Emergency maneuvering at astrogation insertion.

[viral wren]

I know I said I wouldn't suggest this but I can't stop thinking about it. my idea is when you are exiting astrogation fast travel. A number of seconds will be added to the "cutscene" showing your ship flying over the roids. your crew will count down the time until you are in the ring plane and your ship will be able to collide with the roids.

this is so if you know you are going to hit something, you can maneuver while you are still above the ring plane if you need to, but at a cost. the only 2 things I can think for a good cost of doing this is, burning above the ring plane will attracted pirates to you location. the other one is that you will be fined for doing doing it. I would like to hear more interesting idea for consequences. I would probably have a "allow emergency maneuver above the ring plain" button in the tuning menu so new player don't accidentally triggered the consequences. that will also give a place where you can say what the consequences are to the player.

this will give a chance for player to avoid catastrophic damage from exiting out of astrogation straight into an object. it would essentially be giving the players a few seconds of noclip. hopefully this could make koder's job a little easer since not as much effort needs to be put into making sure the exit point is free of objects.

[hoary valley]

You’d have to pivot in 3D; it wouldn’t be instant.

[viral wren]

are to talking about fluff wise or game engine wise. fluff wise, such things are already happening when you astrogate, and it doesn't show any pivoting in 3D. game engine wise it would be like noclip until the timer runs out, if you are 'on top" of an roid when the timer runs out, then you 'crashed' into the roid.

[hoary valley]

We can’t insta-astrogate gameplay-wise.

It takes a bit.

[viral wren]

I know

[hoary valley]

“Jumping into The Third Dimension” (spooky theramin noises) wouldn’t be instant either; you gotta apply thrust.

[viral wren]

I think when you astrogate, you put your ship at an orbital incline compared to the ring, entering the "third Dimension". when you exit astrogation that incline is corrected

[hoary valley]

Agree.

But the difference in doing that in ships of differing performance is substantial; I’m not gonna see a ringroid, press “Jump!” and move 300 meters up instantly.

It’d just be a normal dodge (in a direction we can’t go usually).

No strapping a cloaking device to a Cothon.

[viral wren]

right, I'm not saying this is something you can do on command. this is something you can do when you exit out of astogation fast travel, when your ship is above the ring already.

[viral wren]

ah, I think see where the misunderstanding came from. I added a small clarification to my text

[hoary valley]

How about you choose when to drop back in?

[viral wren]

Not a bad idea, I think lore wise pirates have a lot easier time see your drive plum if you thrust outside the rings plain. So I think you normally don’t thrust until you are in the plain, and thus don’t normally choose when you drop in. Though if that was true then every astrogation would take a long time since you would be waiting half an orbit for your ship to intercept the plains again. So I don’t actually know how astrogations work.

[paper summit]

the orbital mechanics wouldn't make sense for that. when you astrogate you adjust your inclination so that you travel up (or down) out of plane of the rings, and your descending/ascending node (dependent on which direction you burned out of the rings) lines up with your target so that as you arrive at your target you pass through the plane of the rings and can perform an insertion burn back into the same inclination. you'd need to perform a vertical burn just to avoid entering the rings again, not one to enter them. i think that it would work if you set up a visible HUD element showing where you will cross planes at given your current course and lateral velocity, allowing the player to adjust trajectory for a couple seconds before entering the game's physics environment.

[hoary valley]

Just hover

our ships can pull fractional-g and refuel

just spend dV to "hover" outside the ring by constantly thrusting "down" into the plane of the ring

it's constantly adjusting the orbit but that's fine

[viral wren]

But then there’s the whole pirates can see you thing. Which is why I claim it should be an emergency maneuver.

[viral wren]

Essentially what I’m suggesting

[violet sky]

I personally feel like automatically initiating a flip when you start astrogation would be a smart automated move, which would help the problem we're talking about. But at the same time, I know you'd see weirdness in-game, like a flip not being completed by the time you come out of astrogation, for really heavy ships.

I feel like giving you manual control over where you enter the plane would introduce the plane as a gameplay element. Right now we have some justifications about why we don't navigate out of plane, but no control over it. If we offer a little control over it, it becomes a question why we don't offer a little more.

Not entirely sure that's a bucket of gameplay worms that's easy to develop, earns us a lot in terms of fun, wouldn't introduce its own problems/cheese options, etc.

Even just offering a span of non-collision maneuvering time, with a countdown to insertion has its own problems - like the chance we might turn collisions back on during an overlap, which usually has very violent results in the game's physics.

None of this is to say that your problem isn't worth solving or your solutions aren't worth considering. Just to say . . . it's complicated, and we've thought about this specific issue a lot

[hoary valley]

I feel like when leaving astrogation, the ship should be flipped automatically.

[paper summit]

I agree with this. It's always bugged me that this happens on ring entry but not astrogation. Maybe they could do what they do for ring entry and make you decelerate to 10m/s before flipping and returning player control.

[sharp harbor]

To, a point to make, if you go noclip your cargo goes away. That's why you don't actually go noclip while you are still astrogating through the rings.

[sharp harbor]

This is precisely why you have control while you are taking the astrogation jump. Nothing stops you from performing the flip yourself.

[sharp harbor]

Reiterating, if we ever turn the collision off for a ship, that also means we are removing all the cargo. Which implies that while you can disable the collisions, you can not enable them again and let the player control the ship.

We can only disable collisions for a cutscene that ends with a scene change (Enceladus transition)

[violet sky]

If I'm flying something nice and bricky, that flip might take a while; and with any priority settings in effect, rotation or translation reserves some thrust, so it's possible it would be counterproductive, depending on your build.

Current solution is that manual control entering astrogation gives you the choice of how you want to exit astrogation.

[viral wren]

ah, I did not realize that. I'm guessing it's harder than I can imagine to make it so you only turn off collision with large roids while still having collision with ore chunks. though even if that is possible, if you fly "over" a ||uranium cave you will collide with all of the crystals|| . 🤔 then there would be the fact that you would have to turn off collision between ore chunks and roids... yeah, I can now see how this get more complicated then I expected.

[violet sky]

Turning physics off and on again can be a real violent event. Don't stop thinking about it; player solutions are a great resource. We just have to make it fit into the constraints of the engine, in a way that's time-effective to implement.

[viral wren]

if I want to keep pushing this idea. (debatable at this point) I would suggest something like freeze everything the ship is carrying / holding to the ship and give them all no clip during the Emergency maneuvering. disable the player from opening the cargo hold or undocking anything until the player is inline with the rings. but that leads to other probelms.

side note, is the engine not able to "lock" ores position relative to the ship that is carrying it? there was a bug I found earlier where I thought koder was going lock the ore to the companion drone to fix it but he went with another solution. that and some of the things said here makes me wonder if doing that is harder then I released. (insert Dunning Kruger effect here)

[sharp harbor]

if you mess with such things, spaz occurs

[neon marsh]

This is about an insertion, tho?
There is no point to any sort of emergency manoeuvring when you're exiting the ring plane.

[sharp harbor]

I might have misread the initial idea but it seemed to be centered around ability to control your ship while you are not colliding with anything / above the ring plance.

[neon marsh]

Yeah, but the only reason for doing that is avoiding imminent collisions on insertion, you can't collide with anything after you have left the plane.
Basically the brief time when you're inserting into the ring, but don't yet have control over ship (until the flip on initial insertion).

[violet sky]

Yes. But because things go wonky when you disable and try to re-enable physics, it's not a suitable solution for re-entry. It's should be reserved for things like heading into a transition, where the player will not be regaining control. (Such as return to Enceladus.)

[neon marsh]

There is no point for it whatsoever when exiting the ring, because there exists no scenario where you could hit anything on exiting the ring after physics and controls are disabled.

However, on entering the ring there is period when the ship is not controllable and being able to intervene there could be handy for avoiding collisions.

[violet sky]

What we're saying is that it's only useful during that time, because if you try to do it at any other time, physics and the game spaz out. The inverse correlation being it is not a useful solution when you're entering the ring, because physics will spaz out.

[neon marsh]

When you're exiting the ring it's useless because it literally has no use case.

When you're entering the ring you need to switch on physics anyway and may have ship firing thrusters before it can be controlled by the player, so what's different in this case from things that are already in?

[violet sky]

It would be super-useful entering the ring, we all agree on that. What we're saying is that it doesn't work, because the game spazzes if you try.

When you leave the ring, we use it so that ship damage and cargo/salvage loss doesn't occur after you lose control, but before the transition.

Or, alternately, so you don't retain cargo that is visibly lost. Either way.

Re-enabling physics being a violent event is also why cargo containers are on arms, instead of snapping onto a mount.

[neon marsh]

Ok, but what's the difference given that there is already period when ship is firing thrusters and seems to be simulated, but is not controllable?

[violet sky]

Restoring or taking control away is easy. That's just allowing or disallowing input. Turning physics off and then on again is where spaz happens.

[viral wren]

https://cdn.steamusercontent.com/ugc/61466940624019816/A7FA2D7EC39790DC4E0A65B04831633A1A8FEF70/

this is what prompted me to make this suggestion. I do admit the situation is pretty rare and may not be worth waking up the spaz over it. I have no idea how I bounced though, the spaz pranked me that day.