Nexus 2 - Jupiter incident Sequel! - needs you

[eRe4s3r]

Heh its funny that the thing i love most about nexus is the engine physics, when such a large ship goes from standstill to full 100% energy assigned thrust it looks absolutely visceral, like a real shockwave of particles streams out of the engines and propels the ship forward in a sudden movement (even the camera has a slight "delay" and heavy rumble when accelerating which strengthens the effect) it all makes the ships feel actually physically massive. And in combat, when you power down engines to have more power for shields those wimpy RCS thrusters lighting up to keep the ship in a controlled rotation....

Its a rare case of everything fitting together, though its true the game is more like a table top game, difficulty of later missions is brutal...

[x4000]

Yeah, that was what most grabbed me in the video you posted -- the sense of really being there on a massive and realistic spaceship.  It was more like watching a video from NASA than watching Star Wars.

[BobTheJanitor]

This looks neat enough that I would give it a shot if/when it gets released, but I can't get my excitement up enough to actually want to pre-donate in order to get it made. I'm still waiting for someone to make a modern day version of Freelancer. I just want easy exploration and simple trading in an expansive galaxy and combat that doesn't require me to learn 50 different keybinds or invest in a joystick. Maybe I should just go replay Freelancer again. One of these days I'll get around to learning how to play X3, but it seems quite daunting.

[x4000]

What about Evochron Legends, in reference to Freelancer?  I never played Freelancer much, just the demo a bit.  Evochron I've also played very little of and I admittedly had trouble getting into it, but it seems well loved.

[Lancefighter]

x3 isnt quite as difficult as it was - If you had started in x-btf.................. THAT was fun.


x3tc is just kinda easymode in the beginning. Compared to x2, where the starting option was a disco.. or a disco without weapons/shields.
And back then discos were useless, too.

[BobTheJanitor]

x3 isnt quite as difficult as it was - If you had started in x-btf.................. THAT was fun.


x3tc is just kinda easymode in the beginning. Compared to x2, where the starting option was a disco.. or a disco without weapons/shields.
And back then discos were useless, too.

I've got X3 TC, and I put a little bit of time into it. The problem is that everyone describes it as being the easy one to get into, and then immediately follows that up by saying 'just watch this 10 hour series of youtube videos!'

Which I have actually watched some of. It does look like a perfectly good game, I just can't get excited about it right now. Maybe one day I'll have the time to really learn it, but these days I seem more inclined to get into games that can give me more instant gratification. It's not that I'm opposed to a deep, involved experience, it's just that I have a job and a life to deal with, and spending hours upon hours learning a game and building up my way in the universe just so that I can eventually get to the meat of the game isn't as much of an option for me as it used to be. Freelancer is quite dated now, but it does get you right into flying a ship with easy mouse and keyboard controls and the story isn't terrible either. And it's hard to make space look bad, even with old graphics engines.

[Lancefighter]

well, thats kinda it - The 'meat' of the game is wherever you put it.

I tend to have more fun early on, somewhere between having an m3 and getting my first destroyer - past that, I tend to lack distinct goals (still looking for a good mod to fix that), and before that is just really really grindy feeling. Of special notes are the parts where you have an m3 and are trying to board a m6.. And with an m6 trying to board your first m7.

And seeing as getting a hyperion is my number 1 goal in virtually every playthrough I tend to play (love that ship so much), ill be playing the boarding game fairly often

[eRe4s3r]

Worse once you reach capital ships you quickly notice that the game wasn't made with them in mind and I always found that x3 loses all its charm once you get an destroyer or above because you simply have no easy way to fight anymore, everything becomes so detached and clunky.

This is probably why they are gonna cut this down in X Rebirth to 1 expanding core ship (so that you can modularly expand it with race-unique tech and it grows to maybe a heavy corvette or M3+ but not beyond that. That way your ship can grow in size, looks and power but not actually have the downsides of switching between destroyer and m3.

[Echo35]

Heh its funny that the thing i love most about nexus is the engine physics, when such a large ship goes from standstill to full 100% energy assigned thrust it looks absolutely visceral, like a real shockwave of particles streams out of the engines and propels the ship forward in a sudden movement (even the camera has a slight "delay" and heavy rumble when accelerating which strengthens the effect) it all makes the ships feel actually physically massive. And in combat, when you power down engines to have more power for shields those wimpy RCS thrusters lighting up to keep the ship in a controlled rotation....

Its a rare case of everything fitting together, though its true the game is more like a table top game, difficulty of later missions is brutal...

My favorite part was when they turned, all the thrusters would fire all over the ship, and gave it a really heavy, realistic look.

[BobTheJanitor]

I know this is an older topic, but as sedately as this forum moves, I don't feel like I'm going to offend anyone by bumping it. Although I don't really have much to say about the sequel, I wanted to say I did pick up the original Nexus during the recent steam sale, where it was something like $2.50. I've only played a handful of missions so far, and the gameplay seems fine, although the UI is a bit clunky about making it easy to see what orders are being executed by what units. Anyway, that's not the point.

What bothered me was that the game tries to look realistic, and unfortunately doesn't quite get there. And since it's put the effort in half-way, it makes the faults all the more glaring (at least to space nerds). The intro got my attention almost immediately. The ships look reasonably like what you would expect early space-faring civilizations to use. They look big and blocky and not at all aerodynamic, which is good. They have rotating sections for artificial gravity, which is great. Some of them even have long struts separating the fuel tanks and engines from the living areas, which is correct. So we see these ships leaving earth to head out to Jupiter, a journey projected to take 8 months or so (I'm not sure exactly, but it was a reasonable time frame) and they are heading out from earth orbit with their big main engines firing (while their rotating sections were still moving, which isn't strictly the best idea, but I was willing to cut it a little slack). So far so good. But all my hopes were dashed when they pulled up to Jupiter 8 months later, with their main engines STILL firing and still pointing back in the direction that they had come from. Bad, bad, bad.

And when they reached the station and then cut their engines and somehow coasted to a stop, well then I could only hang my head and sigh. Even disregarding the impossibility of those magical space brakes, their built up velocity from firing that engine for the last 8 months in one direction would probably already have them going an appreciable fraction of the speed of light, and they'd be a LOT further out than Jupiter by that time. (Never mind where they got all of the fuel... probably picked it up at the same store that sold the space brakes.)

And yes, I did notice later that in game you actually do have reverse thrusters that fire when you stop, which is good. They fire for a much briefer time and can apparently bring you to a stop in a few seconds from a speed that you've accrued by firing you main engines for a full minute. Which begs the question, if those thrusters are so powerful, why don't they put them on the other end of the ship instead? But I digress.

If the game had been a bit less realistic, this wouldn't have been so offensive to the intelligence of anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of physics. If the ships look like contoured dolphins and fly by shooting rainbows out of their tailpipes, then fine, I'm willing to throw realism out the window and play space dogfighter. Like I've mentioned, I thought Freelancer was great fun, and its physics are firmly in the realm of fantasy. But when I see realistic ship designs and get my hopes up that here might be a game that gives Sir Isaac Newton his due, and then to see it fail so obviously, well, I can't let that slide.

Anyway, rant over. Just had to get it off my chest. I do think there's an unfilled niche out there for a space combat game with a strictly realistic physics simulation. The hard sci-fi crowd would love it. Actual Newtonian physics, having to pay back any velocity you build up in order to change direction. No ridiculously silly 'boosters' that speed you up until they run out of juice, at which point you suddenly fall back to your 'maximum' speed. Yeesh. Unfortunately it seems that the game world is infected with the same hysteria that plagues Hollywood, believing that people don't want real sci-fi. They want disguised fantasy, or airplanes in space, or just a vehicle for horror movie monsters. But maybe one day someone will take up the challenge. Well, I can dream, anyway.

[x4000]

That was one of the more amusing rants I've read lately, I have to say.

Not having played the game, I don't really have a stake. But -- if they are taking steps to improve realism while still keeping the game actually fun, isn't that a good thing? Put another way -- is this a simulation or a game? "Simulation game" is kind of a misnomer, and refers to a whole genre that bends reality in order to make the experience more fun. Take SimCity -- lauded as educational. Since when do mayors wield that much power? Why do zoned buildings take time to build, whereas water pipes and power lines and power stations build instantly? And so on.

The list of "sins" of SimCity are easily as long or longer than your list of stuff with Jupiter. And I agree, playing a true space simulation would be very fun and (for many) educational. What I'm less sure of is if it would make for satisfying game mechanics.

I think Jupiter's team made the choice to go as realistic as they could while keeping the game fun for the average player, and while keeping a game-like progression of ship components (which wouldn't necessarily jive with reality, either). That's going to frustrate the hardest-core space junkies, bu for everyone else it at least gives them something approximating reality closer than other games did.

[keith.lamothe]

I found Nexus a lot of fun, the hard thing for me is that while the 3d looks awesome I felt that I never had the kind of situational awareness that a computer on my ship's bridge could show me with a simple top-down 2D map and order-issuing interface (maybe they had that and I missed it).

Interesting point on the half-way realism.  I think it was more fun for me than a full-on newtonian system would have been in that I probably wouldn't have gotten past the part where I kept slamming my ship into whatever station/ship/planet/star I was flying towards, but it was also more fun than a rainbow-propelled-dolphin model in that it felt more tactile and so on.  But conscious analysis of physics is not part of my daily life; if it were I probably would have lost hair playing the game.  Like if I played a game about programming that had tradeoff-free garbage collecting or simulated floating point division as taking the same amount of time as integer add, etc

[BobTheJanitor]

It's true, I should probably take what I can get and be glad for it. But it would have taken the smallest graphical changes to make that intro correct. Just show the ships coming in at the Jupiter end of the trip with their nose pointed back towards Earth and their main jets firing towards their destination. Bang, done. Admittedly, probably it doesn't bother most people. Once I got in game, it didn't bother me too much either. Clearly it's built to be a game that nods towards realism while still trying to be as loose and gamey as possible.

It's probably because I've read too much Heinlein in my day. He'll have characters in danger with their ship's systems out having to fly by working out ballistic curves in their heads and firing their jets manually. I know that's not necessarily everyone's cup of tea. Some people seem to have the crazy notion that science fiction loses its magic if you make it too realistic. Those people, of course, should be reading fantasy stories instead. Which is an excellent genre of its own, but clearly different from real sci-fi, regardless of how often they're lumped together by lazy bookstore shelving systems.

And though it may not have worked for this game, I think a fully realistic space flight system could still work and lead to some great battles. Look at the battles in Babylon 5 for a good example. While some of the aliens do have sufficiently advanced technology that flies by rainbow, the human ships all follow good old Newton, and fly like they're in vacuum and not in air. Using all directions, spinning around on a dime to aim at someone behind them while still careening in the same direction that their velocity was carrying them originally, etc.

[eRe4s3r]

No such thing as real sci-fi - unless you misunderstand what "fiction" means ,)

Newtonian space battles by the way, would be the blandest and most boring display of golf with spaceships ever. If the enemy doesn't want you to you could never actually catch a fleet. And if the enemy wants to stop, not only do you see that too late due to the delay of information getting to you no, the enemy could be flying in another direction while you see him stopping and react to that, and before you see the enemy moving in another direction you would have lost another hour on him.

And please do not ever mention realism + manned space vehicles + fight in 1 sentence. Nobody would build manned spaceships for space combat when they could build a drone for a tenth of the price with 50 times more powerful engines that no longer have to be G-Limited so they don't turn a human into jelly when they fire. Babylon 5 might be many things, but realistic ain't one of them. (And later on with the whitestar ships there is no realistic physics anymore either ;p)

Basically all i really wanted to say is that the "realistic" newtonian physics idea comes up every now and then and is in all cases and for all game types a bad idea.

[x4000]

Nobody would build manned spaceships for space combat when they could build a drone for a tenth of the price with 50 times more powerful engines that no longer have to be G-Limited so they don't turn a human into jelly when they fire.

That's a really interesting point.  Forever Peace dealt with some interesting stuff along those lines.  And a few others I read, too.  Basically, the idea that we wouldn't real be suited for going out on space combat adventures ourselves, but instead might just do it through remote-controlled avatars since AI might not be sufficient.