floating in the air.

[joakim]

Am I supposed to fly around the ship? Dont I have a body?

[Khallis]

Yes, you are supposed to float. There is no noticable gravity in orbit.

(If this behavior bothers you, you can turn it off in the config tool.)

[joakim]

Ok!

[Apollo-Hunter]

Floating is fine but the fact that my floating "face" can descend down to the floor bothers me. Like if I don't have a rest of my body.

[Khallis]

I think this was probably a design decision I got wrong, based on having heard similar feedback a few times.

My thinking was, if you watch astronauts on the ISS, they're not always upright. They're pulling themselves along, usually headfirst, sometimes pushing themselves feetfirst - the orientation of their whole body is whatever they currently want it to be.

Can they superman along the floor? Certainly, and that puts their face right down where you were noticing you can go. I tried experiments with giving you a body mesh that you could see for body awareness, and it was jarring as heck that it wasn't doing what you were imagining you'd do. Walking is easy, you know what you mean to communicate by WASD well enough for a body mesh to do it along with you and have that feel right.

For floating in zero G, though, having a body do stuff you don't expect, or ragdoll along with you to go along with the movements you made, was way more jarring than it not being there at all. Not being able to see your body was the standard in many early games anyway.

So, game design wise, I applied basic cat rules. You are the size of your shoulders. If you can fit that through a space, the game gives you the benefit of the doubt to say that you could crawl through that space. If you can't, it stops you. I wanted to give the benefit of the doubt as much as possible, because my pet peeve is more games that stop you with glass walls for the slightest of reasons - oops, there's a velvet rope hung there, you can't go over or under it. Oops, crack on the ground, that's the edge of the map. Etc.

Unfortunately, the result seems to be that some people feel like they're just a head, and that breaks the immersion for them. I didn't anticipate that, and I apologize that I can't really fix it.

[Luke]

It really does feel like floating in a space ship, so I always want to push off a doorway and fly through a room faster, in a straight line.

[anonymous]

I like the camera. It took me a second to realize this was zero-G. I wish movement was a bit tighter/faster, but I'm glad theres no "body" to collide with things. It would just make it feel clumsy to walk around and not be able to get into certain spaces like viewing your rover from t he other side in the garage. It feels like you can explore your ship, rather than "here are the designated places you can go"

[HopelessDecoy]

Originally posted by Khallis:

I think this was probably a design decision I got wrong, based on having heard similar feedback a few times.

My thinking was, if you watch astronauts on the ISS, they're not always upright. They're pulling themselves along, usually headfirst, sometimes pushing themselves feetfirst - the orientation of their whole body is whatever they currently want it to be.

Can they superman along the floor? Certainly

I think there is just a lack of communication of this idea, like I went into the first terminal and exited and thought I broke something (I didn't try to go up and down before then just forward) like the camera detatches from the body when entering a terminal view and it didn't reattatch when exiting... But you explaining this I totally get the design idea, maybe the first log should say something about zero G being you're favorite thing about space and being able to float around?

PS. Glad it wasn't a bug this game idea is super interesting!!

[that's what she said]

I'd dig having proper player shadow. I mean having actual first person body awareness, but the body isn't rendered, so there is only a shadow. I've seen this in couple of games (and it's quite easy to do in Unity and UE). So body won't get in a way, and junkiness of body won't be as noticeable if it's invisible, and only drops shadow. It could be great for this game - all shadows are dynamic. It would probably fix both issues with ragdoll being janky (it wouldn't be there) and immersion breaking (body would still exist obviously, you'll see the shadow, but it won't affect view directly).

Man, I think I've seen most recently in that Horus Station game that is also zero-g and has 'grab the walls' locomotion type, it doesn't have an actual body just for the same reason - hard to polish when you fly head first and not upright and need grabbing the "floor" (surface under you view level, which obviously could be any surface), but some lights have you drop proper shadow anyway so you feel that you exist in game world.

[krayzkrok]

Originally posted by HopelessDecoy:

I think there is just a lack of communication of this idea

That was the issue for me. I was confused at first, until I found this thread and now my brain no longer has a problem with it. We're so used to fantasy artificial gravity in ships that a more realistic take seems wrong! I think perhaps a small amount of momentum might have helped to sell it a little more, rather than what appears to be a dev cam at the moment.

[Necrym59]

it probably would be ok if you had arms at least