Advanced controls for the air vehicles in PS2?

[stoof]

I was wondering if there would be any option for advanced controls for the air vehicles in PS2. It appears that the planes go into "Hover mode" when at a slow enough velocity or when close enough to the ground. For example, maybe instead of having it automatically do that, have a button set to it on your joystick or keyboard. Same could go with flaps, gear, etc. I could see how it could get annoying for advanced players for all of those things being automated for you, for example here are some scenarios that advanced controls could help:

You are being attacked by another aircraft at high speed and high altitude. You slow down, and suddenly the hover engages. When it comes time to speed up in pursuit of the other aircraft, you need to take the time to disengage hover and by the time you get out of hover, the other aircraft is far ahead of you, already escaped or behind you.

You are in a low-speed low-altitude fight, and to evade an attacker you duck low over the landscape. Your landing gear goes down, and you would have been able to evade the ground if your landing gear hadn't gone down, and now you crashed.

I could list a thousand more reasons for this.
So I was wondering if there were plans for this type of thing or would we be stuck with the basic, casual controls?

[maradine]

Gear doesn't look like it goes down automatically until you are at a very low speed and over level-ish ground. That's an abstraction I can live with, but no hate for people wanting it.

Asking to turn off auto-hover implies a lot of assumption about the direction the developers are designing the flight experience from. From where I'm standing, auto-hover is a visual ex post facto explanation of why you haven't fallen out of the sky at your current forward velocity. It does not look like they are doing a vector analysis of the thrust vs. the center of mass and having the angle on the jets change to keep you in the air.

Put another way (animators, forgive me for butchering your trade), the flight visuals are inversely kinematic, not forwardly kinematic. I'm not sure there is actually any real in-game concept of auto-hover. You are always in auto-hover.

Like many of us, I can't wait to wiki this shit up once it's put to print.

[disky]

Maradine, your reply is well written and adds much to the conversation.

All I really want to say is that the line in your sig about flying aircraft with mice makes me picture tiny rodent pilots with little WWI style goggles and flight caps every. single. time.

[maradine]

Tell the Mouseguard guy - that could happen.

[Xeller]

I remember Higby saying that he was testing flying with a whole flight sim suite: joystick, throttle, and pedals. If the pedals actually do work as rudder pedals I would consider that pretty advanced for the game and may be a first for a FPS. Also, at least in PS1 you needed to be flying slowly for your landing gear to engage. Based on your scenario, in theory if you were doing some low altitude flying you could still get very very close to the ground without crashing as long as you maintained your speed (if you are doing evasive tactics, you should be going quick anyway).

It will be all about striking a balance though. SOE would not want to add too many advanced controls to the aircraft because it would make it more inaccessible to casual players. I slightly disagree with this, as I think having aircraft with a skill curve makes the game much more interesting.

And yes, I know I haven't played the game yet. So take this all with a grain of salt.

[MrBloodworth]

I was of the understanding its not a perfect hover like the original, but you will slowly loose altitude over time if you just sit and "hover".

Originally Posted by maradine

Put another way (animators, forgive me for butchering your trade), the flight visuals are inversely kinematic, not forwardly kinematic. I'm not sure there is actually any real in-game concept of auto-hover. You are always in auto-hover.

As an animator, yeah you butchered it. In all likely hood the lowering of the landing gear, and the rotation of the "Thrusters" are done by expression. And likely, in engine, not in animation package.

[Hosp]

As long as it doesn't take a horrid amount of concentration like the choppers in BFBC2. While i was pretty good at those i seriously disliked how much focus it took and it took away from my ability to focus on aim while in the gunships.

So overall, I'm ok with making it a little harder than PS1, but not so hard that people avoid them.

[Eyeklops]

Originally Posted by Xeller

SOE would not want to add too many advanced controls to the aircraft because it would make it more inaccessible to casual players.

I have seen many games with a selection for easy and advanced control schema.

[Xeller]

Originally Posted by Eyeklops

I have seen many games with a selection for easy and advanced control schema.

And I think this would be the way to go. If the game detects that you have a joystick, throttle, and rudder pedals it should go into some sort of advanced mode. Otherwise, normal controls.

[maradine]

Originally Posted by MrBloodworth

As an animator, yeah you butchered it. In all likely hood the lowering of the landing gear, and the rotation of the "Thrusters" are done by expression. And likely, in engine, not in animation package.

It was a poor analogy. Perhaps a better statement would be "the thrust animations are being used to explain the apparent physical state, and are not in fact creating it."

[GhettoPrince]

Now that you bring it up, a helicopter style gunship would be a pretty cool replacement since the galaxy gunship isn't coming back.

[SgtExo]

I thought that i the previews it said that if you didn't control the hover when not moving you would drop out of the sky. But that might have changed by now.

[Fafnir]

I hope PS2 VTOL is similiar to F-35 from Battlefield 2. For those, that are unfamiliar with it:

When you press S or pull throttle backwards aircraft takes of vertically. It also makes aircraft lose it's speed, while flying forward, so it starts hovering.
Hovering at the same altidue is possibe by pressing repeatedly S or using analog throttle.
When you do nothing aircraft loses speed, but if you're hovering it will slowly lose altitude land on the ground.

[ZaBa]

Originally Posted by maradine

Gear doesn't look like it goes down automatically until you are at a very low speed and over level-ish ground. That's an abstraction I can live with, but no hate for people wanting it.

Asking to turn off auto-hover implies a lot of assumption about the direction the developers are designing the flight experience from. From where I'm standing, auto-hover is a visual ex post facto explanation of why you haven't fallen out of the sky at your current forward velocity. It does not look like they are doing a vector analysis of the thrust vs. the center of mass and having the angle on the jets change to keep you in the air.

Put another way (animators, forgive me for butchering your trade), the flight visuals are inversely kinematic, not forwardly kinematic. I'm not sure there is actually any real in-game concept of auto-hover. You are always in auto-hover.

Like many of us, I can't wait to wiki this shit up once it's put to print.

It doesn't help judging it by eye that many of the journos who have gotten to try flying and report their experience seem to absolutely suck at it, so it's really hard to tell out of all the things on screen what is happening by design, what is bugs, and what is player error.

Speaking of the visuals of the aircraft, they seem really schizophrenic right now; across the last few months a lot of things in the designs have changed, and there seems to be some redundancy as well. For example, the mosquito has swiveling engine pods, but also a jet that comes out of the belly? But they don't always seem to trigger at the time; similarly, the reaver recently got given tilting wings with additional engine pods on them, and while these tilt for hover in the E3 promo, in other videos only the main exhausts tilt while the wings remain fixed forward.

So yeah, I doubt the graphics have much to do with the mechanics. A bit off topic, but I've been wondering for a while if those are really design revisions or just sequential tests of various parts that will correspond to different upgrades. It seems odd to be completely reworking any vehicle models this late when there wasn't anything obviously wrong with what we were seeing in the promos last winter, so I'd be leaning towards it probably being the latter... but really, who knows.


Back on topic, if I can have manual landing gear and do rolling takeoffs in the mossie (what else are the wheels for?) at least, I'll be happy.

[Captain1nsaneo]

Having an advanced setting where many of the automatic things like landing gear change into manually controlled items? That would be kick ass. Probably not something we'll see until after launch but that would be seriously kick ass.