simple drawing of an airplane simple drawing of an aurora

There’s nothing more fun than single handily clearing a wave of 10 enemy Kilrathi fighters. When you design a single player game you can deliberately dumb down the AI to allow the player to get on the tail and shoot down multiple enemies, which gives the player a sense of achievement. I don’t know how many people played Wing Commander Armada (the first Wing Commander game to feature multiplayer) but it wasn’t that much fun in battle mode (the head to head mode). The second is that Star Citizen will have a significant amount of player vs. I wanted ships to have their own personality – not just a slower of faster version of the base ship.Ģ. I wanted these ships to come with their own identity and feel much like similar sized cars, even if equivalent in mass can feel radically different. Because we were planning on modeling and simulating spaceships with a fidelity that hadn’t been seen before I felt we needed a simulation that would let the player have different flight behavior if a thruster is damaged, a wing is blown off or a pilot overloads his ship with weapons and ammunition? I wanted a system that could feel distinct for a huge variety of ships, with wildly different sizes and roles because in Star Citizen you can go from a single seater ship 15 meters in length to a huge capital ship over 1km in size crewed by many players. There were a couple of reasons why we went this direction – 1. Star Citizen’s physical simulation of spaceflight is based on what would actually happen in space. We model what would be needed on an actual spaceship, including correct application of thrust at the places where the thrusters are attached to the hull of the ship – in our model moment of inertia, mass changes and counter thrust are VERY necessary. Damage is usually handled as a multiplier on the turn rates and linear acceleration. When you want to turn, the joystick or mouse input is mapped directly to the specified turn rate irrelevant of the ship’s moment of inertia. Most space games (including my past ones) greatly simplify the simulation, usually as an atmospheric flight model without gravity and air resistance – ships have predefined pitch, roll and yaw rates, linear acceleration (that is applied to a simplified point mass) and a capped top speed. So I thought I would take a moment of your time to share some insight on the two topics. Two of the hot topics of debate have been the Flight Model and the advantage or disadvantage of various input devices. I, like the rest of the team have been avidly watching the Twitch streams of backers playing and reading the forums for your feedback. It’s really great to see so many of you taking to space to try out the first taste of what space combat will be in Star Citizen.

Simple drawing of an airplane simple drawing of an aurora