Agreed. I'd really love for us to have to deal with a, if not simplified, at least heavily assisted model of orbitals, with your ship's computer doing most of the heavylifting for the different speeds and such. Orbitals should be easy in the distant future, but they should exist. I'd much prefer if we had to use orbitals for local travel around a planet, with non boosted greater speed than what the max we can do now, rather than jumping to OM points, or whatever that newer "slow quantum jump" they've planned (I forget the name of it) is. Travelling around a planet's surface should be part of the journey rather than just blinking about all over the place.
@@MrAnothis I think only a few would like that. Before OM points or surface quantum traveling was a thing. It took half an hour to get where you wanted. And orbiting would take a lot of time doing nothing.
@@Sakisaka_Rei Possibly, but there are ways to find a balance in between. Chris Roberts is too obsessed by Star Wars and the reason because flying from point to point at average planetary distances is boring is because there is almost nothing to do while aproaching. Just look at how much more reasonably implemented is the docking system compared to the mess CIG envisioned for SC. The point being that, if you want to orbit in a geo stationary position, you should keep the right height, and if you want to enter atmosphere, you should do it at the correct speed instead of just jumping in at 1000kps and looking at the pretty flames. Advanced computer systems and future engines could help a lot, without going full kerbal; jumping to locations, might still be available to bring you in key positions, but you should mind your entry trajectories, at least for what concerns planets with atmosphere, not really too many in Stanton, while the moons really should have almost none.
I saw this a few years ago, and the first time his ship VTOL'd on three main thrusters, then transitioned the rear engines to flight mode, I was hooked. And have you see the speeds in Newtonian space?
I've played the demo a ton. Hey everyone there is a free demo! I loved the flight mechanics because it felt very free. Like Alex piloting the Rocinante with all the minor adjustments to vectors
Did you like my LANDING/DOCKING camera in FoN... it's what I asked Star Citizen for FOUR YEARS AGO, so I got together with David to develop it for his game. David's little game also has FULL-SCALE PLANETS, SHIP MASS and DECENT NEWTONIAN SPEEDS in space i.e. it's a thrust-based game, unlike SC's speed-based artificial fixation. We even worked on a planetary-exodus narrative that didn't quite take his fancy... where you live in space stations surrounding the planet and have to salvage what you can from the planet below. Wonder if David remembers that. :)
Star Citizen is trying to saddle the horse from the back: instead of designing a functional flight model and then figuring out what combat would look like in that environment (something the Expanse authors did with great success), they said "it needs to look like Star Wars" and then went bending everything to make that happen. And frankly, I think it sucks. I can't even orbit a planet in the "best damn space **sim** ever". If they just could let go of these simplistic 500m engagement distances, everything else would fall into place so nicely. And box or rescue missions to or from stations/ships in highly inclined and eccentric orbits, maybe even spinning a bit, would be challenging and a very fun thing to do that doesn't involve pew pew pew. Also, I got murdered on Spectrum as well as Reddit for asking for this.
@@himansu_behera I'd rather not, it depressed me a great bit and lead me to a bad place just by how vile the reactions were. Most of them didn't even try to discuss the topic, they just resorted to ad hominems, of which "Oh, you're just stupid then" was one of the nicer ones. Say what you will about SC, but its community is very toxic.
@@Karackal When I want orbital mechanics, I play a game ABOUT orbital mechanics, like KSP. When I want a game about realistically simulated space combat, I play a game ABOUT that, like Nebulous: Fleet Command. Star Citizen has expressly been a Wing Commander spiritual successor in the vein of Star Wars and Star Trek's style of sci-fi. That's been the core touchstone of the experience they are trying to create since literally the original Kickstarter pitch video. At some point, it's just your fault for expecting it to be something else and getting mad when it's what the developers want to make instead of what you want them to make. Going to see an action movie, and complaining that it was a terrible murder mystery, is not really the fault of the filmmakers.
@@Karackal To be fair... while I definitely would prefer a physics based simulation, you really cant do combat properly while keeping it fun when you have orbital speeds and distances. You simply cannot target by eye on a computer monitor something more than 300m away, and something traveling 8km/s is not going to be within 300m unless it is after extensive docking style maneuvering. Orbital speeds are just too fast for humans to process. So this kilometers distant , beyond visual range target would have to be tracked and aimed at entirely by computer. You click to target and click to shoot, and a blip on the radar you never physically see vanishes. It's not engaging, it's automated. The flight is manual and engaging, the combat is not. So Star Citizen opted, right from the beginning, to be WW2 dogfights in space. The only way to keep the human in the equation is to lower speeds and distances to where you can realistically drag a reticule onto target and pull a trigger. You can see their canopy glass shatter, and the bullets crash off their armour. This is also why you probably wont see interesting and fun combat in any of these games where you can go orbital speeds.
My biggest complaint with sc’s flight model is how the maneuvering thrusters can lift up the entire ship. I wish every ship needed either vtol or lift from wings to stay afloat. Imagine if in order to take off from a pad in an arrow u had to use ur boost upwards to barely generate enough lift to get off the ground and then gun it forward and get lift from the wings
You're right, in star citizen the manoeuvring thrusters are practically as powerful as the main engines. It's completely ridiculous and totally unbelievable.
The problem is that thrusters don't have wear and tear right now - no matter how hard they're working, they can't burn out or take damage. Once that's implemented, maneuvering thrusters won't be able to hover a ship for longer than is reasonable without vtol, lift, etc. It's not unrealistic for the thrusters to be able to hover the ships anyway - if you want a ship to be able to thrust at over 1G in a certain direction, then it'll be able to hover in place in 1G of gravity. That's basic physics. It looks wacky, but that's literally how physics works. CIG's solution is to make thrusters a lot weaker in atmosphere than in space (which also has some roots in real life, w/ vacuum or sea level optimized engines, though it's a little different) such that ships can still pull cool maneuvers in space, but not hover endlessly on their nose in mid-air. Once wear and tear is in, though, thrusters won't be able to fire continuously at high power for very long w/o taking damage, essentially forcing players to use VTOL or wings for lift, like you were saying.
@@thenecrolept I don't even play SC, but if spaceships behaved like spaceplanes it would make me interested - land on a runway, unless you have gimballed engines and launch from pads which point your ship vertically
@@pawepakura5404 Despite the newtonian physics in space, SC has programmed limits on velocities because bad players who cannot figure out space cant dogfight properly. IMO, they were never gonna be able to do real newtonian stuff because the devs were trying to make a dogfighting thing anyways.
Imagine a crossover with Subnautica: doing small suborbital hops to get from the crater to sector zero and back, or doing an orbital rendezvous maneuver with a sinister looking Alterra spacecraft that contains important blueprints (and an onboard AI that is the love child of Glados and Shodan).
@@Karackal Ever since I first found the coffee machine in Subnautica, I've been playing under the assumption that Alterra is just Sirius Cybernetics from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy... There's just _far_ too much overlap, especially when you take the Spaceship Titanic game into consideration 🤣
Helion is the closest I have seen of "realistic" space based survival. The project is closed, but I had great time there. If anyone knows anything that comes close to it, please let me know.
No Mans Sky is a game about flying spaceships, where the spaceship autolands for you. They won't let you crash into the terrain if you tried. I never understood the appeal.
I think the major reason SC opted for doing things this way is that having true orbital mechanics requires rediculously high speeds. just staying in orbit of earth would require a speed of about 8000m/s and with Hurston being an Earth Analog and about the same size it would require equal speeds. but with SC being an MMO and the servers being planned to all interact with one another. having to deal with objects that could be in opposite orbits potentailly interceping eachother at 8km/s each would be trying to calculate a 16km/s collisions you would die without ever seeing what hit you, or you would just completely phase through eachother cuz you'd be skipping hundreds if not thousands of meters per physics frame, it's really hard to keep up with speeds like that from a syncronization stand point in a multiplayer game. it's why most ship in the SC universe are capped to a speed of about 1km/s, to keep speeds low and potential differential speeds reasonable for a MMO server to keep track of.
Another aspect is how broken pvp would be. It's a video game after all, so the consequences of dying aren't very large - imagine a capital ship getting rammed at 0.1% of the speed of light and instantly dying to a new player in his starter ship.
Been playing this game for a while now, it can't be overstated how satisfying it is to fly in this game. The sense of weight and power paired with the excellent flight mechanics makes the simple activities so much fun. A nice variety of missions in an enormous playground. What I'm hoping the future brings is a wider variety of ships to fly and a more detailed surface of the planet. Can't believe it's being made by just one guy, huge respect, this is the sort of game I've been wanting to have
Finally, this game getting more attention! I've had it for months now and have been waiting for more RU-vidrs to cover it. Thanks for this video, the community could definitely use some growth!
I really wish this was implemented in sc! SC always reminds me of tv sci fi like star trek and stargate where orbital physics isn't really ever part of the narrative and while i love that about it, i also wish it was more real to life like this!
This looks really good - your descriptions were entertaining and detailed. You earned FoN a customer! So does the game - space sagas are great, but I also dig stuff like this and Hardspace: Shipbreaker, where it's a little more task-oriented.
I would play star citizen if the orbital mechanics applied. It would make fighting people harder too which would probably keep people safer in the game.
This is the first game since when I first started playing Elite Dangerous, that I wasn't so excited for a game. This looks VERY promising. Especially the flight physics!
Here is my take as both a dedicated SC player and someone who would for sure enjoy better orbital mechanics and take of/landing in SC. I think all of this should be divided into multiple issues here: 1. Dumped down take-off/landing. The entire issue here is the mav thrusters in SC which are incredibly powerful to fight and overcome the gravity no matter what it is. Smaller ships can upstrafe with the power of 6Gs which completely negates any ability of a gravity to pull you down. Usual moons gravity in SC is 0.3G and planets gravity is 1G. It is just a fraction of what mavs can output so obviously no one basically notices the gravity in the majority of scenarios. Another good example of takeoff/landing would a flopped game DualUniverse. In their case, whenever you built a ship that is capable of both atmo and space flight you had to have two types of engines and fuel tanks and you had to manage the weight of all that so you can actually fly. For StarCitizen to have better takeoffs/landing developers have to dramatically nerf the engine thrust output in atmo. Basicly explain it by the specifics of "tech" where the thicker the atmo is the worse is the performance of "space" engines. The only way to achieve a more interesting takeoffs/landins is to reduce the possible thrust that is given into players hands, so they have to think about the trajectory of their takeoff utilizing their main thrusters. 2. Aerodynamics. This is another thing that makes SC atmo flight feel bad. We have an overall drag logic but that is about it. It is completely all over the place. In some ships its better, in other its worse. Full hadwavium. No proper calculations behind it nothing. This hopefully (abandon all hope) gets better with addition of a proper lift mehcnaics and control surfaces logic in future. 3. Speeds and orbital mechanics. This is a different type of a beast. Speed are limited due to gameplay and networking logic. Servers struggle to sync clients even at the low current speeds we have right now. Making those speeds higher so the proper orbital mechanics are valid does not seem technologically possible with the current code and logic they have. This does sound like an excuse and I would be the first person to have all that in the game, but it just seems all the dreams crush upon those issues whenever we are talking about the online game where not only it is about the flight but also about combat and precision of shot projectiles between players. Lack of speed also prohibits doing propper reentries and effects of bouncing or burning down. On such low speeds it will just look unrealistic just like the reentry burn right now in SC which is completely faked. I totally feel you with the video, and we can just hope it will get at least a little better with time in future. :/
This is literally the next step in evolution for the genre perpetuated by Hardspace Shipbreaker. Imagine being able to break down ships and asteroids in orbit like Hardspace Shipbreaker, and then be able to fly your cargo down to the planet to sell it, with this games realistic gravity simulation. gods that would be so amazing.
I have played the demo on steam and it's very fun. You can feel the weight of the ship and even the resistance of the atmosphere. Correct orbital mechanics and realistic flight models are my jam. I have even flown from one station to another outside of the main missions
Starfield won't even have (manual) planetary landings - I can't imagine orbit mechanics in that game would be anything more in-depth than a menu that shows an orbit animation while you select which of the preset landing sites you want to head to.
Dude you need to play Outer Wilds! It’s a small scale matchbox solar system with REAL ORBITAL MECHANICS. There is no speed in the game - only velocity relative to another celestial object and it really gives you the feeling of taking off and flying to orbit - there is one trophy in the game to dock with a solar orbital station - i crashed directly into the sun x1000 times before i finally got it. I kept thinking that pushing the stick forward would move me forwards - when in reality because i was in vacuum and free fall - not touching the sticks at all my ship will continue moving in the trajectory it was going at the same speed
Flight of nova flight model has its own charm but i wouldn't replace SC's IFCS flight model with it. Edit: Not because I think SC's flight model is better or anything like that - not even close. But because SC's flight model fits in better with the SC's concept. These are two different games entirely with only spaceships in common.
Thx for the discovery ! Looks like a good middle ground between KSP and a 1st person atmo flight sim. Let's hope the SC flight model will have some of those ideas well implemented :)
about 2% of people will love this game, everyone else thinks you float in space and, not that you're free falling off the edge of planets gravity well.
I played the demo and did surprisingly well. I think I like this flight model. It would certainly make pvp interesting when you actually need skill to fly.
I loved just trying to reach Orbit with an overpowered Delta Glider in Orbiter. This game seems to scratch that same itch. Does FoN have pro/retrograde etc. autopilot modes to balance out the orbit or do you have to do everything manully?
I've used the Flight Model to skydive towards a landing pad using the Belly and Air Resistance to adjust my position until I need to burn to avoid crashing.
Excellent video about an excellent game. Just one small inaccuracy I noticed and you even mentioned. "Pitching up will increase your altitude at the expense of speed" in fact when the Space Shuttle re-entered pitching up past a certain AOA would decrease the altitude because you are decreasing speed as you are presenting a larger area of drag. This of course is only true in the upper layers of the atmospheres when the aero dynamic surfaces don't produce enough lift. Spaceplanes are super weird when it comes to their re-entry which makes it even more of a miracle the damned shuttle orbiters flew 40 years ago
Star Citizen DOES have orbital mechanics. Your thrusters just work to counteract any movement. Turn off coupled mode or exit your ship and you'll start falling. It was a lot easier to feel in the earlier versions when planets were smaller, for if you had enough velocity you would literally orbit around them.
I've been saying this for ages. The only limiting factor here is the fact that ships have a max speed, otherwise you'd be able to enter orbits a lot closer than you currently can right now. And of course they have a max speed for multiple reasons, first being client-server replication at high velocities (it's an MMO), second ramming ships would be OP, and third it'd really trip out new players.
If you try to appeal to everyone, your game will turn out to be mediocre at best: sure, Call of Duty and Assassin's Creed sell well, but they're devoid of soul and not necessarily pieces of art. If you want to make something special you'll always reduce the size of your target audience, but the fans you get will be so much more loyal.
Unfortunately that ship sailed years ago, they tried uping the realism some with changes to atmospheric flight and hover and people lost their shit complaining about it being too hard, best flight model they have had so far in my opinion.
@@Ender240sxS13 Damn so sad that many ppl are too tard to understand/grasp basic physics . Orbital mechanics are not hard at all say in kerbal space program and it's realistic , the only thing that's hard is the calculating part , not the understanding because calculating requires math knowledge while understanding classical physics requires understanding force,mass ,inertia and momentum and their interactions with eachother.
You forget that the spaceships are extremely modern and go in a hover mode in orbit. This also means that in the future you can fly straight up from orbit (even if it is not efficient or gentle). In itself, this is still very realistic as you continue to consume fuel in orbit. What is missing is that at a certain speed you can no longer fall to the ground because you then circle the planet perfectly. I mean, that’s possible in Star Citizen with some ships, but you have to give it a permanent push or at least I had not tried to get into a perfect orbit. But I am sure that with the right ship on a small moon in Star Citizen you can get the perfect orbit, but that will take hours if not days and you will need good luck.
Aerodynamics is coming SoonTM to SC. Have you tried decoupled? or is it not the same thing? Coupled is the training wheels and can be toggled, makes it somewhat easier for smaller and especially larger ships to manoeuvre in gravity.
There was a Game like that once - called Hellion. It had no planetary landing but otherwise had orbital mechanics and docking with a station was really nerve wrecking. Sadly not much development happened after it went into early-access on steam and the small Team eventually disbanded.
Amazing thank you for sharing, this looks like "finally" a proper career space game, we have had zero of these since "Frontier: Elite II" that was released in 1993. There has bene many attempts, and similar, but nothing like it, they have all been messed up by silly ideas... I am Buying immediately to support this solo developer.
The onboard landing MFD is what all spacesim games are missing and it always boggled my mind why developers never implemented it. Without it, switching to an “external” aka third-person camera view; always removed me from the immersion. Happy to see that it is finally done.
And here I was trying to think and plan my own proper space flying game! Thank you for sharing it! Insta buy - no questions asked! Btw, another game that is kinda good with orbital mechanics and flying (and building your own ships) is Dual Universe. Not that level of simulation but has some nice aspects. Especially atmospheric and space fuel. Just leaving the planet can be a huge problem. (but game has some other problems :( )
Did you try Children of a Dead Earth? It's a hard sci-fi RTS space combat game where fighting is based on orbital mechanics. The game also includes a lot very detailed customization for ships, modules and levels, all of it based on real physics and currently existing technology. Developer's blog about the game is a treat in and of itself.
There is something magical about docking with a space station that you can see visibly orbiting a planet. I remember it from KSP and it looks just as nice here. Star Citizens space ports are very flat by comparison, even though the graphics are better, because they never really move.
You are also overlooking the fact that the ships in the game produce an immense amount of thrust, allowing for maneuvers such as nose-down glides and zero-point turns. This resulted in a complete overhaul of the game mechanics, as a single burst of thrust could counteract the gravitational pull of an entire planet, based on in-game calculations.
Just one thing regarding star citizen I'd like to mention. I think it was called decoupled mode that either has to be turned off or on (can't remember exactly) which will disable the automatic thrusters that normally decrease the descent rate etc. maybe try playing with that off if you haven't yet to see whatever it might be closer to what you're looking for. Although doesn't change the fact that SC seems to be set more in an era where engines are advanced enough that people in that age assumingly don't look at space flight the same way they do with current tech though at the same time I don't know what direction they are heading for so I'm just speculating.
Man, this looks awesome. I just played the first 2 levels of the free demo and managed to not crash. I doubt I will fare that well on the orbital landing and the hot re-entry levels. I'd love to see this game take off even if it's just slow high quality updates like VFX updates to the stations and like, quests you can take on for different people to haul cargo. I don't care about dogfighting in space so that's not really on my dreamlist of wants. Just a laid back game where you can haul stuff in space with a realistic flight model. Maybe let us earn credits in-game to upgrade/buy new ships, earn faction rep to do more jobs with different entities. Maybe have an apartment mechanic where you can have a little sci-fi apartment somewhere on whatever planet you choose, earn in-game credits to trick it out with cool stuff. You could include mini-games in your apartment to 'PVP' against other players in, like old school arcade games or something. Something with a gameplay loop that we can take at our own pace and not anything that's centered around high intensity PVP or anything.
I really wish we could combine beautiful space sims like this with games like car mechanic simulator. Because I really want to be working on the individual components of a ship like it's a car, then be able to walk around in an open world multiplayer hub.
As far as I know SC does have gravity once you leave the atmosphere but your ship's thrusters automatically maintain your orbit. If you turn off your engines the ship will fall?
If u decouple do you still stay in one spot? I always gave it a pass because of the ships thrusters and coupling. When u leave atmo but still have gravity pulling you back if u look at your ship the mini thrusters or even your main depending on the orientation, keeps you in position. Constantly firing to keep you there
Very neat game. I think with SC it's not just "rule of cool" that is making it a non-orbital game however. It's also because it's a multiplayer game with dogfighting. This would be an exceptional challenge to implement where relative speeds could get insane if ships are on different trajectories. That said, dogfighting could be limited to points of interest that are on a predetermined orbital plane...but that's just not in the current design of SC. Maybe their coding wizards could figure it out one day if Chris changes his mind about it...but tbh, don't want to plant that idea until after the game is released...its scope is crazy enough as is :P
Try turning flight assist off while on a planet in Elite Dangerous. You have to manage all your thrust manually and it feels way different. I've got this one on my wishlist :D
SC is not just a game. Its a MMO where typical physics that it does have is not common due to server limits. We have to look at the game not only at the perspective of what CIG should do but also what is the cost of implementing it at the cost of performance.
