oreganor

Thanks for the tip!!!... LOL... I literally never thought on using middle mouse button while shift clicking to select 3D entities... I just clicked UI elements.

Numerically you can't... That's why I pointed we need those stats. Operatively what I do is bringing my ship in front of a station docking port and see how far I move strafing in the different directions (I use the docking ports because the distance shown there is the one between it and the closer point of your hull). That helps me get an accurate feeling of how much time I need to reach a possition and then move back again. For me it's mainly a problem related to combat... If you can move a distance equal to your smaller axis, as seen by an enemy that shoots projectiles, in less than half the time those proyectiles take to arrive to you... Then you can dodge most incoming fire. OFC this is the absolute minimum needed... The faster you are able to strafe that distance, the more extra time you can invest into creating random patterns that help fooling predictive aiming.

Thanks for the points. After inspecting more and more scripts I found some interesting bits into the docking scripts the AI uses... ...The API follows a component approach to hierarchy, instead of the standard objective parent/child trees. ATM I'm playing with "Velocity" component and referencing each wreckage by its index... But TBH I'm mostly just randomly changing things until they explode :) (The hackish way :) ). So far the code runs and my Salvagers seems to ignore SOME of the fast moving wreckages until they slow down... But there are strange things and I'm suspecting that I'm not understanding well the index used to reference different "components" attached to the same entity... So most likely SOMETIMES it works but the speed I'm looking at may be of some other moving object in the sector.

Maybe I didn't explain correctly... ATM the game do not simmulate reallistic thrust regarding torque (It would be a real pain to have to balance thrust symetry... It's fun on games strictly focused on that, like KSP... But a game with combat elements?!?!? No way). Rotation exhibits a very high acceleration, while max rotational speed is what's been altered by the torque generated by each thruster. I see a lot of ppl calling this "newtonian"... But has nothing to do with reallistic physics nor a real newtonian model... And it's perfectly ok, for as long as it's fun and ship behaviour forces the players to make tradeoffs between this or that stat. On my explanation, it's about BUILDING PHASES and controlling final stats. OFC you can keep on increasing your rotation speeds... But you can't fine tune it easily if each block alters multiple stats, that's why I offered a gradual approach based on how easily is to "lock" certain maneuverability stats. If you play the game on x1 collision damage... The last thing you want is a 1MT elongated ship rotating at 1rad/s... Meanwhile that same ship is interesting to have at least between 1/4 - 1/6 "lateral thrust" on the smaller axis seen when you are are showing your high weapon density facing to the enemy... And even if it's a civ, you should never let lateral thrust fall below 1/10 forward thrust if you want to control drift decently at docking maneuvers or while avoiding obstacles.

I'm trying to tune some salvaging scripts for personal use and I want my salvaging ships to ignore wreckage chunks that are still moving... ...Is there in the API a property/method/function to check the "immobile status" of an Entity (The small difference in the UI when an entity has a speed entry on its tooltip compared to one totally immobile that lacks it)? So far I have found 2 interesting ones on the Entity Object, but both have problems: property var isTurning [read-only] I don't have a clear idea on the format and seems to fail on wreckages. property float desiredVelocity Has all the problems associated to 0 comparisons with floating point variables :(.

The problem with using frontal thurst to geneate torque is... ...That your design will not be able to strafe in any direction AT ALL. In fact, omnithrusters provide MORE overall thrust per volume than directional but spread it around all their surfaces. So BOTH are usefull depending on were you place them on your Hull. Here is the "procedure" I followed to "update" all my crafts to better performance (see the caveat below) on the new thruster approach: - MOST IMPORTANT CHANGE IS NOT RELATED TO THRUSTERS. It's related to engines... They provide AN HUMONGOUS ammount of forward thrust now. So the first thing you need to do is cuting the volume of your existing engines to less than half. This will put your forward thrust to manageable levels, reduce your top speed BUT... Will cut dramatically down the energy spenditure of boosted mode, which in turn will allow you to stay FAR longer in boost mode, which in turn will result in faster travel. - The second most important change is, again, not on thrusters but on engines. They aren't vectorial engines any longer meaning your course will not "magically" change by simply pressing "W". This, in principle, looks like a nerf on maneuverabillity but in reality is not because, thanks to the new retrograde marker, you can point your ship towards it and use maximum forward thrust (Even boosted thrust is safe now) WITHOUT it wildly changing course at high speeds (ie no more high speed collisions against stations while trying to do an emergency stop). Sadly, low speed maneuvering requires more rotating and lateral thrust (ie strafing) has become more important at correcting the small drifts on your intended trayectory. - Important to highlight is the fact that the whole thrust effect of a given thruster block (doesn't matter the type) is applied ON THE CENTER of the block. Keep that in mind when comparing to the Center of Mass possition. Sometimes is usefull to split big symetrical thruster blocks that instersect any of the CoM axis so you can get some extra rotation speeds with the same volume (and the inverse is also true if you want just lateral thrust WITHOUT increasing rotation speed too much). - The Center of Mass of your craft CHANGES in real time. Watch the effects of adding (or loosing to damage) big heavy blocks because they will move it and with this, the rotation performance of your thruster distribution will change. With the above been highlighted, here is the recipe I followed: - Removing all thrusters from my ships. - Cut all my engines to half the volume. In the space I "liberated" on each engine I added directional thusters aimed at the front. This will instantly give you some rotation (depending on how far your engines are from the CoM) and will immediatly select which ratio between forward thust and break thrust you want to have (try to keep always between 1/3 and 1/2 ratio between Thrust and Break thrust). This can be also achieved by surface thrusters in a more efficient way... But from building PoV, it's easier to keep some magnitudes frozen from the beggining while tweaking other on the fly. - Now the lengthy process, which is to add thrusters to achieve rotation. Simple rule, the farther from the CoM (That colored "cross" that appears in build mode) you put your thrusters the more rotation speed you will get for the same volume. So if you want a maneuverable ship put your thrusters on the surface of your design. Anything above 0.6 rad/s will give you a ship able to turn fast enough to use your main thrust to kill your speed and peform sharp turns in boost mode. Remember that the new directional thruster concentrates all its thrust (derived from the whole volume of the block) in the directions marked by the "holes" or "burns"... Use the rotation key (Default to "R") to select the direction you want to alter with this thrust. ONE IMPORTANT WARNING At the moment of writing this lines, the delta data (The red/green numbers telling you how your stats are going to change) are bugged and think the block you are placing is an omnithruster, so ignore them when placing directional thrusters... The "white" stats are ok. - At this point you will probably have a ship that accelerates and breaks as you like and rotates as you like, that spends globally less volume on maneuver related blocks... Finished? NO!!!!. If you have been abusing Directional Thrusters (as you should... :) ) you will realize your ship barely strafes at all, which is very important not only for combat but to not having to perform too many main thrust rotations when travelling. Well, you have 2 options: Spend dedicated directional thrusters perfectly aligned to the CoM (so they do not change your rotations) or convert some of the direction thrusters on the "corners" of your ship to omnithrusters that give better overal result when you are concerned about lateral thrust (remember that omnithrusters "waste" some thrust on break thrust, so compensate for this by going for 1/3 ratio when "balancing" engines thrust versus break thrust in the first step). There are still some important data that's not visualized that would help tremendously ppl that's learning to build their ships to spot something is "wrong": - The already mentioned delta data bug with directional thrusters. - The total abssence of "lateral thrust" data. We have thrust (forward), we have break thrust (backward), but we need "up/down" and "left/right" also so ppl can see how each thruster affects the whole maneuverability of their designs.