Dynamic Flight Direction

Northerner

This mostly for AI and its use of splitter ships, ships with un-even thrust, and spinner ships. But can be helpful for players as well.

The premise is this have the AI adjust it's flight direction dynamicly to either gain maximum speed or keep the weapons on target or both depending on range. It should also stop ships being stranded when they have one side of their thrusters destroyed.

While the AI does a fairly decent job of doing this on regular ships, it loses its mind when it comes to splitters, ships with off balanced thrust and I'm assuming, spinners as well.

But besides just helping the AI it could also be helpful to the player and prevent a splitter ships sub ship's getting weird flight directions for no apparent reason, and for you to be able to keep the spinner ships auto-fire thrusters going while maintaining control.

However it should not necessarily replace the current hard flight direction opinion, rather be an option either in the build menu for that ship or in the control room(s).

Lafiel

Set one control room to main; and set direction for every control room. Which ever is in control that's where it goes simple and without need of any brain cells.

Edit: Btw. this should be a feature request. @Walt

Northerner

Lafiel when the sub ships split from the mother ship they keep the same flight path right? Yes you can change all the flight paths of the sub ship's once they split off but, unless I'm mistaken, you can't before they split.

It also will help with ships that have one side of their thrusters destroyed and become stranded, automatically. It could also handle spinning ships better potentially

But I will change the tag to suggestions

Walt

This is actually how the game used to work and you had no control over which way the ship would fly. Most people, myself included, felt this was bad and so I changed it to be set by the player. Perhaps I should add some sort of "auto" mode?

Northerner when the sub ships split from the mother ship they keep the same flight path right?

No, it actually recalculates the best flight direction.

Northerner

Walt I think adding an "auto" mode would be a nice middle ground.

As far as the recalulating best flight direction system it seems to work most of the time but I've noticed that when I was testing splitting ships for my mod that there would be one or two out 10 sub fighters that would fly sideways or backwards even though most of there thrust was for forward momentum.

So to achieve "Dynamic Flight Direction" as I envision it, since you already have a system that recalculates flight direction, would be for the Auto mode have a refresh rate of x amount of seconds so the ship is constantly figuring out the optimal flight direction to the target. While it only really needs refresh once or twice on a splitters, sub ship's to get the flight path correct it would need to do it constantly on a spinner ship.

However I do not know how much lag that would cause if any.

Atarlost

Dynamic flight direction is most needed on badly damaged ships ship fragments.

If Ship fragments retained memory of the larger ship these would be the same thing, and dynamic flight could be turned on for ships above some damage threshold.