I do not like flying ESF because of V-Thrust and Airbreak.

Fantastic post, and with Come Clarity playing too
(Not so sure all 109 could outclimb the spitfires, which 'contemporary' versions are being compared, from which altitude etc?)

Now, I can see why for some players (possibly myself too), this would be considered "slow", and perhaps too "deep"; the vision is limited, so the pilot often actually no longer sees an enemy aircraft when he pulls the trigger. This is realistic, but not very desireable for a futuristic shooter.

IMO:
ESF's become VTOL aircraft: vertical take-off and landing. You activate vertical thrust? You become a brick. You can still manoever on a landing pad of course, but yeah.. that's about it. Forget about dogfighting.

Now, in a 'simplified-but non-hover' PS2 model, manoevering (turn/second and turn radius) would likely be far tighter.
What can be different between the aircraft:
-Yaw (least important, generally speaking)
-Speed
-Roll
-Pitch

Buuut hang on:
Pitch is actually different things: "pulling up" mostly. In PS2, you can "pull down" also quite effectively it seems to me. You actually can't do that with modern aircraft (so called "negative G").

Now, Pitch has other differences:
turn radius (like on a car; how many meters do you need to turn),
and turning per second. (so a 360° turn takes X seconds).
And then we have : at which speeds are those attained?
Are we talking about instantaneous turn rate, or sustainable turn rate?
etc.
We could also look at altitude and differentiate aircraft; and some airframes would be better for high altitude.
Real life example: F16 as low to medium altitude; F15 high altitude.
Speed and agility: navy aircraft; must be responsive at low-ish speed and low altitude.

We don't really need extensive psychics for flying to be more fun and more "dogfighting"; without adding anything but removing the hover-stuff there seems to be some "stall" in the sense of the aircraft dropping below a certain speed.

Different aircraft:
The reaver, almost a deltawing in shape, becomes the "high speed interceptor": at speed, excellent roll rate, good instantaneous turn rate, good acceleration, but, get in a "turn fight" and get wrecked, basically. Stay fast or die.

The mosquito is the more turn-dogfightery, excellent sustained pitch & excellent acceleration, including at lower speeds.

The scythe and it's alien tech: can pitch as fast down as upward.
Turn in degree/s near constant over a range of airspeeds.

The rest is first balancing out the numbers.. which is of course hard to do,
and then coding it.

The problem with asking for "realistic" flight physics is that PS2 doesn't have a good way to model energy that doesn't cause the server and lag comp to sh*t their pants. The current physics work fine, removing hoverfighting would make the airgame even worse than it is now.

Well I actually favour a pure new A2A fighter that cannot fire whilst in hover mode (or some similar restriction so hover fighting and A2G become difficult if not impossible), but with a much more dynamic and faster flight model - along the lines of the PS1 Wasp.


But, yes basically making it easier to do, or perhaps more accurately making it much more straight forward to learn and less awkward and thereby reducing the pretty serious inaccessiblity newbies face (that is making it so fewer players just "bounce off" air within their first few hours - there's a few more things that could be improved other than the RM, of course, in this regard).


Much of this thread is just people seriously panicing about that happening (dispite not being able to raise a reasonable argument against it), because they simply don't want it to happen.

Well I'm not against creating a toggle button for thrusters. It may actually create many more possibilities to maneuver aircraft...

Yeah I suspect actually officially supporting it in that way (or something like it) might well do just that.

RM is a combat decision. Using it is skill. So your statement makes zero sense.

Indeed using it is a skill and adds depth, learning it and the awkwardness there in, is not.

Thanks for taking the time to reply. This is something I can agree with. I wouldn't mind if RM became a little more intuitive to do. And like someone else said, it might even open up more possibilities for hover maneuvers.

The easier a skill is to learn, the less it's actually a skill, and the less depth it provides. So the challenge of learning RM is why it's deep.

Skill and depth come from useage, not from the difficulty/awkwardness of learning, that is simply the difficulty/awkwardness of learning.

That's exactly the thing making it more accessible actually potentially opens up further oppertunities to expand its usage.

So guys, can we just use S to go backward and have a true VTOLs ?
Now ESF comes with RM included!! Magical isn't it ?

Now the damn thing can do what it looks like, you know, the Orca fighters from CnC...


Keep the current speed of the ESFs, the afterburners and Voilà! Easier to do, it's STILL there and newbies STILL get wrecked. That's what's important here, newbies won't aim magically better than experienced pilots.

Damn the heresy!!

Right now, this thread is this :

"Not enough real physics considered in the RM. Pointing your nose down and then afterburning DOESN'T make you go BACKWARDS in real life."
So to avoid the "in real life" argument, that would be stupid of me to use those words on these forums as an argument, I'll instead use the "instinctively thought, tribally taught in school and worldwidely accepted as default spatial-gravity-physic movement of objects."

The main argument to counter this is : " I have practiced that a million times to understand it and got used to this broken engine. So since I practiced it, after it was found out unintendly by some guys, then you can HAVE to do it, no need to fix with it."

You even got the main guy of the dev team saying "oops, unintended, but it's cool, let's keep it"

I don't know if you could read the word "unintended", so let me write "unintended" again in case you unintendedly missed it.

So, unless it's passed from one player to another, the newbie, the dirty/filthy casual, has to unintendendly discover this bogus in the code that allows him to do the RM. There's NO tutorial/hints in-game for that!!
Until then, he wonders why the other pilots can counter him easily even when he gets the jump on them!

They "just" turn around.

Sure he'll also try to turn around, he's not that stupid. But with the instinctive reaction a normal human being has... not the RM...

I don't want slow paced aviation like WWIIO, PS2 has it nice, but this ONE, ONLY ONE element is what deters Airgame to have more adepts and thus, challenge and more importanly, complete the combined arms aspect.

Just friggin put it in game for everybody already... one key function is all what is needed... instead of stop, it's go backward...

No actually depth is specifically a measure of the amount of learning involved. Things become explicitly shallower if you take something that was once moderately difficult to learn (current RM) and make it much easier to learn (a reverse button).

Just mention ESF maneuvers specifically ingame, then add something to the UI that tells you whether or not you're in hover... and fixed. New players have a guide to knowing the basics and a way to figure out if they're doing it right which will help them learn faster.

Tough fix right? Doesn't nerf reverse or make it easier, just specifically makes it clear when it is happening so new pilots can figure things out

I would consider the reverse maneuver to be one of the cool unintended physics exploits that results in more depth overall. Like rocket jumping in Quake, or skiing in Tribes. It sucks that new players have to figure it out on their own, but that's what tutorials are for. Both QL and Tribes have tutorials for special movement. Even a built in mentorship feature would be cool. I'm not a sky god by any stretch of the imagination, but I'm more than qualified to help someone set up their controls and teach them to do the reverse maneuver.

It is not at all.


Plastering does not magically have "depth" because it is very awkward to learn.

Conversely Chess is very easy to learn and not awkward at all, but effectively has almost infinite depth (if it was like the RM you'd have to learn by yourself that you had to stand on your head to Castle - which would add awkwardness to learn, but absolute NO depth! ) .



Learning, and awkwardness of learning has nothing to do with an activities depth (which is its usage), simply the difficult of learn.

Making the RM less awkward to learn would take NOTHING (aboslutely nothing at all) from the depth/skill of its useage.

Unfortunately the problem is the ones arguing against improvement specifically do not want this to happen, so you'll never convince them otherwise.

They're against changing the maneuver... not providing more clear information about it.

I can't discuss this topic because you're unable to accept established definitions of terms ("A multiplayer game is deep if it is still strategically interesting to play after expert players have studied and practiced it for years, decades, or centuries." -Sirlin, 2002) This definition clearly implies that the act of learning is why things are deep ("strategically interesting" implies learning.)

You can insist something isn't "deep" with your own (undisclosed) private definition of "deep" all you want, but that argument is meaningless and the fact remains that difficult decisions (which require skill) are what makes things strategically interesting, and clearly RM makes it take longer to fully master PS2 flight.

If we rate player skill from 1-100, and say that the average player figures out RM at 50 skill, then that player will beat a 40-skill player.

If RM is just a button press that literally makes it easier to learn, which means the 40-skill player is essentially equal to the 50-skill player. And that process of skill erosion makes games shallower.

(You get one second chance to respond logically. If you continue spewing illogical nonsense which ignores established definitions, then I'll just end our discussion again.)

Yeah, a flight/hover indicator is the right change. It doesn't make RM usage easier (like a reverse button would) but it provides a crisper indicator of what mode you're in.

That's exactly the point I have made repeatedly.

If player A is 50 skill at using the RM and player B is 40 skill at using the RM........... how awkward it is to intially learn is absolutely and completely irrelevant to the outcome!

Awkwardness of learning it puts newbies off, but has basically no relevance at all on how good you are with it post that, it simply acts as a discouragement to new players. Learning the RM is not where the skill or depth is (simply the awkwardness), but using it is.