Does the stick swivel? I don't really go for rudders so having the same control on the main stick is always nice.
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Star Citizen Pre-Alpha: Hangar Module
- Thread starter MrBig
- Start date
Does the stick swivel? I don't really go for rudders so having the same control on the main stick is always nice.
Teknopathetic
Member
"What are you guys using these days?"
Just picked up a CH Combatstick and Throttle. The only downside to the stick is that it doesn't feel quite as nice as a Sidewinder Force Feedback 2, but still pretty nice.
Just picked up a CH Combatstick and Throttle. The only downside to the stick is that it doesn't feel quite as nice as a Sidewinder Force Feedback 2, but still pretty nice.
My hangar is so poor :-(Just a few pics of my hangar - Triple monitor heaven - 5760 x 1080 @ very high:
You can't have it all for 35 I guess xD
Yep.
A little video showing the shooting gallery. There's really not much to see here, but anyway: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqmxhPqc1Zo
They've just uploaded their whole stream on Youtube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xw7SYWuV_ns
The interesting part that havent been uploaded earlier, is the multiplayer dogfighting module in action in the last part of the video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xw7SYWuV_ns
The interesting part that havent been uploaded earlier, is the multiplayer dogfighting module in action in the last part of the video.
You sicken me
BTW, Cloud Imperium's livestreams are almost always archived on Twitch. You have to find their channel and look for past broadcasts: http://www.twitch.tv/roberts_space_ind_ch_1/profile/pastBroadcasts
Really? A controller will be the go-to method of control. It'll actually give you an advantage when flying a ship simply because of its ease of use. Don't forget the game will be tailored to gamepad controls.
That and the fact it's cheaper and still of a decent build quality.
Teknopathetic
Member
"It'll actually give you an advantage when flying a ship simply because of its ease of use."
Questionable.
Questionable.
Controllers are convenient, but lack precision. Flight sticks for flying, racing wheels for racing.
I would have loved to have a well-supported modern controller back when I was playing Wing Commander, though.
I don't have room for a bunch of peripherals, personally, so I'll be rolling with a gamepad.
I would have loved to have a well-supported modern controller back when I was playing Wing Commander, though.
I don't have room for a bunch of peripherals, personally, so I'll be rolling with a gamepad.
Teknopathetic
Member
"Controllers are convenient, but lack precision. Flight sticks for flying, racing wheels for racing."
That and they're also limited by how many actions you have access to at any given time and a proper space combat/sim game will have quite a few you'll want to use on demand.
That and they're also limited by how many actions you have access to at any given time and a proper space combat/sim game will have quite a few you'll want to use on demand.
Star Conflict is proof that KB+M is a perfectly viable alternative, but I doubt they're gonna spend the time and money required to make controls that good.
metalshade
Member
I get the feeling I will be using kb/m and a controller all at the same time, unless Chris will include the option to have dual rates on a gamepad. I haven't played any of his previous work yet, is that something that would be included?
Don't forget you can switch on-the-fly to mouse and keyboard. For situations where you would to manoeuvre backwards rather quickly, a controller can do those things a tad faster. The introduction video for Star Citizen gave a good look at how a controller would function.
EDIT: Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LuHNXTN--0
Teknopathetic
Member
"Star Conflict is proof that KB+M is a perfectly viable alternative, but I doubt they're gonna spend the time and money required to make controls that good."
Star Conflict is basically a TPS in space which is not what a lot of people want in the game. The controls essentially make KB+M the only viable control scheme because most of your weapons fire on your mouse cursor which moves independently and the flight is extremely simplistic in comparison. That works for Star Conflict, but I don't think too many people want that in one of the two games hailed as the resurgence of classic Space Sims.
"Don't forget you can switch on-the-fly to mouse and keyboard."
I wouldn't really want to take my hands off my controller mid-dogfight to match my target's speed or equalize shields or adjust power or change weapon firing modes, etc. etc. etc. Also, I'm not implying KB/M is better than Gamepad if that's what you're thinking. Flight Stick (with throttle) is my preferred setup.
Star Conflict is basically a TPS in space which is not what a lot of people want in the game. The controls essentially make KB+M the only viable control scheme because most of your weapons fire on your mouse cursor which moves independently and the flight is extremely simplistic in comparison. That works for Star Conflict, but I don't think too many people want that in one of the two games hailed as the resurgence of classic Space Sims.
"Don't forget you can switch on-the-fly to mouse and keyboard."
I wouldn't really want to take my hands off my controller mid-dogfight to match my target's speed or equalize shields or adjust power or change weapon firing modes, etc. etc. etc. Also, I'm not implying KB/M is better than Gamepad if that's what you're thinking. Flight Stick (with throttle) is my preferred setup.
I agree a flightstick feels more realistic and immersive, but not all flightsticks come equipped with shield adjusting buttons and who knows what. A flightstick is perfect for something like the hornets when dogfighting but a controller would be better for simple flying in an Aurora and KB/M could be useful when managing multi-person ships. They all have their usefulness depending on what you want to do. The great thing about PC is that you can always choose though.
My main gripe with a flightstick is that you have to spend $200+ to get a decent, otherwise it is not worth your attention. I sadly don't have too much money lying around.
Teknopathetic
Member
"I agree a flightstick feels more realistic and immersive, but not all flightsticks come equipped with shield adjusting buttons and who knows what. A flightstick is perfect for something like the hornets when dogfighting but a controller would be better for simple flying in an Aurora and KB/M could be useful when managing multi-person ships. They all have their usefulness depending on what you want to do. The great thing about PC is that you can always choose though."
This is a fair point and it's true, everyone can choose whatever they like best.
"My main gripe with a flightstick is that you have to spend $200+ to get a decent, otherwise it is not worth your attention."
There are decent sub-$100 options, especially if you don't care for having a throttle, but it is certainly a niche item with niche prices once you go above that range.
This is a fair point and it's true, everyone can choose whatever they like best.
"My main gripe with a flightstick is that you have to spend $200+ to get a decent, otherwise it is not worth your attention."
There are decent sub-$100 options, especially if you don't care for having a throttle, but it is certainly a niche item with niche prices once you go above that range.
I'm waiting on at least the DF module to decide on my control scheme for flight. Currently I have a 360 controller, and of course kb/m. Depending on the controllers performance in the DF module I'll probably buy a really cheap HOTAS, and then later, probably when the persistent universe beta is out, I'll be getting a Rift and I'll see what works best with that. My keyboard has MX red switches so it may be tough to use without the option to look down at it easily - may have to get one with blue or black switch just for VR. If using a stick is comfortable in VR and I'm really enjoying SC I'll see about getting a nice dual flightstick system instead of a HOTAS system.
demosthenes
Member
Is this the current 'OT'?
I just received RSI Aurora LN as a Christmas present and I know next to nothing about this game
I just received RSI Aurora LN as a Christmas present and I know next to nothing about this game
Is this the current 'OT'?
I just received RSI Aurora LN as a Christmas present and I know next to nothing about this game
It is. Read the OP, also check out the 'About the game' section on RSI's website, including the video. It should get you the global idea of what SC is all about.
Is this the current 'OT'?
I just received RSI Aurora LN as a Christmas present and I know next to nothing about this game
That is a pretty cool xmas present. The game is... hard to define at the moment. Massively online space sim, but not a mmo. Persistent universe space dogfighting/trading/bounty hunting/exploration game with more and more ambition as time goes on. With a single player intro campaign, and private servers for those who want them.
Wait, what? Already?
Whose hair is that, anyway? Feel like I'm missing a reference here
That's just from people *seeing* an early dogfight. Just wait until the real dogfighting module is out.
That's just from people *seeing* an early dogfight. Just wait until the real dogfighting module is out.
Hey look, digital gift cards.
They didn't even raise THAT much money after the dogfighting livestream. It's been a pretty slow burn since $34 million by Star Citizen standards, that is. (They hit $34 million on Dec. 7.)
They didn't even raise THAT much money after the dogfighting livestream. It's been a pretty slow burn since $34 million by Star Citizen standards, that is. (They hit $34 million on Dec. 7.)
I expected it to slow down considerably more though, with the impending delay of the dogfighting and after the boom that were the final sales.
And in case anyone hasn't noticed, Chris Roberts made a lengthly post this morning on the RSI forums in which he goes in-depth on the flight and dogfighting under the hood: https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/92575/dogfighting-demo
I agree.
Chris Roberts said:Hi everyone. I've been reading a fair amount of the posts about the Dogfighting demo we gave during the live stream. I thought it would be useful for me to clarify a few things, as theres a few misconceptions mostly because people are forming their opinions on a very limited view of what we were showing. As I know exactly what is under the hood and how it plays Im going to help you all out with the inside information
Physics. Theres been a few posts where people think the physics aren't correct or fully implemented yet when they were watching the dogfight. Just to be absolutely clear the whole game runs on CryPhysics which is a fully fledged physics system on a par with other physics engines like PhysX and Havoc. Everything is simulated correctly. Any ship movement is achieved by applying impulses to the rigid body of the ship there are no cheats on position or velocity. It has been like this since the beginning even before I showed the initial prototype! If you actually looked closely at the dogfighting footage you would indeed see that the ships have inertia they dont immediately turn or stop on a dime just look when someone enters a turn and notice the movement of the asteroids relative to the cockpit view. Its one of the reasons why there were a few asteroid collisions in the demo. People weren't intentionally ramming or clipping an asteroid they just misjudged their inertia and their turning radius. There are however a few things that make this not as obvious to the untrained eye. Firstly there is no space dust to give you a visual cue on your speed and relative velocity vector. Space dust was something I implemented all the way back in Wing Commander to give the player some visual cues as to his velocity and direction of movement as in space you usually dont have a good reference for your movement as its just normal empty space with no close objects for reference. Its completely fictional but most space games use space dust (which can look / feel like streaking stars) to give cues as to your movement. Its currently disabled in our build as were refactoring some particle system features, so you dont get the same motion cues youre used to on other space games (including all my past ones). Secondly the amount of slide or sense of inertia in your movement is a result of your mass and the strength of your maneuvering thrusters. If you have very powerful thrusters they will be able to correct your velocity vector with very little or no slide. For the test we were playing with values and had juiced the maneuvering thrusters on the Hornet so the dogfighting would be quick and fast as we wanted something that didn't drag for the live demo with lots of kills (to show off the nice explosions and damage!). This is definitely not final and will have a lot more tweaking, especially when the G-Force modeling comes on line for the multiplayer (as this will have a big effect on what maneuvers are best) and the energy management interface on our new WIP HUD is implemented (which will allow you to direct more power to the thrusters for a tighter turn at the expense of other systems like your weapons or shields)
Flight Model. When I see posts about the physics not being correct, or the flight model being WW2 and not Newtonian it really means that current implementation of the Intelligent Flight Control System (IFCS) is not what people would like / are expecting as there is no cheating on physics (as I describe above). In Star Citizen (and pretty much every other space games including the Hard core sims) there will always be some level of fly by wire where the computer interprets the players input on the controls and translates them in a way to maneuver the ship intuitively. Why? Because individually controlling 8-16 thrusters simultaneously to achieve a desired action is incredibly hard just doing it in 2D in the classic video game Asteroids was difficult enough it becomes exponentially difficult with a third dimension. Even in the real world the newest jets and helicopters interpret the pilots input and then manage the control surfaces. Most modern jet fighters are aerodynamically unstable if a pilot tried to directly control the control surfaces he wouldn't be able to make the 100s of micro adjustments needed every second to keep the airplane stable. This will be even more so going forward. So its not so much about being Realistic or Newtonian, its really about how the game (or in our fiction the IFCS) translates the players control inputs into physical actions in the game. For instance the current speed cap is all done by the IFCS if your ship goes above the top speed (say getting an impulse from a collision while at maximum velocity) it will start to fire retro thrusters to bring you back inside the allowed velocity range. The current IFCS is still a work in progress currently it is set up very much like a traditional Wing Commander that prefers yaw to roll (although you absolutely can roll as well its just the X axis on a stick is mapped to yaw, Y to pitch and roll is modifier plus X axis.) The newer IFCS (which we didnt show as its not working smoothly over multiplayer, which has an extra level of complexity due to being server authorative) has a bias towards roll and pitch for turning as it is trying to manage the G-Forces on the pilots body and were built to absorb positive Gs better than left/right lateral Gs. But why would every IFCS behave the same way? My goal is to have more than one IFCS setting (possibly needing a different avionics package) with different flight models and the more sophisticated packages will allow a pilot to switch off and on aspects of the IFCS for instance letting your fly-by-wire system know that you input is now only about angular position / velocity and not your linear velocity vector, or that your input is now just requesting a velocity /adjustment without a heading change. The goal from the beginning of Star Citizen has always been to allow players to set up and customize their ship the way they want. There will be a huge amount of plug in items / systems that will allow a player to significantly tweak the abilities of their ship and part of this is the flight computer.
Peripherals / player input devices. I noticed a lot of people being concerned that the game is set up like Call of Duty and is just a WASD FPS keyboard / mouse shooter because they saw a few of the team members just using their mouse and keyboard during the demo. Star Citizen is set up to be input agnostic it supports keyboard, mouse, gamepad, joystick and HOTAS (and pedals!) Most of these can operate at the same time for instance you can use a HOTAS, mouse and keyboard all simultaneously. This past week in our 6-8 person internal people were flying with a selection of all the above an X65 Pro HOTAS, an X52 HOTAS, MS gamepad, keyboard + mouse, Logitech Extreme 3D joystick. So dont worry were not biased to any control scheme! If you want us to be, well Im sorry, our goal is tune the game in such a way that no one input device is the winner it should be about personal preference, which I think is completely in the spirit of PC gaming that we are trying to uphold.
First person vs Third person. I saw quite a few posts that were concerned about the third person view and it giving an unfair advantage over people playing first person. Putting aside the fact that everyone has the same range of views, so no one will have something that someone else doesn't, Star Citizen will be just like my Wing Commander games its primarily built for 1st person, but we allow you to pop out to a chase plane view to appreciate the detail and coolness of your ship (and perhaps check the external damage). When in third person mode you dont have any of your HUD, radar or targeting information available. Make no mistake you will be at a disadvantage trying to fight in third person instead of first person. If you go back to the live stream video you will notice most people were actually performing kills from the first person camera view NOT the third person thats completely because in fast moving dogfights your targeting computer with shot lead prediction is pretty vital to scoring a hit on your opponent and your HUD target turn indicator lets you know where you need to turn to get your opponent in your sights. And this is before a new cockpit 1st person view that I've been toying with comes on line essentially its going to dynamically scope your field of view and depth of field based on where you are looking, which simulates what we do naturally when looking around which I think will add a whole new level of intensity to the 1st person cockpit view.
I hope you find this small info dump useful!
As always thanks for your feedback and support.
I agree.
Didn't know that WW2 featured different physics than the ones in the current world.
I thought this was well known? Maybe engineering isn't for you after all.
Physics were way different back then, it's why most of the war footage is in black and white. Now I'm wondering why no one's made a historically accurate V-2 dogfighting sim, where the Allies in rocket planes were shooting them down while in space. Seems like a huge missed opportunity.
One of my favorite comics.
Seriously though, WW2 flight model in terms of space sims refers to the spaceships acting like WW2 airplanes flying in an atmosphere at ~350 mph. The Wing Commander games and especially the X-Wing series follow that, as that flight model was the basis for the combat scenes in the Star Wars movies.
Newtonian refers to spaceships acting like real spaceships in space at significantly sub-light speeds (I don't think anyone's bothered to model relativity in one of these games).
So if I could travel faster than the speed of light I'd arrive at the edge of the known universe before i even decided to venture there?
You even can go beyond the edge, seeing as the universe is only expanding at the speed of light. If there exists an edge ofcourse. You could end up at the same spot in an earlier timeframe. Time travel ho!
metalshade
Member
Well that escalated quickly! Wibbly wobbly timey wimey.
The post from Chris does ease my concerns about the flight model though.
Seems like we will be easily able to choose the complexity of our control scheme to suit exactly how we want, whilst still maintaining stability for the craft, which is awesome.
Heck, now I know that, I might even take it easy and choose a nice easy mixer scheme (kinda like using elevons and the like) for my day to day flying, then switch over to a more complicated scheme for combat. Sounds perfect.
The post from Chris does ease my concerns about the flight model though.
Seems like we will be easily able to choose the complexity of our control scheme to suit exactly how we want, whilst still maintaining stability for the craft, which is awesome.
Heck, now I know that, I might even take it easy and choose a nice easy mixer scheme (kinda like using elevons and the like) for my day to day flying, then switch over to a more complicated scheme for combat. Sounds perfect.
Just grab the base aurora and you'll find out what you enjoy and earn the things you need to propel yourself in those areas with it while playing - the aurora is an all-around ship so you wont be locked into anything with it during pre-release.
RaptorGTA
Member
I had the same issue...but I went with Origin Jumpworks 300i. Man this hanger download is taking forever. Only 73 kps...Not sure why its so slow.
I've tried raising this at other forums where seemingly intelligent people used to post, I was hounded mercilessly, the people absolutely want this to work (who can blame them I admit) Their "oh god please please be good!" goggles are so firmly affixed you can't even begin to get traction in the discussion. The kool aid is fully ingested.
The levels of complexities required in supporting the proposed features for all customers, as is, is utterly mind boggling. The levels of complexities of running the different features / rulesets for varying tiers of customers, far more complex. Balancing these one off variables? keeping track of them all? Seriously?
I mean it sounds like I'm talking to the converted here and you get it. It's absolutely and utterly going to be epic when it unravels. I wish Chris had the common sense to have far, far, far less features and things and add "simpler" stuff like different control methods, support for stuff like track IR (he's probably done this) maybe make the game simply look even better or come out faster or plan to simply add X new galaxies / regions. Instead he's had to complicate it with "this person who paid this much has this ship, with insurance but not a gun in the first person section but also can't use Z but can do Y - however when they A it will work differently to blah because he paid............" (and so on and so forth)
What I wish was kickstarted, was an update to X-Wing instead, because ultimately all things said and done Chris's space games all had great stories and fairly good graphics but ummm..
Chris's flight games were kind of not that good,.... the combat sucked and it was the same formula each mission, fly to navpoint 1 nothing, fly to navpoint 2, kill 3 bad guys, fly to navpoint 3, kill 3 badguys, fly to navpoint 4, kill 3 badguys, 1 boss, fly home. I loved Wing Commander but X-Wing combat, mission structure (especially mission structure) was just leaps and bounds ahead
I'm sitting back with the popcorn at this point.
But the Aurora is ugly (no offense to Aurora owners).
I know it won't matter much in the end because of the modules. For example the base 300i is as good as the 315p for exploration with the right module.
For now it's all about what package is worth it for me at the beginning. I think I'm going to wait a few more weeks and buy the Tracker.
I wish I could do the same thing with DayZ. Game is great right now, but lacks content.
Would be nice to come back in 4-6 months and see everything they have done, vehicles, weapons, base building, and other features.