6196

One of my buddies has the Connie too… I flew it a little bit.

I have to say, flying it was kind of… intimidating. It’s just so huge compared to the ships I have, and it’s got SO much stuff going on. The thing has like 58 missiles or something. And at least two turrets (I think more, because it’s got 12 lasers and only 4 are controlled by the pilot).

Oh, and it had another whole ship inside it?

Even after flying around a lot, I found the Constellation to be kind of overwhelming. But even with just two of us in it, we were able to do some work on some pirates and other players.

6197

So when is CIG required to file a legal response to Crytek for? That’s really where I’m envisioning the next batch of popcorn to be used.

6198

By Jan 4th.

6199

Geez, pucker factor plus 100.

6200

Ok, I decided to make some videos and put them on youtube. Overall stability today was average? Meaning, once I got into a server, it was fine. I also learned that apparently my framerate seems to be limited mainly by the server, and not the graphics, because I can up the settings to “very high” and the framerate doesn’t change. Likewise, I can turn them down to low and the same goes. At one point I was one a server today where I was getting a framerate of around 45, but then it eventually tanked to like 10… so whatever? Anyhow, most of the time it stays in the range of 25-30, which is playable, so cool. But often it will crash, repeatedly, while trying to launch. So that’s annoying. But anyhow, here are some videos of me playing today.

This first one is where I was just gonna do a standard “Turn on the comms array” mission. Usually, you go there, EVA into the array, flip a switch, then get back out and fight a few bad guys.

This time, when I got there, there were like… a million bad guys, and one other player, so I proceeded to jump in and get into this long dogfight. It’s stuff like this that is fun, and what gives me hope for the game as a whole.

At the end of it, I don’t even bother screwing with the comms array, and just go land to check out the damage to my ship.

Then some other random craziness…
Ok, so first, I recreated the thing I described previously. On these NPC Distress call missions, the AI seems to glitch out all the time (this time, the enemy AI was pretty glitched out too, focusing entirely on killing the NPC). But after I kill them, I EVA onto the NPC ship and steal it.

Here, I noticed some guy’s ship was open, so I decided to join him.

Here, I was going to see if I could steal an NPC’s police cutlass. I succeed, but not exactly how I expected. Note, that at the beginning, I’m actually just going inverted over him to kind of look into his cockpit from mine, like in Top Gun. I’ve since reported this as a bug.

Now, one thing to note here is that in the case of the Starfarer (The big NPC ship I stole), I think it’s actually a bug in that the door from that outside platform thing that I fall down onto isn’t locked like other doors to the ship (which means you can’t really do this unless the ship is in zero G). And once you’re in the ship, you can’t get OUT of the ship except through that door, and then jumping off the platform. The Drake was similar, in that I could fly it around, but I couldn’t open the doors… likely because the ship was locked. I actually stole a player’s starfarer the same way, and it was also locked the same way, so once I landed it, I couldn’t get back in. In the case of the Drake, I couldn’t get OUT, so I had to suicide eventually.

Oh, one last one, just for the hell of it… that Starfarer that I stole from a player, appeared to have some cargo in its hold, so I decided to see if I could sell it. I couldn’t. But this video is mainly to laugh at my first attempt at landing a huge ship on the surface of a planet. Since my ships are all small fighters, I was… unprepared for the inertia that this ship had. And bare in mind, this is after I had already landed on on a space station. The big difference is that since I was coming in from orbit, and it takes so long (on the order of minutes) I had the throttle maxed out at like 888 m/s or something. Turns out, it takes a while to slow down if you’re the size of a building.

Also I feel bad that some guy paid a bunch of money for this ship, then for all the cargo in it. But hey, it’s still on that planet. (You can actually see it tracked in the first dogfight video I posted, like 65,000 km away) So, if this was your ship, uh, it’s on Yelen, I guess.

6201

Thank you @Timex for single handedly removing the venom in this thread. Bravo!

6202

Sweet, will watch them later, thanks @Timex

6203

In the first video, most of the time I can’t see an enemy ship - all I see is the marker the computer is displaying over the ship and I’m left wondering, if the onboard computer can mark and track all these ships, what the heck are you doing shooting? Why not just let it shoot?

6204

Because what’s the point of shooting if you can’t see the explosion?

6205

Heh, ok, there are a few things to consider here:

  1. The aiming pip isn’t really perfect, so sometimes you need to shoot where it isn’t.
  2. If you’re good (i.e. better than me with my handful of days piloting), you can actually aim for specific regions, since you can see the orientation of the ship in your tracking radar in the top right, by aiming to the correct side of the aiming pip.

But really, the answer to your question is this:
3) in actual space combat, all ships would likely be giant spheres, and all the targeting would be done via automated computers… Hell, even in modern aerial combat, it’s generally all gonna take place BVR with guided missiles. But for the sake of fun, they’ve injected an element of WWII style dogfighting.

I actually really, really dig the flight modeling and controls in SC when it comes to combat, although it’s dramatically different from normal aerial combat.

It may be hard to see what’s going on in that video if you aren’t controlling it, but I’m often not actually going forward. While I’m generally flying in coupled mode (I only swapped to fully decoupled mode a few times), I play with a mouse and a G13 logitech gameboard. The gameboard has a thumbstick, that I have mapped to the secondary strafing thrusters, so I can manually strafe forwards, backwards, and to the left and right, independently of the direction the ship is traveling, even when in coupled mode. the IFC is smart enough to know, as well, that when I’m strafing backwards, to cut the main thruster, so I can effectively seamlessly transition between coupled and decoupled, without actually needing to switch modes. For instance, if I start straffing backwards, and then spin the ship, I’m effectively flying in decoupled mode backwards… but as soon as I let go, it’s gonna kick the main thruster back in and start moving forward again. It all works extremely well, and is an improvement over how the IFC worked at earlier incarnations. The guy who designed a lot of that, some physics guy named John Pritchard I believe, is super smart.

Anyway, if you watch my speed during the fight, you’ll see it’s changing a lot. Some is due to throttle changes, and some is due to just the fact that when you turn you lose speed while the thrusters catch up. But a lot of it is because I’m actually strafing in various directions during combat, so a lot of the time I’m flying backwards, or to the sides.

The flight mechanics and control systems are… not simple. But they work very, very well, and I personally find it very satisfying to fly. I feel like there’s a lot there to sink my teeth into, and get better at.

One thing to note, for folks that are starting in the alpha. If you go into the keybindings screen, down in the lower right, you see a little dropdown menu, that has 4 things in it:

  • On foot
  • In flight
  • On foot (Advanced)
  • In Flight (Advanced)

This is basically showing you the layout for the two main keybinding sets. The default, which is what you start with if you haven’t changed anything, and the “advanced” layout.

To actually LOAD the advanced layout, you need to click on the “advanced keybindings” button. I think that’s what it’s called, anyway. Down in the lower left. There, you’re faced with the huge list of keybindings. The level of customization is nuts. However, an important thing on the keybindings list is the little dropdown in the lower right. There, you have a bunch of predefined “sets”. There are a bunch for specific joystick setups, for instance, which will give you a decent starting point if you have one of those. But if you’re using a keyboard and mouse, you can pick the “advanced” set from there, and load it.

One thing, when you load it, you’re presented with a weird screen, where it has Keyboard and mouse on the left side, and none, none on the right. What it’s actually letting you do, is independently choose whether you want to load the keyboard and/or mouse controlls… So, if you pick Keyboard -> Keyboard, Mouse -> None, it will just load the keyboard part of that scheme.

This is actually what I’d recommend, as I found the mouse portion of the advanced controls to be dumb… but hey, to each his own.

The advanced keyboard controls are pretty essential though, if you want to have decent control of your ship.

Not at first though… you can totally fly with the basic controls, and do lots of stuff… but you can’t do things like decouple your ship or stuff like that. I’d generally recommend going with the advanced controls, after you get the basics of flying.

6206

Simple question, Timex - that ship in the upper right corner of your interface during battle - is that who you’re shooting at and their shields? I don’t see any indications of damage as you’re hitting him.

6207

Is that guy’s ship really out of his hands now because you stole it? Even though the game isn’t out yet?

6208

Oh no, not at all. Even if the game was released, he’d still be able to get it.

He’ll just need to go and file a claim for it, and he’ll get a new ship in 5 minutes.

The cargo’s gone though, I think.

6209

Yeah, that’s the target that I’m shooting at all.
When I’m doing measurable damage, you’ll see the shields surrounding them go down (the panel representing that section of the shield will get smaller). Once their shields are down, if I keep shooting through that section, you’ll see parts of the ship start to turn red, as they take damage.

I’ll try to link to some specific times, not sure if it will work. I’ll put the timestamps so you can check it out yourself if the time links don’t work.

If you watch the cutlass in this part of the video, you can see his shields start to collapse, and then him start to take damage.
Time 9:32

The thing is, depending on the ship and how their shields are configured, as well as how big their powerplants are, and how they have their power allocated, ships can be really tough… because with energy weapons, you gotta do enough damage to the shield to bring it down all the way before you can even start to damage the ship itself, and if the shields are broken into 4 sections (Some are fewer, like 2… I think some are even just one), then the defending pilot can just flip his ship around and expose different shield sections to you. Or, if you look at the console to the right of my stick, you see the shield controls… I can manually allocate my shield power in real time, and push more shields to individual quadrants. Similarly, the console to the left of my stick lets me allocate power between weapons, shields, and thrusters. If I choose to put more power to the shields, rather than the thrusters, my ship will maneuver less agilely, but will regenerate its shields faster.

Now, when I’m flying, it’s hard to do that… but this is something that a co-pilot can do, which makes even the non-pilot jobs kind of important, if perhaps not as fun if you like flying. But I suspect some folks aren’t as into flying, and really, this is the best non pilot station interaction setup that I’ve seen.

The last ship I destroy is actually seemingly disabled for a while before I kill it, but it’s hard as crap to finally kill, because the thing is just tumbling through space really fast, and isn’t even trying to correct. So at that point my shots are just spreading over all his shields, and it’s impossible to drill through them.

The same goes for my ship (represented in the top left). If you watch this section here:
Time 3:36

You can see some stuff happen to me… First, I actually collide with another ship, which tends to bust through the shields since they don’t block physical stuff as much as energy, so it directly damages my wing. Some other ships are drilling me bad at that point, and my shields start to collapse, then once the starboard shield goes down, damage hits my wing and blows it off, so I lose that gun, and some of the thrusters on it, so the way my ship handles is different after that point.

At this point, I still have most of my thrusters… probably 10 of the original 12? So it doesn’t handle badly. When your ship gets REALLY crippled, then it gets interesting. The IFC is good about using your thrusters to the best of their ability to try and do what you are telling it, but I’ve had my ship lose virtually everything and only have like one or two maneuvering thrusters left, at which point it becomes almost impossible to handle the ship at all, where anything you do is really sluggish, you movement in certain directions is faster than others, etc.

Oh, one more thing, which isn’t really seen here…

All my weapons are energy based, but there are also ballistic cannons. Those weapons are limited by a fixed amount of ammo (so you can’t just shoot constantly for 20 minutes like I did (barring shutting down for heat), but they will be less blocked by shields I believe. Shields will still reduce their damage, but they won’t totally negate ballistic weapon damage, like they do with energy weapons.

6210

Really cool. Thanks for sharing. I have been involved in similar escapades before - and that’s when you can still see a glimmer of hope for the game. Then you realize that it’s FUBAR at this point. If only he had stuck to the original game, shipped that, then built on a sequel, DLC or whatever, the narrative would be different.

The fact of the matter is that as games like ME:A, COD:IW etc have shown, the amount of money and talent thrown at a game is largely irrelevant if the execution and reception are poorly received. Star Citizen has so much going against it, that it simply doesn’t matter now what they do, it’s all for naught because the project is irretrievably dead. If backers can tell themselves that spending $25K on what amounts to a $45 game experience was worth it, that’s on them. The rest of us don’t care; it’s their money.

6211

So if you “PvP steal” an insured ship it gets replaced?

That sounds … exploitable.

6212

Are you serious? You’ve just lost a lot of points with that. Heck, most of the backers hate the flight model, and it has been a constant cause of frustration - even in 3.0 (which somehow made it worse).

6213

There are a number of things they have in there that can help deal with this.

Mainly, if a ship gets reported stolen (i.e. someone files a claim on it), then that’s not a normal ship anymore. You won’t be able to fly it in normal space without the cops shooting you up, you can’t insure it, etc.

It’s basically a stolen car at that point.

All of this is kind of academic at this point though, since replacing ships is largely a trivial matter right now. But, there were some detailed writeups on exactly what you’re suggesting a long while back.

6214

Part of me is relieved to know that, because it would truly suck to have someone steal an expensive ship you paid real money for.

On the other hand, I think it would be totally awesome (even as a theft victim) to be able to steal an expensive ship, or to have it stolen from you. If you are the theft victim, you would then make it your life’s mission (in game) to put together a group to go and retrieve your ship. This could result in some epic battles. Also, the very expensive ships shouldn’t be that easy to steal. I imagine them having better protection. I dunno. I just think the option for real in-game theft would give the game a bit of extra zing, and people would be really invested in their ships.

6215

Losing a ship will still normally have some sort of penalty, in that insurance won’t cover things like cargo and upgrades.

The cargo matters today, but upgrades don’t so much, since the amount of upgrades you can actually but are kind of limited I think.

At least, I have yet to find a place that sells shop weapons. What I really want to buy is weapon gimbals, since the non gimballed weapons on the 315p suck… At least, they suck if you are flying with a mouse.

You can currently but stuff like shield generators, power plants, etc… I actually don’t know if they are covered by insurance or not, I should test it.