the ship accelerates and decelerates quickly enough or not.
Whether the turning circles in the various axis are quick enough or not.
Is the computer course correction about the right sort of strength?
Next build will have a toggle for the computer assist - so you can fly backwards for dogfighting, and hopefully a barebones cockpit that you can glance around. I'll also put in some better furniture, to get a more useful perspective on scale.
As a gamer, the best combat I've found in space sims is Freespace 2. It gets dogfighting just right and the controls feel intuitive yet not massively dumbed down.