Hello gang! Long time lurker, first time poster. Recent backer. Watched through (most of) the latest LiveStream, and Uber: Awesome job guys. Your team is making fantastic progress: what a pleasure it must be to not also be under the intense scrutiny of a meddling publisher! (Thinking: EA) -- though your Kickstarter backers might not be all that much more pleasant. Enough Buttering! Things I'm wondering about regarding thrusters on orbital bodies, particularly because it sounds like they will be an option on more than just Asteroids. * Will a player need to take into account an object's rotational speed / direction before firing off the engines? If so, I imagine a player will be able to adjust the rotational period of a planetary body? -- possible advantages could include reducing the amount of energy is required to loft a rocket to orbit (particularly if launched from an equatorial base...) or to likewise adjust the axis of your planet's rotation so that your base no becomes an equatorial base.... (if we're getting that intense into the physics of it) * Will an asteroid (or other heavenly body) require some arbitrary min value of thrusters before it'll be allowed to calculate a collision trajectory? Or will I be able to choose how much energy / how much time is required for the smashy-space-rock A to collide with smashy-space-rock B by the number of thrusters I construct? -- it could be awesome to set several rocks toward another's planet at various velocities / trajectories to make it more difficult to be intercepted. These are my first thoughts and questions! I'm also curious if these ideas would this get way too physicsy for the average user? / overly complex to design an intuitive interface for...? Hope not. /end_thoughts Sincerely, Ragmash
Re: Questions of Delta (V), Thrusters, and the Beauty of Phy My understanding from Neutrino's comments is that the ideal is that the player won't have to worry about that kind of stuff, they build the Engines(under the assumption of moar = faster), and select a target(or orbit) when they're ready, the game handles all the details all on it's own. Mike
Re: Questions of Delta (V), Thrusters, and the Beauty of Phy I recommend playing through the tutorials in the free demo of Kerbal Space Program, by pure chance it tought me how manipulating orbits actually worked 5 minutes before the uber livestream showed their orbit stuff. Needless to say: mind blown by both ! I love me some game physics. My point here is that manually managing the orientation thrust and thus the course/orbit a spacecraft or asteroid takes is pretty much a game in itself and might not fit within the no-micro style of PA Not to say that doing those actions aren`t interesting gameplay because they are ! but for a large scale RTS where I might be managing 10.000 units and several orbiting bodies I`d rather have the game do the maneuvre for me and just let me choose "orbit this thing/crash into this thing"
Re: Questions of Delta (V), Thrusters, and the Beauty of Phy that sounds like a good solution for an RTS, which is not focused on orbital physic ^^ It will be interesting how it finally works. And how fast the Planets go around the sund, because this is directly linked to how fast an asteroid can smash into a planet. If we take the trajectory for asteroids, they showed on the livestream, it took nearly one revolution of the planet, before it could be hit. This means, if a planet needs 20min around its sun in PA, an asteroid needs also 20 minutes. This is fairly long imo. Probably a planet in PA will have to go quite fast, which means moons also have to go even faster^^ Can anyone of the alpha players say, how long a moon currently needs for one revolution?
Re: Questions of Delta (V), Thrusters, and the Beauty of Phy A thought has suddenly struck me. I suppose that really you don't just want to direct your smashy space rock to hit another, you need to be able to designate the position on the planet that you want to hit as well. This is just a matter of timing for equatorial bases, but just dropping to a low orbit before intercept will not work for polar bases. You'd need to alter the angle of the orbit too, and the steeper the angle, the more difficult intercept becomes. I'm sure Uber will have a solution for this, but it sounds like a headache to me.
Re: Questions of Delta (V), Thrusters, and the Beauty of Phy Just like I explained, You select the target and the system handles the rest in the background. Mike
Re: Questions of Delta (V), Thrusters, and the Beauty of Phy And I suppose it really can be simply that easy, given the incredibly predictable nature of Newtonian physics. This is going to be so good. I'm super stoked. Or a really good strategy! -- sounds like you're increasing the complexity of the rock's needed trajectory, possibly buying you some extra time in so doing.
Re: Questions of Delta (V), Thrusters, and the Beauty of Phy I hope they go with this method. I play KSP and I know how orbiting a planet works, but they're going for awesome, not realism. I don't want to have to calculate all that and micro an asteroid WHILE trying to play an RTS. I just want to build the engines, pick the impact point, and have PA tell me "15 minutes to planetary annihilation" in a calm, female, British voice while I watch the fireworks.
Re: Questions of Delta (V), Thrusters, and the Beauty of Phy For asteroids and smaller I expect that the engines will have some sort of built in rotation ability which they use to automatically point the body in the right direction. In the case of planets I am not so sure, planets take a long time to rotate and have a lot of inertia so if you build engines into your planet you may have to wait a while for it to rotate such that you can fire your engines. Although by "you have to wait" I mean the algorithm which handles the engines will have to wait. The player should just set a target and have the engines figure out how to get there.
Re: Questions of Delta (V), Thrusters, and the Beauty of Phy Actually... full n-body simulation is not very predictable, you can't predict collisions, you have to wait and see if they will happen, one of the reasons for the modified 2-body sim is that it is absurdly predictable.
Re: Questions of Delta (V), Thrusters, and the Beauty of Phy So by target you mean the opponents base, not the planet they are on. That's great, it's just not something that I have seen specifically mentioned anywhere thus far, so I thought it high time to bring it up.
Re: Questions of Delta (V), Thrusters, and the Beauty of Phy Well that's how it worked in the Pre-Viz. ;p Mike
