Exposure of ship turn speed & acceleration (curve?) possible?

[swizzlewizzle]

Notice that currently all ships simply have a straight up "speed" multiplier.

It is possible to split that out into turn speed, acceleration, and max speed? Would be nice to have big ships that turn very slow, and perhaps accelerate slowly, but still have a high max speed.

Doesn't seem like something that would be difficult to do?

[keith.lamothe]

The sim has no concept of acceleration or turning. The visualization layer makes it look like there is.

[x4000]

I could make a modifier for the turn speed so that the vis layer lies more about the orientation, which would make it so that big ships seem to turn slower.  It won't make small ships turn any faster, and I don't think it's wise to lie about the acceleration to slow big ships down, mainly because they can switch planets and being that far off their actual positions would be a bad idea.  But rotation doesn't really mean anything much, so lying about that in the vis layer is fine with me.  Would that be a help?

[swizzlewizzle]

No acceleration? Ok that is very interesting haha.

Lying about rotation wouldn’t really help since then you would have ships moving sideways... but hard to create a difference between ships when they all turn in the same way that’s all.

[x4000]

The original AI War didn't have acceleration either, that I recall.  A big part of that is to do with the coarseness of the underlying simulation, and the general processing requirements (read: huge), that keeps things a bit more abstract in the shooting and moving departments. Yep there would be sideways drift on big ships if we made their turning slower, but it might still look cool; hard to say, because sometimes they would drift backwards.

Keith, I do wonder if some sort of fakey concept of acceleration might make sense for really large ships?  Basically kind of like gear-shifts, almost.  I dunno, that's probably scope-creep.

[swizzlewizzle]

Yea honestly hearing your explanation it sounds like something that isn’t really needed per-say

[x4000]

Well, that makes it easier, then.

[keith.lamothe]

AIWC had accel/decel added after release for the main purpose of the visualization, because in AIWC the sim and the visualization were exactly the same (which is why ships would "hop" from point to point 20 times a second if you were looking closely). It led to various control issues because multiple movement commands in short order either resorted in sluggish ships (repeated re-accel) or odd-looking stuff (ships going max speed at angle A, and then instantly going max speed at angle A+90). It wasn't a huge deal but it wasn't ideal.

One of the big advantages of the separate visualization layer is that "mechanics just to improve the look" don't have to impact the sim

Generally in AIW2 it feels like the ships have an accel/decel just because of how long it takes for the vis layer to "get them up to speed", etc.

Now, perhaps the variables used in that vis-layer smoothing could be tuned on a per-unit basis, but that's more a Chris thing.

Overall I think it's fine for 1.0 as far as ships go.

[x4000]

10-4, that logic all makes sense.  And yes, there's a lot of "liar liar" elements to the vis that could be tuned in order to make things look fancier if need be.  If someone wants to mod it, the tools are all there right now.  If not, it's something post-1.0 that potentially can be looked at, if there's time and such.