Heheh, just got done screwing around with my new find. It's really funny the way that the autopilot tries to compensate for the new flight dynamics!

Also I forgot to edit the thruster force, so now it sends me to 990m/s almost the instant I hit it, and my strafing engines are more powerful than my main one!

This could prove to be interesting to incorporate this into freelancer fully! The fights would be alot different!

It would be much more like IWar. *grins* my ideal space sim, would be a mix of IWar with Freelancer, that would be a kickass game.

---------------
Kru Noctum
Project Director
Freelancer Software Development Kit

Come to think of it, this could be a means of separating the light stuff form the heavy stuff! Light fighters could actually be worth flying over a heavy! They could be modled to change direction faster due to the lower mass.

Pretty interesting! Is there a way you could give a quick example of what the ini values would look like to have something playable and newtonian realistic? (yea I'm lazy :/ )

Well, Currently I don't have time now to go in and tweak it so It's workable, got to finish some homework.

Having the Linear drag at 1 is too low, especially with light fighters, as it takes forever to change direction. But maybe try values within 20-200 for linear drag?

You will have to reduce the engine force as well. To give you an idea of what to set, if you divide force by the linear drag, that will be your top speed. When I was experimenting with a linier drag of 1, I had my force at 250, and I accelerated at 2m/s/s. Pretty slow.

Also you'll have to tweak your thruster values and your strafing forces as well, or else they will make you go really fast really quick.

Good luck!

Just tried a linear drag value of 10, and an engine force of 5000. Seems like a fairly good balance, if a little on the relaxed side. Maybe could use a lower engine force for more realism.

Note, I did encounter some problems with docking at bases. I just docked at the Battleship Missouri, and it took me a long time! I manually flew under the docking bay, and it took the autopilot about a minute to finally dock. Seems like the autopilot doesn't really know how to take these modifications into account... not that I expected them too...

Anyways, it's interesting to try it, and I recommend doing it. It certainly changes a few things.

Hmm... just had an idea...

In a mod, have two different drives available for purchase.

#1: Normal Drive.
Newtonianish physics. Fast ship, but can turn as fast, nor can it acclerate fast.

#2: Gravaton(?) Drive.
Freelancer Style. Slower, but can turn quick. Quicker acceleration.

What do you guys think?

Seems like a good idea. Have people managed to add different buyable engines? I don't remember reading a confirmation about this :/

Hi, is it possible to mod the three types of engine seperatly (normal, afterburner and cruise engine)? If it is, you could make the normal engines like the inertia drives in Goa'uld death gliders (Stargate SG1) which manipulate gravity and inertia to make them super manuverable. The afterburners and cruise engines couldbe rocket based and therefore faster, however are forced to comply to newtonian physics, as you suggested.

It is not possible to have your ship perform both with newtonianish physics, and freelancer style, at least via the way im modeling the newtonian physics. Currently, I change the main engine of the fighter to have a low linear drag, and reduce the engine force to give it a realistic speed. This effects the entire ship through all 3 methods of flight. So in normal, afterburner, and cruise drive, it will have either newtonianish physics, or freelancer style physics. I currently don't know how to do both at the same time.

bump

Messed around a bit with a few values and have managed to get an asteriods kind of physics model (engine does more or less nothing and thruster used for steering) which i like but the big problem is docking. Simply aiming the ship at the docking port/ring/whatever doesn't work because the autopilot has to pass a certain point and the way i've set things ut all the (docking)autopilot does is point the ship in the direction it would normally go.
Btw I've set linear drag to 0 for both the engines and the ships so you don't decelerate anymore. Problem with normal engines is that they seem to keep on accelerating once you press 'w' and don't stop, making standing still an impossibility.
Notices a few ineresting vars in the constants.in file but haven't tried them yet.
Does anyone know what they
(MAX_DELTA_FX_THROTTLE = 0.250000
THROTTLE_STEADY_TIME = 0.500000
THROTTLE_ATTEN_MOD_RANGE = 8.000000
DELTA_THROTTLE_ATTEN_MOD_CHANGING = 8.000000
DELTA_THROTTLE_ATTEN_MOD_STEADY = -1.000000
CRUISE_STEADY_TIME = 2.000000
DELTA_CRUISE_ATTEN_MOD_STEADY = -1.000000
CRUISE_ATTEN_MOD_RANGE = 8.000000)
do?

Two more things:
Due to the high speeds of a newtonian mod, missiles will be more important, therefore it would be nice to be able to carry a large number of them (ie more than 50). Does anybody know how to do this?
Also due to the high speeds, it would be beneficial if sensor/radar range were higher. Anybody?

Here is the exact formula for calculating your maximum speed:
max_speed=max_force/(total-linear_drag)

total-linear_drag=linear_drag of engine (usually 599)+ linear_drag of ship (usually 1)

if total-linear_drag=0 then max_speed=infinite (or, more likely, the upper limit of a signed int)

Acceleration is also affected by values such as linear_drag and max_force but mass probaly plays a part as well. Going to try to find that formula as well.