2983

Well, according to Roberts, it was implemented that way because your EVA suit wouldn’t have enough power or fuel to “stop” you if you obeyed the normal laws of physics, so the game makes you magically stop.

2984

I’m reminded of this:

2985

A big part of this, I suspect, is due to the reasonable decision to implement speed caps on things. It’s not just folks in space suits, but also ships themselves. In reality, there’s no real cap on speed, beyond the increasing mass of the body as it approaches relativistic speeds, and thus the increasing amount of force needed to accelerate it. But in order to leverage that kind of realistic system, then you need to do stuff like account for fuel limitations, otherwise you can basically just keep accelerating anything up to some significant portion of C.

But do you really want to deal with fuel levels in your space suit? Meh, probably not. So, instead of having acceleration limited by your suit’s fuel (which, let’s be real here, would end up screwing some ridiculous number of players who accidentally sped themselves up beyond the point where they had enough fuel for the return vector), they put on a speed cap.

2986

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2987

As I said, the decision makes some limited sense from a gameplay design perspective, but it conflicts with the claim of realism and authenticity that seems to be one of the pillars of what people want from Star Citizen. And it’s a really clumsy solution to an admittedly difficult problem, and one of the reasons why it is clumsy is because of other design decisions.

Actually, some games had far more elegant solutions for those problems. Starshatter, I-War 2, Evochron Legacy and to a point even Battlecruiser 3000AD handled the unlimited speed/speed cap thing much better, and I won’t even add Kerbal Space Program to that list because that would hardly be fair.

2988

ST:TNG at its best. #TeamPicard

2989

As I said, the decision makes some limited sense from a gameplay design perspective, but it conflicts with the claim of realism and authenticity that seems to be one of the pillars of what people want from Star Citizen. And it’s a really clumsy solution to an admittedly difficult problem, and one of the reasons why it is clumsy is because of other design decisions.

Actually, some games had far more elegant solutions for those problems. Starshatter, I-War 2, Evochron Legacy and to a point even Battlecruiser 3000AD handled the unlimited speed/speed cap thing much better, and I won’t even add Kerbal Space Program to that list because that would hardly be fair.

I’d be interested in hearing what some of those other more elegant solutions are, and how they would address the issue.

2990

BTW, here’s Chris Roberts’ answer I mentioned in full.

http://www.scqa.eu/?keywords=first_law

You can click on the question to watch the video if you want.

2991

I suppose you haven’t played any of those games I mentioned?

2992

No, I don’t believe so. I’d be interested in hearing about the systems they implemented which address the issues in an elegant way.

2993

Simple. In Starshatter, I-War 2 and Evochron Legacy, in “normal” flight, they did what relativistic physics do, but in a “much less than C” way. That means that is no “hard cap” for speed on the ships, but the bigger the speed, the less effect acceleration has on speed (and the diminishing return is indicated by visual cues like increased vibrations when accelerating, for instance). That also meant that the optimal way to fly was to stay within optimal flight conditions, with the ability to “boost” away in some cases. It’s also worth of note that all three games have full newtonian physics (with that small “relativistic” adaptation for gameplay reasons). Is that realistic? No, but it feels realistic (or better saying, it feels authentic).

Now, of those games, none have EVA. Well, sort of. In Starshatter, you can eject from your ship. When you do, you follow the laws of newtonian physics, in that you’ll remain in uniform motion. You have no thrusters, nothing. At that point you have two options. You can exit the mission and your pilot will be deemed as MIA/dead (and you can then continue as a different pilot), or you can ask for a rescue ship - which may or may not come, depending on many things. It’s a really good compromise.

Now, in Star Citizen, what would be the problem of keeping the speed of your ship when you EVA? If your ship gets blown up, you’ll be there in space without means to go back to a station. Fine. Maybe you can kill yourself to get back to a station and keep going (which wouldn’t be unreasonable - after all, if your ship gets blown up with you inside, isn’t that what happens?). Or maybe you can ask for a rescue ship, that will have to match your velocity to catch you. That’s a pretty cool gameplay opportunity, in my opinion, in that players could choose to be rescue ships. Or you could request automated ones. See?

There are plenty of viable, reasonable solutions. Ignoring basic newtonian physics in a game that’s supposed to feel authentic isn’t one of them.

2994

Now, in Star Citizen, what would be the problem of keeping the speed of your ship when you EVA? If your ship gets blown up, you’ll be there in space without means to go back to a station. Fine. Maybe you can kill yourself to get back to a station and keep going (which wouldn’t be unreasonable - after all, if your ship gets blown up with you inside, isn’t that what happens?). Or maybe you can ask for a rescue ship, that will have to match your velocity to catch you. That’s a pretty cool gameplay opportunity, in my opinion, in that players could choose to be rescue ships. Or you could request automated ones. See?

There are plenty of viable, reasonable solutions. Ignoring basic newtonian physics in a game that’s supposed to feel authentic isn’t one of them.

Well, based on Roberts statement, I think they seem like that may be exactly what they do.

They just didn’t previously, and the systems put in place for the majority of use cases happened to have the effect we see currently.

Since those other games didn’t have the ability to EVA, they didn’t need to deal with capping player speed, since you couldn’t actually accelerate as a player. But in Star Citizen they didn’t want you to be able to just accelerate your little dude to ship-like speeds, so they put in a cap.

2995

Just treat the player as a ship in that case, and limit acceleration. It’s still way better than resetting speed when leaving the ship.

I suspect it works that way right now because of the way the engine works by default, but it’s still lazy and clumsy to say the least.

2996

Just treat the player as a ship in that case, and limit acceleration. It’s still way better than resetting speed when leaving the ship.

The problem with the solution you describe here, is that you would then negate any possibility to EVA, since as soon as you got out of the ship, you would be moving at a speed where your acceleration was reduced to effectively zero. So that doesn’t work either.

What you would need to do would be to establish some kind of acceleration limit relative to a starting speed or something. But then other issues potentially come up as well.

Again, the “real” way to do it is the only truly consistent way, but then that depends upon having some fuel limit.

2997

Clearly players must engage in the “Tethering Self to Ship Exterior Prior to EVA” minigame each time they wish to exit the shit. Also pay 3 million Citizenbux to have Adamantine Anti-Shearing Bones installed so they aren’t immediately killed.

Edit: Yes, I see the typo now. I’m leaving it.

2998

Why all the gruff over realism here? KSP’s EVAs are fun and realistic-ish. They accomplish this by not artificially capping acceleration or speed and instead simply provide the user with a pretty unbalanced fuel efficiency. Is there some reason why the realism peg for this is stuck to fuel at the sacrifice of gameplay? Or is there some other balance issue I’m missing?

2999

Then treat the player as a “special ship” in that the pilot doesn’t have the diminished returns in acceleration, but make his/her acceleration pretty small so it’s not an issue.

Or bind the pilot to his ship in terms of speed reference until the pilot is far enough away to be treated as a separate entity.

Or make the dimished return of acceleration be a smooth curve that will never approach zero.

Or just make the whole thing purely newtonian and let people accelerate how they want and handle the consequences of that.

ANY of those is still better than doing what’s done today. ANY.

3000

Well, fully newtonian gameplay tends to turn dogfights into jousting, which is not as fun as dogfights, and hence (gameplay-wise) makes combat less desirable. I’m not sure how Elite: Dangerous handles that issue. Anyone here knows?

3001

Speed is capped. You can turn off flight assist which enables Newtonian-esque maneuvering, though still with the speed cap. There is no EVA. Dogfights are pretty much turning fights instead of jousts.

It’s fun and feels right. Realism, not so much.

3002

Then treat the player as a “special ship” in that the pilot doesn’t have the diminished returns in acceleration, but make his/her acceleration pretty small so it’s not an issue.

If they reduced the acceleration below what it is now, then EVA would be sluggish and difficult to control. But at the current acceleration rate, you’d be able to launch yourself at pretty insane speeds. I don’t think that’s really an ideal solution.

Or bind the pilot to his ship in terms of speed reference until the pilot is far enough away to be treated as a separate entity.

Well, this is what I suggested, having some sort of relative speed limiter. Potentially, just give the player speed caps, but set them based on whatever the ship’s speed is when they EVA.

It’s worth noting though that I suspect this will have other weird effects as well. It’d just be weird in a different way than it is now.

Or make the dimished return of acceleration be a smooth curve that will never approach zero.

No, this doesn’t work, because in order to actually be effective as a limit at all, then it’d have to get close enough to zero as to make EVA’ing from a high speed ship very difficult as your acceleration would have to be low enough to effectively limit your speed in normal situations.

Or just make the whole thing purely newtonian and let people accelerate how they want and handle the consequences of that.

This is a possibility, although it then leaves open the alternative lack of realism in that since you aren’t accounting for fuel, you’d be able to launch anything to infinite speeds. Even if you went beyond newtonian physics and incorporated relativistic elements, you’d be able to launch anything to speeds that essentially prohibit interesting gameplay.

The whole speed cap thing originally came into play with the ships, because no one really wanted to play a space shooter where ships were moving at .6 C. So in order to have space combat be interesting, the speeds of the ships in combat are relatively slow.

ANY of those is still better than doing what’s done today. ANY.

Yes, I think it’s been established that the current system has issues, and that they are planning on improving it. Although some of the suggestions you made there illustrate why the solution isn’t really super simple.