Speed throttle? (please help)

[MadRussian]

I managed to spawn a ship and start flying around using wasd, etc, and this works but what I really want to do is get moving forward and then vary my ship's speed, like with a Throttle. I check for some throttle keys and found "MoveFaster" and "MoveSlower", which sounds promising.

Meanwhile, I tried out Lightcruise and Boost modes. Both quickly get ship up to a set speed (with Lightcruise way faster than Boost obviously). Seems like while moving forward in one or both of these modes, that "MoveFaster" and "MoveSlower" should work the throttle?

Alas, I can't seem to get these keys to do anything! And that's trying them in all 3 flight modes (normal, Lightcruise, and Boost). And also after a search opening Debug Options (via F3) and enabling "Allow fast move keys", still "MoveFaster" and "MoveSlower" don't do anything (in any flight mode).

Please someone tell me what I'm missing. I must get throttle working to enjoy this game! Thanks

[Musashi917]

Hi, so for now you cant throttle the spaceship, this might be added later though. As removing stuff always create outcry I prefer first to be sure that we really need it before making the game control more complex.
Could you please help me understand why you need throttle? Is it a combat thing or else?\

The Move Faster and Move Slower keybind are for the player movement debug option, it allows the player to move super fast.

Thanks

[Indrasil]

I believe that by Throttle they mean that they want to set the ship's max speed with a simple keybind (or scroll wheel, preferably, like in Star Citizen), but without compromising agility and acceleration (as opposed to how lowering the thrust with the Slider brick works).

[Fortius]

With decades of videogames behind my back, I cannot, for the life of mine think of a legitimate reason why regulating your speed by pushing / letting go of the [W] key is not good enough.
That's how it works in almost every game I played.

Boost is like the nitro button in racing games, except a switch. You can turn it off any time, then turn it back on.

Lightcruise is for one purpose, get from point A to point B as fast as possible, so it needs no additional speed control.
Especially so, since it HAS a self-regulating speed control that slows you down the closer you get to celestial bodies.

Did you want to cheese the game mechanics and use a throttled down lightcruise to get an advantage in combat, or get a ship with weak thrusters to fly like normal in that mode instead?

+ Indrasil's reply hints on this; You can create your own throttle controls with in-game logic systems.

On a related note: If a game is bombarded by new feature requests, it never gets finished.

[ProPeach]

Personally I can't see why you wouldn't want a throttle ability tied to keys while flying. It feels jerky and jarring to have either all or nothing acceleration - either you enable boost and get all your engine power at once, or if you want to go a bit slower you have to stay in normal flight mode and have to tap W intermittently, flinging your ship forward in short intervals.
For clarity, when talking about "throttle", it's more of an ability to set a goal velocity as a percentage of your ships current velocity. So setting your throttle to 50% on a ship whos top speed is 100m/s results in your ship accelerating to 50m/s, as well as strafe movements acting at 50% power.

Making your own logic based throttle with a slider is not helpful in this instance as you have to enable freelook and fiddle with the slider in your cockpit which stops you from controlling your ship for a while - we need real time throttle control baked in to the flight experience.

Throttle is not a complicated system to use or learn either, look at the throttle system in Elite: Dangerous for reference, it's fantastic. All it needs is the scroll wheel and a GUI indicator. Also, a hotkey to set your throttle to 0 for a quick stop is very useful (in Elite it's [X]).

> Did you want to cheese the game mechanics and use a throttled down lightcruise to get an advantage in combat, or get a ship with weak thrusters to fly like normal in that mode instead?

You can't fire your weapons during lightcruise so this is a non-issue

There are so many instances where you'd want precise control over your speed:
Mining - cruising around an asteroid, picking your mining spot. You don't want a jerky, abrupt motion here, you want precise control over your speed so you don't crash into the asteroid.
The same goes for navigating around any point of interest, from a space station to a Point of Interest in a mission.
Because in the current flight system you have no choice but to use all of your ships acceleration at once, small movements become very difficult especially in ships with high thruster power. Such as moving around a hangar, orienting yourself for docking using a connector, aligning a maglock, aligning your ship for a screenshot with your buddy...

With throttle, if you want to gently cruise around a station or POI, you can just set your throttle to 30% say and all your movements (strafes, up/down, forward/back) act at 30% power for extra control. Rather than atm where you can only move in any direction at 100% power so it's easy to crash.

Also personally, it looks weird from an observers perspective if your friends ship next to you only moves in abrupt motions. The NPCs seem to be able to fly more smoothly than we can

The gas peddle in a car is essential for driving it with any kind of precision, it's the same concept in a spaceship

> On a related note: If a game is bombarded by new feature requests, it never gets finished.

This would be a good argument if we were talking about cosmetic armour textures, but not a degree of control over your ships speed in a space sim flight system

[Stan Ash]

I agree with Propeach with basically everything here. Having a basic throttle system is something I've just come to expect from any flight model, no matter how basic. There's lots of ways that throttle can be incorperated into gameplay, or just for a more responsive flight model.

Landing, docking, fuel conservation, tighter turns, escort missions are all good reasons to have throttle control, and I'm sure there are some that I'm missing.

[ProPeach]

To be honest I don't think boost/standard needs to be a separate mode, if you have a throttle control you can do fine 6dof motions at 10%, then just increase the throttle to 80% and speed away like boost mode. Again, I'm drawing a lot from Elite here as they combine the current aircraft dogfighting feel of boost mode with the fine control of 6dof mode, all without the mode switch of sevo

[Admiral Fray]

Agree with Propeach, and I'd like to add a suggestion. In cases the yoke doesn't control the spaceship or hovercraft computer, the scroll could be used to control a slider. This would be interesting to control arms, cranes, and any adjustable mechanism for precise movement. A scroll to control the crane position would be great to move cargo pods between ship and harbor.

[MadRussian]

Originally posted by Musashi917:

Hi, so for now you cant throttle the spaceship, this might be added later though. As removing stuff always create outcry I prefer first to be sure that we really need it before making the game control more complex.
Could you please help me understand why you need throttle? Is it a combat thing or else?\

The Move Faster and Move Slower keybind are for the player movement debug option, it allows the player to move super fast.

Thanks

Hi thanks for the response! Super promising game, so much so I bought two copies to try out the whole "walking on moving ship in MP" thing on my 2 machines.

Let's look at throttle from a couple different angles:

1. Binary controls are (generally) very rigid, forcing player into specific predefined speeds. I found I wasn't enjoying exploring the space station(s) or the habitat ring. I just wanted to cruise around at my own pace, adjusting it on-the-fly up and down by degree as I discovered cool features of the structures, etc.

2. Regarding combat (for me anyhow), the Boost speed is waaaay too fast. I set up a mock battle around the ring habitat ring, and simply couldn't come even close to lining up on any targets while in Boost. And turning Boost off and trying to fly the other way (totally binary) imo isn't very satisfying at all. And certainly the amount of speed players need in combat changes constantly.

I'm not advocating for any changes in ship's performance (acceleration, maneuverability, potentially top speed, etc), which imo should be a result of the ships design (overall mass, center of mass, engine placement, etc).

I'm mostly advocating for a way to throttle speed while in Boost (though ability to throttle Lightcruise would no doubt add interesting possibilities), via two simple keybinds: one to increase forward speed and one to decrease it.

(Btw - If Boost is intended as a binary faster speed thing, then I suppose I'm advocating for finer control of ship's speed through the ship's normal lower range speeds.)

^ How this is technically accomplished is interesting. Throttling thrust vs throttling speed are different things of course. Also, I presume most people likely want control of speed during combat and most would probably find having to look down in 1st person directly at a brick slider (again while trying to line up on targets) to be too cumbersome. I simply wish for fine control of speed, via whatever means but definitely via keybinds.

(Again not to exceed ship's top speed, if that's a thing.)

Meanwhile, curious how you are handling top speed (in non-Lightcruise modes)? Does ship's design (currently) determine maximum top speed?

^ Maximum top speed is a "gameplay vs actual real life physics" thing, and was a subject of intense debate in Empyrion's (EGS) dev, when they completely changed it midway through development. They essentially broke the game for a lot of people who (pardon the pun) jumped ship.

Back to speed (or thrust) throttling via simple keybinds, I think this feature would really set this game apart from other space building games. (Wait come to think of it, haven't played EGS in a while... but pretty sure it has this.)

Regardless, good luck with development. Can't wait to see what's next!

[MadRussian]

Originally posted by ProPeach:

Personally I can't see why you wouldn't want a throttle ability tied to keys while flying. It feels jerky and jarring to have either all or nothing acceleration - either you enable boost and get all your engine power at once, or if you want to go a bit slower you have to stay in normal flight mode and have to tap W intermittently, flinging your ship forward in short intervals.

...

^ Very well put good sir... all of it.

Couple other points about the current SEVO flying experience:

I too found the effect of binary start / stop on ship's motion noticeably abrupt and jarring as well. But also how the *camera* (3rd person) jerks so much. Every time we press a new directional key (especially to the sides), suddenly ship is off-center and camera is no longer pointed straight with respect to the ship (as evidenced when you fire ship's guns). Kinda reminds me of Alan Wake's strange offset 3rd person camera. Of course I mean this criticism in the most positive way, and understand how some would like this (and obviously you do as game dev), anyhow: Could we have an option to turn this camera work off? Or at least slide down the effect? I personally like ship centered pretty much all the time. Even better would be ability to adjust 3rd person cam.

Also, I love the directional look and how it zooms, but wish for zooming in regular flight mode as well.

Game has amazing potential, and again can't wait to see where this goes!

[Fortius]

So let me get this straight....

There you are, playing Need For Speed, Forza, GTA, Saints Row, anything, and all you ever did was leave your finger on [W] until you ram into something at full speed?

Is letting go of the button a hard concept?

[ProPeach]

Originally posted by MadRussian:

Meanwhile, curious how you are handling top speed (in non-Lightcruise modes)? Does ship's design (currently) determine maximum top speed?

So atm yes your ship determines its max speed, acceleration and turn time(in both lightcruise and regular flight), it's a factor of the mass of the ship and how much thrust it has. I think there's a debuff on larger ships too, so even if a much larger ship has the same thrust/mass as a smaller fighter, the fighter will be faster. For that nice balance and cinematic battles

[Stan Ash]

Not exactly a related game, but War Thunder's throttle control system is something that could work pretty well. Hold W to increase thorttle, hold S to decrease (only takes about to second to get from zero to max). Holding W while at 100% will make you enter a boost mode, which could work well for Stevo's current boost system.

Either way, having the ability to have some basic control over speed besides from tapping W feels like something the game needs on a fundamental level. Would come in handy for dog fights, you could match the speed of an enemy ship to more effectively shoot at them.

Sometimes I want to just slow down and enjoy the scenery while being shot at...

[Musashi917]

Thanks all for your feedback (a lot of I already heard prior to this post of course ^^).
Now I also need to speak for the people that usually dont speak on forum, which are the player that gave up or dont buy games because they are too complex.
It is a game at cross genres, if I simply add up the complexity of all sub-genres I think I am doomed.
I would like to avoid getting the same complexity as Elite. I cant get into elite as control are just too complex and overwhelming.

I will make further progress on other stuff and we will see if we really need this or not (I cant just give it and unplug it later).
The approach I choose is 6-dof which usualy dont require throttle. Avorion and Everspace which are easy to pick-up dont use throttle.
War Thunder have throttle because you dont have to press the forward key to move forward, it is not 6-dof.
That being said I will add ways to make landing mode where your ship throttle down. I think you could already do it by mapping a hotkey to you longitudinal thrusters.

Cheers

[ProPeach]

That's disappointing, but I'm glad it's still on the table at least. With the new missions we should have plenty of flight data to inform decisions soon!

[Cassian]

Empryion galactic survival has a throttle set up that works well, Its more like a cruise control, very simple to use just get to the speed you want and hit the hot key.